Bear and His Daughter by Robert Stone Page B

coated the soiled snowbanks along the street. Although it was still afternoon, the street lights had come on.
    The lock on his car door had frozen and he had to breathe on the keyhole to fit the key. When the engine turned over Jussi Bjorling’s recording of the Handel Largo filled the car interior. He snapped it off at once.
    Halted at the first stoplight, he began to feel the want of a destination. The fear and impulse to flight that had got him out of the office faded, and he had no desire to go home. He was troubled by a peculiar impatience that might have been with time itself. It was as though he were waiting for something. The sensation made him feel anxious; it was unfamiliar but not altogether unpleasant. When the light changed he drove on, past the Gulf station and the firehouse and between the greens of Ilford Common. At the far end of the common he swung into the parking lot of the Packard Conway Library and stopped with the engine running. What he was experiencing, he thought, was the principle of possibility.
    He turned off the engine and went out again into the cold. Behind the leaded library windows he could see the librarian pouring coffee in her tiny private office. The librarian was a Quaker of socialist convictions named Candace Music, who was Elliot’s cousin.
    The Conway Library was all dark wood and etched mirrors, a Gothic saloon. Years before, out of work and booze-whipped, Elliot had gone to hide there. Because Candace was a classicist’s widow and knew some Greek, she was one of the few people in the valley with whom Elliot had cared to speak in those days. Eventually, it had seemed to him that all their conversations tended toward Vietnam, so he had gone less and less often. Elliot was the only Vietnam veteran Candace knew well enough to chat with, and he had come to suspect that he was being probed for the edification of the East Ilford Friends Meeting. At that time he had still pretended to talk easily about his war and had prepared little discourses and picaresque anecdotes to recite on demand. Earnest seekers like Candace had caused him great secret distress.
    Candace came out of her office to find him at the checkout desk. He watched her brow furrow with concern as she composed a smile. “Chas, what a surprise. You haven’t been in for an age.”
    “Sure I have, Candace. I went to all the Wednesday films last fall. I work just across the road.”
    “I know, dear,” Candace said. “I always seem to miss you.”
    A cozy fire burned in the hearth, an antique brass clock ticked along on the marble mantel above it. On a couch near the fireplace an old man sat upright, his mouth open, asleep among half a dozen soiled plastic bags. Two teenage girls whispered over their homework at a table under the largest window.
    “Now that I’m here,” he said, laughing, “I can’t remember what I came to get.”
    “Stay and get warm,” Candace told him. “Got a minute? Have a cup of coffee.”
    Elliot had nothing but time, but he quickly realized that he did not want to stay and pass it with Candace. He had no clear idea of why he had come to the library. Standing at the checkout desk, he accepted coffee. She attended him with an air of benign supervision, as though he were a Chinese peasant and she a medical missionary, like her father. Candace was tall and plain, more handsome in her middle sixties than she had ever been.
    “Why don’t we sit down?”
    He allowed her to gentle him into a chair by the fire. They made a threesome with the sleeping old man.
    “Have you given up translating, Chas? I hope not.”
    “Not at all,” he said. Together they had once rendered a few fragments of Sophocles into verse. She was good at clever rhymes.
    “You come in so rarely, Chas. Ted’s books go to waste.”
    After her husband’s death, Candace had donated his books to the Conway, where they reposed in a reading room inscribed to his memory, untouched among foreign-language volumes, local