He had always been compulsively neat. He couldn’t remember a time when his friends hadn’t kidded him about it. As a child he had kept his toy box in better order than his mother had kept the china closet.
Three and a half years ago, after Annie died and left him with the children, his need for order and neatness had become almost neurotic. On a Wednesday afternoon, ten months after the funeral, when he caught himself rearranging the contents of a cabinet in his veterinary clinic for the seventh time in two hours, he realized that his compulsion for neatness could become a refuge from life and especially from grief. Alone in the clinic, standing before an array of instruments-forceps, syringes, scalpels-he cried for the first time since he learned Annie was dead. Under the misguided belief that he had to hide his grief from the children in order to provide them with an example of strength, he had never given vent to the powerful emotions that the loss of his wife had engendered. Now he cried, shook, and raged at the cruelty of it. He rarely used foul language, but now he strung together all the vile words and phrases that he knew, cursing God and the universe and life-and himself. After that, his compulsive neatness ceased to be a neurosis and became, again, just another facet of his character, which frustrated some people and charmed others.
Someone knocked on the bedroom door.
He turned away from the window. “Come in.”
Rya opened the door. “It’s seven o’clock, Daddy. Suppertime.”
In faded red jeans and a short-sleeved white sweater, with her dark hair falling past her shoulders, she looked startlingly like her mother. She tilted her head to one side, just as Annie use to do, as if trying to guess what he was thinking.
“Is Mark ready?”
“Oh,” she said, “he was ready an hour ago. He’s in the kitchen, getting in Sam’s way.”
“Then we’d better get down there. Knowing Mark’s appetite, I’d say he has half the food eaten already.”
As he came toward her, she stepped back a pace. “You look absolutely marvelous, Daddy.”
He smiled at her and lightly pinched her cheek. If she had been complimenting Mark, she would have said that he looked “super,” but she wanted him to know that she was judging him by grown-up standards, and she had used grown-up language.
“You really think so?” he asked.
“Jenny won’t be able to resist you,” she said.
He made a face at her.
“It’s true,” Rya said.
“What makes you think I care whether or not Jenny can resist me?”
Her expression said he should stop treating her as a child. “When Jenny came down to Boston in March, you were altogether different.”
“Different from what?”
“Different from the way you usually are. For two whole weeks,” she said, “when you came home from the clinic, you didn’t once grump about sick poodles and Siamese cats.”
“Well, that’s because the only patients I had for those two weeks were elephants and giraffes.”
“Oh, daddy.”
“And a pregnant kangaroo.”
Rya sat on the bed. “Are you going to ask her to marry you?”
“The kangaroo?”
She grinned, partly at the joke and partly at the way he was trying to evade the question. “I’m not sure I’d like a kangaroo for a mother,” she said. “But if the baby is yours, you’re going to have to marry her if you want to do the right thing.”
“I swear it’s not mine,” he said. “I’m not romantically inclined toward kangaroos.”
“Toward Jenny?” she asked.
“Whether or nor I’m attracted to her, the important question is whether Jenny likes me.”
“You don’t know?” Rya asked. “Well . . . I’ll find out for you.”
Teasing her, he said, “How will you do that?”
“Ask her.”
“And make me look like Miles Standish?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “I’ll be subtle about it.” She got up from the bed and went to the door. “Mark must have eaten three-fourths of the food by now.”
“Rya?”
She looked back at him.
“Do you like Jenny?”
She grinned. “Oh, very much.”
For seven years, since Mark was two and Rya four, the Annendales had been taking their summer vacation in the mountains above Black River. Paul wanted to communicate to his children his own love of wild places and wild things. During these four- and six-week vacations, he educated them in the ways of nature so that they might know the satisfaction of being in harmony with it. This was a joyous education, and they looked forward to each outing.