Beautiful Girl (8 page)

All her mother had ever said, in a tearful voice that was supposed to extract similar sincerity from Cathy, was “At one time in my life when I was very troubled, a psychiatrist really helped me a great deal. In fact, you might say that he saved our marriage, Bill’s and mine.” Not wanting Cathy to sense a conspiracy, she had not told Cathy that she was sending her to her own psychiatrist. This was in August, when Cathy had said that she was not going back to school in the fall, and her mother and Bill—her stepfather for the past ten years—had told her that in that case she must go to see Dr. Fredericks.

“But I’m not troubled,” Cathy had lied. Then she had giggled in her unrelated, unnerving way. “Or married. I just don’t want to go to school for a while,” she had said.

“But I hope you will be married,” her mother had said. She had sighed, frowned and then smiled, attempting reassurance. “Dr. James helped me a great deal,” she said. “He’s one of the best doctors in San Francisco.” She used the first name of Dr. Fredericks—Dr. James Fredericks—which Cathy did not think was a very smart disguise.

While the long pause after his question lasted, Dr. Fredericks struggled with his counter-transference. He stared down at Cathy’s rather squat, short body in its jeans and black
turtleneck sweater, at the long, limp brown hair that fell from the edge of the couch and the perfectly round brown eyes in a pale, round face. He had to admit it—he couldn’t stand the little girl. Injecting kindliness into his voice, he said, “Isn’t there anything on your mind that you’d like to tell me about?”

At this, Cathy burst into tears. A quick, noisy storm of sobs shook her shoulders and her chest, then stopped, and she said, “You dumb fink.”

He leaned back comfortably in his raw-silk chair that did not creak. Seductively he said, “I suppose by your standards I am in some ways rather dumb.” He did not say, Such as they are.

“Such as they are,” she said. “I’m not interested in standards, or school or earning money or getting married.”

“I wish I knew what you were interested in,” he said.

This seemed to Cathy his most heartfelt and least contrived remark of the hour, and she answered him. “Clouds,” she said. “And foghorns. I wonder where they all are.”

“If you really wonder, you could go to the library and get a book.”

“I’d rather wonder.” She giggled.

“The ‘trip’ is more important than the destination, is that what you mean?” Despite himself, he had underlined “trip.”

“I don’t drop acid, I’ve told you that,” she said, deadpan.

“Well,” he said, warming to his task, “that’s a reasonable enough fear. But perhaps you have some other less reasonable fears.”

“Deer-hunters. God, they have the worst faces I ever saw,” she suddenly brought out, forgetting him and remembering the weekend just past. She and her mother and Bill had driven up to Lake Tahoe—a jaunt intended to prove that they were not really angry with Cathy, that they loved
her nevertheless. By an unfortunate coincidence, this was also the first weekend of the deer season. On the other side of Sacramento, winding up past Auburn through beautiful mountain rocks and trees, Highway 80 had been lined with white camper trucks bearing hunters. The men wore ugly red caps and red plaid shirts. They had looked remarkably alike, at least to Cathy—as alike as their campers. Fathers and sons and friends, their faces had been coarse and unintelligent, excited, jovial and greedy. “God, I hope they all shoot each other,” she said to Dr. Fredericks.

“Well,” he said hopefully. “Let’s see if we can find out what deer-hunters mean to you. I doubt somehow that it’s sheer dislike of killing. For instance, you don’t seem to be upset about the war in Vietnam.”

“That’s so bad I can’t think about it at all,” said Cathy, with total candor.

“Well, let’s see.” Dr. Fredericks, almost alone among his colleagues, was more opposed to protesters than to the war, but bringing up Vietnam had been a ploy. He now thrust his real point home. “I do seem to remember that your stepfather is something of a hunter,” he said.

Cathy heard the light note of triumph in his voice, to which she reacted with rage and despair and a prolonged silence. Why bother to tell him that Bill only hunted ducks—and only with his father, before that awful old man had died? During the silence, she listened to the leisurely sounds of outlying San Francisco traffic and the faint, distant foghorns from the Bay. Concentrating on these, she was able to stop the echo of Dr. Fredericks’s voice in her mind. Their voices were what she could stand least about adults: Dr. Fredericks’s bored hostility; her teachers’ voices, loud and smug; the alternately anxious and preening, knowing voice of her mother. The only thing that she could remember about her natural father, who had divorced her mother when Cathy was two,
was his voice. It was high-pitched, almost a whine—nothing much to miss. Actually, Bill had a nice warm deep voice, until he drank too much and it blurred.

A heavy truck went by, creaking and lumbering as though weighted with old furniture or barrels of china and glass. Brakes screeched several blocks away. Then the traffic sounds continued as before. For a few minutes there were no foghorns, and then there they were again, discordant, with no rhythm.

Both Cathy and Dr. Fredericks glanced over at the clock on his desk. Five minutes to go. He sighed softly and pleasurably. He had recently stopped smoking and he enjoyed the air in his expanded lungs. Although he was nearing sixty, he was well preserved. Squash and swimming at his club had kept him in shape; he felt a certain snobbery toward many of his colleagues who were running to fat. He and his wife, who owned and ran an extremely successful chain of gift shops, spent vacations at health spas, playing tennis and dieting together. A blue-eyed Southerner, from West Virginia, Dr. Fredericks liked to view himself as a maverick among psychoanalysts—another breed, one might say.

Cathy swung her short legs off the couch and sat up. She clutched her knees and faced him. “Look,” she said. “It’s hopeless. You and Mother think it’s important to get married and save marriages and get money and save that, and I don’t.”

“We’re trying to find out what you do think is important,” he said. He did not bother to conceal his impatience.

Neither did she. “So am I.”

“Next week?” They both stood up.

Out of context (he felt), she giggled.

Cathy’s parents lived about ten blocks from Dr. Fredericks in the same expensive and fog-ridden San Francisco neighborhood, but instead of going home Cathy walked to the park she often went to, along the broad streets and down
the hill leading toward the Bay. Here the sun was shining. She pulled a small box of raisins from her pocket and began to eat them as she walked.

The park was surrounded by rolling woods of pine and fir, cypress and eucalyptus, through which on clear days one could catch blue views of the Bay, red glimpses of the Golden Gate Bridge. Cathy walked past creaking swings and a slide crowded with small children. Out on a playing field, lounging about on the beaten grass, there were some kids her own age whom she thought she knew, so she hurried on toward the woods.

Off the path, she came to a place where there was a large sloping patch of sand. She sat down and reached into the back pocket of her jeans, where there was a very mashed joint, which she lit. She lay back, her left arm protecting her hair from the sand. She sucked in and waited for the melting of her despair.

The air smelled of the sea, of lemon-scented eucalyptus, of pine and of the dank, dark earth. It was nearly a clear day, but the foghorns sounded more strongly to her from the water. Soon the fog would come in, gigantically billowing through the Golden Gate. Now, in the visible sky above the dark thatched cypresses, there were only a few large clouds; they were as heavy and slow and lumbering as bulls, a slow-motion lumbering of bulls across the sky. Cathy concentrated on their changes, their slow and formal shifts in shape and pattern. Then, in the peace, in the warm silence, she fell asleep.

Bill, Cathy’s stepfather, had at moments a few of the reactions to Cathy that she evoked in Dr. Fredericks. At worst, he despaired of ever reaching her. But he was exceptionally
sensitive to the feelings of women. He could often feel what Cathy felt, and could bear it no better than she. It was his sensitivity, in fact, that had kept him from leaving Cathy’s mother, Barbara, who was his second wife. The extent of Barbara’s anxiety and despair when they first spoke of separation had got through to him. They had seen Dr. Fredericks, together and separately, for more than a year. But before their meetings with him began Bill had already decided not, after all, to leave Barbara for Ruth, his girl friend. (Ruth had been unhappy, too, but she was younger and more resilient; her despair hit Bill with lesser force.)

Perhaps to avoid a discussion of Ruth, Bill had talked about his inheritance from his father, and Dr. Fredericks had given Bill good advice about investing it. Bill gave him credit for that. Actually investments were Fredericks’s real but unacknowledged field of expertise. Bill was a commercial artist, and not a terribly successful one. The investment had brought his income well within range of his wife’s, so it may have been Dr. Fredericks, after all, who saved the marriage.

It was nearly dinnertime when Cathy came home from the park, and Bill and her mother were sitting in the living room having drinks. Barbara had done their living room, like Dr. Fredericks’s, in cool blues and greens, except for the brown leather sofa—a kind of tribute to Bill’s masculine presence; ordinarily, she did not use leather. Bill almost never sat on it. He would sit instead, as he did now, on a small Victorian dark-blue silk chair that must have been intended for Cathy. Fortunately, he was light—a very thin, narrowly built man with delicate bones and sparse blondish hair. Barbara, wearing a smart gray wool dress, was sitting on the leather sofa, and Cathy joined her there. During the cocktail hour, they would sit that way, at opposite ends of the sofa, facing Bill rather than each other.

Mother and daughter appeared to Bill remarkably
alike. Barbara’s eyes, too, were round and often opaque; her body tended to be squat. Its shape was childlike, which at times Bill found quite touching. At other times, it turned him off, and on to voluptuous Ruth. In Cathy, naturally enough, the sexlessness was more marked. Bill sometimes wondered how he would have felt with a voluptuous daughter, a swinging chick. Would it have made him more uncomfortable?

“I told Dr. Fredericks how much I hated deer-hunters,” proffered Cathy. Since Barbara, on principle, would never ask what went on during “her hour,” Cathy would throw out indecipherable and tantalizing tidbits.

Feeling his second drink, Bill said, “God, I hate them too. They all remind me of my father.” Bill’s father had been a mighty hunter, out of the great Northwest, with rather Bunyanesque notions of manhood, so that Bill had trouble from time to time believing in himself as a man, feeling that if those coarse, red-faced, hunting cretins were men he was not one. Indeed, he had been told by several women, including Barbara, that he played around only in order to prove his manhood to himself. At times, he thought that might be true. At other times, he thought it was simply because he very much liked women, lots of them.

But he was not supposed to voice as strong an emotion as hatred in the presence of Cathy, and he sensed reproof in Barbara’s slightly stiffened posture. She was an extremely nice woman who wanted things to be perfect—her house, her husband, her daughter and especially herself. Now, instead of reproving Bill, she smiled at him, sighed and said, “God, I’m tired. I really did have a day.”

“You didn’t like your father?” Cathy asked in a neutral voice that bore, for Bill, an unnerving resemblance to Dr. Fredericks’s therapeutic blandness. But it was almost the first personal question that he could remember Cathy’s ever asking him, and he found that his chest warmed and expanded with
pleasure. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I was very much afraid of him. The way I find hunters frightening.”

“Oh,” said Cathy, and then for no reason she giggled.

“We’re having a really wicked dinner,” Barbara said. “Prawns with that sour-cream sauce. I absolutely couldn’t resist them in the Grant Market, so big and perfect. And, of course, rice.”

“You
are
wicked,” Bill responded, since this was how they talked to each other, but he was hearing them both with Cathy’s ears, and he wondered how she could bear their middle-aged fatuity. She was staring at a small porcelain vase of tiny blue strawflowers as though she had never seen it before. Bill asked Barbara if she wanted another drink.

He made them strong, and by the end of dinner, during which he and Barbara drank wine and told Cathy illuminating vignettes from their own histories, stressing education and travel and friendship, reminding her that they had once been young—by the time all that was over, Bill was almost drunk and Barbara had a headache. But he was still aware of the troubled depths of tenderness in Barbara’s round brown eyes as she said good night to them both—quite out of character, she had decided to give in to her headache and go to bed.

“Cathy and I will clear up,” said Bill decisively.

The truth was that he liked to wash dishes, which his father had seen to it that he was not allowed to do. He liked all that warm, foamy water around his hands and the essential and marvelous simplicity of the task. He handed each hot, clean dish to Cathy, who dried it with a sparklingly clean white towel, in the blue-and-white-tiled, Philippine-mahogany room.

For no real reason, a picture of Cathy the first time he had ever seen her came to Bill’s mind—a small, square girl with chocolate cake and frosting all over her face and hands. It was during what he and Barbara ironically referred to as
their courtship, a protracted and difficult period during which they had both been concerned with Bill’s shedding his wife—and with the difficulty of seeing each other privately, what with Barbara’s child and his wife. Barbara’s first husband had moved to Dallas and had not seen Cathy since the divorce, but Barbara had felt that Bill and her daughter should not meet until Bill was actually free. So it was quite a while before Barbara could invite Bill for dinner. And on that occasion Cathy found the perfect, beautiful chocolate cake that Barbara had made and plunged her hands into its dark, moist depths, then smeared her face. Barbara had chosen to laugh rather than to scold, and Bill had liked her for that. Now the remembered sight of small, smeared Cathy moved him. He wanted to tell her about it, but he knew she would not understand; nor could she know that simply watching someone grow can make you care for them. So instead of any of that he said, “As a matter of fact I think James Fredericks is a jackass,” and handed her a wet wineglass.