FIVE
The Penitent: Arne
It was almost time for another note from Arne. Arne, the penitent. May said so to her daughter. Was there anything? “No,” Laura said. “There’s something from Aunt Carrie but nothing much else. Leah called, of course. Why don’t I just call Arne, see if he can come by? I think Jackie’s coming, from your office, but that would be OK. They’d get along.”
My office, May said to herself. She didn’t ask to see her sister’s note, and try to decipher it or have it read to her. I never gave my office a thought. I must have been worse than they said. She had had a small stroke. They said small.
“Oh . . . don’t know. Funny . . . no card.” In her desk drawer she had a rubber-banded packet of greeting cards, lighthouses and flower gardens and moons, and inside, the rounded, childish signature, two big rings, A and O, for each year Arne Olafsson had lived after chasing her son into the lake.
In the shut drawer, even now, they rave and grieve. That was a poet. Letters in a drawer . . . a woman poet. Since the stroke, May had devised a test of her memory, with lines from songs and poems. She still had a stock of them but in many cases she had lost the source.
When was the stroke? Laura had flown in from Malaysia, then her husband Will, and was it days or weeks since they had first appeared? They were both in May’s apartment, and had been. May felt obscurely detached from the whole episode of the stroke, deleted so cleanly from her memory, and she was unmoved by it, as if she had stayed behind in the car while someone else went out to meet it. “‘Stayed in the car with the door shut!’” she heard Laura on the phone, quoting her.
Any day now another “Thinking of You” would come from Arne, with the carefully varied wording that told her he kept drafts of these yearly requests for her blessing. A man of boyish, stupefying sentiment—what cruelty his first wife had shown, to divorce a little boy—whose mother must have borne in on him some Norse lesson about saying you are sorry, so that he could never be finished with it.
It turned out he was a relative, a distant relative of May’s, by marriage. “My stepmother was an Olafsson,” she had whispered, twenty years ago, in the middle of the night in the police station where they had had their first sight of Arne Olafsson and his dumb tormented blush. Around the state, the Olafsson family numbered in the hundreds. But it turned out there was a connection; an aunt of his brought out the family Bible, he told May, and proved it to him.
Another phone call, to be made by May in response to the note. That familiar jostling audible through the receiver as the man shifted from foot to foot and blushed over whether he could expect it, whether May was really required to come one more time to the café where they met each year. One of his wives had become a friend of hers, but Arne himself made only this once-a-year approach. They met under the freeway, with the roar above them and the whine and vapor of diesel saws drifting in from a little lumberyard next door, in a place where the waitress knew all the cops.
The same big-armed waitress every year: she knew May and Arne as a pair. This waitress knew, May felt she knew, the steam built up in Arne, making him rattle the lid of the creamer as he poured, and fish out the wet sugar packets he dropped in May’s coffee. The waitress knew May’s flat acceptance of these wild surplus courtesies, and let it be known that she did not admire it, her sympathies were with the male. She poured their refills with her chin tucked, and the knowing, put-upon smile she offered every table.
May liked to get there first and sit in a window booth so she could catch sight of Arne, in the black sunglasses he wore rain or shine, as he eased his bulk out of the car and headed across the street to meet her. He had gotten fat. He had a desk job, now; it was years since he had pulled up in the blue cruiser.
Once in a sunny October when they were getting to know each other he had said, “You want to take a ride?” On the streets she liked the way all the cars slowed down in the vicinity of his cruiser, but Arne had a heavy foot when he got on the freeway and she was glad when he took the off-ramp.
His black boot was a size 13. So heavy it would in all likelihood have embedded itself in mud somewhere just off the pier, once it came off. She knew each inching, stuttering frame. She knew the minutes, the seconds. Once he got one boot off he quit hopping and tearing at the other and dived in, and the stuck one filled with water and came loose. Proof, no matter what anyone else recalled or did not recall, proof this man had been in the water with Nick, so that Nick had known he was being saved.
Indeed, long before his first note to her, Arne Olafsson had been an intimate of May’s, figuring in every bolt of thought, visiting in dreams as often as any lover, dream witness with dripping crewcut and awful blush to her howls in the night, before Cole woke her and she came to herself enough to be sorry and stroke the tears these nightmares of hers produced on his stiff cheeks. It was unaccountably worse for Cole, who didn’t dream because he didn’t sleep. This went on for months, years.
Awake, May didn’t know what it was that pulled her back from the groaning fullness, the wretchedness, the night tears to which Cole had mysterious access. Whatever it was, it made her say to herself, Wait a while, wait, for that. Do what has to be done, you’ll have time later for that.
Rescue attempted, Nick’s rap sheet said. May wanted a copy and they gave it to her. They had misspelled Arne Olafsson’s name. Officer in pursuit: Olson. Yes, when he saw a kid fiddling with a car trunk he had jumped out of a patrol car to give chase, with flashlight and stick. But it was he who had dived into the lake on a thirty-five-degree night and gone on swimming in the black water until they hauled him out by the balloon of his jacket. It was he, Arne Olafsson, twenty-two years old, who had doubled over and hung his dripping head down and wept—his partner told her that—because he had chased a poor junkie too wasted to swim, a kid with a wallet with thirty dollars in it stolen out of a car, to his death.
Cole had met Arne. Cole had joined them, once, in the café under the freeway, but with him there the little ritual had foundered. He took up one side of the booth by facing sideways, and rather than slide in opposite him, and beside May, Arne pulled up a chair. Arne spilled coffee, the quiet café resounded with the growls of his stomach, he let off gas, like an animal unloading for flight. With Cole he had to start all over again, pounding the Formica with the flat of his hand. “What—the hell—did I care, anyway? Do I give a shit—if some dumbass lawyer—jogs the lake at night and loses thirty bucks out of his BMW?”
May had prepared Cole: “I don’t think you can imagine remorse like this, going on year after year.” She couldn’t be sure what Cole’s feeling was. Possibly that Arne too should be dead. That might have been what attacked Arne in the gut when he saw Cole for himself and sensed in him the shape of a threat, like a cat arching sideways to enlarge itself. The threat of a furious man, an unappeasable man. That was what Cole was, and it was going to turn back on him too, it was going to squeeze off a quarter of the heart muscle he had left from his first heart attack, it was going to kill him.
While she, May, who thought her life was over this time for good, thought she grieved as a rare initiate, was going to live on.
Laura had come to these meetings too, more than once. The first time, she shook Arne’s hand, allowed him to hold on to hers while he completed a long, garbled speech, and sat down next to him. Of course Laura would not turn her back on a sufferer—though that was what she had done, she told Arne. She had done it with Nick. “After I had been married a few years I think I let go of Nick. I did. He was in trouble all the time and I just . . . I was having babies.”
Arne didn’t say, “Girls get married, they leave their brothers.” He nodded, he wiped his sunglasses. Laying them on the table he said, “I heard he set a lot of store by you.”
“The worst thing I did,” Laura said, with the film of unfallen tears magnifying and lightening her eyes, in which May could see Arne lose himself, gradually swaying in her direction in the booth, “was I got used to him as he wa
s. I thought, ‘That’s Nick.’ I got used to him down to nothing, in the halfway house.”
“He had a beautiful sister, I’ll say that,” Arne said.
May had had to caution Laura. “He’s getting a crush on you, honey. The man’s a bottomless pit. Go easy.”
Vera never came to the café, never met Arne. “It’s not a question of forgiving. I don’t forgive or not forgive. I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to know what he looks like or where he lives or anything about him and I don’t want you to try to talk to me about him.”
“I’m not trying to talk to you about him,” Laura said.
“Don’t even think about him when I’m around,” said Vera. “I’ll know.”
“That wouldn’t be an order, would it?” Vera was working on not ordering people around.
“Just never, never try to sit me down with Arne Olafsson.”
If she talked slowly, the words came in sequence. “Oh, the . . . what . . . it was the CPS, during the war, what . . . was that?”
Laura and Will lingered at the breakfast table, letting her go on. Laura liked to lead her back quite some way, to the part of her life before their family, before anything serious. May obliged, though she would have agreed with Will that her mind was paddling against one subject after another in the mechanical daze of one of those grabbing arms in a souvenir machine.
“Beats me,” Will said with a faraway smile, taking his grapefruit skin to the disposal and peering down out of the high window. “Gulls all over your Dumpsters.” He couldn’t keep from this daily inspection of May’s building, with its cracks and plumbing stains. The day was cloudy, and from the table May could see a smudge, an ash-pink moon, in a clear part of the sky above the nimbus of hidden sun. She did not want Will to notice the moon or comment on it. Come up, thou red thing. Come up, and be called a moon. There. That was Lawrence.
“They did . . . survey, land survey. I was married . . . but young,” she told her daughter. Sending a silent message, Will doesn’t like old women. Be careful when you’re getting to be an old woman. Laura was not young herself, in a year or two she would be fifty. Already she had a grandchild, as May had at her age.
But at her age I still had a little boy at home, May thought with an ancient, absurd pride. I had all those years to go.
“Civilian . . . Service. Was that it? Think of the—the whole wartime—”
“Atmosphere,” Will said, getting up and looking at his watch. “Well, the stores are open. I’ll go get that wrench.” He was repairing something under the bathroom sink for May, she was not sure what. “There was a man in it, I’ll bet,” he called back, in the relief of getting away from the table. He had found something to tease May about, early in his marriage to Laura, and he relied, not unkindly, on the comedy he found in a mother-in-law with a liking for men.
“CPS . . . Civilian Protective Service?” Laura said, waving him out of the room.
Where did this girl (for in her forties Laura was still a girl) come from, with a nature so serene and pitying? Maybe it was because she had been born on the spring lawn of their childish delight at being married to each other, safe together after a world war. Laura would say calmly, “See that?” pointing at a halftrack on TV, one of the Gulf War earthmovers driven over trenches to drown men in sand. “I think the kid next door drove one of those. Poor guy. He’s in the reserves. Remember, Vera, the one who cut our grass when Will was away?”
Whereas Vera was afire with bitter theory and had to get herself to the Middle East, she had to be on the spot, carry in medical supplies on her back and drag reporters with her to expose the border guards, the bribe-takers. In the field, Vera had been known to snatch a syringe out of a clumsy doctor’s hand.
Vera did not believe in medical school, whatever Cole said, or in submitting to any ordeal except one you picked for yourself on the spur of the moment. “So I fly out on Thursday,” she would say, rushing in when Laura was cooking one of her dinners for all of them. “Can Will steal me masks from the hospital? Do I still have a passport? Is it here?”
“It’s at Trevor’s,” Laura would say. “Remember he called Mom to say he had it, when you moved out.”
“No, did he?” Things belonging to Vera lay unclaimed in half a dozen apartments.
The surgeon had a way of genially shouldering aside that vague dark thing, the Possible, that had reared up over May. “You’re going to do fine. Wish everybody snapped back like this. Wish Cole could see it.”
He was a neurosurgeon brought in by the neurologists to consult. He raised his hand and gestured away, with one grand, crossing-out motion, the chart, the previous consultations, their fears. “Sit up, it’s the pope,” Laura said the next time they heard him at the nurses’ station. He always looked in, because of Cole. He had been a resident when Cole died.
It was unlikely that May would have any further trouble. Possible but unlikely. Further trouble would be another one. Well, yes. A bigger stroke was possible.
“Are you all right?” Laura said when May was back in her own apartment. “What do they think? I still don’t know, after all that talk the whole time you were in the ICU, and all the diagrams the guy made us. Will says it’s because you have him for a son-in-law. I said, ‘No, I bet he thinks you’re a lawyer.’”
“They all . . . all knew . . . your father. Laura, I know Will . . . has to go,” May said, leaping ahead.
“He will, Mom. And we want you to come back with us for a while. You’ll like it in Kuala Lumpur.”
“No. No.” Will was teaching epidemiology in the medical school. He worked hard with his students, he met their families and recommended them for grants, he worried about whether he was overemphasizing technology that would not be available to them, he was probably a good man. The family joke was that Cole had singled Will out in medical school, for Laura. “Well, right at the moment, we’re here,” Laura said. “You might as well get used to it.”
“I don’t know about room . . .” The apartments in this retirement complex were expensive and tiny. May could hear the contractor: How much space do they need at that age? No one she knew in the building had an extra bedroom.
“We can stay indefinitely,” Laura said. They were sleeping on the hideabed in the living room. “Will’s on leave, we have plenty of time.” For Laura there was always plenty of time, she moved in it at her ease. “So, back to the CPS, whatever it was.”
“What was I . . . damn. I’m better in the morning.” Each day she seemed slower to herself. “Oh . . . they had a foreman! He came, did . . . interviews. With me. For smoke . . . smoke jumpers. I had such a crush! But that’s . . . that’s what I went in for, as a girl.” She pondered. “So much purer and more intense.” Than what? she would have written beside a sentence like that, in her teaching days.
“Crushes are underrated,” agreed Laura, who had married Will at nineteen, while he was still a medical student. May tried to imagine this placid daughter of hers with a crush on anybody. Yet Laura had written a book. Out of nowhere came a book. And then another one, about Malaysia. Out of the blue!
Cole had said to May at the time, “You shouldn’t keep saying that.”
“But I don’t say it in front of her.”
“And it wasn’t out of the blue,” Cole said, surprising May by having an opinion on the subject. “Don’t you remember how she had to have a bedtime story?” May could see herself coming downstairs after the girls were in bed, and Cole just back from the hospital coming up, taking the stairs two at a time, still in his raincoat, to say good night. How would he remember, when May did not?
May remembered movies. Westerns. All those Saturday afternoons when Cole was on call, before Nick was born. The fifties. The three of them in the dark, Laura with her knees up, mesmerized, Vera a whispering, squirming thing, sulking at being kept indoors. Looking up at the huge gnashing horseheads, the golden country, the plot unfolding into rescues so sweet and inevitable.
The first book Laura had written g
ave May a jolt, coming from someone who, unlike her sister, had little to say on many subjects absorbing people just then, such as the war and the pre-election burglaries. And women. Laura went to her friends’ houses for consciousness-raising but she didn’t try to get May to go with her, the way Vera did. “I do need to change,” Laura agreed with Vera, but she didn’t change. The book was an extension of a series of articles she had written for the paper about the downward spiral of a family on welfare. It was a surprise to May that those articles, with all their distracting and somehow ameliorating photographs, could have turned into this unnerving little book. What was to be done? Laura did not know, she merely wrote her book.
The second one, about Malaysia, was not a travelogue or one of those smug books about living abroad; it was about the country, such aspects of it as Laura had studied or come to love. It wasn’t political enough for Vera, but it got Laura an interview on the radio, where little mention was made of it. “Well, my mother taught English,” Laura said at the end of the first question, an inquiry into the motives she might have had for writing a book at all. The interviewer did these shows on the radio and he wrote reviews for the newspaper. Why, he’s envious, May thought, listening. In answer to his insistent questions about the first book, on the welfare family, as it related to herself and her background, Laura said calmly, “Are you saying were we on welfare? No, we weren’t.”
“Playing devil’s advocate,” said the moderator, “you make a lot of allowances for those who don’t work. The one you call Stogie, the father in your first book, is a—”
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