“Will you tell me what happened?”
She was still holding Rena on her lap, petting her hair and smoothing the collar on her school dress. After a while, when Rena stopped crying, when the hiccups too had stopped, Edith told me. From her account and from what Rena was later able to say, I’ve pieced this much together: They were traveling in the parlor together as usual. The boxes of travel stuff were spread around them; the maps of the country were on the wall. In front of them on the desk they had their work papers and charts and Crayolas and pencils, the two of them sitting there in the travel bureau in their matching green visors, that old man and my daughter, getting up another trip for themselves. They had decided, it still being late winter in Colorado, that now would be a good time to take the sun in Phoenix because it would be full spring there, and Rena said she was getting tired of this snow and rain dripping all the time so they had to stay in the gym for recess, and Lyman said: “Phoenix.” Well, that turned out to be a mistake: the train connections were too difficult. They would have to get on in Denver, go north to Cheyenne, cross over to Salt Lake, track west to San Francisco, change trains for Los Angeles, and then come back eastward into Arizona. Something like that, anyway. And Lyman couldn’t manage it. It called for more sense, more figuring, and more understanding of time changes and layovers than he was capable of. He had to call Edith in from the kitchen three or four times to help him. So he was getting hot. It set him off.
But he wouldn’t change his mind either. Not that he had a lot of mind left to change, you understand, but it had to be Phoenix, so leave him alone.
Of course it didn’t matter much to Rena where they went; she didn’t care; she had only said that about the snow and rain because she preferred slides and playground swings to a constant ration of dodge ball in the gym. Parlor travel was a game to her, a good reason to draw more and more elaborate figures on yellow paper and afterwards to cut them out, a chance to wear a green visor and pretend. But it was never any game to Lyman. He took it as hard as if his life depended on it, and I suppose in some ways it did. So he was beginning to fume now. He was mixed up, mad, losing control. He didn’t know where the hell he was.
Meanwhile my daughter had finished coloring their train tickets. She wanted to start. She was ready for the pretense of seeing the country. But Lyman wasn’t ready yet. Far from it. So finally, out of boredom I suppose, Rena called Nancy—that’s what they called the dog—into the mess of the travel bureau to play with her while she waited. And that was too much for him. He thought he had reason to dislike the dog anyway. He came unhinged. He started shouting.
“Get that damn thing out of here! She don’t belong here with us.”
You understand he was like a frantic kid now, screaming and shouting. And Rena was saying, “Well, Nancy can stay in here if she wants to.”
“No, she can’t. She stinks, damn her. Get her out.”
“Nancy doesn’t either stink.”
“She does too. Don’t tell me, by God . . .”
“Do you, Nancy? Nooo, her doesn’t stink. Her’s a good old poochy.”
Rena was kneeling in front of the dog, talking baby talk into its grizzled face, patting its old head while the dog shut its eyes, shivering in pleasure, and then Lyman hit Nancy on the spine with his cane. There was a sharp crack, a yelp.