Sweet Mercy

by Ann Tatlock

  At that moment a young woman showed up at our table with an icy pitcher of fresh-squeezed orange juice. She bade us good morning and chatted amiably as she poured us each a glass. I took a long swallow; it tasted heavenly, so much better than the canned orange juice the milkman brought to our door in St. Paul.

  “Will I be waitressing here like she is?” I asked after she left.

  “You might,” Mother said, “if they need someone to fill in. But not today.”

  “Cyrus told us this morning that he’s opening the Island Eatery today,” Daddy explained. “Summer’s here and it’s time to get it under way. You can help us with that. Looks like the Eatery is where Mother and I will be spending most of our time this summer, serving up hamburgers and soda pop. Sounds like fun, huh?”

  “Sure,” I said with a nod.

  “The rowboats and canoes will be coming out of storage too. We’ll be responsible for the rental of those.”

  As Daddy spoke, the romance of the island came back, and I forgot about family squabbles and my strange and previously unknown cousin named Jones. I was glad once again to be living at Marryat Island Lodge, where families came to play and life was good and surely some faint scent of Eden still lingered in the sweet clean air.

  We spent the day, along with a couple of other workers, cleaning and stocking the Island Eatery, a cinderblock building painted pale green and fronted by a breezeway, where patrons could eat at concrete tables. We polished the grill, readied the soda machine, oiled the popcorn maker, laid out condiments, filled the walk-in freezer with hamburger patties, hot dogs, and tubs of ice cream. Folks came to the counter looking for refreshments; we had to turn them away with the promise we’d be ready for business by five in the evening.

  While I was sweeping the breezeway sometime in the early afternoon, an overturned canoe passed by, carried on the shoulders of two young men. One of the men was wearing only a swimsuit, the trunks a solid black, the top a black-and-white stripe. In contrast the other fellow was fully clothed; he wore the long-sleeved gray shirt, denim pants, and black suspenders I’d seen in the ballroom the night before. When the men heaved the boat off their shoulders and onto the boat rest, I saw that Jones was also wearing dark glasses and a broad-brimmed safari hat. Other than his hands, very little of his skin was exposed to the sun, not even his feet, on which he wore a pair of white tennis shoes.

  “Mother, come here a minute,” I hollered. She looked up from one of the tables where she sat stuffing paper napkins into aluminum holders. She put the napkins aside and joined me where I stood. “That’s Jones,” I said with a nod toward the boat rest. “The one in the hat and suspenders. He’s—” I stopped. For some reason I was finding it difficult to say the word.

  “He’s what, Eve?” Mother asked.

  I let the word escape on a sigh. “He’s albino. Did you know that? His hair is completely white, and his eyes are the fieriest shade of red you could imagine. Did Uncle Cy tell you?”

  Mother shook her head slowly. “No, he didn’t. He never said a word. Then again, Cy never told us much about Jones at all.” She gazed at Jones and seemed deep in thought. Finally she said, “Pity. His eyes might have at least been blue, like some of them.”

  “Blue?” I echoed.

  “Some albinos have blue eyes,” she said absently. After another moment, she shook her head again, as though to shake away her thoughts. “But it doesn’t matter, does it? That he’s albino, I mean?”

  “Of course not,” I answered dutifully.

  She smiled at me. “We can look forward to getting to know him.”

  Good luck, I thought, remembering my encounter with him the night before.

  Mother stepped away, then turned back. “You know, Eve, he probably has a hard time of it, being different the way he is.”

  “I know, Mother. Maybe that’s why he’s so . . .”

  “So what, Eve?”

  I wanted to say rude, but Mother wouldn’t like it. “Shy,” I said. “He seems rather timid.”

  “Well, then, we’ll make sure to let him know he’s part of the family, won’t we?”

  I nodded. Sometimes it was hard to be my parents’ daughter, but I wanted to think I was up to the challenge.

  At about nine o’clock that evening I was passing by the front desk on my way up to my room when Uncle Cy stopped me. Another man, one of the night clerks, was behind the desk with him.

  “Wait just a second, will you, Eve?” Uncle Cy dropped a stack of thick manila folders into a cardboard box and closed the flaps. He handed the box to the night clerk. “Okay, Thomas,” he said, “this old tax stuff is ready for storage. Take it on up to the attic, will you? One more box to add to the clutter.” He winked at me. “But we’ve got to keep it in case the IRS ever starts breathing down our necks. Got to have all our ducks in a row for the feds, you know.”

  Thomas, bald and bespectacled, nodded and took the box. Without a word, he slipped around the desk and headed up the stairs.

  “How do you get to the attic, Uncle Cy?” I asked.

  Uncle Cy, already busy gathering another pile of papers, didn’t look up. “You know where the VIP suite is, right?”

  I thought a moment, reaching back into childhood memories. “It’s at the opposite end of the hall from my room, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.” He nodded. “That’s where I stick the bigwigs and the people who think they’re bigwigs. Well, the door to the right of that door, that’s how you get up to the attic. I don’t recommend you going up there, though, especially if you’re allergic to dust.”

  I shrugged. “I’d rather spend my time in the suite. From what I remember, those are the prettiest rooms in the lodge.”

  “Smart kid. And don’t worry. You’ll see the suite plenty, once you start helping the maids clean the rooms.”

  “That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, Uncle Cy!” I tried to sound stern but laughed instead.

  Uncle Cy smiled good-naturedly as he bundled the papers with a clip. “Now, listen, Eve honey”—he waved the papers at me and looked annoyed when the phone rang—“do me a favor, will you? Take these invoices to Jones.”

  “To Jones?”

  He nodded and picked up the receiver. “Good evening. Marryat Island Lodge. Cyrus Marryat speaking.”

  He listened to whoever was on the other end of the line. I took the invoices and whispered, “But where is he?”

  Uncle Cy put his hand over the mouthpiece and nodded over his shoulder. “In the apartment.”

  “But—”

  Uncle Cy cut me off with a wave of his hand, pulled the guest register from beneath the front desk, and started flipping through it.

  I frowned at the invoices. I really didn’t want to carry them to Jones. So far, he wasn’t anybody I liked very much, and besides, I had worked hard at the Eatery all day and I was tired, too tired to deal with anyone as surly and ill-mannered as this newfound cousin of mine. But I remembered what Mother had said, that we needed to make him feel like part of the family, so I resolved to deliver them willingly and perhaps even wish Jones a good-night.

  I clenched my teeth as I made my way through the sitting room, down the hall, through the ballroom, and into yet another hall that led to Uncle Cy’s apartment. The door was open, so I paused to look inside. From what I could see of the room, it was sparsely furnished with a couple of wing chairs, a bookcase, and a long dining room table pushed up against one wall. The hardwood floor was dull and rutted with scrapes and scratches. Dark heavy drapes hung in the window. A few paintings and framed photographs adorned the walls. Other than that the room was nearly devoid of a woman’s touch, and I wondered why Aunt Cora hadn’t tried to make it more homey and cheerful.

  Jones sat at the dining room table in one of its accompanying ladder-back chairs. Every inch of the tabletop was consumed by clutter: coils of wire, vacuum tubes, batteries, dials, and any number of unidentifiable parts belonging to an odd collection of radios in various stages of assembly and
disassembly. On the upper left corner of the table was a small pile of books. Wearing a pair of dark-framed glasses, Jones leaned over a pad of paper. In his right hand was a pencil poised for note taking, but instead of writing he appeared to be listening. A woman’s singsong voice drifted from the large cathedral radio directly in front of him; I strained to hear and caught something about sugarplums and teddy bears and the noontime train to Wonderland. As she spoke, Jones intermittently scribbled a few words before pausing to listen again.

  I wasn’t sure what to do, but after a moment Jones snapped off the radio and continued scribbling. When I knocked on the doorframe, he sat up so abruptly his chair jumped several inches. He turned to look at me with his crimson eyes greatly magnified by the glasses.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  My jaw clenched again. I stepped into the room. “A little old for bedtime stories, aren’t you?” I said.

  He looked at the radio and back at me. “I was just testing the clarity. I’ve been teaching myself about electronics, mostly radio, as you can probably see. I’m not going to work at the lodge the rest of my life, you know.” A few seconds passed in which neither of us spoke. He took off his glasses and laid them on the table. “So did you want something?”

  I had almost forgotten my reason for coming. “Uncle Cy said to give you these.”

  “Invoices?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded toward a rolltop desk on the other side of the room. “You can add them to the pile there.”

  I moved to the desk and laid the invoices down among several stacks of bills, receipts, and ledgers. “Do you keep the books for the lodge?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Among other things.”

  “Like carrying canoes?”

  He almost smiled. “Whatever needs doing.”

  “A jack-of-all-trades, then?”

  “I suppose. Though mostly I’m here taking care of paper work.”

  We locked eyes then, and for several long seconds we seemed to be sizing each other up. Finally he said, “Anything else?”

  I started to shake my head and turn away, but I stopped. “Yes,” I said. “I wanted to tell you I’m sorry your mother’s sick and I hope she gets better soon.”

  Where that sentiment came from, I didn’t know. Jones looked suspicious as well. But after a moment his face seemed to relax and he said, “Thank you. I’m sure she’ll be better before long.”

  “You must miss her.”

  He nodded but didn’t reply.

  “So you’re learning how to put radios together?” I stepped closer to the table, and when I did, Jones closed up the notepad and pushed it aside.

  “Yes,” he said. “I have a knack for things like that.”

  “I see.” My eyes swept the table as I tried to think of something else to say. I wanted to learn more about this mysterious person, but my mind was a blank slate, and I couldn’t find any words. “Well,” I said at length, “I’d better go. Good night, Jones.”

  He looked at me another moment. Then he nodded, one small lift of his chin. “Yup,” he said. He turned back to the table, put on his glasses, picked up a tool of some sort, and went to work. Our conversation was finished, and I had been dismissed.

  Chapter 6

  Several days passed and Mother, Daddy, and I quickly became accustomed to our new life. The local public schools let out and summer settled into full swing, meaning Marryat Island was hopping. People came from all over Ohio and Kentucky and even farther away to spend a weekend or several days or maybe a week at the lodge. Poverty was on the rise in a way the country had seldom seen, but plenty of people still had money.

  With the official arrival of summer, our jitney bus added several runs to its usual back-and-forth route between the lodge and the train station. Sometimes I’d ride along to greet the guests and make them feel welcome, one of my favorite jobs. I enjoyed chatting with our jitney driver, a kindly Negro man by the name of Morris Tweed. He was the husband of one of our cooks, Annie Tweed, whose infectious laughter permeated the kitchen, sweet as the cinnamon rolls she baked up fresh every morning.

  I didn’t have any one job at the lodge; each day I simply did what needed doing. I helped Mother and Daddy in the Eatery. I washed dishes with Annie; I waited tables, cleaned rooms, put freshly washed linens away in the linen closet. I swept the front porch, made change for boat rentals, showed guests to their rooms. When those who had driven to the lodge asked about a car wash, I directed them to the service station across the street, owned and operated by an old friend of Uncle Cy’s by the name of Calvin Fludd. In my spare time, I was allowed to enjoy the island or walk into town or join a game of croquet or volleyball on the lawn.

  Never had I been so happy and at peace. Occasionally I thought about my old life and the friends I’d left behind, especially my best friend Ariel, who wrote me weepy letters about how much she missed me. I missed her too, and yet, that life seemed far away and like the torn edges of an early morning dream. The lodge and the island were my real life. This was the place I was meant to be, and I had little desire to look back at what I’d left behind.

  On our first Saturday in Mercy, I was enjoying an early afternoon swim when I saw Marlene. She waved at me from the shore and then splashed her way to my side.

  “I see you’ve finally braved the water,” she said with a laugh.

  “Yes. It’s wonderful!”

  “I’m afraid I can’t remember your name.”

  “I don’t think I ever told you. It’s Eve. Eve Marryat. And you’re Marlene, right?”

  “Yes, Marlene Quimby. For a little while, anyway.”

  She took a deep breath and sank beneath the surface then came up shaking water off her curls. She threw up her arms and said, “You know what’s really wonderful, Eve?”

  I had to smile at her enthusiasm. “No, what?” I asked.

  “I’m free!” She pushed up on her toes and floated on her back, her face lifted to the sun.

  “What do you mean, you’re free?”

  “I have officially graduated. The ceremony was yesterday. I am finished with school forever!” She kicked her feet and paddled around in circles.

  “Good for you,” I said. “So what will you do now?”

  “Get married, I hope.”

  “Get married?” I echoed. “Are you crazy?”

  “Yes, yes, yes, I’m crazy!” she cried, emphasizing each word with a splash of her arms. “Crazy for my boy Jimmy.”

  “But you’re too young to get married.”

  She stopped paddling, looked at me, and laughed again. “I’m eighteen! I’m old enough. How old are you?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “So you haven’t graduated?”

  “No, I have one more year.”

  She poked out her lower lip playfully. “Poor you.”

  I shrugged. “After high school, I intend to go to college.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “To earn a degree.”

  “A degree in what?”

  “I don’t know yet. Something that helps people.”

  “Phooey!” she said. “You’ll end up getting married like everyone else.”

  I frowned and shook my head. “I don’t think so. I don’t want to get married. I intend to have a career.”

  She sank under the water and popped up again. “Well, Eve Marryat,” she said, “I’ve just learned something about you.”

  “What?”

  “You’re a liar!” She laughed loudly and down she went again.

  I wasn’t sure whether to be offended or to laugh along with her. I decided to let it go. When she broke through the surface of the water, I asked, “So when are you getting married?”

  She sighed an exaggerated sigh. “I don’t know for sure.”

  “Well, are you engaged?”

  “Not officially, no.”

  “So whoever this Jimmy is, he hasn’t asked you to marry him?”

  “Not yet. But he will. And soon, I
think.”

  “Well, if that’s what you want, then I hope you get it.” I was telling the truth. She seemed incredibly happy and her joy was infectious. We shared a smile. “By the way, Marlene, I met the red-eyed devil.”

  She stopped splashing and gave me a disbelieving look. “You did? What happened?”

  “Nothing. We talked.”

  “You talked? What did he say?”

  I thought about her question, my mind flipping through the catalogue of what Jones had said: “You can just pick yourself up off the floor. . . . Don’t dance in the ballroom. . . . I’m learning to fix radios. . . . I bet you’ve never seen anyone like me. . . .”

  Nothing seemed right. So I simply said, “We’re cousins.”

  Her wide eyes grew even wider. “You’re what?”

  “Well, step-cousins.”

  “You mean . . .” She looked around at the others splashing in the water near us and lowered her voice. “You’re related to that freak?”

  I drew back. “He’s no freak. He’s very nice. Well, mostly, anyway.”

  “But how can he be your cousin?”

  “My Uncle Cy is married to his mother.”

  “You mean that Cora lady?”

  “Yes, Cora. She’s my aunt.”

  Another glance around, another whisper. “She has the consumption, you know.”

  “I know. But Uncle Cy has sent her to the finest sanitarium in the East. She’ll be all right.”

  Marlene eyed me warily. “Well,” she said, “this is a surprise. Who knew the devil was Mr. Marryat’s stepson? He’s only seen around here once in a blue moon, you know, and even then he’s all covered up from head to toe. Only a few people have seen his eyes. I never have and I hope I never do.” She paused long enough to shiver dramatically. “Most people assume he’s some sort of hired help. You know, like Mr. Marryat feels sorry for him, so he allows him to work here and sleep in the attic or something.”

  “He doesn’t sleep in the attic,” I said, rolling my eyes at her.