Inland Passage

by Jane Rule

  “We were discussing your spiders,” Nigel said.

  “Would you like to see my new ones?”

  “I would not! I can’t stand them.”

  Rick did not go on to make any unpleasant assumptions about Nigel’s relationship with his own mother. Instead, he made Nigel an ice cream cone and then asked him about his famous friends. Nigel had known everyone, briefly. Perhaps his basis for being rudely impatient with both Cornelia and Rick was that they could go on putting up with him two or three times a week, year in and year out, when people of character and achievement crossed the street to avoid him.

  “I gave a little luncheon the other day,” he said, “and simply nobody came.”

  In that mood, Nigel was nearly intolerable to Rick, who expressed desperation by raising topics calculated to make someone much more tolerant than Nigel threaten to bury the whole generation. But Rick had so little invested in drugs and long hair that he couldn’t sustain Nigel’s anger for long. Then back Nigel would go to his social sorrows until Rick retreated to his spiders, which required wonder but not sympathy. Or he’d invent another song for himself, “I’m a Drop-out with the Drop-ins.”

  Cornelia’s mother had learned not to drop in. She had her heart to consider. She inspected once a month and otherwise expected to be called upon. Rick minded that requirement less than Cornelia did. He was fond of his grandmother, who provided an abrasive moral sanctuary. There was really very little difference between her pronouncements and Nigel’s, except that they were laced with neither gin nor self-pity. “Straight-laced talk and straight-laced tea from my straight-laced granny is enough for me.” Along with the generous checks, larger if she had been particularly critical.

  “We are being bought,” Cornelia protested. “Have you thought of joining the Peace Corps?”

  Rick gave her a speechless look before his eyes went back down to his strumming hand.

  “Well, anyway, let’s go down to the Red Cross and give some blood.”

  “Whose?” Rick asked, but he went, knowing in advance that his wouldn’t do, being hardly adequate for himself.

  “I do such bad things to you,” Cornelia said. “I’m a lousy mother.”

  Just for example, she never seemed to be able to get a meal for him at a time when it was reasonable for him to eat it. Breakfast wasn’t a problem because he slept through it, but Cornelia could never remember lunch; and dinner, even when she concentrated, hardly ever got to the table before ten in the evening, by which time Rick had either eaten himself past hunger or gone to a movie. He didn’t seem to mind, but she did, measuring her boy against all her friends’ enormous sons and knowing that she had failed.

  After the episode at the Red Cross, Cornelia was full of reforming remorse. She would feed Rick red meat on time. In her zeal she bought too much and decided to ask Nigel as well. It would be good for him to be fed at seven before he was so sleepy with drink that she had to wake him not just between courses but between bites.

  Nigel, not used to being invited until he’d already been at the house for several hours, was in an uncommonly good mood, which meant his barbs were less frequent but more accurate. He had dressed specially in a long African shirt, which didn’t require trousers, and Rick, to help him with the spirit of the thing, found a record of African chants. Cornelia was actually out in the kitchen at six-forty-five, trying to locate the olive oil, when the door bell rang.

  It was her friend, Lucile, who had just, by an act of maternal will, succeeded in dropping her youngest child at the movies. Rick helped her from the front door to a chair as far away from Nigel as possible. None of Cornelia’s friends liked each other.

  “Lucile would like some rum,” he said to his mother, his voice perfectly normal, his eyes crossed to indicate Lucile’s present condition.

  “How about something to eat, Lucile?” Cornelia suggested.

  “I’ve eaten,” Lucile decided. “But don’t let me…you know…innerupt. Ricky, you’re a nice boy. What are you doing out of jail? You know my Tom’s in jail? In jail. I’m so proud. Did I tell you that, Cornie? About my Tom? Wouldn’t take bail, no sir. He wrote me a postcard: ‘Dear Mom, The food isn’t so good, but I am o.k.’ Have you got any rum, Cornie? Just a drop. I won’t innerupt. You just go ahead.”

  “What did Tom do, steal a car?” Nigel asked.

  “Certainly not! He hit a policeman. He just went right up and gave him a good sock inna nose.”

  “Commendable,” Nigel said.

  “What the hell have you got on, Nigel?”

  “This is an African robe,” Nigel said.

  “Looks like drag to me.”

  Rick and Cornelia drew in simultaneous asthmatic gasps and wheezed into a duet of suggestions. But Nigel and Lucile had located the two games they wanted to play. Nigel was going to be the big white supremacist, and Lucile was going to be the defender of young manhood against that kind of decadence. They obviously couldn’t be left alone. Cornelia sat down while Rick went for rum and asthma pills and his guitar. Dinner would have to wait.

  Cornelia wasn’t drinking, but in her attempt to keep jovial peace between her two guests her speech became as slurred as theirs, her remarks as random, until after an hour had passed she seemed, if anything, drunker than either of her guests. Rick leaned against the wall accompanying the conversation with his guitar, usually softly, shifting from protest to Uncle Tom songs as was appropriate. Sometimes he played into something from the First World War or hummed an Irish ballad. When he couldn’t soothe or mute in this way, he would for a moment censor comments with violent strumming. One of these finally irritated Lucile.

  “What are you doing, Ricky? What are you trying to prove?”

  “We shall overcome…” Rick began to sing.

  “It’s not funny. Tom’s in jail. My sister’s son is out killing the Viet Cong, and all you do is stay home and sponge off your grandmother and play that silly guitar…”

  “I’ve got problems,” Rick said, amiably. “It’s bad blood, for one thing, but I’m not being funny…really. All I’ve got is a voice…” and he began to sing again. “How many roads must a man walk down before they call him a man?”

  “Why don’t I get us all something to eat?” Cornelia offered.

  “I’ve eaten,” Lucile said.

  “So have we all,” Nigel said, “at one time or another.”

  “I’m going to cook the dinner.”

  “Before Lucile resorts to cannibalism after the fashion of her favorite natives,” Nigel said, unsteadily pouring himself another drink, “I think it’s a good idea.”

  “Do you want me to do anything?” Rick asked following Cornelia out into the kitchen.

  “If we leave them alone, they’ll kill each other. But maybe that’s the most humane solution. Why should you be a decoy anyway?”

  Blank-eyed, Rick gave a professional imitation of a duck.

  “Why don’t I just tell Lucile to go home?”

  “She can’t drive,” Rick said. “She’s got to have something to eat.”

  “Drunks don’t eat.”

  The door bell rang again. This time it was George, an organist gone wrong in the electronic music center, where he now did nothing but record and tamper with supersonic sounds.

  “Listen to this, Rick—where’s Cornie?—I want you to hear this,” George was saying, already putting a tape on. “You won’t believe it. It’s originally only two sounds. The natural drift is fantastic.”

  “Must we?” Nigel asked.

  “You’ll like it, Nigel,” George encouraged, and there was something so ingeniously certain about him that even Nigel could not reply to the wry contrary.

  Out in the kitchen, above the boiling and broiling, Cornelia could distinguish the by now familiar sounds of outer space. George would certainly not have eaten. She cut another of the blood building steaks in half. It was nearly nine o’clock. So much for her resolutions. Now along with the sustained and drifting tones, Cornelia heard Rick’s vo
ice, singing.

  It wasn’t just that she was his mother. She was the first to admit that he was half blind, anemic, and crazy. And she hadn’t done a good job of what health he had. He would probably never be either in the army or in jail. But whether he could march or not, he could sing. She carried the food into the dining room and then stood to listen, which was what Rick was doing really. He listened, then joined, a voice in communication with the sounds of stars, of engines, of the under sea.

  Nigel sat, not asleep as Cornelia would have expected but staring out above the hand that covered the rest of his face into a lunar space of his own. Lucile looked at Rick with the tear-bleared, drowning eyes that kept her conscious in spite of herself. George smiled.

  What need did Rick have for blood, eyes, breath for the roads? He was at home with the miraculous. He was generous with this hardest minority of all: Nigel, Lucile, George and herself. Cornelia had had just this sense before and then lost it. Tomorrow there would be another blood drive or march or swami, but just now Rick was still singing.

  SLOGANS

  JESSICA DID NOT SAY, “I am dying.” She said, “I live from day to day,” that cliché of terminal therapy. Some people never did learn to say the word, cancer, but nearly everyone could master a slogan.

  Already divorced before her first bout, the children all away at school or college, Jessica bought a wig, took a lover, and in the first remission went with him to Europe.

  “Serious about him? Of course not,” she explained to a friend they visited. “I’m not serious about anything.”

  After the second bout, she put a pool in at her summer place and then nearly regretted it.

  “The children come home not only with lovers but with pets. I am being overrun with dogs and budgies and a bob-tailed cat.”

  “It’s given her permission to be selfish,” her critical sister observed.

  “She’s finally doing what she pleases,” explained an admiring friend.

  “I live from day to day,” was Jessica’s only answer.

  For some that obviously meant doing what they’d always done, going to work every day or not dropping out of the bridge club or still having everyone for Christmas. For Jessica it meant something quite different, lovers, trips and swimming pools. Finally, at the end of her second remission, when she discovered it was not arthritis in her back but cancer of the spine, she took a trip across the continent to see her birthplace, to attend her twenty-fifth reunion at college, to resurrect old friends who had not been much more than signatures on Christmas cards for years.

  “If I’d known you were planning to go to the reunion,” Nancy wrote, “I would have planned to go myself,” a lie, for not having married, given birth or divorced, Nancy was uncertain what she might say to friends of twenty-five years ago, even if it was also to be Jessica’s premature wake. “Come and see me on your way home,” she added.

  When Jessica accepted her invitation, Nancy tried to remember what kind of a friendship theirs had been. They lived in the same dorm, and they both had clownish reputations, teeth too strong, brows too high to be pretty. So they were funny instead, co-operatively so, setting each other up in song or gag or prank, protecting each other, too, from being thought to be just fools. Jessica had been clever as well, good at winning elections, and Nancy was smart. They were never roommates, never a team, but Jessica was in the crowd Nancy took home for a week of spring skiing, and Nancy was among the few friends Jessica took home singly to keep her holiday company in the house of a much younger sister, reclusive father and put-up-with-it mother, both long since dead of wasting diseases. Nancy’s parents were still skiing the slopes, and, if she needed a slogan, it was learning how to live forever.

  Jessica and Nancy hadn’t much confided in each other, but they came to depend on each other in a casual way, more like sisters than like friends but without sisterly intolerance. Nancy knew first hand about what Jessica called, “the gloom of the ancestral mansion,” and Jessica knew that Nancy didn’t care a fig about the slopes. “Oh God…” they were apt to say to each other just before Christmas holidays.

  But one evening, toward the end of their senior year, Nancy went to Jessica’s room to borrow a book or check an assignment and stayed for a cigarette, then another. Jessica was obviously in a mood she was trying to joke herself out of.

  “Mother says I must simply resign myself to a tailored exterior. I don’t tell her about my underwear. I give half a dozen pairs of white cotton pants to the Good Will every year and spend my pocket money on black lace and apricot ruffles. Do you believe me?”

  Jessica opened a bureau drawer to reveal stacks of what Nancy’s mother would have called “whorish” underwear.

  “Some people are too rich to worry about being old maids,” Jessica said.

  “I won’t even be able to afford to marry a poor man.”

  Had Jessica actually asked Nancy what she was going to do, or had she, out of embarrassment at Jessica’s vulnerability or some moody need of her own, simply offered her confession?

  “I’m a lesbian. I don’t suppose I will marry.”

  “Oh, God,” Jessica said. “What is it about me that people are always telling me such awful things? Why do I have to bear it?”

  It was years before Nancy again risked a friendship with that information. It did seem to her that she had taken unfair advantage of Jessica, presumed far too much on her good will. Jessica hadn’t dropped her, but they were both careful, in the months before graduation, to avoid being alone together.

  They had met only once in the years since by accident on the street in Edinburgh, both there for the same festival, Nancy with Ann, her lover, and Jessica with her stiff young husband, George. They were glad to see each other and raucous about it, like the college girls they had recently been.

  “Come help me buy a set of bagpipes,” Nancy suggested. “I’ve decided I can’t have them unless I can manage to play them.”

  While an embarrassed Ann and George stood by, Nancy blew mightily into the instrument they found without being able to make a sound over Jessica’s laughter. Only when Nancy had left the bagpipes on the counter and crossed the shop to consider the kilts, did there come a soft groan of air like a creature expiring.

  “That doesn’t count,” Jessica said firmly.

  When they were back in the street, taking their leave of each other, Jessica explained, “We’re having to cut our trip short. My father’s dying.”

  Faithfully over the years, they wrote their Christmas notes to each other, Jessica reporting the progress of her children, the success of her husband’s business, the move to a city apartment when the last child went to boarding school, Nancy describing her work, the house she and Ann had bought together, the progress of nieces and nephews, the health of parents.

  They had nothing in common really. What held them to their ritual was the shadow of guilt that one evening had cast over their otherwise easy friendship, Nancy’s for her burdensome indiscretion, Jessica’s probably for her lack of sympathy. That they had both aged into a more permissive climate made that guilt nothing more than a seasoning for their yearly good will. Yet without it, there would have been no reason for putting a good face on year after year.

  Then Jessica divorced, apparently with great relief. She asked Nancy some practical questions about getting a job, and Nancy gave what advice she could, but across a continent and the years, Nancy could not easily imagine with Jessica what she might do. It became obvious that Jessica entertained the idea of a job only to be entertained. When the children weren’t at home, she found cruises, courses in art history, and shopping for new clothes enough to occupy her. Probably the post-cancer lover had not been the first. Remembering the underwear, Nancy speculated that he might have been one of many over the years.

  Now with a spine of fast multiplying cells which would this time surely kill her, Jessica was crossing the continent and coming for dinner and the night.

  Ann was fixing the guest room, twin-be
dded now that Nancy’s parents preferred it when they were away from their own king-sized. It was an arrangement that suited an increasing number of their friends, a less melodramatic symbol of decline than a visit from a dying friend, but it saddened Nancy simply. She had decided, she wasn’t sure why, to bake cookies. Motherly gestures, whatever the occasion, occurred to her more and more often these days. She wondered if she’d ever said, in one of her Christmas notes, that she was white-haired now.

  “Are you going to smoke in front of her?” Ann asked.

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” Nancy said, handing Ann a cookie to sample.

  Nancy got out the large cookie tin, brought to them once by a would-be lover neither of them had liked, partly for that reason. They had kept the tin because they did like it, a wreath of old fashioned flowers stenciled on the lid, in the center of which was the motto:

  To the House

  of a Friend

  The Road is

  Never long.

  It reminded Nancy of the petit-pointed mottos of her great-grandmother and her great-aunts which used to hang in the stairwell of an old summer house. In childhood, Nancy had been surrounded by protective, promising slogans and superstitions, making wishes on everything from a load of hay to the first raspberries of the season, crossing fingers against her own white lies, wearing a small cache of herbs around her neck to ward off germs.

  The tin was too large to put on the table unless they had a crowd. Then always someone began to read the verses stenciled on its four sides.

  Monday’s child is

  Fair of Face

  Tuesday’s child is

  Full of Grace

  Nancy could never remember the day she was born. She knew it was one of the hard ones, either “Thursday’s child has far to go,” or “Saturday’s child works hard for a living.” It was easy to remember that Ann was Friday’s child.

  Friends usually didn’t know their own days either. Nancy didn’t always tell them to look in the back of the phone book where the years were blocked out, in silly dread that someone would discover a Wednesday birthday and be “full of woe.”