The Moonlight Man by Paula Fox

Author:Paula Fox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2016-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

Five

He began to grow restless. In the night, she heard him moving about the little house. Sometimes he took care not to disturb her sleep; at other times he walked heavily through the rooms and turned on all the downstairs lights. She lay awake, staring at her doorway and the dimly illuminated passage beyond it. She listened to his footsteps, the jarring of furniture when he bumped into it, and she felt disquieted, confused, by his voiceless presence below.

Once, at four A.M., unable to fall back to sleep when the house had grown silent again, she went downstairs to find him reading intently in the parlor, an opened bottle of club soda on the floor by his foot. He looked at her briefly. “Back to bed with you, Burnhilde,” he said. “Leave me to my wars.”

Only a long time later, when she was back in school, did it occur to her that his “wars,” his trouble, had been about liquor.

They did a good deal of driving: to Lake Rosignol, often to Halifax, or they would follow a country road for miles, pausing in one of the villages they passed through to buy a lunch of cheese and crackers and apples, eating it in a field by the side of the road. Whatever it was that kept him wakeful at night, he appeared to Catherine to be calmer in the day as they drove about the countryside without any special destination, or as they sat among clumps of wildflowers in those stubbly fields talking of this or that. There were even hours when she took his presence for granted and so, in a way, forgot him.

The place she liked best of all was a tiny fishing village perched on a cove that opened out into the Atlantic Ocean. They spent an afternoon there, climbing across great beige-colored rocks, stopping to watch the water sweep into narrow crevices, investigating tidal pools. Beneath their motionless, mucky surfaces, the little pools swarmed with minute life. He told her about the creatures that lived in them.

Looking at her quizzically, he said, “Surprised, aren’t you, that I know about such things? I know a lot that doesn’t matter—to me, that is. My brain is like an old attic. I wander through it, picking up one thing or another, hoping to be interested.”

It was not his knowledge that had surprised her so much as the odd revulsion he showed toward the rock-trapped greenish pools; as he pointed to a plant, or a tiny creature wriggling about it, one hand hovered just above the water and the other gripped the rough rock. He seemed to read her face, to know she was puzzled by something about him. “The teeming earth,” he murmured.

The sea glittered like a cloth of gold. Beyond the curve of a narrow jetty, its movement was slow and soft. The sky was cloudless. Fishing shacks on stilts strode the water like long-legged birds. A woman hung men’s workclothes on a rope stretched from a hook in the weathered shingle of her house to a pole that looked like a mast.

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