Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  “Oh, yes,” said Claire, “I was part of Marcel’s disreputable past. We knew each other way before that, though. We met when we were fourteen, in boarding school. I was at Northfield when Cell—excuse me, Marcel—was at Mt. Hermon. He had this terrible crush on my roommate, Shanté Mills.”

  “Not Shanté Mills, the mezzo,” Jessup said.

  “The same.”

  “I have a crush on her!”

  “You and everybody else,” Claire said, “including my husband, Ransom. But that’s another story. Do you see his earring?”

  “I don’t think we need the earring story, Claire,” said the dean, who wore a small gold stud in his left ear.

  “Should we take a vote?” Claire polled the group’s expanding membership, and everybody raised a black-sleeved arm, except Deanna Holmes.

  “You probably know he’s from Manhattan. His family has a manse on Morningside and a summer place in Vineyard Haven. They’re fixtures at Abyssinian Baptist. Marcel was once the chapter president of a nifty little club called Jack and Jill. He came to Mt. Hermon from St. Bernard’s, and his first year he went around in a blue blazer with a little crest on the pocket and these heavy oxblood shoes. Somewhere in England, little men with jeweler’s lenses on their specs had a wooden last shaped to his foot, and when his mother, Miss Corinne, put in a call they took it off the shelf and whipped young Marcel out a brand-new pair. And he had these really awful glasses, too, like…” Claire glanced involuntarily toward Deanna Holmes, then caught herself and looked away. “These thick black things, and a fro like Sly Stone, circa 1969. It was generally lopsided from where he slept on it and had specks of towel lint and the occasional bird’s nest. And he was in, like, Latin 6 or some ridiculous course they had to invent for him, and he carried around this special pair of drumsticks. What were they, Cell?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “And Linus doesn’t remember his Binky. Come on, you know…. You know you know. Zildjian 5A’s, right?”

  “Zildjian didn’t even make sticks then. They may have been Vic Firths.”

  “But he doesn’t remember,” she said. “And you know those shiny metal rails in the cafeteria? You’d be pushing your tray along, waiting for the lady in the paper hat to ladle gravy on your mashed, and suddenly, rattatatta rattatatta, ‘Wipeout!’ and that creepy little laugh? He had it down. The whole line, twenty, thirty people, would groan in unison, and pelt him with a hail of napkin balls. And, oh, yes, I should also mention that he was the worst basketball player on the team, possibly the worst in the whole history of the school, and, in short, he was just so hopelessly uncool that Shanté and I took pity and adopted him.”

  Claire knew she was getting on a tear with this, but something in Marcel just drew it out of her and always had. Though not Southern in the least, he was like Southern gentlemen she’d grown up with, and, most especially, like that Southern gentleman of Southern gentlemen, her father, Gardener DeLay, who, in the bloom of apparent health, was struck down by a massive heart attack when she was seventeen. Claire’s mother had been the dominating figure in the household. Before her descent into Alzheimer’s, Rose DeLay had been a noted Charleston personality, a tongue-in-cheek provocateuse who specialized in that peculiarly Southern, female form of humor, lobbing burnished epigrams of gay, off-color wit like Molotov cocktails at cotillions, garden parties, and assorted charity events. Rose sucked the oxygen from the drawing rooms where Claire grew up. After bringing down the house with her command performances, however, she frequently got vapors and retired to bed with a compress on her eyes. On these occasions, Gardener made Claire grilled-cheese sandwiches downstairs, cutting off the crusts the way she liked. They dunked these in tomato soup, a trespass so egregious that Gardener put a finger to his lips and Claire crossed her heart, agreeing to conspire. Gardener and Rose…Their names so perfectly expressed their natures and their roles that the in-joke spread beyond the family and permeated the whole town. Claire blamed herself, but in her heart of hearts she always loved him more. In a crowd, Gardener did not require centrality the way her mother had. Rather, he conferred it. There was something in the quality of his attention that made you feel singled out and special, as though bathed in the gold light from a photographer’s umbrella. Marcel’s attention was like that, too. Even now, in this new crowd of virtual strangers not all disposed to be her friends, it brought Claire out. In their youth at boarding school, she’d taken this for granted, but now, since moving back to Wando Passo, she didn’t anymore. Just lately, Claire thought about this subject quite a bit.

  “Behind his back, we called him ‘the mascot with the ascot,’” she went on. “Did you know that, Dr. Jones?”

  The dean, however, was in distress and couldn’t answer, choking on a hilarity he clearly wanted to suppress, and couldn’t, and as he chuffed and panted and waved his hand in a negating motion—meaning, no, he did not remember, or simply that he wanted her to stop—his clear face beamed like a dry shell dipped in ocean water and restored to its essential gleam. He almost seemed another person than the one who’d breezed so easily into their midst, and the same was true of Claire. Ransom and the children would hardly have recognized their wife and mother. Her old friend and schoolmate recognized her, though, and, more important, so did Claire. For the person she became with him—the way we all do, if we’re lucky, with one other person one time in this life (and sometimes, if we’re most unlucky, twice)—was herself. Or was she simply channeling her mother’s ghost? The question seemed important. Wanting to avoid it at all costs, Claire continued on her roll, diverting, together with the audience, herself.

  “So one Saturday he comes over, and we had some hash and got him stoned and did a fashion intervention. When he realized what was up, he was, like, hey, this is me, take it or leave it, and we were like, Marcel, if you’re ever planning—like ever, in your life—to have a date, much less to procreate and pass on your genetic package, the whole object you must strive for is not to be yourself, to try very, very hard to be someone else. So we made him lose the coat and glasses; Shanté cut his hair. The earring was the coup de grace. I don’t remember who did the actual bloodletting….”

  “You did,” said Jones, regaining self-control and affecting an ironic glumness with only moderate success.

  “Did I? You may be right. I know we used the needle in the sewing kit, and I can also tell you that he screamed and fainted at the sight of his own blood.”

  “Now that”—Jones’s baritone boomed out strongly on the word, and he was laughing—“that is a lie, and a damned lie!”

  Claire’s laughter ran a scale of glee. “Dead away. Right flat out on Shanté’s bed, the only time he ever got there! And look at him now…. Look who the ugly duckling grew up to be. Not to give myself undue credit, but I have to say the earring was the start of the whole turnaround, the beginning of the change in fortune that led to the result you see.”

  “I’d like to point out for the record,” he said, “A, this story is apocryphal. B, I don’t recall smoking hash with you….”

  “He didn’t inhale,” she put in sotto voce, and the whole group cracked up, converted to her cause.

  “C, they’re ready for us in the dining room and I suggest we repair there at flank speed.”

  No one, however, made a move to go. The black-garbed members of the chorus looked at their new colleague and the dean as though not quite sure what they were witnessing. Whatever it was, though, they were hesitant to remove themselves from it, and Claire and Marcel in their peach and isingreen pastels—in what might otherwise have passed for an old RHB gig at the Mudd Club, circa 1983—resembled tropical birds, Carolina parakeets, let’s say, who’d spelunked by accident into a cave of nesting academic bats. They were isolated from the others, enveloped in a field as charged and brilliant as their clothes.

  “Dr. Jones?” A nervous waiter looked out from the inner door.

  “People,” he said forcibly, ushering them ahead.
As Claire filed in, he caught her sleeve.

  “Oh, God, Marcel! I’m sorry! What did I do?” She put her hand over her heart. “Do you have any nitro, because I think I’m going to have a heart attack! I can’t believe I said all that! What came over me? It wasn’t even like me.”

  “What do you mean?” he said. “It was exactly like you.”

  Claire blinked and mulled it, then said, “You’re right, it was!” And they both laughed.

  “So, tell me, how did last night go?”

  On that, Claire’s face went sober. “Oh, fuck, Cell…Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  SEVEN

  In the submarine of creation, Captain Nemo

  Can be found kicking ass and taking names.

  I ought to know ’cause he impressed me deeply

  And I attended boot camp in his brains.

  It never rains down here, there isn’t any weather.

  On maneuvers, blind fish osculate our masks.

  I’d like to know their taxonomic listings,

  But I fear Nemo would torpedo if I asked.

  Stretched across the partners desk, one hand in his tousled hair, the other twirling Clive’s nib pen, Ran reread the lines by the light of the green-shaded lamp and laughed out loud. He had the spirit now, or the spirit now had him. Though a rent in the bedrock, there was magma boiling up from the deep world. He hadn’t written anything so free in months. Could it be years?

  He could see it all before him: the album title would be Nemo’s Submarine, and “Nemo’s Submarine” the title cut. The music—playing all around him, bouncing off the moldering walls of books as it came on to four a.m.—was the driving three-chord blare that Ran and his whole generation had gone to school to with the Clash and the Ramones. (And Joey, gone, and now Joe Strummer, too. Alone in New York City in his cab, Ran had taken their deaths hard, but he was past the fear of death tonight. More than that, Ran was in a place where he knew death did not exist.)

  And the words kept tumbling:

  It’s not that he’s a tyrant or a monster.

  In fact, he’s like a father to us all.

  It’s just that loneliness has made his heart ferocious….

  “Mama?”

  Upstairs, Charlie softly called and something in his father clenched. When Ran looked up, gray light surprised him at the window. Suddenly the clock read 6:15. “Go back to sleep, sweet boy,” he whispered. Prayed. Just another hour. Thirty minutes.

  “Maa-ma…Maaa-ma…” In a sweet, teasing singsong, Charlie, working off his own agenda, willed his mom to come.

  It’s just that loneliness has made his heart ferocious,

  And…

  Ran could see the next line, like a billfish on the gaffe beside the boat. He had to land it now or watch it slip away into the dark.

  Upstairs, the bedsprings creaked; the soft pad of Claire’s footsteps, tentative and groggy, gaining purpose as they gathered speed, moving down the hall…

  And he…he’s grown hard deaf hard deaf…

  “Mama? Maa-ma? Mama!”

  “I’m coming!” Claire called. “Good grief, Charlie!”

  Dopplering like the whistle of a train, the song gave Ran a final chance to board.

  It’s just that loneliness has made his heart ferocious,

  And he’s grown deaf to any softer call.

  Frowning, he put down his pen. “I’ve got him, Claire,” he called, and went to fetch his son.

  It was quarter to eleven when he finally made it back from Powatan, after dropping off the kids at preschool. Centuries had passed, and Ransom was a different, humbler man.

  Holding one somber child in either arm, he’d watched Claire drive off down the allée toward her first-day breakfast, and he’d smiled for the rearview mirror.

  We gave three heavy-hearted cheers and plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.

  The lines from Moby-Dick played back, and Ransom, swallowing a Bluepoint of cold, briny fear, took Hope and Charlie in the house and scrambled eggs.

  “Are eggs baby chickens?” Hope asked as she climbed into her blue and purple booster chair.

  “Baby chickens come from eggs,” he conceded, spooning some onto her plate.

  “Do they die when we eat them?”

  “Well, Hope,” he said, searching for a valve for Charlie’s sippy cup, “the baby chickens aren’t alive yet, so I don’t think you can really say they die.”

  “Do chickens mind when we eat them?”

  “What? Charlie, come eat breakfast!”

  “I coming, Doddy!” Carrying his little toy guitar—another street-find Ran had mailed down for the birthday he had missed—he skidded around the corner in his socks.

  “Look at me! Look at me!” he said with his sweet serrated smile and such vulnerable, unvarnished need in hazel eyes, which were neither Ran’s nor Claire’s. Whose eyes were they? Holding the guitar left-handed, with the treble E string on top, he hit a jangling stadium chord. “Look, Doddy! Look at me!”

  “I see you, bud.” Fighting the impulse to turn the instrument around and tune it on the spot, Ran lifted him into his high chair. “Now eat your eggs, okay?”

  “Do they, Daddy?”

  “What?”

  “Do the chickens mind?” Hope articulated very clearly, as though he were semicretinous.

  “Well,” he said, “when we eat a chicken, the chicken becomes part of us, okay? Part of something that can think and laugh and dream and do all sorts of things a chicken can’t…So maybe the chicken doesn’t mind. Maybe there’s something in it for the chicken, too. Does that make sense?”

  Hope listened soberly. “Uh-huh,” she said, and pushed her plate away. “Let’s play the Scar game, Daddy.” Her eyes took on the wicked gleam.

  He faced her, arms akimbo. “What exactly is the Scar game, Hope?”

  “Look at me, Doddy!”

  He raised a finger. “Just a minute, bud…”

  “You be Scar, and I’m Mufasa climbing up the rock,” she said. “I say, ‘Help me, brother, please,’ and you grab my paws and say, ‘Long live the king!’ and let me fall into the wildebeest stampede.”

  He frowned. “What happens then?”

  “I get dead.” Hope grinned.

  “How about when you say, ‘Help me, brother, please,’ I lift you up onto the rock with me and everyone lives happily ever after?”

  “No, Daddy!” She regarded him with shocked disapproval. “No! That isn’t how you play. You have to let me fall.”

  “I’m sorry, Hope,” he said, getting softly in her face. “I don’t think I can play that game with you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’d rather fall into the wildebeest stampede myself than see you break the toenail on your little toe.”

  “I don’t have toenails, I have claws,” she said, and showed him. “Rarrrrrr!”

  “Rarrr, yourself,” he said, wondering how it was that Claire always seemed to know the proper move. And not just Claire. It was as if there were some universal primer course on parenting, and everyone had taken it but him. This was an old feeling, though. Catching it, he made a mental note to pick up the scrip he’d dropped off at the pharmacy last night.

  “Doddy?” Charlie’s voice was wilting plaintively.

  “What, Charlie, what?” When Ransom turned, the smile came back.

  “Eat my eggs.”

  “Yes, you did. Good job. Now, everybody, listen up! Attention! No more fooling, we have to get to school. Mama’s counting on the team. Now where are everybody’s shoes?”

  Charlie shrugged with big, round eyes, and Hope said, “Mama knows.”

  They searched the house three times—all fifteen rooms—only to find them in the one place the Team Leader never thought to look: the closet.

  “Do we have time to swing before we go?” Hope asked him on their way outside.

  “What are we doing here, Hope?”

  She frowned at his tone. “Going to school?”

  “That’s rig
ht. Going to school. Do I look like I have time to push you on the swing?”

  “No, but Mommy does.”

  “Well, I’m not Mommy. Obviously.” He threw in this ad hominem aside against himself as he strapped them in their seats. At which point, the missing valve in Charlie’s cup—the one that Ransom never got around to putting in—led to a drenching OJ spill; which led to an unbuckling; which led to an about-face to the house; a hosing in the tub; another Huggie; a new set of clothes.

  Finally—to the tune of “Five Little Ducks”—they set out. They were down to four, when the opossum or raccoon—the remains had reached the state where it was hard to differentiate—disappeared under the hood. As the tires tump-tumped, Ran caught Hope’s expression in the rearview. Her face had gone grave; her eyes had that scintillant and musing light. She seemed like a tiny mathematician working out a problem, and it struck her father that his little girl had found the deep equation that would occupy her life. She had the artist gene—Ran didn’t know what else to call it, or if he would have wished her spared.

  In a guilty need for reciprocity, he looked toward Charlie, and found his son’s eyes waiting for him in the mirror.

  “Hi, Doddy.”

  “Hi, buddy.”

  Ransom smiled, and Charlie’s left eye blinked, then both, and then the left again. Ran had seen this last night, too, and maybe if he’d been here all these months, this tic would never have developed; Hope might have turned her powers to the bright side, say, Barbie dolls, some correct, updated version in Birkenstocks with a waist and a flat chest. Ransom couldn’t blame himself, and yet he did. I’m here now, Charlie, his eyes said to Charlie’s in the mirror. The affirmation sank without a trace.

  After he’d parked and slung their bags across his shoulder; after he’d put Charlie’s socks and shoes back on and tied them; after he’d crossed the parking lot with Charlie slipping from one arm while holding Hope’s hand and reminding her to look both ways; after he’d surrendered them to their teachers and come back out with two dark moons of sweat in his armpits and a tremor in his picking hand; after having longed for them and missed them so, Ransom slipped into the driver’s seat and breathed a sigh of profound and profoundly culpable relief. In the desperate hope that he might find a pack of two-year-old cigarettes from his last trip, he reached for the glove box, but no such luck.