The Maytrees: A Novel

by Annie Dillard

  One evening of those twenty middle years she was watching Pete sop gravy from his plate with a biscuit. She had already handed him that day’s mail: a letter to him from Camden in Deary’s hand. He threw it away and smiled without guile. Lou could imagine his fearing that his father was making it clear he wanted nothing to do with him. Pete had moved to two rooms a few streets over. His friends and their ways called his tune. It took years for her and Maytree to grasp that he was not going to college but to sea. When she used to wash his face, he screwed his skin so hard it got dark as a tire.

  Just as few men love their wives so much as their daughters, few, if any, women love anyone so much as their children. Parents love adopted babies with the same passion. Often she missed infant Petie now gone—his random gapes, his bizarre buttocks. How besotted they gazed at each other nose-on-nose. He fit her arms as if they two had invented how to carry a baby. While she walked, he patted her shoulder in time with her steps. If he stopped patting, she stopped walking. If his pats speeded up, she stepped lively. He was driving her; they both died laughing.

  Later she washed his filthy hair and admired his vertebrae, jiggled his head in toweling that smelled like his steam. She needled splinters and sandspur spines from his insteps as long as he let her. Every one of those Peties and Petes was gone. That is who she missed, those boys now overwritten. Their replacement now sat at the green table wiping crumbs onto his plate. Pete’s friends came by to get him for a party no one wanted to attend without him. He was good-natured; could he also be the life of the party? Did she ever know a noisy fisherman?

  His friends hauled Pete away. She confronted the sink. How she wished she could see all those displaced Petes and Peties once more! She imagined joining picnic tables outside by the beach and setting them for 22 Peties and Petes, or 122, or however greedy she was that day and however divisible Pete. Together the sons at every age and size—scented with diaper, formula on rubber nipples, salt-soaked sand, bike grease, wax crayon, beer, manila, engine oil, fish—waited for dinner. Who else knew what each liked? It was a hell of a long table. She gave herself a minute to watch them—Petie after Petie barefoot near his future self and past. They pinched or teased or shoved one another. All but the babies ignored the babies. What mother would not want to see her kids again? When this sort of thing got out of hand, Lou called herself “Poor Mom.” She dreaded “Poor Mom,” her periodic walk-on role as grieving and piteous victim. Lou spied her from a distance floating long-skirted over the sand, hands on face. Lou gave the hag a short hearing to shut her up, and tea in a cup. “Poor Mom,” she commiserated: her child grew up.

  A bank wrote her. Her vamoosed father, who left their Marblehead house and never came back, had died in Edgar-town—so near, all these years, and here he was, gone—and left her money she split with Pete. She bought telephone service because Pete might need to reach her from any port.

  She wrote Maytree and Deary to stop alimony. She described Pete’s new boat and detailed his fish hauls. She reported that Jane Cairo had washed ashore for good. Chiefly Lou wrote to persuade him and Deary she was content, good-willed, and long past regrets. She urged them to take a vacation to the Cape.—Everyone misses you both. Please come and stay here. Or move back! Was this a bit thick? Well, they both knew her.

  In the next few years she painted two canvases she could bear. One showed kapok spilt in clots from ripped red cushions, a blue kite in a dead man’s float, and gassy sky. Another was cirrus cloud high over a rusted-out boiler in a dune. She read the Russians again, just about every novel, and Cather, Middlemarch, Hardy, Hemingway, Conrad, etc. One night Jen and Barrie twisted her arm until she agreed to let them hang some of her own paintings in a locals’ show. The night before it opened, she used her key to break into the gallery and steal her stuff back.

  THREE YEARS AFTER HE threw away Deary’s letter, Pete was overnighting on his boat offshore. He wore red sea boots. Eating hot dogs from a can made him hungry for old-fashioned work. He was manning a square-rigger rounding the Horn. When he saw that a given South Sea wave would overcome the ship, he jumped to the yardarm and hooked one leg over it and water poured from his boot. He saw green water scrape the deck and drown the ship. Then it moved off, heavy as land. His ship hit and entered one sea after another and rose streaming. Like his parents, Pete was a reader. He knew more about Cape Horn than about Boston.

  On watch Pete ignored cold hands. Why not ignore every other feeling that dropped his way, instead of biting and getting hooked? Long ago when he was a boy he tried to talk himself out of hating his father. It worked for a while, until the years’ silences piled up.

  Now he was frying in crumbs. Helplessly he imagined those two there in Maine doing what. He did not hate them. Observing, he saw that hatred is rare. Envy and begrudging wreck a man first. Other people lived in peace without knotting their brains. Pete’s boat partner was Sooner Roy’s son. In a bigger boat they could fish Georges Bank in winter and the Gulf of Maine. The hauls were heavy offshore, halibut and swordfish, as well as those winter waters’ unending cod. Till that big boat materialized, they handlined near shore for turbot and witch flounder, for haddock, redfish, whiting, pollock, and striped bass. They used trash bluefish, sliced squid, and dogfish to bait bass.

  Pete & Co. also owned a mackerel seine and averaged decent hauls. If only decency sufficed. Every few decades, on one ocean or another, someone lucked into a bank-buying, hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars’ haul of mackerel or herring or something. It could be that Greenlanders made the mighty haul off Baffin Island, or purse seiners made it in salmon three thousand miles away in Haro Strait. It could be that the sum in dollars had swelled to a lie. That haul nevertheless set the benchmark for everyone forever. Their neighbor’s son Heaton Vorse saw a boat unload 138,000 pounds of halibut. Any great haul anywhere, however, in any fishing port’s imagination happened recently and nearby. Pete heard of catches that sank boats to the gunwales. One guy, somewhere, once, would not trim the load that was sinking him, refused to toss out fish at fifty cents apiece. He saw he would sink before he could dock. He limped to the buyer boat and got himself and his boat winched aboard in a net. The buyer boatmen dumped fish from his hold to theirs, and lowered him and his empty boat away. When they heard about it, others in the fleet considered that saving the fisherman’s haul was unfair.

  Pete multiplied possible pounds by possible price per species next year. Mackerel could yield $6,000 in one haul. He might then dare speak to Marie Koday. He saw fish scales thick on deck like doubloons, gold bullion dragging down the hoppers below denting two thousand fathoms of ocean that lesser boats could never ply. No one would envy and begrudge him, because he did not envy or begrudge anyone else.

  Onshore a headlight pair appeared on High Head, illumined the rain in a cone, and came about. Through his teeth he whistled “Nel Blu, Dipinto di Blu.” Could he surmount his trash-ditch thoughts and work above them? Could he let them come and go without bias, minnows schooling about his feet? Simply slosh through them and let the waves wash over? He could build on the mainmast a crow’s nest. With his life, with his mind, he would build him a crow’s nest, rope by rope and plank by plank for as long as it took. Ahead dwelt some heart-pure Pete who rode whatever came. So might a seeing white statue, aware and at ease, over whose feet and plinth wash wild seas, guard a greasy harbor.

  LATE ONE BLACKFLY MORNING Maytree was supervising a crane operator smashing with a wrecking ball a house across the marsh. He saw Deary driving her new Buick to the site. Maytree pulled an eight-penny nail. He felt its hot point cool in his fingertips.

  Deary brought forks, linen napkins, and a rhubarb pie. She wore a suede jacket and cashmere scarf. She asked, On Cape Cod, did I ever tell you why I liked poverty? Because she could no longer remember. By then Lord & Taylor knew her measurements. She ordered three tailored skirts a year, eight or so small-print McMullen blouses, Papageno (as she said) low heels, navy cable-knit cardigans grosgrain outside…she never dreamed
she would remember those things, she told Maytree, who thought, What things? When at a college reunion he saw she resembled and outshone other well-to-do wives, it gave him pause. What impelled her to revert to a lady now? She was sixty-two years old. Years ago she scuttled her palm-of-hand pedestal chair and retrieved her overjoyed mother’s ancestral carved-cherry furniture, and her flatware, linens, and jewelry.

  Her old mother subsequently yelled into a telephone, I knew it was just a phase! By then Maytree understood that Deary’s mother adored her in any form or function. She was merely rejoicing over the cherry furniture’s staying in the family—possibly, Maytree thought, as she herself would like to stay in life.

  Deary’s mother dwelt at the peak where old Stockbridge families met atop old legacies. She sent Deary to Concord Academy and Smith before MIT. A stoneworker could chisel on the tomb of everyone she knew: GOOD TASTE. Only once did Maytree himself see Deary’s mother. Erect, wearing a slant-brimmed hat, she drove an open car down Commercial Street. She commanded the steering wheel from its bottom. Shortly after the furniture arrived in Maine, Deary’s mother’s final illness came. Deary lived with her in New York for six months to tend her. After she died Deary spent another month emptying the apartment. Deary’s absence felt as if it would kill Maytree.

  After she got back, he exchanged Blackwell’s shipments with his Maine friend, an abstract expressionist painter who played Brubeck while he worked. One winter day the men skated on a beaver pond and sliced each other’s shadows.

  —We must buy land around those ponds, Deary said that night, and you can build on spec. Where did she get these terms? She continued, We must buy every waterfront lot available. Deary spoke into one of her full-length mirrors. He saw her gauge his reaction.

  Keep her happy, Maytree thought.

  —Who can afford a waterfront lot?

  —We can, if you work full time.

  How happy? Maytree thought.

  Her curls took well to permanent waves. To Maytree they looked like Peaked Hill Bars at low tide. One evening, over rows of her colored hair’s parallel waves, she was fastening a dot-veiled hat, to go out. She was starting to look like the Queen Mother. A fine figure of a woman, and one to whom he was vowed.

  Maytree knew Lou read his letters. Why not? He loved her and had long ago forbidden his deep thoughts to turn back to her. He dreaded learning she hated him. Surely by now would she not have let it all go? Her letter said she had. She even invited them to stay with her. And would she not think of him fondly but not regretfully, as he thought of her fondly and stopped himself? Though surely not so often. Year after year Cornelius urged him back home.

  Maytree could no longer find red-speckled notebooks. He got his first one over twenty years ago. In Camden, he bought a batch of black-speckled notebooks. In the black ones he kept random notes. He glued red ribbon to the binding of one of these. He wrote on the binding the letter L. Damned if he would write love. He was studying not love but consciousness. Insofar as he still saved time to read.

  On a hot day he and his friend drank on the back steps. The friend was a hangdog giant with a crew cut. He had introduced Maytree to Henry Green and Borges. Now he asked if he liked Stevenson. Maytree brought out some old notebooks. “Marriage,” he read, “marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness.”

  Now in the same notebook Maytree found a passage from Under the Greenwood Tree. Someone wonders of a couple, How could they be in love? They are distant in manner. —“Ay,” says a rustic, popping up. “That’s part of the zickness. Distance belongs to it, slyness belongs to it, the queerest things on earth belongs to it!” He read aloud. His friend liked Baudelaire’s calling lovemaking “the lyric of the masses.”

  After his friend left that day he found Deary inside manning the telephone like a howitzer. For clients she drew up similar plans and elevations. She fooled with rooflines. Deary and he convinced each new client that his or her personal needs—for bedrooms, kitchen, bath, living room, porch—showed unique taste.

  Tonight they expected ten for dinner. On the extended cherry table he placed crystal and sterling in phalanxes on linen and lace. Maytree foresaw tonight’s distinguished crowd repeating information from the newspaper. Some of their guests wrote excellent articles and books. Consequently Maytree knew them to be—somewhere in there—vastly more learned than social life permitted.

  Seeing friends used to be easier. Was it their age? Did anyone actually like adult social life? Ping-Pong brought laughter as respectable entertainment did not. He and Deary wasted their many-paned dining room on dinner parties instead of ongoing games and music. Portuguese and Azorean old-timers in Provincetown—calling themselves respectively Lisbons and picos—enjoyed whist, singing fados, and taking grandchildren out in boats. Maytree envied them their noisy parties. He could not change Maine alone.

  After they cleaned up the party, Maytree helped breathless Deary upstairs and into bed. Then down on the back steps he paged through another old red-speckled notebook by the backdoor light. It intrigued him still, what an art historian wrote of Michelangelo’s poetry: “The tensions deepen in the twenty or so poems of the middle period as the poet who is working deeply to complete the Sistine frescoes of the Last Judgment suffers the torture of loving two women and one man.” Maytree thought, Torture?

  Decades’ reading had justified his guess that men and women perceive love identically save for, say, five percent. Reading books by men and women showed only—but it was something—that love struck, in exactly the same way, most, but not all, of those few men and women, since the invention of writing, who wrote something down. An unfair sample.

  —KEEP YOUR WOMAN FRIENDS, Reevadare told Lou long ago. But Lou ignored friends when she met Maytree. After Maytree ran off, people imposed on her the unwelcome dignity they accorded new widows or Nobel Prize winners. They blamed her for their own distance, fancying she caused their feeling by a vaunted opinion of herself. It drove Lou bats. At parties she danced silly dances, made far-fetched puns, sang camp songs, and all but wore lamp-shades. She could not imagine a friend more lively, and loyal, than Jane Cairo turned out to be. Jane seemed not to resent or begrudge anything Lou was by birth or hap, such as tall, or made-into-myth.

  Jane often visited Lou or Cornelius or both in the dunes. Once she invited Lou to Cornelius’s shack when he was gone. Sitting on the shack bed, Lou watched Jane ladle water. She hooked the ladle, took three steps to the bed, raised an arm, and, whoops, detained a big black snake that was speeding up the wall by Lou. Thumbing the back of its head like a tick’s, Jane seemed to persuade the snake to be caught. She peeled it from the wall. When its front half coiled on her arm, she offered it her other arm, as if for a quadrille. It curled its weight on Jane’s two arms and kept moving balanced between them. It was over six feet long, and unduly thick.

  —They relax, she said, when they know you’ve got them. She was short and nearsighted like her parents. She freed the snake outside, saying, Let them eat mice. Were not people who tolerated snakes going against human nature? Did that mean they were cultured?

  Jane came back blinking. —Why is it always a big black snake? Have you ever seen a small one? Imagine their eggs. She looked at Lou, who had not budged. —Oh, you and your marble calm! Lou laughed and knocked down her water.

  All Lou’s life after she got her height, only Maytree mocked and teased her as an equal, and now Jane. How generous of Jane to chaff her. Jane worked at the Art Association. She and Lou met often. Her general knowledge surprised even Lou. Jane looked roguish through her glasses, tapped her temple, and said, Like a steel trap!

  Lou walked through the dunes back to her house. The tide was out so far the metal mudflat smelled, Lou thought, like the moon.

  Reevadare knew a thing or two when she told Lou to keep her women friends. Jane was a teenager then. Come to think of it, Reevadare herself could not have been much over fifty at that party. Lou was now fi
fty-eight. Was Lou now old, or had Reevadare been young? Lou knew herself to be young. She touched her mouth. So Reevadare had been young? Hands veiny, her mottled face and arms, lipstick ascending, much-married, thin-voiced Reevadare?—had been younger then than Lou was now? Old people were not incredulous at having once been young, but at being young for so many decades running. Then what is old? Old must be…out of the ball game.

  One windy Thanksgiving Lou joined the Cairos visiting Jane behind the Art Association counter whence she sold paintings, prints, posters, and magazines. These academic parents of Jane’s, in whose summer house she lived above the harbor, were waiting for her to finish—that is, to write—her dissertation. Their shining prodigy was throwing herself away in a backwater so rural that four digits dialed the phone. Was her dissertation not finished—except the actual writing? Jane faced her father. Her glasses lenses miniaturized her eyes. —That’s why there’s no need to write it. She could easily defend it. She quoted Einstein on abandoned doctorates: “The whole comedy has become boring.” Walking back, Elaine Cairo, nonplussed as she put it, appealed to Lou. —Help her find some ambitious man who will sweep her into the mainstream.

  Summer people loved the Cape and never for a minute mistook it for real. By which Lou guessed they meant skyscrapers? opera? She realized the older Cairos meant, at bottom, universities. Her parents said that while Jane dallied in Provincetown not writing her dissertation, she might as well insulate, paint, and reroof their house. So she did. When Lou and Jane were alone, Jane told mean stories about her mother. She disdained her mother’s academic outlook; she said her mother treated her father like dirt. Lou thought Jane was getting too old to regard her bitterness as the natural effect of a cause outside herself.