by Lamar Herrin
There was a long dock leading out to the boathouse, long because there were periods when the water was low, and in a boathouse built too close to shore, the boats, unless they were raised on hoists, could become beached. The long dock allowed you to get a good running start, not to the boathouse itself but to the float fastened alongside, off which you could dive into water that was chilly only on first contact, but after which was as suited to you as the water out of which you’d been born. Some of the grown-ups complained that it smelled faintly of gas—and boats did run up and down our finger of the lake to a ramp at the end—or that it left an algae-like film on the skin, but this was the excuse aunts and uncles used when all they wanted to do was sit on their chaise lounges in the shade of a catalpa tree, on a strip of lawn between the house and the retaining wall, and sip their iced tea, or in the evenings their cocktails, and be entertained by their children as we jumped on and off that float or water-skied by.
Occasionally one of them would venture out to the float to swim. Uncle George, Ruth’s sailor husband, was a big man, six feet five inches tall, it was said, and he was the one we welcomed with cheers, because he always shouted, Man overboard! before cannonballing into the water, which created a huge cratering splash. Afterwards, if you were lucky, he’d tell the story of when the Japs torpedoed his ship and he really had to jump overboard, which made him lucky to be alive. But here he was, and he’d be damned if it wasn’t a beautiful day! Ruth didn’t like for him to use that sort of language, especially around us, and she wished he wouldn’t keep telling those war stories to impressionable young ears, but one morning, when they’d left their bedroom door open so the air could pass through, I happened to glance inside and saw them in bed, Uncle George sleeping on his side and my aunt Ruth clinging to his back as if she were the one who’d fallen overboard and was holding on for dear life. Uncle George could seem massive and Aunt Ruth had never been petite. But, together, they buoyed themselves up.
We all knew about her youthful career as a songbird, but I never heard her sing to him. My mother played the piano, and when she struck a chord and her sisters were present, they knew to gather around. But there was no piano up at the lake. Up there the grown-ups spent their time talking, they reclined on their chaise lounges deep into the evening, and, depending on the day I’d had and the mood I was in, as the oldest of the youngest generation I’d sometimes hang around. They told stories, the same stories, year after year, unless one of the four sisters happened to be absent, which was frequently the case, and then they told stories featuring that missing sister. I wouldn’t hear those they told about my mother, since when I was there she was too, but her bossiness was so notorious there wasn’t much left to tell. And, generally speaking, her three younger sisters didn’t begrudge her her bossiness since Mama Grace had been an equally notorious soft touch.
Rosalyn, being our hostess and benefactress, rarely got stories told about herself. When Big Howie was there, for the sport of it my mother would tie into him, but that frequently had something to do with politics, which on a summer evening with the swallows swooping over the lake at sunset, dipping their wings into its lustrous orange glow, could have a jarring effect, as playful as my mother and Big Howie might try to keep their little confrontations. My father didn’t always go to the lake with us. Before going into business he traveled for a living, was, it seemed, his own boss, and rarely gave himself a vacation. He sold granite to monument companies. He was not a high-powered salesman type, not at all a quick talker, and he let the granite sell itself. Granite from Vermont, granite from Georgia, gray granite with swimming black specks and red granite straight from the iron-enriched earth. When he was there in that line of chaise lounges drawn up before the lake, he usually found himself seated beside Aunt Lily, who, with her provocative swagger, amused him no end. She was the mystery sister, and how a woman so up-front and open to attack could be mysterious was a mystery in itself.
She had married late, a man twenty years her senior—a marriage of convenience, it was whispered, whatever that meant—who, not being an outdoorsman, more of a banker type, someone who would have a vault nearby he could step into when life got too raucous outside, rarely came to the mountains. Why in the world he had married Lily, and vice versa, her sisters soon tired of talking about. Since as a subject of conversation Lily was waywardness personified, her sisters saw the folly of trying to account for her and talked about something else. She still intrigued her mother, as though Mama Grace before she died was determined to figure Lily out, but Mama Grace also knew when she was beat, and I decided, as far as Lily was concerned, the missing figure was her father. Mama Grace would shake her head and mutter some baffled endearment under her breath, but my grandfather, James Pritchard, would have picked Lily out of the congregation with his pinioning black eyes and sat her up straight.
She’d been in Australia at the war’s end and had brought me a boomerang. When I had the arm for it, I launched the boomerang, expecting it to fly around me in a huge circle before falling, like an exhausted bird, at my feet. Instead it just kept flying away. What kind of hoax was this? I wondered. Something that could trace a great, world-encircling arc before returning home I’d bought into, and the failure of the boomerang to perform as advertised might have been my very first loss-of-innocence moment. But then I remembered that Aunt Lily herself had sailed off and basically gone around the world and come home, so I’d been able to shore up my innocence with a bit of symbolic reasoning. The boomerang was her totem, her charm, you didn’t throw the boomerang so much as you threw yourself, and when you circled back if you were lucky you landed here, up at the lake, with your family spread out in one long front row as the sun set over the water. I told Aunt Lily she was the boomerang lady, which caused her to smile her big opened-mouth smile and to say, Bud (her name for me from the start), I’m going to change that to the Boomerang Babe, if you don’t mind. It suits me, don’t you think? And then she gave me her hoarse, hooting laugh.
It was a laugh that could scare the fish, and she was the other adult who would make appearances out on the swimming float attached to the boathouse. She wouldn’t run out the long dock to get a head start, but when she appeared out there, she seemed to be riding the winds of some sort of release, so you never knew what to expect. She wouldn’t always jump in. Unlike her sisters, she never wore a bathing cap. She had crinkled ginger-colored hair, which she kept short, also unlike her sisters, whose hair was a wavy shoulder-length black. Some days she’d stand there on the float and make critical comments about our swimming styles and attire, and other times she might dive in over us and with a powerful kick swim straight out into the lake, in which case the message she was sending us, her nieces and nephews, was clear. Get your money down, because the odds were good that this time she wasn’t coming back! When she finally stopped, she’d be out in the middle, swimming-wise in a world of her own. There were houses and boathouses across the lake, housing other families, in case she wanted to make a run for it, but she always came back to us, and cautioned us as she pulled up onto the float. Don’t you dare swim out there where I did! I saw a fish out there as big as Uncle George with a hungry look in his eye! Then she went back and took her seat in line, frequently beside my father, whom she never failed to amuse. From his time on the road he must have seen a number of women who reminded him of Lily, just as those women out there, thanks to Lily, would remind him of home. My father had a long face, he was lanky and long and could always use a smile. Lily obliged. She was the swing character in the family. The boomerang babe.
When I wanted a break from the lake and the family, it was simply a matter of choosing any of the streambeds flowing down off the hills and following it back up. There were hiking paths up there where I almost never saw anyone hiking, and sooner or later I’d branch off onto one of those, but the streambeds were full of stones, so that even if it had rained recently and water was running down, you could make your way up, and these streambeds always gave off a deep bre
ath of earthy coolness even in the middle of the day. If you got hot from your effort, all you had to do was find one of those especially cool spots and stand there without moving, without making a sound, and a breeze in the pines and the scent of pines would come down to find you. Birds took their turns calling, a whistling sort of screech, probably warning each other there was an intruder in their midst, but if you stood still long enough, they quieted down. You weren’t really an intruder, but they didn’t know that yet. Eventually you began to hear whippoorwills and jays and the low chuckling coo of doves. There was a constant shrilling of cicadas, but that was a curtain of noise you could slip behind and into the presence of quieter, more intimate sounds. Something was always scampering away, there was always a woody ticking of some sort or maybe a stray gust of breeze in the pine-cones, some insect would buzz by your ear, and there was a quiet settling sound, as though the earth itself were settling, but which was probably just the settling of your own breath. And, of course, there were snakes, there was an ever-nearness of snakes, but if you stuck to the streambeds and the paths, the snakes, with a thin rustling slither, as though keeping their half of the bargain, would move back into the brambly underbrush. The smell of that underbrush was so fresh it was rank, it was manless and rank, as if in a thousand years a family reunion had never been held anywhere near there, as if you could travel a thousand miles and get no farther away than you were at that moment from that large family gathered on the shores of that lake, probably no more than a hundred yards down that streambed. But I was young, and a little wilderness went a long way.
And I loved returning from my excursions. As a boy I was a loner until I’d gotten my fill, then I wanted to belong. The family kept getting larger and larger, and for the longest time no one died. Even as a young girl my cousin Harriet had a detached, unflappable way about her, which made her a reliable playmate, if not a very active one. She picked things out about the adults, though, which made her seem wiser than her years. She was the next oldest of the children, and would be the cousin in whom I confided. She had gotten her father’s height, a girl’s share of it, and something of his long ruminative face. She had sleepy brown eyes, which served as a decoy because she was keeping an active eye on everything.
As a girl, more than a talker Harriet was a gossiper of a few well-chosen words, which you had to coax out of her, but which she took pleasure in, in the effort you made. Lily, of course, was easy pickings, so easy she made a mockery of gossip, but the way Big Howie had Rosalyn under his control and the way Rosalyn escaped it once her husband’s back was turned allowed Harriet to take potshots at her uncle from behind the shield of his wife, so Big Howie’s gaucheries could be made to seem like a little boy’s. Using any of the Pritchard girls as shields behind which their husbands could be ridiculed was something Harriet was very adept at. Lily’s banker husband (although that was not what he did, just how he behaved; he made his modest living as an accountant) was like a dog Lily let out to do its business and let back in when he learned to scratch at the door. Lily’s husband had a son from a previous marriage, and the one time Lily brought the two of them to the lake, they seemed like a species from another planet. They struck a stance and stayed put until Lily took them home. Her own father, Harriet claimed, could be whistled down if her mother suddenly became untracked, which could happen. It was as if Ruth had woken up one morning and said, Where am I now? and when Uncle George spoke the name of a place his wife couldn’t even pronounce, she told him they’d strayed too far over the map. They needed to go back to the lake to touch base, and here they were.
It would be years before Mama Grace sat me down and told me the story of how her husband had picked her out of the congregation and held her there with his eyes until he could propose at the church door, but her daughters must have known that story and taken its cautionary lessons to heart. Matinee idols posing as itinerant preachers preying on innocent young girls with picture taking on their minds—what all that meant was that the Pritchard girls needed to be on high alert and, in the public eye at least, to keep up the farce of keeping their husbands cowed.
More children came. Harriet had a brother, little Bobbie, three years younger, who was a pistol, a firecracker, and all of that. Then a sister, Beatrice, little Bea, so pretty and happily behaved that you questioned your memory once she’d become a normal, active, stubborn, spoiled and noise-making girl. And my sister, of course, was included in there, five years younger than I, but I never forgot that I was the oldest, the firstborn, with certain obligations I imagined I had to fulfill, a position that not even Little Howie with all of his gifts could claim. I drifted off and I drifted back. I counted heads to see if more children had appeared, reassured when none had, but I knew the day would come.
For a while the question became Lily, and Lily was the sort of woman you could put the question to directly. All right! Let’s see! Cards on the table! Are you going to reproduce or not? But no one bothered to ask the question or even hint at it in a joking sort of way, because Lily in the guise of a pregnant woman, with a pregnant flush to her skin and a pregnant rounding out of her bones, no one could imagine, much less imagine her husband performing the role of procreator. So then the real question became the one that everybody had been asking themselves since the Whalens had built the cabin and invited family up here: When would Little Howie have a brother or sister? The Whalens rebuilt the cabin, modernizing and extending it so that the original cabin became a sort of off-at-the-end nucleus of what was now one long train car of a house, painted a cedar red, with new bedrooms and baths off to each side, room to sleep up to twenty, and the question of how to fill those rooms was never far from anybody’s mind. We still sat in front of the fireplace in the original cabin, the trout and bass mounted on the walls stayed there, a bearskin rug remained before the hearth with the bear’s head attached and the teeth still bare but completely domesticated now, and on the rainy afternoons—part of the risk you ran, rain in the mountains on summer afternoons being close to the norm—we assembled jigsaw puzzles or played cards on the screen porch, canasta and hearts and old maid, until the rain ended and we were let loose back into the lake.
It was mostly the women playing cards, and it was mostly then, with the competitive juices flowing, rather than when they were all sitting out before the lake and the setting sun could soothe their spirits, that the most telling stories got told. It was on a rainy afternoon on that porch that word escaped my mother’s lips that Lily was not exactly childless, not technically at least, and that a gasp escaped Ruth’s lips, not at the news, which she seemed to have known, but directed at my mother for revealing it before one of the children, for there I sat on a nearby daybed, as my generation’s spokesman, with now, perhaps, another cousin to add to the count. But mum was the word, and it wasn’t until much later, in fact after Lily died, that my sister in going through some of her things found a photograph of our aunt in her WAC uniform holding a baby in her arms, actually holding it up as though proudly presenting it to the world, and the look on Lily’s face was radiant, even though the quality of the photograph was poor and the intervening years had dulled whatever luster it had once had. But I asked myself: how was anyone to know if this was Lily’s baby or not? There was the better part of a year it took for Lily to travel back cross-country from San Diego to her hometown, time enough for her to get pregnant, if that hadn’t happened overseas, and to give birth, but that delay was chalked up to Lily feeling her oats, with her father dead for four years and her mother too loving and obliging to take offense. Lily, it was believed, was out seeing something of the country she’d just helped to save. When she finally appeared before us, she came bearing gifts, a boomerang for me and down under mementos for other family members, and with a big grin on her face that meant, in case we’d forgotten, We won! We won!
If, I put it to myself, after all that death she’d seen in the Philippines, she’d gotten off the boat and held a baby in her arms, that didn’t have to mean she’d give
n birth to it, did it? Even though she might have spent the better part of a year out West soaking up the sun, it could have meant, We won, we won, and here’s fresh life to prove it. Somebody’s fresh life. A twig on somebody’s tree. Jean secretly hoped it had been Lily’s baby, even if she’d had to give it up for adoption or something like that. But only after, as Jean imagined it, a long, jubilant one-night stand! Yet that look on our aunt’s face in the photograph could also have been the look of a victor, celebrating with the nearest fresh life at hand. Knowing how impulsive my aunt could be, and how winning, too, I could imagine Lily stepping down from that troopship in San Diego, with crowds there waiting to welcome their loved ones home, and persuading a young mother to relinquish her baby for just one moment, for just one snapshot from the thousands of cameras that must have been on hand out there. Or, since there were no Polaroids back then but an abundance of Brownie cameras, and Lily was still, after all, her mother’s daughter, it could have been a snapshot taken with Lily’s own camera, perhaps a hand-me-down from her mother, which Lily had carried through the whole horrid course of that war in anticipation of this one moment, when she could step off the ship onto free American soil and hold up a newborn baby to represent them all. Why wouldn’t Mama Grace have loved that? Why wouldn’t we all? I could have made the case to all my cousins if I’d thought of it, or if I had dared.