The Distant Shore (Stone Trilogy)

by Mariam Kobras

  He looked at Naomi and Joshua while he talked, seeing his own family, feeling a deep pride to be able to present them to his mother, a lovely bride and a gifted son, the whole package. Finally he would settle down, in his mid-forties, and enjoy his achievements.

  His mother had been a teacher, he told Joshua, and had worked at a high school right here in Brooklyn. His father, who had died five years ago, had been a surgeon. They lived in the house his great-grandparents had built. His mother, Helen, was retired, but his sister had followed her professionally and was now a music teacher at the very same school a few blocks from home.

  “And my uncle?” Joshua asked. Jon grinned at Naomi. “He’s a doctor, like our dad. The family tends to follow the same paths. Except me, I’m the vagabond of the bunch.”

  “They sound so normal.” Joshua frowned. “Just a normal family.”

  They stopped in front of a three-story brownstone on the corner of a rather quiet street, directly opposite a small Italian restaurant with a red and white awning. Getting out of the car, Naomi could see the river and the promenade not far away, and the skyline of Manhattan across the water. It was a nice view, and she thought it would be romantic and exciting to walk there at night and see all the glittering lights from the skyscrapers of the city.

  “I grew up here,” Jon said. “My childhood, my youth, my first guitar lessons all happened here.” He pushed his hands deep into his jeans pockets. “And I used to stand here, staring at Manhattan, just the way you’re doing now, and dream of making my career over there, standing on the stage of Radio City Music Hall or Madison Square Garden. A star.”

  The woman who opened the door was not what Naomi had expected at all.

  “Well, don’t just stand there in the street,” Helen said briskly. “You might as well come in. Jon, don’t be so mindless. Stop dreaming, for God’s sake.”

  “Yes, Mother,” he said meekly.

  Naomi would not have described her as formidable, but there was something of it in her; of middle height and slender, with straight, chin-length silver hair, startling blue eyes, and very fair skin, she looked nothing like her dark-haired son. Any qualms Naomi might have had about her own clothing were blown away, seeing her future mother-in-law in a jean skirt and apple-green knit jacket over a pink t-shirt, an incongruous and wild mixture. “You could have stayed here with us,” she said to Naomi instead of a welcome. “I would have told him right then how stupid he was. No need to keep one of my grandchildren away from me for so long.”

  “I never thought there was anybody who could stand up to him. If I had known about you earlier, believe me, I would have sent him home to you to have his head bashed.”

  Naomi loved the house. The dark hardwood floor of the hallway shone like auburn hair in the slant of the evening sun, the walls were lined with family photographs, and a vase of flowers sat on an antique sideboard.

  Helen tilted her head like a curious bird and eyed Naomi speculatively. “You are not what I expected. I never thought he would have the guts to pick a woman who would not be starry-eyed by what he has made of himself.”

  “Mother!” Jon’s voice from behind her sounded painful, and Naomi enjoyed it enormously.

  “Oh, shush!” Helen waved her hand at him. “You are the reason for all this upheaval. Since you are here early you might as well light the barbecue. Your brother and his family will be here soon, and you know Kevin is useless with the thing.”

  Naomi soon found herself in the kitchen. Joshua had received a warm embrace and some kisses from his new grandmother and then been told to go out in the garden to find his cousins and aunt. From the window Naomi watched as two young girls came running toward him, a woman following with a basket of tomatoes.

  “My daughter, Valerie.” Helen had begun washing potatoes. “And her girls, your new nieces.” She paused, then added in her tart, lively voice, “Of course I want to know everything about you. He never said much, being the way he is, but I know he suffered enormously through the years. Then, all of a sudden, he vanishes from Earth, and now, out of the blue, he calls to tell me he is dropping by with his family? Informing us we had better get ready to travel, that he intends to get married finally, and in Norway, of all places! Go on, I want to hear.”

  She pushed the paring knife and the bowl of clean potatoes over, indicating that Naomi should start working.

  “He doesn’t come here often, leading the life he has chosen, and he rarely speaks of it. Doesn’t have to either, we can read it in all the tabloids anyway. But you, now, you have been a rather well-kept secret. And the temerity of it, presenting me with a grown grandson! I should have clobbered him instead of sending him out to light the fire.”

  “He didn’t know,” Naomi replied defensively. “I never let him know. I hated that life, and I didn’t want it for my child. That’s why I left him.”

  “Well, good for you.” Helen tossed more vegetables on the table.

  “Don’t clobber him, I beg you. It’s not his fault.” She had never in her life peeled potatoes, and now she was afraid of making a fool of herself.

  “Oh, and protecting the self-centered bastard! Really, my dear, you should protect yourself if you intend to stick with him. He’ll eat you up without a second thought if it suits his purposes. I never thought a son of mine could be so self-absorbed and willful.”

  Jon walked in just then, his shirt half open and the sleeves rolled up.

  “Ma, I need the lighter fluid. Where did you put it?”

  “It’s in the garage,” Helen replied without turning. “Don’t spill it on your clothes.”

  “I won’t, Mother.”

  At which point Naomi broke up in hysterical laughter, the tension she had felt washing off her in a sudden rush of relief.

  “Yeah, laugh all you like.” He shot her a dark look, petulance in his voice. “Didn’t think I could light a freaking grill?”

  Naomi looked up just in time to see a grin pass between mother and son before he left again.

  Helen sent her off to have a look around the house after commenting that cooking didn’t seem to be her strong point. Naomi shrugged her shoulders in defense.

  “I grew up in hotels, more or less,” she began her feeble explanation, but Helen waved her away wordlessly.

  It was cool and dim in the silent rooms. Opening doors and peering into them seemed a little intrusive, but when she walked up the carpeted stairs she found a gallery of photos from Jon’s life, on stage, receiving honors, a Grammy, another Grammy, and an Oscar; Jon, standing godfather to one of the girls; with his siblings; with his father. On a sideboard on the landing, the Oscar statue itself. She touched it reverently, wishing she had been there when he had received it, in that colossal moment of glory.

  One flight further up she found Jon’s old room, untouched by time. A boy’s refuge, with posters on the walls, a bed with a patchwork quilt, the pennant of some football team over it, and rows and rows of music books from all kinds of artists.

  She sat on the bed absorbing the atmosphere of the place, imagining him at the desk with the view of the restaurant on the other side of the street, making his first attempts at songwriting, searching for the melodies that would make him famous.

  “Ah, here you are.” Jon peered through the half open door. “You shouldn’t be here. I’m not sure I like you unearthing my secrets.”

  “Afraid I’ll find the naughty magazines under your bed?” She made room for him on the quilt. “Tell me, Jon. Tell me about your life here, and the first songs you wrote. It must have been here, in this room.”

  “But you know all about that. There’s no big secret to it. I got my first guitar, I took lessons, I found I could express myself in music, and I started to write. It’s that easy.”

  But it was not true, of course.

  It had been a hard and bitter struggle, first against his parents, who wanted a proper career for him; with school, because he never seemed to have enough interest or concentration for it; and th
en the true, painful fight with his inner self, the process of learning how to reach deep inside and find the melodies and words he wished to communicate to the world.

  “First,” Jon said thoughtfully, “there’s this itch, or maybe an ache, like a very irritating, persistent, nagging mosquito bite or a headache, I don’t know. You need to pick at it all the time, it just won’t give you any rest, and it feels as uncomfortable and annoying as anything you can imagine. So you worry and work at it like a dog with a bone until all the meat is gone and you’re left with only the basic thing, the gist of what it is that you want to say with this particular song. But you know all that! Why am I telling you?”

  “Because I asked.”

  “It’s different for you; you get the spark, and then you sit down and belt out whatever it is you want to say. Which I admire greatly, as you know. But I have to dig and sweat and grovel and humiliate myself most of the time before I can drag it out. Often it’s not what I thought it would be, and sometimes I can gnaw at it forever and it still doesn’t come out right.”

  He wandered over to the desk and looked down at it, clean and orderly now in a way it had never been when he had inhabited this room. He moved his hand across the wood. “I used to sit here and stare out of the window, and instead of studying my Latin I would have one of those yellow legal pads in front of me, scribbling disgusting, sentimental lyrics, a young boy’s fantasies of his one perfect love, the one you would recognize in an instant, one glance, and know for sure she was the right one.”

  “As far as I can see, you’re still doing it today,” Naomi murmured, but he heard her.

  “Of course!” He turned back to her with a smile. “Of course I am, because it still confounds me that such a thing is possible. I’ve never overcome the miracle of our first meeting in Geneva. That is a bone I’ve been chewing on for years now, and I’ve still not found the marrow. It’s irrational and confusing, but there it is: it has never left me alone, this thought that I’m not entitled to receive this special grace. And maybe there’s some truth to that because I lost you soon enough, wasn’t able to hold on to you. I knew it had to be you, and yet I did nothing to make sure of you. My punishment and I accept it.”

  “Here you go again.” She sighed. “You are such a hopeless fool. A romantic, hopeless, and wonderful fool. Let’s go back down. I want to meet the rest of your family. I love your mother, by the way.”

  “Told you.” His grin was wide and quite smug.

  This was not what she had expected at all. Surrounded by his family Jon seemed reduced, somehow toned down to normal size. Just another grown son and brother who lived far away and had come to spend the weekend at home. He was tending the barbecue and discussing baseball with his brother while their teenage children sat in the shade of a tree. The sound of their young voices drifted over as they talked about school, movies, and music.

  Naomi received an unrestrained monologue from his sister Valerie, who told her in no uncertain terms what she thought of a woman who would keep a child of the family away from them, and when Naomi replied, “But I did not even know you existed. He never talked about family back then!” she very unceremoniously went over to Jon and hit him hard on the shoulder.

  “What was that for?” he cried in mock outrage, rubbing the injured arm. “I come home and what happens? I get beaten up by my own sister. They’re here now, aren’t they, so what’s the fuss? I had to get things settled first!”

  “You conceited bastard. And now you tell us you’re getting married, and I don’t even get to do any organizing?” She refused him the ketchup when he tried to reach for it.

  Jon’s brother Kevin popped open another bottle of beer. “Yeah, man. And then showing up here like that, the audacity of it all. Hey, Mom, I’m in town, and guess what, I’m getting married in a few weeks. And oh no, not here, but in Norway. Drop everything you’re doing, and no, I don’t care that you have tickets for the Met for that weekend. What? La Boheme? Vastly overrated. Nah, what’s a couple hundred bucks for a ticket, they pay that every day to see me perform.”

  Joshua and Kevin’s son Ethan ran past them into the house and returned a moment later with a couple of guitars. They began to sing together softly, then more raucously as they gained confidence.

  “Leave him here with us for a while,” Valerie begged, “We’ll bring him back when we come over for your big day. We have so much catching up to do.”

  Once more the terrible, deep hurt cut through him, and he wondered briefly if it would always be there, if they would ever be able to outlive their burden.

  “Of course, if he wants to,” he heard Naomi’s soft voice from behind him. “I’m so happy to have found you. Even if you weren’t related to Jon at all, I would love you as my family.”

  “You try not to become what you do,” Jon said much later, when the grill had cooled down. “But it takes constant reflection. I know you don’t want to hear this because your credo is ‘you made your bed, now lie in it,’ but that’s not the whole truth. You choose what you want to do; the life that goes with that choice catches up later. The lack of privacy, the constant need for security, the tabloids and paparazzi lying in wait for the most embarrassing moment to snap your photo and run. That I could do very well without. But I could never do without the music.”

  Naomi had the feeling they had discussed this before and often. There was a mild but pervading accusation in the air, of him not seeing enough of the family.

  “You are all successful in your professions,” he went on. “And you strive for perfection in what you do. But perfection in my job means success with the masses, or it would be for nothing. If no one wants to hear my music, I might as well go out and flip burgers. The only thing we can do,”—he took Naomi’s hand and pressed it—“is try to be as good as we can.”

  Kevin asked Naomi what she did for a living, and when she replied that she ran a small hotel in Norway, Jon laughed at her.

  “She runs a hotel, right. She makes her millions by writing my lyrics. Did it back then, is doing it again now. Watch us; there will be a series of albums with her lyrics. Running a hotel, yeah, Baby.”

  “I did,” she insisted, “And I did it well. Our restaurant is famous all along the west coast. I only wrote in my free time.”

  “The way you write, my love, that is all that’s needed.” Jon kissed the tips of her fingers one by one. She drew them back in embarrassment.

  Helen returned from the kitchen with two bottles of champagne. “It seems we have ample reasons to celebrate. My lost sheep back in the fold, and still sane enough, it seems. Or sane again? No matter; bring out the glasses, Val, please.”

  “Whole again,” Jon said in a low voice. “Oh yes, whole and healed.”

  Dusk fell slowly in the garden. A mild wind blew in from the river, bringing the sounds of boats and ships with it, and the scent of sea water. Naomi lifted her head to breathe it in, wondering how it could vary so much in different places, and if it might be possible to recognize a shore simply by its smell.

  “You wanted to be famous even when you were still in school. You always wanted to stand out.” Jon grinned at Valerie and her accusing teacher’s tone.

  “Of course. The same way Kevin wants to be chief of surgery or you want your own private music school.”

  “You never understood.” She waved at him disdainfully. “You could never be a teacher. A teacher’s success is seeing her students turn into successful people, into doctors and lawyers and engineers and more teachers. Famous musicians, like you. Great cooks, like Naomi.”

  Naomi woke from her reverie. “I’m not a cook. I hardly know how to peel a potato. I haven’t cooked anything but coffee in my life. Jon does the cooking if we do it at all.”

  The laughter that followed her statement was so loud that she looked around in confusion.

  “Really?” Helen said. “He cooks? I never thought he could. Jon, you really do the cooking in this new Stone household? You are a dark horse. I’m definite
ly coming to see that!”

  “Yeah, thanks, Ma.” Jon opened another bottle. “You never think I can do anything useful at all. That’s so encouraging.”

  “We can debate all you like about being useful, my dear.” Helen took the open bottle from him to pour herself. “I don’t care how useful you are to the rest of the world, but you certainly aren’t much use to us if you’re never here. You could have come home to lick your wounds, but no, you elected to hide in that shack by the ocean, all by yourself for all those years. I guess being with your family wouldn’t have satisfied your dramatic streak.”

  Naomi coughed to hide a giggle, but he knew, of course.

  “Laugh all you like. It wasn’t funny. I was lonely and confused and sad, and I’m not going into that again. I don’t have the time for it. If you want to wallow, go ahead, and don’t forget the ice cream buckets and the pizza to go with it. I want joy and happiness back in my life. But me? I’m not going to waste another moment mourning those lost and lonesome years.”

  “Hey man, you’re right. But promise to show up at home a little more now that you have a family. And who knows, maybe there’ll even be more family some day?” Kevin raised his glass to Jon.

  “Hush!” Helen reprimanded him sharply.

  “No, it’s okay.” Naomi blushed, but no one saw in the growing darkness. “I don’t mind you asking. I can imagine…” She reached out to Jon, who caught her hand and rested it on his knee. “I can imagine…” But she couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “You want another grandchild, Mother,” Jon said instead. “You’re mad at me because I never took care of Joshua, so now you want me to raise another child, and you want to be there to see a child of mine grow up.”

  Helen carefully gathered some crumbs into a neat little pile.

  “Mom, I’m sorry.” His voice was pained. “I promise, we will not cut you out of our life. It was never meant to happen like that.”

  “For goodness sake, Jon! It’s not always all about you. Or maybe, come to think of it, it is. I don’t know why you thought it would be a good idea to retreat from us and only show up every couple of years or so, usually when you were passing through anyway, and then only for a cup of coffee. You truly could have come home for a while and taken a rest here.”