She raised an absolving hand: “I knew when we arrived home you’d never make it through the evening. I told Tessa so straight-away…. I’m very glad you conked out.” (At the end of a watch, Sutter would always put his lips on the gun and kiss it and tell it in his mock Edward G. Robinson gangster’s voice, “It’s my conk-out time, baby. But stick around; I’ll be back.” The act always drew a laugh from the Owl.) “Hello?” Maud said. “Breakfast is ready when you are.”
He snapped to: “Give me fifteen minutes. I could eat a horse. After breakfast I’ll call Pa. Then we go to the lake. Right?”
“Yes.” Said with that high, heart-stopping look: Eve’s very own.
They drove out to the lake in the small, snazzy Chevy convertible he’d bought back in the summer of 1939 and promptly named “the Harold Teen,” in honor of the adolescent boy in a then-popular, syndicated comic strip. Although the day was beautifully clear and sunny, they did not fold back the car’s canvas top: what they were up to, even before the fact of its being indulged, wanted sequestering.
Some things, once learned, you can do for the rest of your life. Like driving a car. But if you haven’t done it for a goodly while, when you are again in the driver’s seat, you reexperience all the charms of first mastery: that you are in control; can negotiate curves with ease; brake to a smooth stop; turn on a dime; obtain a speed that outraces the wind, and glide—one hand on the steering wheel, the other on the knob of the stick-shift, ETC.
He had always liked driving, and never more than he liked doing it today.
Their departure had been delayed by Caroline’s protesting tears that she and Julia were being left behind. “We’ll be back this evening,” Maud kept telling her, stroking her hair back from her eyes. Julia but watched. Tessa, though, handed the picnic hamper to Morgan with the words: “You should just go. Callie’ll stop her bawling before you’re out of the drive. She likes to put on a show.” She told Maud the same thing: “You and Mr. Shurtliff should just go.”
At last Maud conceded and at last disengaged herself from Caroline’s clutch.
He bent to Julia: “I’ll bring you and Caroline a bouquet of wild-flowers. All right?” He kissed her.
Julia nodded, and in her sober, peculiarly adult way, said: “Good-bye, Morgan.”
Which Maud heard and now, under way, alluded to: “She must have picked up calling you ‘Morgan’ from listening to Pip and me talk about you.”
He needed to know more, so was cautious: “Caroline hasn’t called me anything yet.”
“I always speak of you as ‘Daddy’ when I talk with them about you. I think that’s what they should call you. You are their father, after all.”
He sensed to tread lightly: “It’s possible they’ll come to it in their own time and way.”
But Maud continued to frown: “They don’t call me ‘Maud,’ and it strikes me as wrong, Julia calling you ‘Morgan.’ You should discourage it.”
“I’ll do my best. But whatever they end up calling me, I want to feel they’re comfortable doing it.” Then he dared: “Perhaps with adopted children—”
He got no further. He had struck the old chord of discord between them. Maud all but flared: “They don’t know yet that they’re adopted and they don’t have to know for a long time. It’s up to us to establish for them who we are; that we’re their parents.”
The groundwork of her reasoning was sound, but he feared its dangers of future illusion. For now, though, the topic was one best not pursued: as long as the war was on, leaving Maud to cope with parenting alone, he must reconcile himself to having the lesser voice. So he addressed instead what he believed and what was in his heart to say. “They’re marvelous children, darling, because you’re a marvelous mother to them. I don’t know how you’ve done it, all on your own. It can’t have been easy.”
Her eyes had a sudden, moment way of skimming over with tears, and now, in a low voice, with intimate force, she said: “Oh, Morgan, there’ve been times when I missed you so I thought I’d die.”
He understood that she bespoke the two sides of the coin of longing: of a boldly-minted, fully aspected sexual visage on the obverse side, and on the reverse side, encircled by a wreath of modest leaves, an engraved head shown in profile, its chasteness a propounder of the plainer aspects of conjugal life.
There wasn’t a car in sight. He stopped in the middle of the road. “I know,” he whispered, kissing her. “God, how well I know.”
And when they drove on: “Your captain telephoned Pip about five weeks ago,” Maud said. “He told Pip he’d tried to reach me but hadn’t gotten an answer. It made me cry that I’d missed his call.”
Ah, he thought: the moment’s come. “Rupert Wilkins. He promised me he’d call you or Pa.”
“He told Pip he’d left you and the other members of your ship’s crew somewhere in Africa—he didn’t say where—and Pip got the impression he shouldn’t press him. It seemed fantastic, your being in Africa. We’d had no mail from you for ages, so to hear that you were all right was wonderful.” She turned on the seat and fully faced him: “He told Pip it’d been a pleasure for him to serve with you. He said you’d been a tower of strength to him.”
He kept his eyes on the road.
“You seem very far away. What are you thinking about?” she asked.
Still questioned me the story of my life
From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes
That I have passed….
He had no idea how to proceed; how to bring together the rags and tatters of his scattered thoughts. It was futile, absurd to try, there being no logic to the experience, and its tragic shades too harsh to thrust in whole upon her. Not, anyhow, conveyable.
“Morgan?”
“I was going to tell you later, but it’s just as well to tell you now.” He stated the simple fact: “We were torpedoed in the Indian Ocean.”
“Morgan! When?”
“March nineteenth.” He wanted to get it over with quickly: “As torpedoings go, ours was a relatively lucky one. Our ship went down and I spent about three days I’d not like to repeat in a lifeboat before we were picked up. Beyond that, there’s not much to tell.” He looked for an instant directly at her.
Her eyes were wide with wonder and spectral fright: “You might have died,” she whispered.
And because she touched his hand in a way that made confession possible: “I’ve spent a lot of time wondering that I didn’t.”
“How many did?”
“Two.” He felt a sudden need to raise them from anonymity: “A merchant seaman named Davis, and one of my gun crew, a boy named Henry Malkerson.”
“And wounded?”
“There were some.”
She remained for a moment silent; then, with lowered eyes, quietly: “I don’t know what to say.” But she did; exactly: “I love you.”
My story being done
She gave me for my pains a world of sighs:
…She loved me for the dangers I had passed
And I loved her that she did pity them.
His tears almost blinded him. He slowed the car. They were at that point in the trip where the road dipped down into a wooded valley, down to the turn-off lane that led to the inland lake. She touched his arm again: “We’re almost there,” then drew from the pocket of her skirt the key to the gate and displayed it, solid and gleaming in the sunlight. “I love you,” she told him again.
Maud’s grandfather had bought the hundred-odd acres of land back in 1889. In 1891, the so-called “cabin” was built—a deceptively simple name for the commodious, two-storied, hand-beamed, Adirondack-style dwelling set on a hill above the large lake. Doctor Leigh was fond of the place (he referred to it as his “retreat”), but, ironically, Mrs. Leigh found it too remote, too lonely for her liking. In recent years, Doctor Leigh used it almost secretly, slipping away from his medical duties, coming out to the property on the odd afternoon for a couple of hours of solitary fishing or a hike in the woods. H
e kept the cabin in immaculate repair and had the land regularly patrolled by an old loner who lived in a small, narrow-windowed house down the road from its gates: Fred Canoose—said to be a full-blooded Indian, remnant of the region’s Iroquois tribe: an untalkative man with dark, undomesticated eyes set in a lean face, a man seldom seen, but given to leaving “things” on the cabin porch as evidence he was minding his duties as care-taker—a collection of pheasant or raptor feathers; a pyramid of dried alder branches for starting a fire, the boughs cut by a beaver’s teeth; bunches of wild herbs tied with a hide-string; a rabbit’s scut. Those kinds of lonely things. Now, propped up against the front door, an old, found, two-pronged deer antler. Maud picked it up: “It wasn’t here last week,” she said. “I’ll put it on the mantel.”
In ones entire life, there are but two or three days when only the lyrical happens.
The cabin smelled of ancient wood-smoke and pine boughs and the dried brown tufts of bulrushes. In an upstairs chamber windowed on the sunlit lake, they made love the first time with a hard, emphatically selfish passion; afterwards, with an encyclopedic range of sexual indulgences, languorously.
In the early afternoon they ate their picnic lunch and between them, drank a bottle of wine. They were a bit heady afterwards and sleepy, and napped under a light blanket in each other’s arms. When they woke, he took her rowing on the lake. Red-winged blackbirds whistled. Jesus-spiders walked on the water. A flock of ducks came, circling, quacking, splashing down. There were yellow irises blooming in the shore-line shallows, and with the knife Doctor Leigh kept clamped to the underside of the boat’s middle thwart, he cut a bunch for Julia and Caroline. The sun was three-quarters down. In a voice already cast in reminiscence, Maud said: “We have to think about getting back.”
He rowed toward the pier and let her off. “I’ll be along in a moment,” he told her.
He secured the boat and stored the oars in a near-by shack. A loon appeared and swam near but dived out of sight when he lit a cigarette. It came up farther away, eyed him, and let out the shiver of its call. He stood watching it, pleased by its presence, thinking it had probably been hatched on the lake and recently returned to it to seek a mate and bring into being another clutch of its kind. And then he had a sudden image of himself as being someday an old man. A premonition that really, someday, he would be: that it was his fate to outlast the war, outlast his youth and the flood and ebb of middle years, and live to an age when he would walk with a cane. He had never imagined himself so, and that he did so now, sated as he was in body, and stupendously happy, struck him as a strange, evincing curiosity.
He stubbed out the last of his cigarette and picked up the bunch of water-irises lying at his feet.
Tonight, for the first time, he would read a bed-time story to Julia and Caroline.
The next day, in the morning, he went to see Lillie Ruth and Mrs. Leigh. (He had telephoned in advance. “Come at ten,” Lillie Ruth told him.) At the front door of the Leighs’ house, she hugged him and praised sweet Jesus he was home. “Safe with us,” she said.
“I’m so very, very glad to see you, Lillie Ruth.”
The lines on her forehead had deepened and she had allowed her hair to go completely white, but her smile was as rich as ever. “You’re thin, Morgan. We’ll fatten you up…. They’ve had you roaming the world.” (It sounded biblical, the way she said it.) “I thought you’d be in your uniform.” She ducked her head down and wiped her eyes with her apron. “I’ve never seen Maudie like she was when Dennis took her into Cleveland to meet you. Crazy with excitement, so happy…You must have crowed when you saw the twins…. Doctor Leigh’s gone to the hospital, same as usual. Mrs. Leigh’s in the library. She’s different, Morgan. I won’t be long bringing you some refreshment.”
Mrs. Leigh rose from her chair to greet him. She looked in perfect health, her figure as ample as ever, the color in her cheeks and lips her own, her abundant hair glossy, wound up on her head in a neat French twist. “Morgan, my dear.” The alto of her voice (inherited by Maud) had lost its beguiling deepness; was thin and airy and wanting in draw.
He moved a chair close to hers and sat down. “You’ve been gone such a long time, Morgan.”
To this conventional opening, he made the conventional reply that yes, it had been a long time, but here he was, back, and as she could surely imagine, thrilled to be. She nodded, though without animation. He spoke of Maud and the twins, and she seemed to be listening, but her eyes never fully met his own, and the way she sat, so still, and in such a majesty of self-absorbed calm, left him with a sense of disengagement. (Maud, too, had warned him.) He would have been at home with her nervousness that in the past had used to send her hands rummaging through the air or fluttering up to her throat—gestures of her affrightments—for, as quirky reminders of his own devils, they had peripherally involved and included him. But now, her unfathomable tranquillity distanced her from him to what he felt was an unbridgeable degree.
In a footling way, he rambled on, talking of the lovely morning and the cloudy beauty of the white field-daisies flowering everywhere over the landscape, even, with the hope of eliciting a smile, of Ralph. “Our dog,” he said, to remind her. Her face was blank: the dark side of the moon; and he gave up and fell silent.
He loved the room, the solemn oak paneling, the visual affronting spontaneity of the mantel’s carvings, the book-lined floor-to-ceiling shelves, the old brocade pillows strewn on the couch, the tall windows—
“When you were away, Morgan, did you see death?”
It was as if a rock had gained a voice. The sound, and the dark question, stunned him. Yet having posed it, she did not wait for his answer, but went on in her paper-thin, commandingly tranquil voice, now a confider’s one: “I used to see Death often, but not so much anymore, and when I do, I’m not a bit afraid of him. Not in the least.”
Him, Morgan noted. Death (if that was what she was really talking about), to her, in gender male.
“I envy you your lack of fear.”
“You must learn to accept, Morgan dear.”
He would never forget the teaching tone of the admonition, never, in the future when he thought of her, be able to set aside the collected power of her composure, separate and arcane, a temple without exit in which she resided alone in the exampled logic of her advanced madness.
He thought again of Maud’s warning made to him at breakfast…. Of course, Lillie Ruth, knowing, came in then bearing a tray set with cups and saucers and a china pot filled with freshly made coffee. “And cookies, Morgan,” she said over a glance shot at him at how he was holding up.
“Sit with us, Lillie Ruth,” Mrs. Leigh said with a first smile.
Conversation was easier with Lillie Ruth present, but he was spent, and stayed only a few minutes more, and when he left the house, he closed the front door carefully, noiselessly behind him.
Sheriff Gary Mills was conducting traffic at the juncture of Main and Barnes streets. “God, if it’s not Mr. Shurtliff!” he said through the rolled-down car window.
“How are you, Gary? And Mrs. Mills?”
“Good, thanks, both of us.”
“And young Gary?”
“Joined the Marines last year. On the day he turned eighteen. Couldn’t wait to sign up. He’s off somewhere in the Pacific now. There’s three cars behind you, Mr. Shurtliff—”
In front of the courthouse, he spotted Bob Dulrich (chief clerk of the court) talking with Byard Williams (the court stenographer). He steered the car curbside. “Gentlemen—” he called out.
“Morgan Shurtliff!”
“None other.”
“Judge Malcolm said you were due back,” Bob Dulrich said. “You’re a welcome sight.”
Byard Williams—a great questioner and a great talker—had a waxy voice and the fluke deformity of a hare-lip, the line of the vertical fissure extending from his left nostril down to his mouth, giving that portion of his face a tucked, perpetually tortured look. “How long you hom
e for?”
“Nearly a month. This is my first drive around town.”
“Have you seen our new industrial complex?”
“No. Where is it?”
“On Geddes Street, about a half mile down from Seton’s Hardware. It was built so fast we hardly knew it was happening. It’s big. You’ll see. ‘Dawson’s Manufacturing,’ it’s called.”
“What do they turn out?” Morgan asked.
“Trigger parts for machine guns, government contracts, of course. They work three shifts a day, seven days a week. A lot of women. You’ve heard the song, ‘Rosie the Riveter’? We’ve got plenty of Rosies around these days.”
Bob Dulrich put in his oar: “The plant’s brought in a whole new breed of folks to town, Mr. Shurtliff. Men past draft age and their families, moved out from Cleveland. The high school’s overcrowded”—Bob’s wife was the tenth-grade math teacher—“and like Byard said, a lot of single women in overalls working eight-hour shifts, earning more than my wife does at her teaching…. As you see it, how’s the war going?”
It was a question that would dog him for the whole of his leave. “I don’t know anything you don’t know.”
Bob Dulrich’s lip twitched: “It’s sure taking longer than any of us ever thought it would. Everybody’s showing the strain.”
Morgan nodded. “Are things frisky at the courthouse?”
“Never busier. Judge Malcolm’ll tell you.”
Morgan started the car’s engine: “I think I’ll go take a look at the new plant. Let’s the three of us get together soon. Give me a few days.”
On the railroad side of town the large, hastily built, utile structure of Dawson Manufacturing, Inc., scarred the landscape. Compared to the solid, brick Victorian facades of Seton’s Hardware and Tyler’s Agricultural Outlet and Garrison’s Lumber and the picturesque New York Central Branch station with its oval stained-glass windows, and the well-laid-out abutting strengths of its loading platforms and grain silos and holding sheds for cattle, Dawson Manufacturing, Inc., was an affront to the eye. Morgan viewed it with the sadness of disgust; saw it as a forerunner of more such abominations to come, the legal endorsement of its ugliness a precedent difficult, if not impossible, to undo.
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