She pours herself coffee in a clean cup and sits across from him at the round oak table in the breakfast nook. She rubs her fingers in something sticky on the table.
“I watched tv with Carter a while last night,” he says. Their good television is in the basement with their lumpy old couch. “Fish brought a girl home. Young.”
“Oh,” Ursula says, feeling a knot come together in her chest. This is not the first time Fish and Katie have separated, nor the first time Fish has sought comfort with another woman, but Ursula feels a sorrow gathering in her, for Katie and Fish, for all the Fishers, for lovers estranged, and dreams lost.
Fish sleeping in their basement is a temporary arrangement, though familiar over the years. He was released six weeks early from prison, and his own house is rented until midsummer. Katie has taken tiny quarters downtown by the theatre, and she doesn’t want to try to live there with Fish. “It’s more like a dormitory than apartments,” she said of her building. Fish, in turn, said he was put off by fruity theatre people. Katie came for supper a few times. She and Fish have spent some hours together downstairs. She still has not stayed the night, as far as Ursula knows, though who would want to? Fish sleeps on a foam pad on a plywood bench over storage cabinets they all think of as his.
There is something about Fish in the basement that pleases Ursula, as though Fish were in place under her protection. All in all it is a thoroughly silly thought, as though no more bad things can happen.
“Is something wrong with Katie?” Ursula asks. “Is it Fish?” The urgency of Katie’s call is diluted in that same moment by Ursula’s sudden realization that she has not returned Mrs. Angstrom’s call yesterday about Carter’s English grade. Urgent the message said. Maybe Ursula doesn’t want to hear about it! What if Carter doesn’t graduate? A’s in advanced placement Calculus and Chemistry, a semifinalist in the Merit Scholars competition, and he is fucking up in English! (She is sure he would have been a finalist in the tests if he could have been bothered to think about the language portion.)
“I don’t keep track, Urs.” Michael sets his bowl on the floor by his chair, for the cat to lick. Ursula tries not to show her annoyance. He goes to the sink and fills the oatmeal pan with water to soak. They have had many petty quarrels about the pan, until Michael, a fair man, began the practice of washing it as soon as he comes in the door in the evening, so that Ursula will not have to do so before making dinner. Of course, she often does not make dinner. Did the contract change? It is his oatmeal.
“Early as it is, couldn’t you wash the pan?” she says, unable to stop herself. She realizes as soon as the words come out that she sounds nasty, and she knows it is really Carter who inspires her tone. She wonders where she put the note with the teacher’s message. Ursula will have to catch her during her prep period. She thinks it funny when Michael refers to his “prep-period,” as though teachers were surgeons requiring a harsh scrub. Ah, Carter. Mostly, she overlooks his adolescent eccentricities. She has had a lot of experience with strung-out, enraged teenagers, and she knows there is nothing basically wrong with her son that time will not cure. Failing to graduate, though, is not an option.
Michael comes back to the table and stands behind Ursula, bending over, putting one hand down into her gown. The warmth, so sudden and unexpected on her breast, sends a chill the length of her body. She reaches up to touch his arm. So what if he will not open up to her? There is this, and it isn’t really rare. Sometimes it makes her a little indignant that he touches her so easily—she thinks him evasive, trying to distract her when she asks the wrong question, say—but she never throws him off.
She will not repeat the error of the refused coffee elsewhere in this marriage. Besides, to hurt Michael, she would be the loser.
Michael’s parents have been married fifty years. A half-century of disappointment, guilt, suppressed anger, and—more recently—fiercely deliberate loyalty. Ursula wonders if Gully ever touched Geneva in this way, so easily. She has seen pictures of them, young, standing by one another, Gully’s arm across Geneva’s shoulders. Yet closeness between them seems inconceivable. Still, this is the couple who, newly married, drove to Mexico City in a 1932 Ford, and then traveled to Guatemala by train and bus. There must have been passion to spur such a brave endeavor.
“You know, that same thought occurred to me,” Michael says, sliding away. She has forgotten what “thought” came before. He speaks in a faintly wry tone, one their friends think charmingly characteristic, never having been forced to weigh the burden of alternative interpretations. He pads in his sloppy sheepskin slippers to the stairs.
The pan. That was the referent. She is embarrassed.
Then Michael says, before he begins his ascent, “It’s sure to do with Fish. What other topic is so dependable?”
Ursula feels her nipples grow pert under the flannel of her gown. “Michael?”
He stops, one foot suspended above the next step. She remembers, for no reason except the sight of his foot, a girl who was her client many years ago. The girl was very ill. She would stand in just such a pose for hours, rigid, as though she would never grow tired. In the end she walked out of her parents’ home straight into traffic, and was killed. All the while, Ursula had been trying to get her institutionalized, and had failed. They weren’t doing that anymore, she was told.
“Oh Michael,” she says, back in the moment.
“Yo.” He makes her laugh, but it isn’t what she was looking for just then.
Michael’s parents sleep in separate beds at opposite ends of their mobile home. Her own parents divorced when she was fifteen, Juliette’s age. Do separations start like this, with snoring, or some other dreadful little tic? Or do people blow apart after an ignominious spectacle? Will the furniture one day shift in her house? Are they happy?
She knows that Michael will never leave her. The thought would never be a serious one for him, whatever turn their marriage takes. It is up to her to keep the marriage alive, because even if it were dead, Michael would not be bothered to bury it.
“I wish we had a little more time,” she says.
13
She drinks her coffee slowly. She doesn’t want to talk to her sister-in-law this morning. Life was calm with Fish in jail. The only personal crises, and small ones they were, have been with her children, who have a reasonable claim to her sympathy and occasional intervention. But it did not seem possible that Fish would survive a year in prison. They might have been locking him up in a trunk, for the panic she felt at his sentencing. He refused his brother’s offer of bail. “You know I’m going to get it in the ass this time,” he said. “I might as well get started on jail time.”
At the moment of arrest—so stupid!—he looked amazed. Later he looked beaten and listless. He wouldn’t see Katie until after the trial, and then he told her he didn’t want her to visit him. He wouldn’t write letters. Katie moved in with Michael and Ursula for a while. She couldn’t stand the house out of town, with all its half-finished projects, its overgrown yard, its gloominess in winter. She couldn’t sleep. She cried a lot. Ursula realized Katie had nothing to do with Fish gone. She told her to go find a job, something besides waiting tables. She knew idleness only worked for Katie when it was with Fish. Together they had amassed years of doing nothing.
“Damn him for being fucking crazy,” Katie wept. “Damn him looking so goddamned guilty. He scuttled off like a—a sick crab.”
Ursula was on the phone day and night, trying to find out what was happening, what Fish was doing, where they had taken him, when Michael could see him. Michael said, “Really, ladies, where do you think he’s going to get away to?” In fact, it wasn’t long before the authorities moved him to a forest camp to plant trees. Prison was prison, even outdoors, but at least he wasn’t in a little cell.
He wrote them once, a card. He said there was an Indian kid in the camp who went off where he wasn’t supposed to go and got in trouble. Ursula wrote back to ask if that meant the Indian went back to Sa
lem, but Fish didn’t answer.
Freed, Fish appeared exactly as Ursula knew he would, out of the blue without warning, looking sheepish and sober, as if he had been caught with his trousers down. He didn’t have Katie’s street address—his one card had come to Michael’s—and it was very late. Michael ushered him downstairs, carrying blankets and sheets and a pillow. Fish had slept down there enough times before. Michael had rented out Fish’s house for the year, and moved his stuff for safekeeping to the basement, except for his guns, which were out at his dad’s.
When Ursula saw Fish, she blurted, “But you’re home early!” She thought he looked rather good, his eyes less bruised. All those months without booze, drugs, sex—had they been good for him? She wanted to wrap him in her arms and press against him, to bring some life back into his expression, but of course that was for Katie to do. Ursula said she would call her.
“Aw, don’t bother her,” Fish said of his wife. Michael went out and bought a half-gallon of tokay, and sat up and watched Fish get drunk and pass out content. Michael got mildly drunk himself. He came upstairs red-eyed, with a forlorn air. “Is he really okay?” Ursula asked sleepily. “Are you?” In the morning Katie asked the same thing, when Michael called her. Michael, tense and quiet, was, as usual, unable to say anything when it mattered.
Fish told them more stories about the Indian kid, who could whistle like thirty birds, and call deer and elk. He said there was an old prospector-type, too, who could speak four languages, including Athabascan. He told about the deer someone shot out of season, that ran up right into the compound and lay down on a bunkhouse porch and died. When Fish is in a good mood he talks very fast, rat-a-tat, like somebody on speed. It sounded like he was ready to quit talking prison stories—he was winding down—when he said bitterly, “I really asked for it, didn’t I?” He recovered quickly. “It could have been worse.”
He looked at Katie, as if Michael and Ursula weren’t there. “It wasn’t like that inside, baby,” he said, “not for me.” He took a long swig of his bottle. “I’m too old. Not pretty anymore.”
“What did that mean!” Ursula asked Michael as soon as they were alone.
“If you want to know, ask Fish, or Katie,” Michael said. “I’d ask Fish, since he said it. Didn’t he used to talk to you?”
Ursula blushed scarlet, surprising herself. She wasn’t at all sure what Michael meant. She and Michael had never talked about her with Fish, anymore than if it was someone they never saw again. She never had said how lucky she felt, that Fish went off to Reno and threw his money away and enlisted, and she moved all her stuff downstairs to Michael’s three weeks after. It was all blind luck, to have quick, silly choices yield good decisions. She had considered moving in with a graduate student named Delmore, but he was on a macrobiotic diet and she didn’t think she could conform.
Days later Ursula realized Fish had to have meant sex. Everyone knew about rape in jail, she just hadn’t let herself think of it. It made her sick to think of it, but Fish said it didn’t happen to him.
Katie brought up the subject of divorce again, six months into Fish’s term. “I guess I couldn’t do it while he’s there,” she said. She was thinner, she didn’t come over often. She said she was working long hours. Ursula wanted to ask her about her feelings, about the years with Fish, but she sensed there were things she wouldn’t want to know. And she sensed a cooler Katie, as though the opportunities for intimacy might have passed. Had Ursula been looking the other way? Had she failed Katie as friend and family, to quiet her fears about her husband’s brother?
There was no question Fish was easier to deal with absent, but to divorce him while he was helpless? It couldn’t be right. Why now? Ursula thought. It wasn’t like he had hurt anyone. He had already been dealt a lot more punishment than he deserved. He had taken a little ride in somebody’s double-parked Porsche. They were all going into the Chinese restaurant to pick up Hum Bows on a Saturday night, and there was that damned car. Once around the block. The problem was, it wasn’t Fish’s first such lark. The law made a big deal of it, like Fish was a threat to the fabric of society. Maybe the judge sensed incipient anarchy. The cops were their most arrogant with little people.
For years and years it has been Ursula’s job to make recommendations about the disposition of human lives. Remove this child from this bad mother’s custody. Place this one in a foster home. Choose these adoptive parents over these. Prosecute this abuser, and not this one. She tries to think the best of people (or not to have expectations), tries to forget them as soon as she files a case. Some stay with you, but most do not. A judge should certainly have had simliar experience, but the one who sentenced Fish said, “We could grant some levity to the young person who lacks judgment, but a man in his forties constitutes a threat to his community when he ignores its basic rules of property and decency.” Property was the key word. They give suspended sentences for DUI manslaughter, for sodomy with children, but property! Ursula can still remember the helpless rage that poured through her. It was a scalding, inside. The judge hated Fish for having lived this long without buying in. He gave Katie a loathing look too; maybe he wished he could send her away with him. It was all no more and no less than Fish expected. He said that in Nam he had expected neither to live nor to die, and hadn’t he been right about that?
Katie didn’t ask Ursula’s opinions at times she might have. She did not for example ask when she took her baby to Texas and gave her away. Ursula knows what she would have said. Give her to us. We’re family. She has waked up many nights, grieving for that baby, as if it were dead, but she has never told Katie. She hasn’t even told Michael. Well, Ursula has long ago forgiven Katie (knowing it isn’t even her right to do so); Katie has no business with a child, and had the sense to know it. If only more young mothers made the same decision, early. Fewer infants would get underfed, left alone at night, fried in skillets, not that Katie would ever have done any of those things. There is still a tiny wedge between Katie and Ursula. Katie looking for approval. Ursula declining. Katie said this was the first time since she met Fish that he was gone and she wasn’t looking at the door ten times a day to see if he would come back to her. It had cleared her head. There was peace in the certainty. But it was temporary. She had to decide.
And Katie has a new boyfriend, at her age.
Ursula doesn’t think Fish knows. He has things to learn. He thinks the world in general is peopled by creeps, but he expects the best from his family. His wife. He has been living downstairs a couple of weeks, working most of that time. As soon as Ursula mentioned that he was home, her supervisor, Angela, said she was going to ask him to work on her house, a wonderful old Victorian above the boulevard. The idea made Ursula nervous. She did not want to end up with her supervisor angry at her brother-in-law. She warned Angela that although Fish’s work was an artisan’s, he was undependable. She recalled aloud the time he built them a fence but not the gate, and then didn’t finish it for three years. (Michael wouldn’t do it, either, it wasn’t his project.) Angela, hearing all about the fence, didn’t flinch. “Do you know what it’s like, finding somebody you know will love your house because it is beautiful?” She gently chided Ursula. “I won’t blame you, I promise. It’s my decision. My gamble, if you will. I won’t say a word to you.” It went well enough. Fish has started a new project now, unrelated to Ursula. She can relax.
Fish says Katie needs time to wind up whatever she was into while he was gone. He didn’t expect her to sit around the whole while. Ursula thinks it all bravado, and she aches for him. Fish is in jeopardy. There is no good resolution in the offing. The elder Fisher marriage is no model, and the Ursula-Michael union Katie dismisses as good luck. She has no idea how strong some Fisher traits really are, how they worm their way into the soundest beam. Besides, Ursula knows Katie has never envied her Michael. If Fish is the darker brother, Katie has no taste for the light. Through all the years, Katie has grown taut, a little brittle; there are pocks in her existenc
e about which she volunteers no feelings (a true Fisher, if only by marriage), and she invites no questions. She has always seemed, at even the worst moments, the right match for Fish. And no one can deny the depth of her loyalty. Didn’t it cost her a child?
14
“Katie, it’s me,” Ursula says. “I was surprised to hear from you so early.”
“Sorry. I know morning isn’t your best time. But Ursula, I’ve got myself in a mess—”
“What’s wrong?”
“Fish. But you knew that.”
“Fish,” Ursula repeats. She would like to ask Katie if other things ever fail her. If everything does.
“I’m going through with it. For the first time in my adult life I feel like I’m getting it together. I don’t think I can do it with Fish. I can’t drag the weight any longer.”
“I haven’t got much time, Katie. Could you call me tonight?” Ursula knows it is terrible to pull away, knows she ought to respond to the message in Katie’s plaint, but she doesn’t want to hear it. And she is pressed for time.
“No, listen. It’s important. My lawyer has been pushing me. She says if I don’t let them serve Fish the papers, she is washing her hands of me and I can kiss the four hundred I’ve paid her goodbye. She says it has to happen. Shit, Ursula, she thinks she’s my fucking shrink. My mommy.”
“I didn’t realize it was that far along.”
“Oh Ursula, I told you. You know I did.”
“Okay.”
“Only not today! I told them today was okay, I just wanted to get it over with, and I told them he’s over there, and to get there early, before he goes off, but I forgot about Saturday.”
“Oh God.” The anniversary party in the River Cove Grange. Fish will be a terrific guest. His parents celebrate fifty years of contract, and he greets the end of his own. What was it, Ursula wonders fleetingly, that he and Katie agreed to do?
Beyond Deserving Page 5