The Maytrees: A Novel

by Annie Dillard

  —Hell, young Toby’s mother said close by, the very hell. The whole frozen town on the beach groaned.

  His father and the other coast guards at the Peaked Hills Bars station had already tried everything: firing the breeches buoy; launching their boat into the breakers; and even launching an old whaleboat that Captain Mayo’s tractor hauled down the beach from town. At first the men hooked in cordage and spars were waving to the people on the beach, as if hallooing them in midnight high spirits, or as if pointing out their situation, or as if warming their blood by saying até a volta, adeus, good-bye. Seas, spray, and sleet froze on them. Toby and the others onshore waved and jumped and all useless else, as if their encouragement would lighten the men’s hearts, and maybe it did.

  The stranded crewmen dropped all night like acorns. More groans low under the high wind. Toby saw something like laundry roll in a breaker. The next wave presented it as Frisch Fragonelle’s body. Maytree’s father and another coast guard brought it in and laid it at his wife’s boots without a word. Mothers were turning their children and heading back toward town.

  —Do I have to go home now? Toby was eight. He hoped she would say, Yes, darn tootin’ go home. You must shun the sight of the men of our own fleet, your friends’ fathers, dying almost an arm’s length from shore, and us helpless to save them.

  His mother bent to his face and looked at him. Her face was chapped. Two wool shawls covered her head; she had wrapped her fingers in their fringes.

  —No, she said. You don’t have to go home. This is part of life.

  Damn, he thought—not that he would watch his neighbors drown, but that it was part of life.

  If Maytree’s mother and that drowned crew, and Deary, were now sticks or star-gas, cui bono? It was all brittle. That dying was at least nothing personal had comforted Marcus Aurelius. But what could be more personal than a person?

  Of course everyone had tended Deary. Was that tending love genetically or socially determined convention? The idea of love as irresistible passion died hard in Maytree long after he knew better. Was he “in love” with Deary all those years? No, but he never dreamed of shipping his iced-over oars. What, carry off the Maine poet’s fetching wife or—for that matter—their stunner of a daughter?

  Still less was Lou in love with Deary. Nor was noble Pete. Then what guides will—reason? The darling of dead Greeks, that guarantor of the science he loved? Surely reason never trafficked in a man’s love life. Science rinsed love’s every scent from its hands. Maytree had been sensible of no particular sentiment except the natural wish to help Deary find comfort. That steady wish for her comfort on which he had acted for years and Lou and Pete had acted for eight weeks—was love?

  Wishing and doing, within the realm of the possible, was willing; love was an act of will. Not forced obeisance, but—what? The obvious course of decency? Innate knowledge of goodness? Was it reasonable to love the good and good to love the reasonable? What a crashing bore. The painter’s wife was such a peach.

  At the garage he bought three new tires and rotated the old. He replaced windshield wipers in front of the gallery across from the house. Inside he washed and hung Deary’s nightgowns and later rolled them and her tweed suit around her jewelry. He wrapped newspaper over the bundle, tied it with string, and set it in the trunk beside her newly anachronistic purse. How they used to search when she lost her purse.

  Now behind Lou’s house he leaned cross-armed on a neighbor’s handrail by three stairs to the beach. The reeling sea rose before a silence as if the neighbors’ houses were prehistoric children asleep and drying from the primordial mudflat that formed them. Cold seemed to be chipping his ears to flakes of chert.

  He missed Camden’s big trees. Ahead of him in Maine was time to read and write. He would commandeer the dining room table and sideboard as study, click up a card table or two, and leave their three television sets at the curb. In his former study he would build stacks for books. Moor a Hobie cat and get a mutt and let it run. The Camden building market would pick up in May. Or he could retire. He already had much more money than he could use even if he died in a hospital. The process of retiring itself would swallow two or three years. He would have to find and train new people so his and Deary’s business could thrive without them. Then he wondered: Exactly why did his business matter? It took them years and years to build it up. Why would he devote more years to keep it going—to keep his memory alive when he was dead? Like a pyramid? What nonsense. He could plain walk away. That was a revolution.

  He watched a gull pace the iced-over tide line before him. Actually, he had an idea, a structure, for a long poem all these last many years. But not so much as a phrase for it.

  At rare intervals he granted that he would die like everyone else, only, of course, worse. He read that four in five of us die slowly, attended by family or strangers or generic Smithereens. Waves bounded up the beach. He pinched his nose’s bridge. Behind him dead grasses changed directions together like a horse’s hair whirling from its loin.

  Had he redeemed himself with Lou? By any chance? Just by doing the chores he caused? He would welcome her general knowledge and intelligence. She was in his view too old to live alone. Arthritis in her spine, knees, elbows. At the Bronx Zoo years ago a lion and a tiger were milk brothers. Lions and tigers hail from Africa and Asia respectively, and would fight if they met. In the zoo these two were close. Neither had ever seen himself, only the other. Each had looked at the other for as long as he could remember. So the lion thought he was a tiger, as it were, and he feared adult lions. The tiger feared adult tigers. Only in the face of the other did each find home. Maytree watched sky’s turmoil and a scallop dredge heading out.

  He stayed on the first of three steps to the beach. Had not Lou herself once been a peach? Monument of unaging intellect and all that? He and Lou used to have a way about them he recalled vividly. One man loved the pilgrim soul in you. Would she be thinking such a thing? Anyway, how ever could he start when now was far too soon, and later was impossible? A movie, a chocolate soda, and two straws if they could stay awake? On the other hand, nothing was more common than courting your wife. How meek you had to be varied with the depth of the particular creek you were up. He and Lou knew the same past. Their fourteen years’ marriage vastly outweighed their twenty years apart. Of course she might disagree. It never struck him that she had anything to do. What did she ever do?

  This was how Lou found him at the neighbors’ beach rail, pants over potbelly. He was rotating one wool ankle after the other in a circle whose hub was his heel. She recognized that gesture. She had forgotten it. She smiled and pulled in her jacket. Would he stay in Maine or—save the sailors!—ask to move back?

  She stilled there by the back door so he would not hear her. Sky ran its candid lengths round the hoop of horizon. Weak swells spent themselves in muddy sea ice. A tide line of frozen froth like lees stranded in dead rye.

  This winter before Maytree came with Deary, Lou had been orbiting one galaxy of ideas as close as she dared. Could a person hold all people past and present in awareness? She further wondered if doing so was, by some errant chance, the point—toward what end she had no clue. Not that life required a point. But she found herself starting to sway toward eventually considering that there might be one. A point. Any point.

  Books must know something. She dug from every direction. The bravest foray would be to try it, to hold all human consciousnesses, past or present, etc., in awareness…. Or just stay aware that…or just stay aware. She was wary. Conceding that there could be a point—merely granting it as a long shot—might lead to a mess. Both time’s back wall and front wall fell open. As a mire in which to wallow, it had housework beat all hollow.

  She kept her eye on Maytree by the beach. His ears looked cold. She felt she had gained, oh, half a millimeter on these questions over her lifetime. That is, her sense of the vastness of each aspect multiplied, and the more it expanded, the denser with questions it grew.

&nbs
p; The draining tide was leaving a ring of debris. Terns made hullabaloo over a crinkled patch of sea—must be a herring ball. Had she by hap made of her solitude a moral stance? Talking lately on and off, she and Maytree touched on their recent lives, mostly his. Was there any poet left in him? She did not say how she liked the recklessness of her own venture into simplicity. How many decades had she spent listing, like Diogenes, all she did not need? Her thoughts’ motion accelerated in giant paces down the steep unending dune that revealed more dunes, each comprising all time and every place—a real rabbit hole. Taking those flying steps and not crashing! It reminded her of an old parody of Ripley’s Believe It or Not: DUCKS CANNOT FLY! They are merely GREAT LEAPERS!

  Maytree would resume his life in Maine, and she could pick up her subjects’ edges anywhere—in other cultures, in any mind’s track, in paleontology, old peckings and runes on stones, in Asian philosophy—…and poke up at the bottom of things with a stick, or however she used to work. She kept an eye on the rifling, fletching, skeg, or keel that trued her aim. What was it, that hum? Did generations make it or hear it? She forgot herself like a cloud. This was the out-of-earshot life she cobbled from her freedom. Maytree fit in like a couple of aircraft carriers.

  The sea’s line was sharp. Beyond Maytree’s form, waves were crashing in spaced convulsions—a big storm out at sea, and the clouds blowing two or three ways. What was in her awareness after Maytree brought Deary? Why, nothing; she was busy. When she bumped into something that needed to be done, she did it. Then she wet a cloth and went to Deary.

  What in her bare awareness might Maytree expand? And his car, and Deary’s car and their boat. Their business and tax records. And the new stuff he mentioned—stereos and speakers, tape player, radio, televisions, 35mm film camera, VCR, skis. Let alone the old things, the tools, notebooks, and lordy the books! Anyone rich could move to Provincetown and buy a big house. She needed him and his junk like a hole in the head—except for the shack. He would take back his shack and fix it up. That she loved him and his depth had nothing practical to do with anything.

  He still stood tall on the beach rotating his ankles. Maybe it helped ease arthritis as well as yearning. Wind covered her approaching him from behind. He was leaning on the two-by-four as if he needed it. What kept Maytree far from her these twenty years? She doubted it was Deary, who trilled over bumps as they came. She hoped it was not shame. On the other hand, she knew it was shame.

  She crept up and put her arms around his waist from behind. Instantly, one of his hands—the one with the good thumb—covered hers. How did he do that? His touch was light. He was exactly with her but not holding, not pressing. Neither he nor she crossed the line beyond fond.

  How she had enjoyed having him around, his easy competence and camaraderie. How grand of him to help her take care of Deary! (Oh, they don’t make them like that anymore; it’s just as well.)

  The creases behind his neck made him look like the survivor of several beheadings. She knew that any note at all, of even so much as inquiry, was up to her. Her inquiry was: What did she hope?

  A FEW DAYS NOW before he returned to Maine, he crossed the dunes with Lou to check the shack. For twenty years he had sacrificed his shack as well as everything else. Where a footpath forked, Lou made straight for the ocean to swim. It amazed him, that the custom of some people here was to swim the ocean—the Labrador Current!—every summer day through October or until they dropped dead. They seemed never to drop dead. Jellyfish stung them, and Portuguese men-o’-war. They saw sharks. He remembered young Lou in a red suit waving at him from far out in the ocean at a spring ebb. Half her torso was out of water; she was standing on a bar as a stunt. When she came in, he asked, How is the water? Still in her twenties, she spoke three languages and held her tongue in all of them. Now up the shack steps. Through his socks he felt two of four planks dip. He was carrying Pete’s Manny.

  Storm sands had blasted shutters silver. An hour later between mattress and wall Lou found a shed snakeskin. She held the translucent husk by Maytree’s crown; the tail skin trailed on the floor. They found mouse poops like jimmies and nests of shredded newspaper. (Why had she left pillows and paper out? Was she losing her wits?) They found a crack in the floor between planks.

  You could leave the woman, but not, it turned out, the shack. He seemed to have toiled on it all his life. When he was a boy his father, whacking it up, used him as clamp. Now he walked outside and under the shack to study the floor timbers’ crack. His father had buried chainsawed driftwood logs—trunk bottoms—to prop the floor. The heavy crawl of the dune pushed these logs half over. For fourteen years Maytree had buttressed and shimmed them. Now he found the cornerposts askew and deeper in the same crisis. On the floor timbers he saw his old flat-pencil marks.

  —Who did this work? he yelled pleasantly up at Lou, like a new dentist. —A mess under here! You should sue! She was up there feeding Manny. Easy as it was to make Lou laugh, he never wearied of it.

  He reckoned he had not seen the shack in twenty-one years. No, by crikey, no—only six months ago he slept on this very shack’s floor. Six months ago. He had not noticed the propane tank and hose. He had not noticed much that night. He remembered himself bone-cold and old and furious with pain laid out on the floor as if gut-shot.

  When Lou opened the shack door that night he almost fell forward through the frame on his broken arms. Heat and light seemed to blast him up. Behind her head in the doorway yellow light shone and wreathed her hair. He saw the dark red-bowled lamp smoking on its wall shelf behind her head. She was using cheap kerosene. He felt his blood pulse in his eyeballs. And that night she had said, Sure, of course she would house and help Deary and him, in town for the winter and for the duration. She wore a red shirt open at the neck. Familiar she was, and unsurprised.

  Exactly what might surprise the old witch? Come in, his ex-own Lou said, and he saw her oval face and her wide eyes still affectionate, or affectionate again, or affectionate by habit. Or she didn’t recognize him.

  As soon as he saw her easy-eyed look that night he started falling asleep. Yet he had to crank himself up and speak more carefully than ever. Then he would drink water and cross the dunes to the motel. She had unbuttoned his jacket for him. He drank from a hot and too-heavy cup. That night, he thought now, they would have sat at this table. His feet’s thawing under the table had turned out to be his chief woe. That and deciding if he was crazy or she was.

  Now kerosene lamps made the room hot. She said, Certainly, of course, as if they two had already hashed this out for months on end, Deary’s dying and his broken bones—and she had already told him yes long ago. Or as if, after his bad fall on Dr. Cobo’s steps, she had naturally bade him and Deary to come live with her in Provincetown so she could tend Deary, and he had agreed, and it had all slipped his mind. So he had crawled the wild dunes in the dark and stood late in her doorway half-dead just to secure what they already decided? It gave him the royal creeps. He broke his bones the very day before Mrs. Smither drove them to the Cape. Was Lou expecting him in the doorway any minute? After breaking his bones he had no intention of bothering her, not for hours.

  Oh, yes, his knees and thighs had unstrung that recent sneaky day when Lou wrapped her arms about him from behind. He could only barely remember why he had dreaded seeking refuge for Deary with Lou. Of course she was too wise to blame them for long. That cold night in this shack she was matter-of-fact and he was drained. Keeping this everlasting smash of a shack upright and dry might again, if he failed to watch his step, become his job. Maybe she foresaw that.

  Later Manny fell asleep on the four-plank deck against a knapsack. Dozens of mosquitoes were feeding through his skin when Lou fetched him in. When he woke, Maytree picked him up and thumped him like a cask. —He couldn’t be hungry again, Lou told Maytree. He just ate!

  EPILOGUE

  Nothing restores the sense of being alive less ambiguously than the birth of the unexpected, the finding of a person who on
e did not know one loved so much.

  —Ralph Harper, On Presence

  Sometimes in the middle of their sleep, in the black of the night with the metal wind and stars forcing the room through the window, they woke together as if at a quake. If passion returned they burst out laughing.

  Sometimes by day or night he heard them breathe old as oceans—experienced. They enfolded each other and looked over each other’s shoulders at the world’s wreck where all shattered, at bareness they held at bay. Or they cradled the world between them like a mortally sick child, loving it and not telling it all they knew.

  Now in compassion they bore, between them, their solitudes each the size of the raveled globe. Everything looked better since they were old.

  By day a smell of her lingered in sweet sheets. Intimacy with Lou had no bounds. Half his life he had sounded her and never struck bottom. Perimeters edged Deary, and the girls of his youth, and for that matter himself and everyone he knew. Lou held nothing back, but he knew he never reached it all.

  —Let’s pretend we’re old, Lou remembered saying back when they were young. They had been watching hurricane waves rip the outer beach. To walk back they aligned adjacent legs like a pair in a three-legged race.

  —Those days will come soon enough, Maytree said. His gravity had startled her. Now those days were here. Lou remembered when his forehead’s skin stuck tight as an apple’s. She pressed a finger to her own forehead and drew a circle. She was loose in her skin as a rabbit. She felt French knots on her shins. Now she wanted a book not to knock her out but only to move her. And when will the days of wisdom come?