The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [13]
Phoebe listened, mystified. She was too young to dive except from the pool’s edge, but her father’s face she understood. He climbed on the lowest board and bounced, handsome in his faded trunks, his muscular body more like the boys’ than the half-melted physiques of the other fathers. He could still do a one-and-a-quarter, though he’d been much better back in the seminary. “Don’t fight the fear—let it swallow you,” he called, still bouncing. Their heads bobbed as they listened.
Abruptly he stopped and climbed off the board. “You poor kids,” he said. “You just want to get wet.”
From a reclining chair he watched them practice, gathering Phoebe absently into his lap, calling over her head to Faith and Barry. “You’re not ready for that,” he said when Faith headed for the middle board. She tried anyway, hitting the water sloppily, legs flapping back over her head. “She’s a show-off. That’s not enough,” he remarked to Phoebe, adding with a laugh, “Too bad.”
For ten days each July, they came to St. Louis to visit Grandma and Grandpa in the mansion where their mother grew up, and while their mother played bridge with old friends or golfed with Grandpa, their father drove them to the country club. Thick grass surrounded the pool. You could have your lunch brought there: cottage cheese, salade niçoise. No money ever changed hands; you just signed “3342” with a tiny yellow pencil and the bill went to Grandma and Grandpa. Early evenings, tanned and showered, martini in hand, Phoebe’s father would lift her into his arms to wait for her mother on the club’s flagstone terrace. As he gazed down at the sloping green lawns and egg-shaped flowerbeds, Phoebe felt his happiness. Behind the chugging locusts she heard the faint thump of tennis balls, like a heartbeat. There was a warm sweet smell of cut grass. He was happy. Phoebe drank her Shirley Temple, saving the cherry for last. Summer heat on her bare arms, filling the sky with strange, imaginary colors. It looked like heaven.
But he never painted enough. Driving the stakes of his easel deep into the lawn, their father would gaze up at the towering elm and walnut trees outside their grandparents’ house, everyone hanging back, letting him alone. “I can’t believe this is all I’ve done,” he’d say, panic in his voice at the discovery that he’d spent his vacation drinking cocktails, charming the club wives with his lean handsomeness, his roguish air of having come from somewhere else, someplace less fastidious. Now the vacation was over. Tomorrow they would fly home.
“I’ll bring them to the club today,” their mother said. “You stay and paint.” But no, no, he would take them. He was dying to escape.
Beside the pool their father lay back in a chair and closed his eyes. Phoebe and Barry and Faith clustered helplessly around him, frightened of a world that could reduce their father to such despair. Phoebe stared at his tense, unhappy face and wanted to help, but she felt so small. He couldn’t see her.
Faith kept glancing at their father, fidgeting with the straps of her bathing suit. Finally she rose to her feet. With dread in her face she walked slowly to the highest diving board and climbed its steps. She looked tiny up there, eleven years old, slim and deeply tanned, slightly knock-kneed. “Dad,” Barry said. Their father opened his eyes and rubbed them, followed Phoebe’s and Barry’s stares and sat upright, muscles tense in his neck. Faith stood a long time at the end of the diving board. A few teenagers waited impatiently below, craning their necks to see what was taking so long. Please do it, Phoebe thought. Please, please do it. Faith gave a tentative bounce. Then a clarity came to her movements, a stillness; she leapt high in the air, spread wide her arms and arced into a swan dive, head straight down like an arrow’s head, pulling the wand of her body toward the turquoise water. Her splash was minute—in years to come Faith would never again match that first, perfect dive, a fact that galled her—and their father leapt to his feet. “That’s it!” he cried. “Jesus, you see