by Ian Woollen
“That’s just because her kids were even worse,” Duncan shrugged.
“Kayla works sixty hours a week now for a radiologist,” Mary asserted.
“Okay, good for her,” Duncan said.
“Rusalka really did stick by me,” Mary repeated.
“And your point is?” Duncan said.
“You can’t fire her.”
“I’m not going to fire her. Dad’s going to do it. He understands that business is business. That this country and this city and our firm are on the verge of a great leap forward. We can’t have prospective clients walking into our office and being met by a computer-illiterate dike painting her toenails every color of the rainbow. I’m sorry if this causes you some personal distress. She’s not going to be destitute, or out on the street. We’ll give her a severance package. Ruby has a house and a job.”
“Isn’t there a way to shift her around, put her in a position less visible?”
“I thought about it, but really it’s better to make a clean break. It’s better for company morale, rather than risk harboring a bad apple.”
“What about Vincent and Kayla? If you don’t care anything about my history with Rusalka, what about your history with them?”
“Mom, the operative word there is ‘history,’ as in, ‘over and done,’ ” Duncan stated.
Ward took Rusalka to the King Cole. It was the only joint left that felt like the old Morace, where Rusalka had first appeared. The dark, smoky King Cole, buried in a basement just off the Circle, was also where he brought Father Tyler after the controversy over Ruby’s ordination. And where his father had brought him, in a former life, to teach him how to flirt with waitresses. Ward privately said a prayer for forgiveness. He ordered Rusalka’s favorite wine and tried to fondly reminisce about when they’d first met at the Morace twenty years ago.
“Is more than twenty years,” Rusalka corrected him. She knew something was up. She wasn’t giving him an inch.
Ward said, “I was so excited that first night to meet a Russian, and you remember, I ran upstairs to fetch Mary, so she could talk with you about Moscow.”
Rusalka swirled her wine. She said, “You bring me here lunching to talk about Russia?”
“No, to talk about you,” Ward said. “You’ve done very well for yourself, given your past, and however long ago it was that Mary came to me and asked if Wangert Public Relations could temporarily give you some work to get you through the difficulties of the divorce.”
Rusalka interrupted, “What you mean, temporarily?”
Ward steeled himself for the speech about “one door closing and another door opening.”
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, especially by a fellow crone. Scorned, and desperately worried that the loss of her job would compromise her position with her D.C. overseers. Vituperative invocations followed, both undermining and revealing the complexities of her emotional attachments to Ruby and Mary.
Ruby, of course, had to get behind her partner, had to participate in the de-crone-ing ceremony, banishing Mary from women’s group and tai-chi class. Ruby insightfully pegged Duncan as the culprit. Rusalka claimed no son would do such a hurtful act, if his mother genuinely opposed it. To demonstrate proper motherly control, Rusalka ordered Vincent to confront his childhood playmate.
Vincent, using a coat hanger, broke into Duncan’s car and hid in the backseat. He gave himself away by leaving the coat hanger in the front seat. And wearing a fright wig.
“What the hell, Vincent?” Duncan exclaimed.
“Get in the car,” Vincent ordered, unfolding himself and brandishing a gun.
Duncan climbed into the driver’s seat. They stared at each other in the rearview mirror. Duncan recognized the weapon. Manufactured with a jigsaw in his basement from scrap lumber, glue, and ten-penny nails. The red fright wig set off Vincent’s facial features. Duncan noticed how Vincent’s baby face had transformed into a high-cheeked, almond eyed, Slavic visage. His pupils were dark pinpoints. Duncan wondered how, all these years, Vincent had never expressed interest in his Russian heritage. He stank of fear.
“Vincent, that gun is a toy,” Duncan said.
“We made it. We made it together,” Vincent said.
Duncan grimaced. “Yeah, so what?”
“It doesn’t work,” Vincent stated. “Nothing works anymore.”
An alarm on Duncan’s wristwatch sounded. He poked at a button. “You lost me, pal.”
“I’m going to learn how to make a bomb that works. With red mercury, I can make a device the size of a softball.”
“Good for you. Now get out of my car.”
“First, you gotta promise me!” Vincent said.
“Promise you what? Is this about your mother and the job?”
Vincent waved the gun around. “If you had tried to teach her on an Apple, she might have been able to get it.”
“I’m not going to sit here and debate operating systems with a speed freak,” Duncan said. “You’re hopeless, man.”
Vincent said, “You should be more worried about Kayla than me.”
“At least she’s got a job.”
“She handles some scary shit.”
Duncan adjusted his tie. He said, “I’m done talking. I’ve got a meeting.”
“You must promise me about your mother,” Vincent demanded.
“What does she have to do with this?”
Vincent said, “I visit your old house sometimes.”
Duncan nodded, “She tells me. She finds you at the back door and you come into the kitchen and drink coffee.”
“I want to be able to still do that,” Vincent said.
When Mary heard this, she commented glumly, “Vincent and me. The one strand of the web that holds up.” She added an appendix to her paper about the metastasizing of rifts. She grabbed desperately for anything to maintain some perspective on her fractured family. She charted the effects on a wall-chart genogram: jagged lines between Rob and Ward, Rob and Kathryn, Anthony and Duncan, Anthony and Mary, Duncan and Ward, add a jagged line in the social subset between Rusalka and Mary, and Ruby and Mary; oh, and the fissure between Kathryn and her parents over Duncan’s political leanings.
Shortly after, a rift occurred within her clinical training. For her practicum internship, Mary found a part-time position as a counselor at a community mental health center near Ellenberger Park. Her clients were the poor and the homeless. Nothing she had been taught in graduate school seemed to work. Nothing about transference, resistance, transactional analysis, I-statements. Nothing had any relevance to this population. The ‘tear ’em down, build ’em up’ confrontational method was useless. There was often nothing left to tear down. She doubted whether Dr. Keller would know how to approach these cases. Mary felt stymied. As 1984 loomed on the horizon, she labored fruitlessly at clinical-speak.
Chapter 63
Island Frolic
Slightly removed from the mainland rifts of the 1980s, Rob enjoyed a generally blissed-out time on Great Tusk with Geneva.
Gorgeously tired at night, sensually revived in the morning, Geneva bounced awake at fisherman’s dawn. “Pinch me! We’re alive!” she said. It was hard not to be when every day started with a quick bong-hit and a toasty futon pounce. Followed by whatever followed. They took turns choosing. Taking a swim or playing guitars or making soup. They ate off the land and the sea. Rob developed a taste for Bambi-burgers.
They pickled and homebrewed and canned and preserved wild blueberries, raspberries, and the prickly gooseberry. In the depth of winter, a matted wall of onions in their kitchen sprouted little green shoots to remind them of the spring to come. Rob pored over his Grandma Loretta’s gardening journals for tips on increasing the yield from their half-acre plot. They made monthly runs off-island on the rural transit bus to the co-op in Blue Hill to stock up on provisions and fastidiously stored them in mice-proof jars.
Despite the looseness of Rob and Geneva’s schedule, a certain amount of fastidiousness and
regimen were required to maintain their rustic existence. Geneva instructed Rob on the basics. No dry wood meant no heat. Green wood wasn’t worth much either. And no work meant no money.
Their business plan for Island Instruments never got off the ground. Instead, Rob and Geneva fell into a seasonal, subsistence livelihood as gardeners. Specialists in fence-building and varmints and the installation of crushed mussel-shell paths. A 1980s wave of property developers built stucco ocean-view compounds for wealthy people who liked crushed mussel-shell paths. Rob and Geneva labored well together. They sensed each other’s rhythms and aches, silently anticipating when to pass a tool or the water bottle and when to break for a shoulder rub.
Rob and Geneva squatted on an as yet undeveloped corner of the island near Puffin Cove in a mossy, two-room structure known as ‘Miss Ina’s Cabin.’ It stood beside a rousing brook that after a rain clattered down to a rocky shore. When the brook was dry or frozen, Rob pulled water from a well. He gradually mastered lowering the bucket without knocking grit off the sides and jerking the rope at just the right moment to sink the lip.
Rob grew a beard and tied his shoulder-length hair back in a ponytail. Geneva stitched a pair of matching, beaded headbands. They teased each other with nicknames. One year it was ‘Ma’ and ‘Pa.’ Another it was names from the well-thumbed Mr. Natural comics that Wolf mailed over from his commune. They read aloud at night by lamplight. Rob enjoyed listening to his silly, socks-in-bed lover generate a variety of stoned accents.
Rob also secured a recreational lobster license, which allowed him to hand-haul five traps from a dory in the thoroughfare. Enough for weekly chowders. Historically, the Great Tusk thoroughfare was protected from the predations of non-resident fishermen by tacit law. Whenever encroachments occurred, a nocturnal posse would drag the violator’s traps out to open water and raft up at the mouth of the thoroughfare to await the violator’s boat in the morning. Unofficial recognition of Rob’s year-round status came in the form of an invitation to join a posse. Four boats, including Johnny Salter’s Endurance, rafted up and spent the night eating steamed clams off the briny gunwales of Endurance.
Official recognition of Rob’s islander status came at the annual town meeting. The selectmen of Great Tusk Island appointed him fire chief. Nobody else wanted the job. It was largely ceremonial. If the fire chief could get the truck running (its battery was often ‘borrowed’ to start other vehicles), he could drive it in the July Fourth parade. Most of the Great Tusk Volunteer Fire Department’s antiquated equipment had been donated from larger communities across the country, and much of it was inoperable.
Rob was happy with the position. He got to wear a genuine, slightly dented fire chief helmet from Elmira, New York. Geneva said he looked much more handsome in it than Duncan ever did in his Park Ranger uniform. Rob did what he could to make the job more than ceremonial. He scrubbed the rust off the chimney brushes and pole fittings and offered free chimney cleanings to all residents. He secured a grant from the Park Service to supply every house with an externally-mounted twenty pound extinguisher. And he figured out how to repair the valves and connect hoses on the pumper truck, donated from Scranton, Pennsylvania. When Wolf and his commune-mates came to visit, they drove the vehicle to the pond and giddily sprayed high-pressure plumes up the hill at Pine Bluff, creating a magnificent mud slide down to the shore, perfect for the naked human body.
Having crossed over to year-round islander, Rob tried to bury his former identity. He refused his parents’ offer of the caretaker job for their house. He hid behind his beard and sunglasses, which fit perfectly into the oblong hollows of his gaunt, and usually reddened, eye-sockets. It gave Rob satisfaction whenever summer people he’d known since childhood passed blindly by him at the dock or the post office.
“Look at that wisp of fog blowing over, like watching time go by,” Rob said. They were snuggled in sleeping bags on one of their star-gazing nights at Shark Point. They lay supine on a sloping beach of small round, flat stones that felt good on their sore backs. “Honey, I wouldn’t change a thing,” he said.
Geneva pointed to an airplane high above, wing lights blinking among the Pleiades. “That’s the route in from Europe. They touch down in Bangor if they have an unruly passenger to drop off,” she said.
“It feels like we’re aboriginals, watching a spaceship from a different world,” Rob said.
“Maybe someday you’ll take me to Switzerland,” Geneva said, impulsively.
“Since when do you want to go to Switzerland?” Rob asked.
“I’ve always been kind of curious about the city with my name,” she said.
“It probably stinks just as much as any city,” Rob said.
Geneva grunted and fell silent. A few minutes later she said, “I thought it was neat when your dad picked out those individual stars for you all.”
“He didn’t really know what he was doing. He doesn’t understand people very well.”
Rob still waved to his Wangert relatives when he passed them on the road. He waved to Duncan and Kathryn from the fire truck during the July Fourth parade on Kathryn’s first and only visit. It was their honeymoon. Neither Rob nor Anthony attended the wedding in Indianapolis. Kathryn apparently got sick from red-tide clams (this was communicated via Anthony), and the next year Duncan announced a preference for weekend getaways with the Indy business crowd at Lake Wawasee.
Rob and Anthony, although not in direct conflict, limited their contact to monthly postcards. Rob sent ones with pictures of sailboats, and Anthony sent postcards of Washington monuments. Anthony avoided any mention of Rob’s aborted education, and Rob avoided asking why Anthony and Trip never came to the island. Their correspondence went well enough that Anthony and Trip eventually suggested a brief visit, a couple of nights in the thoroughfare as part of an off-season coastal cruise.
“Why doesn’t he visit when your parents are here?” Geneva asked.
“I don’t know exactly,” Rob admitted, “Something must have come between them.”
Geneva teased, “Anthony was the first one of the Wangert boys I went for. He turned out to be gay. Then it was Duncan, and he turned out to be an oaf. What are you going to turn out to be?”
“A pothead fire chief,” Rob said, passing a joint from their backyard harvest, a little preparation before the get-together with his oldest brother.
Anthony and Trip hosted Rob and Geneva onboard for wine and hibachi-grilled lobster. The evening was an experience for Geneva, who for all her years growing up on the island, had never been aboard a Hinckley. Captain Anthony explained all the coiled ropes and stowage. The Big Dipper hovered overhead. The bilge pump gurgled. The harbor rippled calmly. It was still warm enough to dine out in the cockpit, although Trip sat wrapped in a scarf and blanket.
“What’s it like down in D.C.?” Geneva asked eagerly. “Do you run into Nancy Reagan at the grocery store?”
Rob interrupted, “Come on, woman. They’re on vacation. They don’t want to talk about that stuff.”
Geneva patted his knee and giggled, “Poor Rob! He feels threatened if I show curiosity about anything beyond a twenty mile radius of the island. You guys must be doing really well—to have a sailboat and be able to take all this time off.”
“Not exactly. We’re freelancers.” Anthony shrugged. “We really needed a break. Trip hasn’t been feeling too well.”
“If we could afford a place, we wouldn’t be living on this leaky rig, believe me,” Trip added.
“Oh, it’s not so bad,” Anthony countered. “Friends enjoy coming out to the marina. It’s different. Our boat is a good place to do an interview.”
“Rob tells me that you write about nuclear bombs,” Geneva said.
“Not anymore. We’re in the grips of a new story,” Trip said, “with just as much intrigue and conspiracy.”
“We were at the right place at the right time, you might say,” Anthony said. “AIDS just keeps getting bigger. We can’t do enough. It’s all AIDS
, all the time.”
Rob asked, “What’s that?”
His question caused a stunned look between Anthony and Trip.
Rob saw it and felt a switch turn. He felt like the kid brother again. Slightly stoned and slightly drunk, Rob couldn’t suppress it: “Here we go again! Me feeling stupid and you acting all superior. I’m not the same little punk anymore. I’ve been around the track and I know a few things. For instance … for instance … those stars up there. I know a few things about astrology. People make fun of Nancy Reagan bringing an astrologer into the White House, but I am one hundred percent okay with it. There’s lots of wisdom in the stars, and if Nancy can use it to rein in her Star Wars husband, we should all be grateful to her!”
Geneva threw an arm around his shoulder. “Whoa, it’s okay, Pa—”
Anthony held up his arms in surrender. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. Trip and I are so far into this thing that we forget the rest of the country is just learning about Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. It’s an illness that only recently got an honest name. It’s like … you remember when we were little and I would try to scare you and Duncan with descriptions of what nuclear radiation does to the body? AIDS is like radiation burning from the inside out.”
“Early stages can look like this,” Trip said. He uncoiled the scarf from his neck, revealing a dark, curdled swath.
Rob and Geneva traded their own stunned glance. “Is it contagious?” Rob asked.
“Not casually, no. Please don’t tell anyone yet.”
Rob cautiously asked, “So is this … the thing between you and the folks?”
Anthony spewed a harsh chortle.
“No. That’s a different cover-up,” Trip said.
Anthony grimaced and shook his head. Trip said, “Go ahead, tell him! He’s as much on the outs as you. He should know.”