The Voyage of the Morning Light

by Marina Endicott

  Of course, it was not like Thea writing home to the aunts; with mail to Ha‘ano, nobody could say when he might receive her letter, or if he ever would.

  One afternoon, just before Francis was to leave for Belgium, Kay accompanied him out to the East River to tour the Shively Sanitary Tenements, also called the East River Houses. The tenements were not a medical clinic, Nurse Burgess had explained, but housing designed with tuberculosis patients in mind, built the year before by Mrs. William Vanderbilt to a plan devised by Dr. Shively, who ran the TB clinic. There were still suites genuinely untenanted, Nurse Burgess had hastened to say. “The building is new, and the concept still experimental, so you would not be in a set of rooms where—well, where any former tenant had passed on.”

  “It can’t be long until Thea clocks that prune-mouthed old biddy with a bedpan,” Francis told Kay as they took themselves off in a cab to the East River—an area which Francis said was not generally thought wholesome. “We’ll reserve judgment, I promised your sister,” he said, and told the cabman to stop at the corner of East Seventy-Seventh and Cherokee Place.

  Kay had thought tenement meant a crowded lodging house for the poor, but the place looked very respectable: a large, modern yellow-brick building, bandbox new and handsome. Each apartment had lacy copper-green metal balconies and large windows looking out onto the river. Kay thought it was pretty. And less frightening than the hospital.

  “Handy for shipping,” said Francis, pointing downriver past the bridge to the long strings of docked steamships and luggers. “Might get a berth there . . . Let’s go up and see.”

  Tiled tunnels led them in from the street to a central courtyard with a little garden. Mrs. Prince, the manageress, met them in the lobby and took them up, asking them to “Notice, please, the wide corridors and generous stairwells—Dr. Shively believes this lessens the risk that healthy family members will succumb to the infection.” She directed their attention to carved seats built into the stair landings, resting places for easily winded residents as they went up and down. It all smelled of fresh paint and fresh air, almost to the point of wind.

  At the fourth floor, Mrs. Prince unlocked 4B and let Kay and Francis step inside. The pale-green walls of the little foyer matched the green balconies outside. They walked through four large rooms, opening into one another but arranged, at least in this corner apartment, so that each room had two or three windows—those on the interior side opening onto the central court, so that Kay could feel the breeze on her cheek. This was the most like a ship of any house she’d ever seen.

  Mrs. Prince threw open the windows to the balcony on the river side and they heard the bustle of the street, only as a cheerful rumour this high up. There was a small kitchen in black and white; more black-and-white octagonal tile in the well-outfitted bathroom. Past the kitchen lay a little room with one diamond-shaped window—just the size for an elder sister. Kay thought that would be her room. She saw for a moment her old iron bedstead from Blade Lake half-filling the room. Then her inward eye shut and opened again, seeing Aren in this good place.

  “Only thing is,” Francis said, as they descended again to the street, “it won’t be easy on Thea if he is discharged.” Because that would mean the hospital had given up, had decided he could no longer be treated.

  And would they be allowed to keep Pilot in the apartment? She would walk him herself, every day, three times a day—and Aren was supposed to have lots of outdoor exercise. One of the doctors advocated eight hours a day outside! Francis had suggested that such a regime might be easier to manage back in Yarmouth than here in the city, but Thea had not answered him at all.

  They were walking down a street lined with trees. Kay bent to pick up a pale gold leaf opening out in a fan shape. “Look!” she said. “It is a ginkgo tree—like the one in Yuyuan Garden in Shanghai!” The tree there was three hundred years old. These trees looked spindly and young, but the beautiful shape of the leaf was there, halfway around the world. Kay did not know why a leaf should make her feel less miserable. She would send it to Aren.

  Francis glanced at it but kept walking, preoccupied with thinking, assessing, making arrangements in his mind for cargo and contracts and what would have to be done. Kay walked on beside him, taller than she had been last year, so that it was no effort to keep up with him. She put an arm through his navy-blue wool sleeve anyhow.

  At the corner there was a fruit and flower shop. Francis put a hand out to some white narcissus, slender, fragrant things—and then, abruptly, picked up the top one of a pyramid of coconuts, old, brown, hairy things, not at all like the young green ones at home. At Aren’s home, she corrected herself.

  “We’ll take him one of these,” Francis said.

  Thea had never sat beside a child at Blade Lake with such fierce concentration. That, she saw now, was her true fault. She had existed in different relation to those children: their caregiver, their guardian, but not their—family. She did not for a moment call herself Aren’s mother; the word did not even spring to mind. But she was his family now.

  Those children had had mothers of their own. Mothers who came to the school too late, to ask where were their children. It was very hard that she must live through this again, must see what she had done and what (being younger, unprepared, untrained, selfish) she had left undone. Again she told herself what the doctor had said in Corcovado: six months to cure, patience, do everything you are doing, this is all that can be done.

  Nurse Burgess came down the ward and stopped.

  “Mrs. Grant,” she said, a genteel, tittering canary. “I’m afraid we are going to have to discharge this little fellow on Monday, according to Dr. Shively’s advice.”

  Aren was sleeping. Thea stood up slowly.

  Burgess continued, “We’ll have to go over some indications, of course, and there will be papers. It’s a terrible shame, poor little monkey!”

  Thea turned on her, very angry. “Do not speak of him in that degrading way again.”

  “Oh! I meant no harm, I’m sure!” Pink squares flashed hot on the bunchy cheeks. “I’m sure, he is quite civilized!”

  There was no point in saying more. Thea turned away and knelt beside Aren, putting her face down into the blanket over his chest, the good red blanket that they had bought in Corcovado. She would pray again, pray better. Perhaps that would help.

  She bent her mind to the humblest prayer she could remember. “We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy—”

  Where she was pressed against the bedstead, Thea felt a small interior motion. A ribbed movement, a finger raking along damp tiles, a fish turning in the riverbed.

  It did not take her an instant to understand—it was as if she had told herself already but had failed to read the note in her own hand. She looked back over the last several months and realized that she had not even thought, had not for a moment—

  Oh no, no, she thought, pressing again more deeply into the bed, her cheek on Aren’s arm. Do not do this—dear God, I beg you, I’m sorry, please do not take this child away so that I may have one of my own.

  There was no punishment she did not deserve, but she could not bear that. She knew—she told herself again—that God in His great mercy did not operate by vengefully tallying, but she could not trust that now.

  Aren’s hand touched her hair. “Are you weeping?” he asked.

  “Oh, I am only tired,” she said. “Just a little.”

  “We will go from this old place,” he said.

  She nodded. His eyes were half-closed, but they had sense in them. He held the little yellow ginkgo leaf in his fingers, not quite dried out, that Kay had put in her letter.

  “Kay says the airy place is good,” he said.

  After a minute she said, “Shall we go there, to the apartment?”
r />   He answered, “Yes.”

  In the afternoon-shadowed room with windows wide open to the street below, Aren lay resting on the low camp bed. Pilot yawned and leaned slowly against the shape under the blankets, exhausted from his walk.

  “I am very brave,” Aren said.

  Kay nodded. “I know that you are.” She sat against the foot-board, feet tucked up.

  “It is a thing that I have . . .”

  “A quality,” she said.

  “A quality that was given to me. But now I am aferrad.”

  “Afraid.” It was hard to stop correcting.

  “Yes.”

  Yes. The high room was as quiet as birds flying above the mast, not speaking, no wind carrying their cries.

  “I am afraid too,” she said. Then she wished she had not, but Aren smiled at her, skin stretched over small bones.

  “That is good company!”

  He curled himself into the crescent of her knees as Pilot had curled into his, and they waited for Francis, or for Thea, or for the next thing to come along.

  PART TWO

  YARMOUTH, 1922

  Do good to people while they are alive.

  When each man dies he is dust and shadows.

  What is nothing changes nothing.

  EURIPIDES, FRAGMENTS

  1

  Yarmouth

  Some nights Kay dreamed she was still on the Morning Light—in the tilting corridor, mahogany doors shut tight in a long row, searching for Aren or Mr. Brimner. Standing in the shifting, swaying darkness, wondering which door to open. If she could see up the companionway to the small lamp burning to light the stairs, she could go back to sleep. But often she was all in darkness, uncertain which way was fore or aft, adrift below decks, trying door after door.

  She dreamed it again, coming back from Olive Wetmore’s wedding in Bar Harbor. In her thrumming bunk on the Prince Arthur, a wide-bellied steamer that pitched slightly, stiffly, on the late spring tide, she woke in the dark to the smell of old vomit on old metal. Not right.

  Still night. She lay with eyes open, nothing to see but the dim glow of the porthole. Teak, spice, wet canvas: that’s what she wanted. Nothing was right. The hard metal edge of her bunk had pressed her arm to sleep. It tingled into life again.

  Francis had the next cabin—you couldn’t call them cabins, just boltholes in steel. She heard no snoring. Perhaps he was lying awake too; sad to be a sailor home from the sea, ferried in a tub like this.

  She lay for a long time trying to return to the dreaming world, which so often seemed more real than this world. Even when they were bad dreams, she often wanted to stay there, in the place she felt at home in, more than anywhere else. Where did that world go when she woke?

  The next time she opened her eyes, it was lighter. Sitting up, she looked out the round, yellowish porthole, in case they’d entered the narrows already. Not yet. Grey seas, grey skies, grey paint cracked around the porthole’s edge. Morning, anyhow.

  The snack bar would be open. She brushed her teeth at the little steel sink with the nice red toothbrush she had got in Boston. Then she quickly dressed, tidied and locked her case, and went to look for a cup of tea.

  She was standing mist-damp at the rail in the fish smell, in the gull scream, when they docked with a clanking clunk that shook the whole ship into shudders. The Halifax train was waiting, and most of the Prince Arthur passengers streamed onto it.

  Shouting a farewell up to Cocker, the first mate, who had been bosun on the Morning Light, Francis took his suitcase and shouldered Kay’s golf bag with his own. She had only her small dressing case otherwise, and could manage that herself. They bulled through the crowd, and found that the pony trap had not come.

  Crossing the tracks, they trudged up the wharf to the cotton mill office, where Francis got onto the telephone. After shouting quietly into it for some time, he said the cart would be out directly; Thea had mistaken the day. He looked very tired, and Kay did not ask anything more, but set her case on a rickety chair by the window looking down onto the factory floor.

  The noise was ferocious. Looms racketing back and forth, belts and levers shaking as they were pulled and shoved, girls in white smocks standing at the ready to grab for discard. Seven in the morning and all those girls looked worn out, more tired than Francis. Boys too, of course, and men—inspecting spindles, checking the warp. Roland Spinney from her high school class was assistant floor manager now; there he went, long and dark, running down the aisle beneath the flying strands of thread. Clouds of feathery dust choked in Kay’s throat; she did not know how Francis had stood it, when he was managing the mill last year. She went to join him at the open back door where he stood in foggy sun, talking to Abel Muise, the mill foreman, who had also sailed on the Morning Light. Back in their real life.

  Then the trap came and they climbed up and Jerry Melanson clicked to old Blackie, who strained his poor thin spine and jigged along, not home to Elm Street, but out toward Lake Milo. The grass verges were green and springing, dirt bright and damp with the night’s rain. A pleasant place in springtime, everybody always said.

  Finding no one she could bear to talk to in the house, Kay went to the woods. Spring-dressed branches parted to let her through with the sharp-rotted nose of wood that never dries, fresh shoots, clear brown water, crushed moss—dead leaves revealed from snow, waiting to fall into leafmeal in the usual pattern of seasons.

  Kay walked along the worn paths wanting the not-difference, the seasonless Pacific cycle of never-ending growth, dry sand, wood that crumbles in hot salt air, the transparency of water. Eleuthera, Tonga, Fiji—even Singapore or Manila, though she’d wilted in that unchanging weight of heat.

  Funny to see Cocker on the Prince Arthur, grey-headed but sturdy, doing well for himself. What ship was Liu Jiacheng on now, reading his ancient book, smoke from his thin pipe rising thinner? He could not have died, he was catgut, indestructible. Or Seaton—but Seaton must be dead by now, he had teetered on the brink even then. From her present great age, twenty-two, she wondered if he might have been only forty or so, back then.

  She must answer Mr. Brimner’s last letter, four months old already when it arrived in April. She had it in her coat pocket, meaning to answer it from Bar Harbor. His two years of mission had stretched into ten, his friend Prior’s manuscript was still not sent to the publisher—she imagined drafts accumulating, curling poems pinned to the wood round the door of his bure to weather until he might be satisfied that he had read the true intent of his dead friend; a careful file of black-bordered letters from Prior’s mother, agreeing or disagreeing with an editorial note, open on the desk; and Mr. Brimner busy at his ink pot, teasing out the golden thread from all those drafts.

  Or else he had lost impetus, lost his compass bearing. But he was not as feeble-spirited as she was. And he had real work to do, which she lacked. Some peace could be found in a long walk alone round the golf course, moving there with an easy rhythm she could never find on a dance floor. No satisfaction at all in company, in the society of one’s peers.

  She had no peers here, if peers meant people who knew the things she knew. Only Aren knew those things. And things she did not know, too. Kay put out her hand to touch a young birch’s paper-flimsy bark, the thickness of a white petal, already beginning to peel. She peeled more, slowly, slowly, to make a page to write to Mr. Brimner on. Destroying it as if it was her stupid discontent. She wished she could talk to Aren. She could go and visit him in Halifax, she supposed. If he would talk to her.

  Coming back along the creek to the old orchard, still frilled and scented with late blossom, she heard a quiet call: “Too-wheee!”

  There was Roddy, up in the king apple tree, hidden except for his boots. The oldest tree: their refuge and their hiding place, whenever she and Aren were sent to stay at Lake Milo. She knew the branches like a spiral staircase at the trunk, and the wind-ruffled swaying of the crow’s-nest branches at the top. In the last slow weeks of summer you could read up
there all day, reaching for an apple when you were hungry.

  Roddy’s narrow elf-face moved through the new leaves, behind a tattered haze of cloud-pink petals. “There you are!” he called.

  “Here I am,” Kay answered, cheerful as she could be. “We thought you’d gone with Thea.”

  “I ran away when she said we must go visiting. I did not want to go when you were coming home.” Roddy stopped on a branch to cough—he needed his belladonna drops. “Did Cousin Olive get married off?” he asked, wheezing.

  “She did. She is Mrs. Braydon Dawlish now.”

  “She was pretty old, to be married.”

  Kay remembered Olive saying that about Thea marrying Francis: quite an old spinster to be new-married, and how sad that she wasted her youth raising Kay. “Not so very old, really.” Not that she had any desire to defend Olive. “Your mama did not marry till she was twenty-nine, and Olive was only thirty-two.”

  “She was lucky anyone wanted to marry her.”

  Kay laughed, but could not disagree. “He is a little older, I think, but Dawlish seems to like her pretty well. Francis says she deserves some happiness after dealing with her mother for so long.”

  “Did you win the hotel tournament?”

  “I did. A nice silver cup. They said it’s worth fifty American dollars. I’d rather have the cash, but nobody offered to buy it.”

  “If they had given you the money, though, you could not be an amateur champion,” he said. “You are good enough to be.”

  She laughed. “I’m not. Alexa Stirling was there, she won the ladies’ amateur cup last year, you know. She said if I went touring, we should chum around. But it was just for fun, or for advertising, because Dawlish owns the golf course.”