Except once, perhaps. He was with his two daughters, both grown by then and one of them married, on a beach in Amagansett when a heavy gray military plane buzzed the shoreline. It was a cool day in early fall and there were few bathers, but all those who were there put their hands to their hearts or their ears, terrified for one second, a thoughtless, scampering terror, by the sheer, overwhelming sound. His daughters felt their own hearts pounding and there was a quick and general covering up all down the beach, the empty sleeves of shirts and the legs of shorts and pants suddenly thrown up into the air. (They heard later that one of the bathers there had been to Vietnam and woke screaming that night, all of it brought back to him by the sound.)
Their father, in a webbed beach chair beside their blanket, shook his head and said, when his two daughters had finished composing the letter of outrage they would send to the army, that once during the war he had been carrying a tank of gas across the open road that bisected their camp when suddenly, out of nowhere, a plane appeared, and in the same second he realized it was a German plane, he saw that it was heading right toward him and that he was close enough to see either his own terrified face reflected in the cockpit glass or that of the pilot’s, as surprised and terrified as his own. He threw the gas can to one side and himself to the other just as he heard the sound of the American artillery. They pulled the pilot from the broken plane but he’d been hit by the gunfire and was dead already. He was twenty years old and carried a photograph of a middle-aged couple and a young girl with a baby. The best anyone could figure was that he was lost, probably undertrained—it was late in the war—and out of fuel. It may have been just bad luck that put him in the American camp as his plane was going down, he may have been trying to do some damage, he may have hoped to land and be taken prisoner. No one could really say, although, their father added, he certainly had a clear shot at me, an irresistible shot with that fuel tank in my hands, fuel the very thing he needed, and didn’t take it. There’s no way of knowing, he said. Just as he would never know, even after he’d seen it close up, in new death, if that terrified young face had been the German pilot’s or his own.
On the blanket beside him his two grown daughters, covered up now and still hearing the outraged tone of their imaginary letters of complaint, sensed for a moment that here, perhaps and at last, was a story that might support or even simply renew their own interest in their mother’s old contention. But then their father said, “I don’t think I’ve thought of that day for forty years. The plane just brought it back to me out of nowhere,” and they concluded, together and each to herself, that had the incident changed him he would have thought about it before this, would have told the story before this, told it often enough that its significance, clearly established, would have begun to wear thin.
But it was a new recollection, perhaps the last new recollection he gave them, and their parents were separated by then, had been for some time, so there really seemed to be little sense in further wondering.
In their salty little cottage, in the two weeks he took away from the insurance office where he worked, away from the strict routine of eight to six, cocktails, dinner, homework and baths, read the paper and watch twenty minutes of the nightly news, he indicated to his children what it was he had brought them out here to see and then more or less stepped back, believing that the green trees and furrowed fields, the stretches of pale beach, the moonlight and the sea would all, in and of themselves, give his children a sense of wonder and beauty and whole life. Would serve somehow as antidote to the easy misery of daily life as his wife and her family and too many people he knew lived it. An antidote of green. He’d been given as much himself as a child, dipped once a year into the greens of Rockland or Westchester by the Fresh Air people as if to be rid of fleas or varnish—even, when he was nine, sent to the mountains for three entire months to recuperate from a bout of ghetto malaria. His mother believed in such cures entirely, as did his six uncles, but her faith took no account of clean air or wholesome food or open spaces and had only to do with what she called the need for beauty. Every child, she said, needed to see some beauty. His own children lived in a house and had grass and trees and flowers in their own back yards but in these two weeks he was able to walk them through woods or point out the Milky Way or, in a rented wooden boat with a small outboard motor, teach them, rocking slowly, to contemplate the width and the age and the endurance of the sea.
They caught blowfish and flounder and ate them breaded and fried for dinner. They roasted marshmallows on the beach. They bent to study the stalk of milkweed their father broke to show them and learned from him the names of the easier wildflowers: tiger lilies and black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace. They picked blackberries on his instructions, avoided the wild beach plums. They sat on the screened porch when it rained and listened as he read to them a “Drama in Real Life” from the Reader’s Digest, noticing always, as he instructed them to notice, the way the leaves were blackened by the rain, the way the rain had beaded a spider’s web under the eaves. They burned their cheeks and the tips of their noses staring out across the ocean’s limitless horizon or looking back to the sliver of shoreline and its own endless green.
Twice a week they walked with their mother to the nearest public phone—to a general store where they bought ice pops to eat while she talked, to a street in town where they sat with a bag of homemade doughnuts on a scuffed park bench gouged with blackened letters, to a gas station where she bought them small bottles of Coke before feeding a handful of coins into the phone and shouting, a finger in her other ear, “Momma? It’s Lucy. What’s wrong?”
If they were close enough the children could hear the small leaps of sound Momma’s voice made as she, in a role reversal that would last just these two weeks of summer, enumerated her griefs and their mother nodded silently or cooed in sympathy or said in the mildest, most heartsore protest, “Oh, Momma.”
The distance from Momma’s chair to the patch of dirt or parking lot where their mother stood was not two hundred miles and yet it seemed to inspire in the old lady all the regret and loneliness and sense of devastating mortality that whole churning oceans or continents of mountain ranges might elicit.
When their mother had finished off her substantial pile of coins she carefully placed the receiver back in its silver collar and then turned again to her children, usually with tears in her eyes. She touched their heads, their dark hair, and all the green or dusty way back kept at least one of them against her thigh, their shoulders under her arm seeming to satisfy something, so that by the time they returned to the cottage she was no longer carefully preparing them for her imminent departure (“Would you like to come to the train station with me tomorrow?” “Would you like to spend a few days with just Daddy?”) but discussing instead a trip to the drive-in movie tonight or what she might pack for lunch on the beach.
Once when they returned their father had lunch packed already and four fishing rods were leaning against the deep green shingles beside the screen door. For the first time they could remember, he shook his head when their mother said she would stay home to read while he and the children were out on the boat. “No,” he said simply, “we’re all going,” and when she once more declined, politely, almost perfunctorily because all of them knew that she never went out on the boat, he suddenly swung her into his arms and carried her, to the delight of his children, to the front seat of the car. He put his hands on the roof and leaned down to speak to her. “I won’t let you drown,” they heard him say.
She went. The boat dock was down a long, narrow road paved with crushed seashells that popped and broke and grew finer under the heavy wheels of the car. It was ramshackle and fishy and half the boats that nosed the pebbly shoreline were filled with water. There was a small wooden hut with a dark mouth, a table where fish were to be cleaned, and a bright red gas pump, circle on top of rectangle, cartoonish in its simplicity. On this day there were six navy-blue seat cushions trimmed with white and decorated with fa
ding white anchors scattered in the sun across the dock, and even the children could tell by the way they lay, dejected somehow, their plumpness a kind of ill health, that they were sodden.
The man who rented the boats here might have seemed a cartoon as well were he not, like the candy-store clerk in Momma’s neighborhood, so clearly the authentic version of a caricature. He was thin and wiry with a red face and reddened watery-blue eyes under a white yachtsman’s cap stained yellow with sweat. He greeted their father, who seemed to have known him forever, and tipped his hat to their mother and gave off, as he collected their life preservers from the wall behind him and took a packet of squid from the freezer on his right, the flat, sharp, glancing—glancing like the occasional streak of light against his gold tooth—odor of alcohol.
As he walked them to their boat he indicated the wet cushions. “Not gone twenty minutes,” the children heard him say, “when they all come paddling back in here. Swamped the boat.”
The single, reaching step from dock to rowboat was a long one, and although their brother nearly embraced the piling beneath the dock, the boat scooted away as their mother stepped into it and she cried out as she stood for a moment with one foot on the dock and the other in the boat, clutching both the captain’s hand on one side and her husband’s on the other.
With her cautious, unaccustomed presence beside them, the two girls sat primly on the first slat of seat while their brother cast off and their father rowed them out to deeper water, where he lowered the outboard motor and began the complex, delicate process of starting the engine. He pulled the cord, adjusted the choke, pulled again. He stood, the boat rocking beneath him and their mother clutching both sides, and with one final and determined tug (they had seen him use the same stance in starting the lawnmower at home), set the motor running. He sat, well pleased, tugging his dark baseball cap so it dipped over one eye, and, with his hand on the tiller, headed his family out to sea.
The bow of the boat lifted and slammed, bouncing over the wake of the bigger boats, whose captains—all equals here—raised their hands in greeting. There was dark water under the slats of the floorboards and the paint across the bow was speckled and peeling. The oar locks shuddered and bumped with each rise and fall, but the two girls beside their mother—whose fear had turned into something elegant now that she had tied a dark silk scarf over her hair—watched their father carefully, the vast blue sky behind him and all his attention on what was ahead. Their brother mimicked his pose, his watchfulness, his own baseball cap cocked in just the same way, and when he caught his mother’s eye, a strand of hair blown across her cheek, he nodded as his father would have done had he noticed her small smile.
They were back by midafternoon. On the dock, the two girls put their tongues to their arms to taste the salt. They were sunburned and weary and the spray of fish scales that rose from the table where their father and the captain cleaned their catch seemed to them to be, along with the rise and fall of the sea gulls diving for entrails, a sudden celebration of their safe return.
At the cottage, after showers and in fresh clothes, with the potatoes boiling on the stove, their father mixed martinis in a Pyrex measuring cup and poured them into the thick long-stemmed cocktail glasses they had brought from home. Their mother placed slices of American cheese on saltines. The children drank their lemonade and knew that for this part of the hour they would have to entertain themselves as their parents sat silently together on the screened porch, at the front of the house this year. While the boy brought his book to the rocker in the living room, the two girls went into the tiny bedroom they shared. There on the tall dresser with its plastic doily they had placed the two net bags of sugared almonds from last Saturday’s wedding. They were lovely colors, bright pink and pale violet and sky blue, gathered in white net and tied with the thinnest white satin bow.
“Let’s try them,” the older girl said, and although the younger one had had, until that moment, no intention of ever upsetting the lovely sack they made, had planned, indeed, to place it on her night table at home as a permanent, inedible reminder of the first wedding she’d ever attended, the proposal suddenly made her mouth water.
But she said first, “You open yours.”
After some negotiation on the thin gold counterpane of the lumpy double bed, they agreed each to open her own at the exact same moment and to try just one each. On the count of three, they both began to pull at the small satin ribbon and might have been thwarted entirely by their lack of fingernails if the older girl hadn’t, resourcefully enough, used her teeth.
On another count of three, each put a carefully chosen almond in her mouth (the older girl choosing the prettiest shade, sure it would be the sweetest, the younger the dullest and thus the most easily sacrificed).
They studied one another.
“How does it taste?” the older girl said.
“Like nothing,” the younger one reported. “A little sweet.”
“Bite down,” the older one said, but the younger girl shook her head. “You first.”
“On three,” the older one said and counted a third time.
They cracked the candy shells between their teeth and met the dull, tasteless meat. They held their mouths open, showing each other the half-chewed nut and the slivers of candy coating all white now, the green and pink pastels across their tongues.
They ran together to the bathroom, spitting elaborately into the sink. The older girl held her throat as she drank a cup of water, the younger one scooped water from the faucet into her hands, rinsing what looked like pieces of wood and scraps of eggshell from her mouth.
The almonds and the netting and the satin ribbons now gray with spit lay scattered on the bedspread. They tried to put them together as they had been, but the tiny ribbons were limp and wet and would not hold, and without one almond, the sacks seemed lumpy and misshapen.
“We should have left them the way they were,” the younger girl said. She had inherited her mother’s easy access to regret.
Her sister shrugged. “So now we know how bad they taste.”
That night the family went to a drive-in movie where a platoon of American soldiers had such a difficult time taking a hill that the sound of their heavy artillery seemed to reverberate in the dark, still, starry air as they drove home past potato farms and silent villages.
The girls were wide awake and as they talked in bed they saw a dark slug, its horned devilish head moving slowly to and fro, making its way from out of the cracked baseboard into their room.
They ran to their parents’ door first but knew from their father’s response (It won’t hurt you) and the closed door itself (on such a hot night) that they would get no further sympathy. They went to their brother, who was reading on the couch in the living room where he slept. He agreed to come and then concluded from the path of slime on the linoleum that either it had gone into the closet or under the bed or there were two of them. They begged him to bring out their pillows and sheets—“But shake them first!”—standing on bare tiptoe as they pleaded, enjoying the sense of menace the creature had brought them, the chill in their spines. They spent the next hour pulling chairs from the porch and the kitchen into the living room and suspending themselves across the seats, twisting and turning and spreading their blankets one way and then the next.
So they were all three tangled in the living room and deeply asleep when Mrs. Smiley rapped at the glass sometime before dawn. Their father, tying his robe, stubbed his toe on a kitchen chair and said, “Damn them,” as he went to answer.
The children, barely awake, gave some brief attention to the sound of his voice and Mrs. Smiley’s as they spoke on the porch, although they were aware of their mother standing in the door of the living room, making the sign of the cross over her nightgown in preparation for the worst.
On any number of such mornings in the past, on afternoons when they got back from the beach or the boat or evenings after restaurant dinners, they’d found Mrs. Smiley or Mr. Porter waitin
g to tell them that there had been a call from Mrs. Dailey’s mother. Their own mother greeted the news every time with a quick blessing and a sharp intake of breath and often, just as she clearly feared, the call was indeed about a death, the death of a former neighbor, or a distant relative, of a nun or a priest she had once known whose wake their mother would rush to the train for, although, as their father said, she had not seen or heard from the person in fifteen or twenty years. But more often the call would be about a mere minor accident as when Veronica broke a wrist in a fall or Agnes had her pocketbook snatched on the subway, or about nothing at all. Each year their mother wrote Mrs. Smiley’s or Mr. Porter’s telephone number on the pad near the phone that was on the table next to Momma’s chair and each year the children understood, although no one had ever told them, Momma did the best she could to find some reason to dial it.
They heard their father’s voice as he thanked Mrs. Smiley and apologized for the early hour. They heard the screen door slam and might have fallen back to sleep in the time it took for him to see Mrs. Smiley to her car and, standing in the streaked pale light of a summer dawn, watch the car disappear from sight. When he came into the living room again they heard their mother say, “What’s wrong?” and were grateful for what struck them as the casual wave of his hand. “Go back to sleep,” he told the children and, making his way across the small room cluttered with their makeshift beds, took their mother’s arm.
At Weddings and Wakes Page 5