It began with Jerome’s usual after-work six-pack, proceeded to a town meeting where an easement was passed permitting a video arcade to replace a foreclosed delicatessen, an easement Jerome had protested. After the vote he bushwhacked the young entrepreneur who owned the arcade; next he hit Matthew (who liked video games), then Brendan, knocking loose a tooth and opening a gash inside his son’s mouth. “I know there’s kids get hit all the time,” Brendan told Araby, “but it was like my dad’s one rule never to, ’cause his dad did a lot to him, I think.”
Before Araby could react he closed for the kill, describing the chaotic emergency room scene where Jerome had bawled that he was a low-down child abuser and please somebody cut off his hands. Only Brendan and his Aunt Lois’s pleading testimony had prevented a call to the cops. “His crying carried over later,” Brendan explained to Araby, “when he got me to accept his apology. He swore he’d never hit me again.”
Araby was speechless. She leaned toward him, her eyes avid and shiny. She wiped tears off his cheek that weren’t there, kissed him with an open mouth, moved her fingers over his face like a blind person finding a friend. Her arms embraced him and her shirt pulled up and the path beneath it opened. Brendan touched her flat stomach and then higher up, amazed to discover not an undergarment but the breadmuffin warmth of a naked breast, with, as amazingly, a taut cool nipple on top.
He’d felt girls before, but none who’d really participated. Araby leaned back her head to indicate he should kiss her neck. He kissed her neck, forgetting for a moment to move his hand on her breast, to do things to it of general interest till he figured out what to do next. She murmured, “Take it off me,” and he wanted to comply more than anything — to see, suck, regard her breasts in unhurried, unabashed daylight.
But as he pondered the concept of shirt buttons, he suddenly decided he’d done the worst thing in his life and that it would be wrong to take further advantage. He withdrew his hand and smoothed her shirt down. It wasn’t the secrets he’d told that bothered him — Jerome himself was quick to confess any story that confirmed him a bum. But successfully baiting Araby’s sympathy had diminished her in Brendan’s mind, enabling him to overcome his intimidation and put the moves on her. His trickery appalled him, and now in a blend of remorse and relief he hugged her protectively, as if to forgive the embarrassing truth he’d uncovered about her, that she was no better than he. “I’m sorry your mom’s sick,” he said to her tenderly, “and about your dad and all that money you have. Those’re tough things for anybody.”
“Not like yours.”
“Well, if I was honest — I’d trade.”
She nestled against him. “You kiss pretty good.”
“Beginner’s luck.”
“I doubt it.”
They reclined under a tree in the apple orchard. No one spied, no one eavesdropped on the words they shared. The feeling between them was of long-marrieds who’d just had surprising sex. It was okay to say anything, to drowse and not worry. Today there was peace in the valley.
In the dusky library of the Winston house a wolfhound yawned, a cricket chirped, a floorboard eerily heaved: silence in an antique home. The chime of the ship’s clock on the mantel was a visitation of sorts, filling its appointed moment every quarter hour.
Above the mantel hung an oil painting of Carolyn Winston’s long-dead father, bearded, imperious, rich. Carolyn’s husband, sitting in a stiff chair across from her, traced her gaze to the portrait. “I, for one, never liked the bastard.”
“You never met him.”
“He looks long-winded and cruel. And his money ruined me.”
“Everyone needs a little, and you had none whatsoever. And no trade, either.”
“I flew planes — ”
“Like a blind man.”
“ — and I had wit.”
“You would have starved.”
“Better than ending up like him. Cruel, long-winded bastard.”
The old woman smiled. “Haven’t you anything pleasant to say? What about dinner tonight? Mrs. Locke labored all day for you.”
“What was it?”
“Striped bass, with oyster stuffing.”
“Fish? I don’t eat fish. Fish pick clean the skulls of drowned men.”
“For heaven’s sake. You ate it tonight and loved it.”
“I’d sooner eat shit.”
“I’ll have Mrs. Locke prepare you some. She aims to please.”
They laughed. It had been years since they’d shared repartee of even this screwball variety. It was eerie to her, her husband’s resurgent vitality. It was like a last desperate resistance against tides overwhelming him, and reminded her she was next in line.
He faded from her. It was as if a shadow from the lip of a cave into which he was withdrawing had passed across his face and left it indistinct. His neck bent and his eyes fell to the empty fireplace, leaving her, but for the dogs, alone in the room. She resumed her needlepoint. She wound blue thread slowly through the pattern and in millimeter increments a summer sky became complete.
A while later her husband’s head lifted. “I could sleep now.”
She helped him stand. His leatherbound portfolio fell to the floor and some yellowed pages of his thirty-year-old manuscript spilled out. She read “ . . . last seen falling . . . ” on the top sheet as she bent to pick it up. “Falling, John? Who?”
He snatched the papers away. “Eddy Epps.”
The name rang a bell circa 1920, in Boston, where the Winstons had met and later married. “The polo player who fell?”
“Four floors. Chasing the maid.”
“Over the banister to that massive marble foyer.”
“Wrecked a good party.”
“It’s lovely you’re writing your memoirs, John. But why Eddy?”
“He could have grabbed the chandelier on the way down. I went back later and checked. He could have saved himself.”
“That would have taken impossibly quick thinking.”
“It would have taken a miracle! But there was a chance.”
“Can you imagine? If Eddy had fallen and caught the chandelier and lived! Can you imagine?”
“Yes,” he said, moving upstairs. “That’s the point.”
She oversaw his toilet and his change into flannel pajamas. Some nights she read aloud to him of biography or history; tonight his eyes shut quickly. Her fingers traced the shell of his hipbone as she debated lying beside him, clothed but alert to whatever came to mind. “Better go, Marguerite,” he mumbled. It wasn’t a surprise. In thirty years of dementia, he’d spilled every secret he had. She regarded their long checkered marriage as incidental to her full experience of life and indeed almost imaginary, therefore not to be taken too seriously as either an accomplishment or a failure.
She glanced at his writing portfolio and was struck with apprehension. She knew how hindsight enticed writers to thread corrective themes through people’s random life stories; she wanted no such fiddling with hers, preferring to think it pure undeserved chance that her life had come to this. She reached to the portfolio to open it. “Now Carrie,” came a voice. “Don’t.”
“Johnny?” He was propped on an elbow in bed. His face was shadowed, the outline of his head erect and topped with a skinny crest of hair. “I didn’t mean to pry.”
“I don’t mind about that. I’m just saving you trouble.”
“I’m grateful then,” she said drily. Was he grinning? The sonofabitch was grinning! “Guess I’ll say goodnight.” She left in a nervous flutter, as if after a first date that had ended in a draw, and sought the company of a makeshift sister.
Araby sat cross-legged on the bed in her room, draped to the knees in a big T-shirt. A thin blouse dampened the light of a table lamp to make a mood for art. “Am I disturbing you?” Carolyn asked.
“I’m just sketching.”
>
“I thought poetry was your thing.”
“I hope to be multimedia.”
“When I was a girl I wrote poetry. I was always in love, so it was all terribly tragic — I threw myself out of a lot of bell towers. Nice,” Carolyn said of Araby’s sketch, done well enough to tell its subject. “Did you invite Brendan to our party tomorrow?”
“I had to.” Though the party had been Araby’s request, Mrs. Winston was using it to repay favors to Police Chief Thomas Rickert and First Selectman Amos Clearwater, who’d expedited the removal of the whale carcasses from Oceanside Beach, the last one hauled away this afternoon just as its odor began to carry. “I don’t know anyone else coming,” Araby said.
“That’ll be the fun of it.”
They heard Mr. Winston’s door open across the hall, and the floorboards creak under his feet. “Oh no. I knew he went by day — ”
“Every night too,” Araby told her. “He throws junk off the roof and writes about it afterward.”
“In his portfolio? How much I miss, sleeping away. You’ve read these things?”
“‘Miracle.’ ‘Another miracle.’ ‘Third miracle confirmed.’ Don’t ask me what it means.”
“Sounds potty as ever. Lately I haven’t been sure.”
Peeking around Araby’s door, they spied Mr. Winston emptying a closet of old athletic gear — warped polo mallets, woodshafted golf clubs — apparently finding what he sought in a football soft as a rotten melon, which he deposited into his shopping bag.
“Perhaps he’s sleepwalking,” Carolyn whispered. “He used to sleepwalk — ” naked, his erection thrust forward like a blind-man’s cane “ — whenever we stayed at a new hotel.”
“He sings to himself sometimes. In French, I think.”
“My husband’s secret life.”
The old man headed upstairs to the widow’s walk. The women started to follow, Carolyn impulsively taking a flower from a pitcherful Johnwayne Locke had given to Araby. It seemed poetically girlish to wander a house at night with a flower in hand, something on Araby’s level. But they paused at the stairs when they heard Mr. Winston cussing above them, heard him rattle the trapdoor to the widow’s walk and then begin to wail. Carolyn’s heart dropped. “We finally got it locked today.”
“What for!”
“He might hurt himself. He’s not competent.” Remorse sounded in Carolyn’s voice and Araby laid off. For a moment they listened to the old man’s weeping, an awful rasp of sniffles and coughs, before they withdrew to their separate rooms. “Goodnight, dear.”
“Will you unlock it tomorrow?”
“There are many considerations here — ”
“Right.”
Carolyn Winston stood alone in the hallway holding her flower. She was a steady old dame, yet for a split second she suddenly got thoroughly disoriented, not knowing who nor where she was, nor how to breathe or walk or reason. The spell passed; her pulse raced in aftermath. It frightened her to think that in that helpless instant she would have believed any voice, chased any vision, that promised a way out of her panic. She looked at the flower, its stem broken where she’d clenched it, and was stunned by the belated revelation that she might easily, to no one’s surprise, die first.
Mr. Winston returned to his room. He’d stopped crying, by now more alarmed than upset about the locked door to the widow’s walk. Evil was openly out to stop him. What guy wouldn’t worry?
As he climbed into bed he nearly pissed his pajamas when he laid his head on the pillow, for there seemed to be a big insect there, tickling under his ear. Like an entomophobe half his age, he grabbed his cane off the bedpost and pummeled the bug to bits. But lamplight revealed not yuck on his pillow but scattered flower petals and a green, denuded stem. He smiled in relief at the sight, and also at himself for momentarily losing faith. A flower on his pillow. Somebody up there still cared.
Twenty-One
The pickup pulled up to the pond late in the afternoon. The double doorslam of Jerome and Brendan climbing out spooked a mallard pair to flight. Brendan tracked the ducks with pointed fingers. “Bang. Bang.”
“Doubles,” his father said.
The mallards pitched into a cluster of ducks at the pond’s center. Jerome often hunted here in winter. His wife used to accompany him with a .410 single-shot that did birds no harm at all. Last season Brendan had used it, and on the drive here today he’d lobbied for his father’s twelve gauge. “Sell the .410, give me your gun and get yourself a new one.”
“Shotguns cost. Money’s tight, you don’t know. I keep a lotta things from you because you’re a kid. And the .410 was your mom’s.”
“It’s puny.”
“Your mom was puny.”
“She was not. She was big. I remember.”
“She was plump. Puny plump. The .410 is sentimental to me. It reminds me of her.”
“Everything reminds you of her. The Honeymooners. Pizza.”
“You.”
“Yeah?”
Jerome looked at his son. “Yeah.”
To imagine his mother alive in himself was scary to Brendan, and unwelcome. Since he’d fallen for Araby his mother’s memory had become a serious annoyance, making him sad when there was no reason to be, mad when he ought to feel happy. He’d enjoyed introducing them in his mind; the enjoyment fizzled when it became clear they wouldn’t have liked each other. Describing his parents to Araby, Brendan found himself making excuses for them, as if the best he could say was that Jerome at least knew he was ignorant and that Eve at least had died.
Recently Araby had recited a poem she’d written and Brendan had heard his mom laughing, “What crap!” It made him mad at his mother — at her memory, that is — and mad at his father for being a loser and at himself for thinking such things, emotions that put on his face an expression Araby took as moronic. “You don’t understand my poem, do you? It’s about art, about how artists know death is beautiful.” Brendan had nodded, impressed. But there in his head was his mother again, guffawing like an old fishwife. It was getting irritating.
Every night at bedtime his mom used to make him say a prayer, any prayer, as long as it ended, “God bless Mommy and Dad.” He’d begun to protest but Eve wouldn’t hear of it: “Shut up and pray. We need all the help we can get.” He’d continued it nightly since her death, the prayer dwindling away but its postscript remaining, even when Jerome was a shitass doing cocaine in front of him and hitting him that time last summer. “God bless Mommy and Dad,” Brendan would say, and always in a meek baby voice the sentiment seemed to require.
It was his deepest secret that at fourteen he’d still lie in bed and gurgle his dorky prayer. Last night, however, in the quiet of his darkened bedroom, he’d taken a deep breath and intoned, “God damn Mommy and Dad.” Nothing happened, no earthquake or lightning bolt. He lay for a long time listening, not sure if his words made him bigger for braving them or smaller for the lack of response. He said it again: “God damn Mommy and Dad.” Suddenly his father’s voice boomed outside Brendan’s door, “Go to bed!” followed after a pause by “Who you talkin’ to, anyway?”
“I’m prayin’! Is thatta big crime?”
“Oh. Sorry.” Then, “Say one for me. I bought a lottery ticket.”
They unloaded a flatbottom skiff off the pickup and lugged it to the pond’s edge. In the bow was a sack of feed corn. The duck blind was a deep wooden box sunk in the muck and fringed with papery reeds. A plywood sheet lay on top to keep out rain and critters. Jerome fetched a hammer from the truck and took position at one end. At the other end Brendan gripped the plywood resolutely. “Go,” his father said.
Brendan hated this part. He was supposed to yank away the cover so his father could pummel anything nesting inside, snakes and muskrats usually. Brendan would wince as Jerome poured hammer blows on animals shocked by sunlight into fatal confusion, killing
them, it did seem, with fury bordering on relish. The boy gritted his teeth and pulled. Jerome leaned into the dark box holding his hammer ready. Relief smoothed his face. “All clear,” he said. “I hate this part. I get scared there’s gonna be, like, a dead body inside.”
“Really?”
“Sometimes I think it’ll be your mom. And not lookin’ good.”
“You mean rotten?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Sometimes I think she’s gonna be behind a door I open, like my closet or in the kitchen. I get nervous before I open it.”
“It’s ’cause we never found her. You bury ’em, you know where they are.”
Brendan talked fast, “If we’re lobsterin’, I look in the water when the traps come up and I think I see her hangin’ on the rope. Like a mermaid, you know? Or like you said, all rotten and twisted up with weeds. I think that every time I look in the water.”
“Four years in the ocean, Bren. She’s bones.”
“Do you think a shark got her?”
“Afterward, sure. They’re scavengers, that’s what they do. But Eve drowned. I’m positive she drowned.”
“She was drunk?”
“I was drunk. She was sober — that was the weird part.”
“What was?”
“I’ve told you the story. I gotta tell it again?” At his son’s silence Jerome sighed. “We were at Surfside — it’s outta business now. She tells me she’s pregnant.” He smiled. “All nervous, she was.”
“Why?”
“Stuff. I wasn’t actin’ too in love, those days. But the news made me happy, which made her happy. Then I get loaded, which is standard, ’cept I promised her it was the last time, that I was gonna get healthy, keep the new baby healthy and make us a healthy home. We went out back of the bar. Lyin’ in the sand, lovin’ in the sand. I pass out. She goes swimmin’.”
Life Between Wars Page 15