Stepping Read Free Page B

hairy and solid as an ape’s arm. There were spiders in the grass and mice and rats in the old barn and muskrats in the pond and God knows what else everywhere. But in all our years there no one was ever bitten by a snake or spider, no one ever caught poison oak or poison ivy, no one was ever hurt there at all. The place was charmed. The property we owned was shaped like a hand when it’s cupped, with one large mountain behind and one low side where the stream rushed, and the bright blue pond gleaming in the middle. All possible sorts of birds lived there: robins, sparrows, blue jays, cardinals, owls, egrets, herons, hawks, crows, doves, bobolinks, pheasants, quail, and especially whippoorwills. Every morning, spring through fall, they called across the valley to each other, comically, compulsively, hauntingly, welcoming us to day, lullabying us into night. The place was charmed.
    And our horses were there. When we married, along with my other possessions, I brought Liza, my six-year-old quarter horse mare. My parents had given her to me for my sixteenth birthday, when I was furiously in love with horses, and I had boarded her at a farm a good half hour’s drive from my house. It was a delight to have her there on our farm, where I could ride her first thing in the morning, last thing at night. Charlie bought himself a quarter horse gelding, a bigger, showier horse, and we spent hours riding together through the woods and over the meadows, hours of silent rocking joy.
    The first nine months of our marriage were perfectly happy. Perfectly. During theweek I had my studies and the movies, ballets, concerts, theater that Kansas City offered, and on the weekends and long holidays I had the farm. And I had Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, big, blond, strong, brilliant, fierce-bodied Charlie, all to myself. I adored him. I loved him. I believed we would be eternally happy.
    Charlie’s daughters came to stay with us the last day of June 1965. Their mother didn’t want them to come, and they didn’t want to come, and although I had never met them I wasn’t crazy about having them either, but of course, loving Charlie, I said nothing. But Charlie wanted his daughters with him for a while, and it was a legally arranged agreement that Caroline and Catherine Campbell were to spend every summer with their father. Legalities are by and large a bore and a hassle, but they do have the effect of being rigidly, simply clear right at the time that human emotions tend to be soggy and mushy and confused.
    Early in June, Charlie sent a letter with his monthly child-support check, asking Adelaide when it would be best for him to make plane reservations for Caroline and Cathy. Adelaide had, after the divorce, moved back to Massachusetts, to a town near Amherst. They—she and Charlie and their daughters—had lived there for several years while Charlie taught at the university, and Adelaide had friends there, and knew she could get a job as a secretary at the university.
    Adelaide’s reply to Charlie’s letter was brief: since the girls were so small, she wrote, so young, she thought it would be better if they did not make a long plane trip this year, which after all would involve changing planes alone in Chicago. Perhaps next year it would be possible.
    Charlie stomped and raged for a day. Since his divorce it had been obvious that Adelaide was not going to be cooperative. When he sent the girls gifts, he did not receive any sign that the girls had gotten them. When he wrote them letters, there was never any reply. When he called them on the phone, it was usually lunchtime or bathtime or bedtime; and anyway, he was cruel and malicious, Adelaide said, to call them at all; it upset them so much. At Christmas, Charlie had flown back to New York to some convention and delivered a paper there, then taken a day to drive to Hadley to give the girls their Christmas gifts and to take them out to dinner. Since Christmas, Charlie had not had any word from