Read Online Dale Loves Sophie to Death by Robb Forman Dew - Free Book Online Page B

ever come back to Polly’s house. He had lived in an apartment in Fort Lyman for about five years. It was near the hospital, where he underwent physical therapy for a while, and close to his office. Eventually, he bought the house in Enfield, and came home to it. When he did that, he officially discontinued his psychiatric practice, so that he wouldn’t have to commute even the short distance back to town.
    Dinah could look from her bedroom window, across the street, directly into his study with its long french doors, and she often saw him looking through his papers or reading a book late into the night. She could watch his progress as he stacked the papers on his desk and made his way into the central hall and up the stairs, turning the lights out as he went. He moved slowly, dragging the leg that had been left damaged by that shot. But with his tall, spare figure and arrogant hawk’s head silhouetted in the windows as he passed them, he never aroused her pity. She only watched him, bemused. At last the light in his bedroom would go off, and Dinah would go to sleep.
    Dinah had watched one day three summers ago from her window while two of her father’s gardeners erected a sign on his meticulously kept lawn. It was a cleverly designed sign, hung in the fashion, Dinah supposed, of the period of the house. Three narrow white boards were suspended one from the other by little chains. Three separate messages. All three were then suspended from a black iron bar and post by two sturdier chains. She could not read the messages on the slender boards, though, not at such a distance. When she took the children out for a walk and to get the mail, she stopped by her father’s wrought-iron fence for a long look. The three signs said:
    PSYCHIATRY ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAMS FORTUNES TOLD
    It was after the sign went up that people talked to her about her father as though he and she were not related. They were absolving her from responsibility. The people in Enfield were no less sophisticated about human behavior than people anywhere else, and some of them had always understood her father’s brooding cynicism. Almost everyone understood that the signs were intentionally amusing, but in the end they had come to think that beneath the surface of that slippery humor lay insanity of a sort. Dinah was not sure herself. She had sometimes considered the possibility of her father directing the force of his intellect, and his gloomy wisdom, to the outermost limits of sociability. Beyond the reach of sociability at all, perhaps, so that his keen intelligence would be cut asunder to range around among the most grotesque facets of his mind. Out of civilized bounds. She felt an obscure pride in the fact that it would be a profound madness, not any pitiful eccentricity. Sometimes she wondered what her father thought if he looked out his window and saw her with her three children ambling by his doorway on their daily walks. Did he have any compunction about his loss of her—her loss of him? But after eight summers she had become more and more accustomed to this peculiar arrangement.
    Even so, when she was at her mother’s house in the evening fixing dinner or tending the children, she was roused to a great, repressed rage if she had to hear those nightly telephone conversations between her parents, to whose silences she had devoted the whole passion of her youth in her efforts toward mediation. This evening, as she sat with Lawrence and Pam among the flowering spirea, she did not move a muscle when the phone rang; she let Polly get up and go to it. But her body went tense, because she was so disturbed by this ritual. Her parents kept up a running chess game, too, in this manner, telling each other their moves over the phone and then rearranging the pieces on their separate boards. Whenever Dinah came across her mother’s board, laid out on the table in the study with its little ivory pieces all set up in the current positions, she found it inexplicably