by David Payne
And suddenly here they are. As the Nina rounds the final bend, the captain blows the horn and Addie catches her first glimpse of Wando Passo, her new home. There is the park; there, the six great chimneys rising up above the canopies of the old trees; there, on the rolling greensward that slopes down to the river, a crowd of well-dressed people mills beneath a tent with colored ribbons flying at the poles. Now, thinks Addie…Not tomorrow, not next week, next year, but today, this hour, my true life starts….
And there, surrounded by his friends, stands Harlan on the dock. It’s the first time she’s seen him since the wedding, the first time she’s seen him in his handsome, worrisome gray uniform. There, to his left, is Tom Wagner, his commanding officer at Fort Moultrie. (Just three days, she thinks, three days before he must report.) Both Harlan’s face and Tom’s—all the faces in the crowd, in fact—are turned expectantly one way, as if waiting, yet, oddly, not for her. Odder still, Harlan holds a gun.
FOUR
Eyes still shaded with a hand, Ransom gazed southward toward the river bend, waiting for a boat that never came. He could still make out the birds, though, away there in the distance. Like spindrift from a breaking wave, they hung a moment, a curtain of bright green high in the air, and then they veered and Ransom lost them, too. Through some trick of light, or of perspective, they vanished as though never there.
“Daddy!”
Coming to as from a fugue, he found Hope glaring from the edge of the periwinkle.
“What?” he said.
“What are you looking at? I called you three times!”
“Did you see those birds?”
“What birds?”
“You…” He took a sounding from her face and stopped.
“Mommy said the coals are ready. Everybody’s hungry.”
Some doubt of him had been instilled, he recognized. “All right, then, come on,” he said, deciding it was going to be his project now to banish it. “I’m deputizing you as my assistant.”
“What’s ‘deputizing’?”
He smiled and put his hand on her small shoulder. “It means you’re going to help me cook.”
They were really there, though, weren’t they? As he walked toward the fire with Hope, Ran posed the question to himself, or, rather, a little voice asked him, the familiar one that, in the morning, when you hesitate between the blue shirt and the red, reminds you, Red is better with your coloring. This conversation, for the most part, in most of us, goes on subliminally, yet for Ransom, in the months since Claire had left, when he had no one else to help him choose his clothes, this voice had broken through; he had befriended it, or it, him, and he sometimes answered it aloud. This didn’t seem too worrisome—the voice, after all, was his—yet in the cab and elsewhere, it had occasioned looks, so Ransom, heading south to rehabilitate his life, had decided to forgo further conversations in this line.
“Absolutely,” he muttered now, forgetting that resolve.
“What, Daddy?”
“Nothing, Pete.”
She watched, frowning, as he forked the first steak on the grill. “Is that zebra?”
Ransom laughed. “Zebra? What, does your old man look like a poacher, a horseflesh-eating kind of guy? Nope, Pete, plain old beef.”
With her hands clasped behind her like an Oxford don, scratching one big toe with the painted toenail of the next, Hope contemplated the meat with the oddly mesmerized and mesmerizing stare she’d had since infancy. “Scar eats beef.”
“Who’s Scar?” he asked as he seared one side and flipped.
“He’s the bad brother in The Lion King.” Brushing dirt smudges from her knees, Claire emerged from the garden with Charlie and a shirtfront full of Silver Queen and baby mesclun leaves.
“He isn’t bad,” Hope said. “Scar’s my daddy.”
Surprise made Ransom’s laugh a little sharp. “So who does that make me?”
“Silly, Scar’s my real daddy. Let’s play the Scar game!”
Claire’s look said, Don’t pursue, but Hope dropped to her knees and reached her fingers up to him, curled like claws. “Help me, brother, please!” she said, and her eyes glowed like two small illuminated swimming pools at night.
“No, ma’am.” Claire hauled Hope to her feet. “I need you inside to help me shuck this corn.”
“Mommy, please!”
“Madam, in the house. Right now. March.”
“Mo-om!”
“Move it!”
What’s this? Ran’s look said to Claire, and hers answered, Later.
In the square of mottled, antique yellow light, he watched them stripping tassels and green shuck into the sink, the same home movie he’d screened every night in New York all these months when he turned out the lights. Twice, Claire passed the table without looking, but the third time she glanced at the check, as though to reassure herself that it was really there. She glanced toward the window, seeking him outside in the darkness. Ransom, though—outside in the darkness, looking back—could tell by the vagueness in her face that Claire couldn’t see him through her own reflection in the glass.
“I think I may have diagnosed your problem,” he told her, slightly later, as he poured the wine.
“Do tell.”
“Carpenter ants.”
Claire glanced up, surprised. “You’re kidding.”
“There’s a mongo nest out there in the periwinkle patch.”
“Carpenter ants…They’re not that bad, though, right?”
Ransom shrugged. “Not as bad as termites. From what I understand, they only bore in wood that’s wet. That sill felt pretty damp to me.”
“So where’s the water coming from?”
“That would be the question.”
Claire considered. “That side of the house is always muddy when it rains.”
“Maybe it’s runoff from the roof. I’ll see what I can see tomorrow. By the way,” he said as he sat down, “there isn’t power to the cabin, is there?”
“No, why?”
“When I was feeling around out there, I got a shock. I wondered if there could be a buried line.”
Claire shook her head. “I don’t think so. The house line comes in on the other side, from that pole in the allée. It must be five hundred yards from there.”
Ran considered. “Maybe I just scared myself.”
“Look at me.”
Feeling this parental tête-à-tête had gone on long enough, Charlie put his bowl of macaroni on his head.
“Nice chapeau,” said Ransom, feeling some paternal comment was required.
Encouraged, Charlie strafed the china in the corner cupboard, twelves of this and that, an hour’s cleanup for a second and a half. Another volley hit the chandelier and plopped back down like muddy rain. With a big, pleased, slightly nervous grin, he looked around, assessing impact. Knowing better than to laugh, Hope polled Mom and Dad with a jewelly gaze that said, Bring on the dancing bears!
“So, Monster Man, that all you got?” said Ran.
They howled like happy hell on that, like happy hell broke loose. Charlie took his bowl and tossed that, too.
Claire’s chair skidded with the sound of a bad traffic accident. “Okay, buster! That’s it for you! Upstairs in the bath!”
“I’ve got him.” Swigging Pinot Noir and taking one quick bite of steak, Ran tossed the squealing miscreant across his shoulder like a twenty-five-pound sack of Idahos and headed up the servant stairs.
As the tub filled, Ran undressed his son and, with a finger-sized black comb, raked melted cheese and white sauce from his hair. Charlie took advantage of a lull and bolted down the hall. From twenty feet away, he looked back with that gleeful, defiant, anxious grin that seemed to say, You can’t catch me (but please try).
“You’d better get your little ass right back here, Hoss,” said Ransom, with an ominously Mel-like note, as the fun wore thin.
Charlie, in response, raised his arms, cocked one knee like an impertinent dauphin, and burst into a stomping, penis-flapping ve
rsion of the Highland fling, cantering down the hall in one direction and then, widder-shins, back again. From the landing, Claire looked at Ran, and Ran looked back. Astounded and indignant, they both blinked and burst out laughing the way they hadn’t laughed that day and probably that year.
In the rocker, though, the little animal stilled, and as Ran read, he could see the pink curve of tongue working the plastic nipple from beneath the way no adult remembers how. With his buttery pomade, he looked choirboy trig and innocent, and under the smell of residual cheddar, under the watermelon of his no-tears shampoo, there was something that reminded Ransom of the smell of jute that, along with sweat and gasoline, was always in his father’s clothes and which, in spite of everything, he’d loved.
When Ran finally put him in the crib, Charlie said, “Stay, Doddy, stay,” so plaintively that Ran turned off the light and sat back down.
“Doddy?”
“What, buddy?”
“Doddy?”
“I’m right here, sweet boy.”
“Doddy?”
“Close your eyes now.”
“Shadlow, Doddy…”
“It’s just the bedpost.”
“Doddy?”
“Shh.”
“Doddy?”
“Charlie, damn it, go to sleep!”
Forty minutes later, he made good his escape.
Claire was in the bathroom, washing up.
“Jesus.”
She mugged in the mirror, knowing all about it.
“How do you deal with two?”
She shrugged. “One minute it’s five o’clock, the next I know it’s nine and they’re both in their own beds in their own rooms and neither one is dead, and how they got there—poof!—before I’m five steps down the hall, it flies out of my head.”
“How is it I don’t remember any of this?”
“Post-traumatic stress, babe.”
She’d hung her coveralls on the door and had on just her sleeveless linen blouse and underpants—new ones, Ransom noticed, hot pink briefs the color of her nails, with darker fuchsia trim. “Nice undies.”
With a droll look, she put a cotton ball on a bottle of green witch hazel and shook like Lady Luck about to roll the dice. The room filled with sweet astringency.
“You excited about teaching?”
“More nervous.” She began to swab her face. “A lot of this stuff I haven’t thought about since Juilliard. I mean, four-part tonal writing? I barely—and I mean barely—remember what it is.”
“They’re lucky to have you, Claire,” he said. “You’ve got ten times more real-world experience than anybody in that dump. To say nothing of talent.”
She glanced at him uncertainly. “Yeah, well, thanks, I guess. Harlow’s not a dump, though, Ran. It’s really not.”
There was just one way the conversation could go now.
“So, how’s Cell Phone?” Ran’s attempt to make this sound offhand came off like skywriting four-story capitals in multicolored smoke.
Claire’s reflection frowned at him, and then her face. “For starters, no one calls him Cell Phone anymore.”
“I guess it’s not in keeping with his newfound dignity as dean.” Ran’s single bite of steak—or something—threatened to repeat.
She turned. “It’s been seventeen years, Ran….”
“Eighteen,” he corrected. “Not that anybody’s counting.”
“Eighteen years,” she said, building up a head of steam. “After Marcel left…”
“Marcel?”
“After he left RHB, he toured with Olatunji. He was the principal percussionist with the fucking Boston Philharmonic. His dignity isn’t ‘newfound,’ and it doesn’t stand or fall by you.”
“You remember, though, don’t you?” Ransom said. “That first one he got at Crazy Eddie’s back when even the roadies had no idea what a mobile was? I think it was some sort of prototype. It weighed about six pounds and came with its own vinyl tote…more like a holster for a ray gun?” He laughed with happy malice. “The only place he could make calls was from the observation deck of the Empire State on a clear day when the wind was blowing from the south-southeast?” Doubled over now, hands on knees, Ransom gasped and tears streamed down his cheeks.
Claire slapped the countertop and stamped her bare brown foot. “Ransom! Look at me!”
Looking at the quiver in her pretty thigh instead, he swallowed hard and straightened up. A look of less-than-convincing penance filmed his eyes.
“Marcel Jones is my oldest friend. I’ve known him almost thirty years. For eighteen of them, I didn’t call him because of you and your various wounds and sensitivities, but when I was desperate and about to sell this place to pay the taxes, I picked up the phone and asked him for this job. I didn’t even know what a fucking CV was, Ran, and he hired me, no questions asked, and I love him for it, I’m grateful to him, and I need this thing to work for Hope and Charlie, I need it for myself, and I’m not going to have you fuck it up over old bullshit and hurt feelings.”
“That’s fairly clear,” he said. “Anything else?”
“Actually, yes. There’s a cocktail party at the college tomorrow afternoon, and if you really mean it when you say you want to be supportive, I’d like your skinny ass in situ. Correction, excuse me: I’d like it very much if you would come. In my dream, you will arrive in your white hat; you will walk across the floor; you will look him in the eye; you’ll say ‘Marcel’—not ‘Cell,’ not ‘Cell Phone’—‘Marcel, it’s good to see you’; you will shake his hand; there will be peace in the valley. Do you read me, Ransom? Sir?”
“If Cell Phone wants peace, why can’t he come see me?”
Her frown turned terminal. “You don’t read me. Ransom, I’m not asking this for Marcel, I’m asking this for me.”
He let a beat elapse. “I guess this is what they call a Mexican standoff.”
“I guess it is.”
“That’s a hard one, Claire. You know it is.”
“Suck it up,” she said.
“Can I sleep on it at least?”
“Please do. And sweet dreams to both of you.” She turned away, dismissing him, but Ransom didn’t go.
“So what is this Scar business, anyway?”
She doused another cotton ball. “It’s 101, Ran. He scares her. If she makes him her father and pretends he’s good, then he won’t hurt her, see?”
“So it’s about me….”
Claire laughed a short, bitter laugh. “Why not? Isn’t everything?”
Ran held up his hands, surrendering, and turned around.
“I’m sorry,” she called after him. “Ran?”
He turned.
“That was a cheap shot.”
“Okay.”
“And thank you for the check. It’ll help with that repair.”
“It should do more than that.”
“Great,” she said. “Because I still owe seven thousand in back taxes, and this year’s are coming due.”
“There’ll be more.”
Her face turned sober and attentive.
“Want to know how much?”
“You know I do. Don’t make me jump through hoops.”
“Come on, guess,” he said in a tone of sportive wheedling.
“Fifty?”
He pressed his lips and shook his head.
“More?”
He pointed toward the roof.
“A hundred?”
He shook his head again, trying not to smile.
“Oh, shit, Ran, just tell me, would you! What?” Her excitement had an edge of childlike terror.
He shot her a V.
“Two?” she said. “Two hundred?”
He let the grin come now, and Claire’s eyes filmed. She leaned back against the counter, staring blankly into the white void of the clawfoot tub, and then she covered her face and her shoulders shook.
Ransom hadn’t seen this coming and took it like a hard punch to the gut. He put his arms around her. “
It’s been a bad patch, Claire.”
She looked up with streaming eyes. “It has for you, too, Ran. I know it has, and I’m sorry.”
“It wasn’t your fault. You did what you had to.”
The happy news led them down the alley, around the corner to revisit the dark place they’d escaped. For years they’d lived like gypsies and never cared for money—or thought they hadn’t, when there was enough—and then they’d found out what it was to be without it and have children. They’d found that what they took to be their basic and inalienable rights—to have a decent place to stay, to feed and clothe themselves, to take care of their children—weren’t rights at all, were nowhere guaranteed. The moment the spigot of their cash flow had shut down, the moment Ran had ceased to be able to meet his obligations, their inclusion in the human family, in fellowship of people of goodwill, had become tenuous in the extreme, and they had looked as near as their own families—Claire’s, that is—and far through the wide world and failed to find a single other person who would go to bat for them or stand up for Hope and Charlie’s right to eat and breathe and occupy a space on earth and serve out their allotted term of years. Ran had understood this growing up with Mel, who would have let him starve and advanced starvation as a character-building exercise before he would have forked out for an unearned Happy Meal; Claire had learned the news for the first time. The experience had been stinging and transformative for both.
“Listen, Claire, you don’t have to do this Harlow thing.”
She sniffed and gathered. “No, it’s done, Ran. They’re counting on me. I promised, and I want to.”
“That’s okay, too.”
“I’m glad you think so.”
He drew the inference, and her look, more sad than confrontational, confirmed the inference he drew. There had been a fundamental shift, and in the resounding childless stillness of the house, they contemplated each other, uncertain what came next.
“You know,” she said, “despite your God-given talent for driving me insane, I’ve missed you. I’ve missed you every day.”
“I’ve missed you, too,” Ran said, “but more at night.”
She smiled at this, her lips did, but her eyes were grave. “You know what my therapist said when I told her you were coming?”