Crying Child

by Barbara Michaels

  Crying Child

  Barbara Michaels

  ONE

  From the air, the island doesn’t look big enough to land a plane on. It’s a pretty sight, from above, calling to mind all sorts of poetic images—an agate, shining brown and green, flung down in folds of sea-blue satin; a blob of variegated Play-Dough, left in a basin of water by a forgetful child; an oval braided rug on a green glass floor.

  Or a hand, in a brown-and-green mitten. The hand is clenched into a fist, with a thumblike promontory jutting out on one side. Across the broad end there is a range of hills that might be knuckles; at the other end, the land narrows down into a wrist-shaped peninsula. There are beaches there, like fur trim on the cuff of the mitten; the rest of the island is thick with foliage, somber green pines and fir trees for the most part. The house is surprisingly distinct from above. The lighter green of the lawns and the gray outline of roofs and chimneys stand out amid the darkness of the pines. The only other distinctive landmark is the cluster of buildings that make up the village, along the thumb promontory, and its harbor, which is formed by the junction of thumb and hand.

  And that’s where the figure of speech fails. You could compare the house to an oddly shaped ring, up on the knuckles of the hand, but the village doesn’t suggest any analogy. A diseased imagination might think of sores or warts; but there never was anything festering about St. Ives. It was just a charming Maine town, and not even the events of that spring could make it anything else. There was no lurking horror in the village. It was in the house.

  I certainly wasn’t aware of horrors that morning in May. I had worries, plenty of them, but they were comparatively simple ones. I didn’t know, then, how simple.

  Fortunately, fear of flying was not one of those worries. If I had had any such weakness, the plane I was in would have reduced me to a quivering jelly. It was the smallest winged thing I had ever been in. After the big jetliner that brought me from San Francisco to Boston, this object looked like a squat beetle with stubby wings. The pilot flew it like a hot rod; with his long hair curling around the base of his neck and his grin almost buried in blond beard, he wouldn’t have inspired much confidence in a timid flyer.

  Although I was in a hurry to reach the island, this charter flight from Boston wasn’t my idea; it was Ran’s. A brother-in-law who is also a millionaire has certain advantages. As Ran pointed out, the alternative arrangement would have taken a lot of time: another plane from Boston to Portland, then a bus or train or taxi from Portland to the coastal town of Richmond, which is the closest city on the mainland to the island; then a privately chartered boat. The ferry only runs once a day—in the summer. In the winter, I assumed, the inhabitants would have to swim.

  It was a long swim. King’s Island—they insist on the possessive form—is the farthest out of all the islands of Casco Bay; so far out that it isn’t on the regular ferry route, which chugs like a commuter bus between Portland and the other islands that cluster thickly between the arms of Cape Elizabeth and Cape Small. The inhabitants of the island say that’s fine with them. They see enough tourists during the three summer months. The Inn, with twenty rooms, is the only hotel. A few private homes take in boarders, but there isn’t a motel or a resort hotel on the island. The Fraser family owns most of it, and they have always refused to sell to developers, so there are no cabins or summer cottages.

  Ran’s last name is Fraser.

  I suppose owning things gives rich people the feeling that they can manipulate human beings as easily as they do inanimate objects. Ran has certain tendencies in this direction, but he gave up trying to boss me after I ran away from home. I was twenty at the time, and a college graduate; but I’d been living with Ran and Mary for ten years, and he carried on like a Victorian father whose daughter is planning a career in a bawdy house. His original idea was for me to hang around the family homestead on Long Island after I graduated until I hooked one of the wealthy young males he kept dragging home. When I insisted that I wanted a job instead, he offered me fourteen (fourteen—I counted them) different positions in Manhattan, from an assistant editorship in the publishing house he controls to running my own interior decorating business—which he would buy for me. I literally had to elope, down the stairs at 2 a.m., with my suitcase under my arm—but not with a man. My companion on that flight wasn’t a human being, it was a bizarre quality called pride.

  I took a job in San Francisco because it was about as far away from Ran and Mary as I could get, and I needed that distance to keep myself from crawling back. I was so homesick and so broke those first three months that I almost did weaken. It took Ran another three months to forgive me. He called on New Year’s Eve. After that he and Mary called almost every week, just for company and gossip. But the last two calls had been something else. It was because of those calls that I was in the air over the coast of Maine in a plane that looked like a sick lightning bug.

  The first of the significant calls came in April. It was Ran telling me with curt brevity that Mary had lost her baby. That wasn’t how he phrased it. In fact, he corrected me when I used the word.

  “Baby?It wouldn’t havebeen that for another six months. Fetus or embryo; I never can remember which comes first…”

  The words sounded callous, and so did his voice. Iwasn’t shocked; I thought I knew why he was so determined to avoid the emotional overtones that particular word carries. So I didn’t sympathize; I didn’t offer to come back east, though I knew how desperately unhappy Mary must be. I also knew that Ran would resent any suggestion that he wasn’t the only thing or person Mary needed.

  I’m ten years younger than Mary. She brought me up by hand, like Pip’s sister, after our parents died in an automobile accident when I was nine. There’s no one left, now, except a distant cousin in Milwaukee, so there are a lot of reasons why Mary and I have always been even closer than sisters usually are. But I knew Ran was a little jealous of that relationship. Oh, he loved me like a brother. He had taken me into his heart and home without hesitation when he married my sister. But the combination of money and masculinity made him very sure of himself; he resented the hint that any woman he cherished could possibly need anything, or anybody, else.

  Yet not even Ran could realize how much losing this baby could mean to Mary. She had been pregnant twice before, and had miscarried both times. Then there was nothing, for six long years, despite all her efforts—and, to do him justice, all Ran’s efforts. The doctors said there was no physical reason why they couldn’t have children. It wasn’t until recently that I had realized how much Ran must have hated it all—especially the fact that his gangling adolescent sister-in-law knew all the gruesome details. Mary wasn’t reticent; the problem was so important to her that she had to talk about it. The schools didn’t go in for sex education in those days, but I got all I needed from Mary.

  I wrote to her, of course, after Ran called. I got a brief scrawl in reply, and a promise that she’d write at length later. That letter never came. Instead there was Ran’s second call.

  It was typical spring weather in San Francisco—cold. I was huddled over my imitation fireplace trying to work out a sketch for an ad for face cream. It wasn’t my job. Beauty Aid is one of our big accounts, but junior artists don’t originate layouts. Still, I thought, maybe if I came up with something spectacular…

  When the phone rang I jumped, I was concentrating so hard. As soon as I heard Ran’s voice I knew something was wrong. He has a deep baritone voice that gets softer and deeper when he’s upset. That night it was almost a bass rumble.

  “When are you taking your vacation?” he asked.

  “First two weeks in June,” I said; and the funny feeling at the pit of my stomach began to spread out. “You know that, Ran; we discussed my c
oming to visit you—”

  “Could you come now instead? And stay longer?”

  “I’ve been at the agency less than a year. They don’t—”

  “What about an emergency leave?”

  There was a long silence. Then I said, “Start from the beginning. What’s wrong with Mary?”

  “Nothing physical. She’s fully recovered from the miscarriage.

  “Don’t make me drag it out of you, Ran. Do you think I’m that dumb, that I’ll flip when you mention mental illness?”

  There was a little chuckle from the other end of the line.

  “That’s what I like about you, Jo—that hard core of brutal honesty. Yes, her illness is mental. Melancholia, depression, whatever you want to call it. A nervous breakdown—”

  “Never mind what I call it; or what you call it. What does the doctor say? I assume she’s seen a doctor?”

  “A dozen doctors. Gynecologist, neurologist—”

  “Psychiatrist?”

  “Well…”

  “For God’s sake, Ran—”

  “Wait a minute; don’t jump on me with both feet.” He was laughing again, I could hear him, and the anger that I use to veil my fears, even from myself, spread and grew stronger. Before I could say anything, he went on, soberly, “Of course I took her to a psychiatrist, after the other doctors found nothing wrong. The man she saw was first-rate, and Mary seemed to like him. Trouble was, he couldn’t take her on full time. And that’s what she needs, apparently—five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year.”

  “There are other psychiatrists.”

  “He gave me the names of three others. Mary has seen all three. The third man was a disaster. She took a violent dislike to him. Now she absolutely refuses to see another psychiatrist.”

  “But Ran, surely—”

  “Jo, you are a bright, intelligent girl, but you don’t know the answer to every damned problem in the world. Don’t tell me what to do until you hear what I’ve done.”

  There was a brief silence; I could hear him breathing. It was uncanny, hearing those puffs of restrained anger from three thousand miles away. Then he said briefly, “Sorry.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  I didn’t. I was glad that he was just as concerned as I was, under his seemingly careless laughter.

  “Psychiatry is helpless, Jo, without cooperation from the patient. What am I supposed to do, drag her in there kicking and screaming? I tell you she won’t go!”

  “I see your point. I suppose it was the miscarriage that brought this on?”

  “Brought it on, but fails to explain it. Look, Jo, let’s not tear the thing apart now. In lieu of analysis, which she isn’t ready to accept, the doctors think peace and quiet and a complete change of scene might help. I’ve got a house, on an island off the coast of Maine, and we’re going up there for the summer. Can you join us? As soon as possible, and for as long as you can stay?”

  “An island? Why an island?”

  “Because that’s where the house is,” Ran said. “Of all the stupid questions… Will you come or not?”

  “There is the little matter of my job.”

  “Quit.”

  “I love fresh air, but it’s low in calories.”

  “For God’s sake, Jo, you know I can get you a job any time you say. So far as that goes—”

  “We went through this before, Ran.”

  “Yes, and I came around, didn’t I? I admire your independence—even if I do call it pigheadedness when you aren’t around. But there are more important things than pride, Jo.”

  He fell silent, then, and all at once I could almost see him—his tall, lean body slouched in the big leather chair, his thick dark hair standing up on end because he had been running his fingers through it the way he did when he was annoyed. And he was always annoyed when some lesser human specimen intimated that his plans were less than perfect. I got to be pretty familiar with his moods in the years when I lived with him and Mary; so I knew, now, what the silence meant. He was trying another approach. In my mind I saw his heavy dark brows lift and an ingratiating smile lighten a mouth that was, in repose, lather too thin and too long for geniality. The voice that finally spoke was just the voice I expected.

  “Honey, I’m sorry. I’m in a lousy mood, or I wouldn’t be so overbearing. I’m not ordering you; I’m begging you. Mary wants you. And you are just about the only thing she does want.”

  It might have been calculated—it almost certainly was —but that statement broke through my defenses. Not because he admitted that Mary wanted me, but because of his admission that she didn’t want him. He was not a humble man.

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay, I’ll come. It’ll take a while, there are so many things… But I’ll be there.”

  I was still sitting by the phone, trying to sort things out, when the doorbell rang. It was the special-delivery mail man, with a letter from Ran. It contained a plane ticket and detailed instructions for reaching the island. All I had to do was call Ran’s office when I had made my reservations, and everything would be taken care of.

  Fifteen minutes between New York and San Francisco is good time, even for air-mail special. I didn’t have to look at the postmark to know that Ran had sent the letter that morning, before he even bothered to ask me to come.

  The next two weeks were filled with furious activity and with an increasing anxiety that made all activity more difficult. I took the time, though, because this way there was a slight chance that I might be able to get a job when I came back to the West Coast. I didn’t expect the agency to offer to hold my job for me, and they didn’t. But at least, by offering to stay long enough to train my successor in my peculiar ways, I avoided serious hard feelings. Of course, by the time they heard my excuses they couldn’t have blackballed me without making like Scrooge. I have an unfortunate habit—not of embroidering a story, exactly—but of bringing out its more dramatic features. And in the process I tell more than I should. I don’t do it for effect, I don’t even approve of it; I just can’t seem to help it. Mary used to say that I could bump into a lady at the grocery store and by the time I was through apologizing I would have told her I was breaking up with my boyfriend and described the dream I had the night before.

  Anyhow, I managed it somehow—left the job on good terms with all concerned, sublet my apartment, and packed three suitcases. It sounds simple, but I’ve left out all the little things, the details that sound so insignificant and take so much time. By the time I got on the plane I was so tired I slept most of the way across the country. And when I reached Boston, the plane Ran had hired was waiting for me.

  We landed on the island. I’m sure I don’t know how we did. Of course I knew that the island really was large enough to allow a small plane to land; I knew it in my brain, anyhow, even if I didn’t know it in my insides. But as we came down, my interested eyes failed to find a flat space bigger than a front yard anywhere among the acres of fir trees and the miles of rough cliffline. I did see the field finally—if you could call it that—it looked like somebody’s corn field. So I chickened out and closed my eyes. The landing was what I can only call exuberant; we bounced a couple of times more than necessary.

  Ran had said I would be met. I guess I expected him, or Mary, or both; I was conscious of a pang of disappointment when I scanned the faces of the people near the small building that served as a terminal, and failed to see a familiar one. I started walking toward the building, and as I did so a lounger removed himself from the wall against which he had been leaning and came toward me.

  It’s hard for me to remember my first impressions of William Graham. I. must have been struck by his height; he’s really tall, six feet four or five. He has one of those long, weather beaten New England faces that change very little between the ages of twenty-five and sixty. The features seem to be all sharp angles and the skin is tanned— not just sun-browned, tanned like old leather. Will has sandy hair and light-brown eyes. They look like amber in the sunlight. And i
n direct sunlight, and only then, you notice his freckles, just a scattering of them, across the bridge of his nose.

  Then he smiled. I didn’t exactly stagger, but I felt like doing so. It was the most amazing transformation I’ve seen outside of an old Lon Chaney movie. His face got rounder and years younger; his pale amber eyes glowed as if a light had been switched on behind them.

  “Will Graham,” he said, and put out his hand.

  “Joanne McMullen,” I said. I let him have my hand with some trepidation; it was the first time my not-so-dainty digits had been swallowed up by a man’s hand. But I needn’t have worried. His handclasp was firm, but gentle and businesslike. His eyes were fixed on my face, and I fancied I could hear the facts clicking into place in his brain. Female, early twenties, five-nine, one hundred and twenty-five pounds (approximate), brown hair, blue eyes, no visible scars or deformities…

  “You must be a friend of Ran’s,” I said inanely. The clinical stare was making me nervous.

  He didn’t bother answering, but turned away to greet the pilot, who was coming up with my bags. They were apparently old buddies.