Come Sunday: A Novel

by Isla Morley

  “See? This is what I am talking about,” Cicely interrupts, looking at me.

  “No, wait a minute, let me finish—my wife thinks I am morose, but I propose a more noble quest. Not for happiness but for identity. Strip away all that fetters it, all the bells and whistles, till there is only self.”

  “Till there is only a selfish, miserable old goat!” flashes Cicely. She pours another glass of wine for herself.

  “That, my dear, will be a matter of opinion, of which the pure identity will have no need.”

  It might as well be a tableful of tomcats for all the bristling. In an effort to inject levity, Greg says, “Sounds to me as though you are talking about a midlife crisis.”

  Rhiaan snorts his pleasure. “Ah, if it were only that simple. Then we could purchase our sports cars, have our fandangos with minors, and be done with it.”

  At which point Cicely leaves the table and heads for the kitchen.

  “What about you?” Greg asks, turning to me. “You are very quiet.”

  What I want to do is recite Rhiaan’s poem. “What’s there to give up when all I ever wanted has been taken from me?”

  The banter ceases and for the moment we all become occupied with the task of heaping tidy piles of food onto our forks, till Cicely returns. “Homemade apple pie,” she announces. “Who’s for à la mode?”

  When dinner is over and the dishes are soaking, Cicely asks me to join her for a dip in the hot tub. The air is frosty, the sky punctured with stars, and the water a scalding welcome. It is one of the things I love about this place—the absence of human-generated sound. Although there are homes tucked among the pine trees all along the lake and up into the foothills, you don’t hear much. In summertime, they even insist the boats creep out of the keys. In winter, when the boats and vacationers are hibernating, nothing but nature has a say.

  Cicely talks about the quilting guild of which she is not only a member but the president, mentions that their prayer quilts are being sold online to raise money for the AIDS orphans in South Africa. She talks of accompanying Rhiaan on his trip—if he goes—and volunteering at one of the orphanages for a month or so. “The babies need someone to rock them,” she said. “Goodness knows I can rock a child.”

  “You could do just about anything you put your mind to,” says Greg, walking out to kiss us each good-night. After he has left, and while I am still choosing something to say, Cicely turns to me and says, “He’s a wonderful man, Abbe; if I were you, I wouldn’t let him go.” She gets out, wraps herself in her gown, and darts back into the house.

  I switch off the jets and close my eyes to the quiet. After a while there are discernible sounds: the lap-lap of the tub’s water, the occasional rustling of trees, and then suddenly a hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo. On the roof of the shed alights a screech owl, its gray plumage a perfect camouflage. It is still there when Rhiaan opens the sliding glass door and steps out onto the veranda.

  “See the owl?” I point out to him.

  “Ah yes, she’s a regular visitor.”

  “Granny told me a story once about an owl. This beautiful woman called Blodeuwedd who had been made out of flowers to marry a man who didn’t have a wife.”

  “Ja. And then she fell in love with another man and killed her husband, and for her punishment the gods turned her into an owl . . . She told me that one too.”

  “I always felt sorry for Blodeuwedd. I always pictured her husband being someone like Dad, impossible to live with, which is why no earthly woman would marry him. No wonder she fell for someone else.”

  Rhiaan nods.

  “What I haven’t been able to work out,” I continue, “is whether things would have turned out differently had she not gone down that path.” Had I not gone down that path.

  “You mean, whether she was to blame?”

  “Yes.”

  My brother prefaces his axioms, as he always does, by lighting his pipe. Only when there is a steady glow in the tobacco nest does he say, gently, “Blame is another excellent thing to give up for Lent.”

  GREG AND CICELY leave only after I convince them I would much rather look at the snow than go out and play in it. The advanced slopes, then, will be their choice today, and Greg can’t hide how pleased he is at the idea. Rhiaan is working in his studio, so I settle on the chaise lounge with Mr. Pope.

  It is the sound of chopping that diverts my attention. I head outside and around the side of the house, following the noise to where Rhiaan is splitting firewood.

  “I thought you were working,” I say.

  He smiles. “I am. I do my best work with an ax; ask my editor.” He stands a log on its end, lifts the ax, and swings it till the blade finds its soft center. Thwack. Again he reaches for the pile for another log. Thwack. I hate the sound, the sound of nursery rhymes: Jill tumbling down the hill, Humpty-Dumpty breaking to pieces; the sound as the bough breaks just before the cradle falls. It is also the sound of a kitchen table felled by a madman, the seams of the world as they are ripped asunder.

  COMING HOME FROM TENNIS PRACTICE, I watched my mother, overbloomed in her pink chenille gown, wincing at the insults my father hurled at her: liar, bitch, whore. After running out of expletives, he flung the soiled dishes she had so neatly stacked instead of washing till it seemed a flock of porcelain birds had taken flight in our kitchen. “You think you can leave me? You think you can just walk out of my house? You think you can just go and I won’t drag your skinny ass back here again? Is that what you think?”

  My mother didn’t answer him but rather turned to me and beseeched me to go to Mrs. Folliett’s house. This time she did not even bother with a reason: tartar sauce, a cup of sugar, a barrel of gasoline, a box of matches. “I’m not going, Ma,” I protested.

  “Someone’s got some fucking sense around here!” he spat.

  “Harry, please—”

  “Please? Please? You don’t ‘please’ me anything! It’s about time she knew about her mother, about what a lying little whore she is, about how she was just going to up and leave her own daughter for some prick without so much as a goodbye.”

  Looking at me again, she pleads, “I wasn’t going to leave you. I wasn’t.”

  “You going to lie to your own goddamn kid now, Louise?”

  When all the dishes had been smashed against the cupboards and the air was thick with cussing, my father thundered out the back door. I picked out the shards from my mother’s hair while her gaze fixed on the stain Mr. No-One-Friend’s unattended cigarette had left on the Formica kitchen table. The stain might as well have been a damp spot on a mussed bedsheet for all its testimony. “You weren’t going to leave me, were you, Mom?”

  Before she could answer my father was back, this time with his ax. In one deft blow—thwack—he chopped off the corner of the kitchen table and the burn mark with it.

  “Teach you a lesson,” he muttered, padded-cell crazy. “Teach you to bring another man in my house and have him pack your bags!” Wild, he swung the ax over his shoulder and above his head, his eyes scanning the room for its next mark. And I watched them come to rest on my mother at the moment she sank to her knees.

  I did scream then, as if all I was ever born to do was become a single, piercing siren.

  CICELY KISSES ME GOODBYE while Greg loads the picture and the bags in the trunk of Rhiaan’s car. In place of blinding cheeriness, Cicely shows signs of resignation. She will never leave Rhiaan, and I am glad, but I can’t say the same for myself. Greg wants to give up the past the way cocksure people give up smoking. Which seems to leave me with only two choices: either I give up the past too, or I give up Greg.

  “I never understood why Ma didn’t leave him when she had the chance,” I tell Rhiaan as I hand him the pink parka at the airport.

  “She found a way in the end, don’t you think?” he asks.

  “No,” I say, “I don’t think she did.”

  He rubs my head, shakes Greg’s hand, and watches us till we pass through the security checkpoint.
<
br />   Greg steers us to two empty seats in front of the departure lounge’s TV set. He watches the news while I think about the passion that binds my brother and his wife, a bedrock that cannot crack from the weight of humdrum, or even, I suspect, from catastrophe. It occurs to me now, in a flash, that the kind of love I once sought is the kind that is not found but rather stumbled upon when the gaze is fixed on something else. The kind of love Mr. Pope’s lovers knew all about. I retrieve from my backpack the airline’s magazine and open it to the crossword puzzle. Fourteen across: Pope’s lovers (6,7). Eloisa, Abelard.

  FOURTEEN

  The garage door is open when I drive up in the car, and Greg is stacking the cardboard boxes with his office books in the left corner even though it is raining hard outside. The new roof inspires that kind of confidence now.

  “I didn’t think you would make it home this early,” he says when I get out. “They have shut down the Pali Highway to one lane because of a huge rockslide.”

  “It wasn’t raining that hard when I left the office, but the traffic is crazy. You’d swear we were having a blizzard.”

  “Did your boss like your Tahoe travelogue?” Greg asks, changing the subject, following me inside the house.

  “Oh, I guess,” I reply. “I think she likes the advertising it generated.” Greg brings out the basket of laundry and starts folding it while I sift through the mail.

  “It’s her birthday week after next,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve been thinking . . . a remembrance service might be a nice way to commemorate it.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “And that it could be the right time, you know . . . to spread her ashes.”

  “You have a place picked out?” I ask curtly.

  “Let’s not make it like this, please, Abbe.”

  “You do, don’t you? Where?”

  He gives up. “I thought the beach by the lighthouse. The time we went shell-collecting, remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe we could recite some poems and say a prayer.”

  It is a watery grave, then. We think it is quiet under the waves, but when they roll over it sounds like the distant beating of thunder on the Highveldt when the rains herald the arrival of summer. And in between, the perpetual rustle, like cicadas in the bush.

  “You can’t go on keeping her under the bed,” he says.

  “You’re probably right.” I think of Rhiaan’s “ashy mound.” What kindness then to puff / and words shall be no more.

  I ARRIVE AT WORK bleary-eyed from lack of sleep and Buella follows me to my office with a report that the city’s sewer system has burst in several places, the one closest to us at Bishop Street and Nimitz Highway.

  “Most of the staff can’t get into work. You might say we are well and truly up shit creek now,” she scoffs.

  The TV is on in the staff lounge and the reporters are telling viewers to stay off the beaches and out of the water, now contaminated. There’s a report of two hikers missing, presumably a result of new waterfalls.

  “Speaking of shit creeks . . . ,” she says, handing me a postcard. “This is from the One Whose Name Shall Not Be Spoken.”

  On the front is a picture of New York at night, on the back Sal’s hastily scribbled note. It is addressed to “the Belle of Kahako High.” “See, it was me he was really secretly in love with!” she teases. The note says that he’s getting married again, to a chorus girl named Charlie. At the bottom, a postscript: Tell Abbe that Dionysius beats Apollo 2-to-1.

  “What the hell does that mean?” she asks.

  “It means he’s giving love another chance.”

  Buella reaches over to answer the phone, “Abbe Deighton’s desk, may I help you?”

  “For you,” she says, and waves goodbye with her postcard.

  “Hello?”

  “Elizabeth, Carolyn here. I got your work number from Jenny, I hope you don’t mind.”

  “What can I do for you?” I ask, already bristly about the chorus girl.

  “Some of the ladies at church want to have a reception after the event and I thought we should check with you first.”

  A rummage sale? The annual women’s auxiliary meeting? “What event?”

  “The remembrance service next Saturday, of course. Even though it’s not going to be at church, Lou and I thought we could have the reception at Sylvia Horton’s house, since she lives on that side of the island.”

  I can’t be sure if I reply before dropping the phone down on its cradle. Picturing Carolyn standing on the rocks, flagging the group of well-wishers into a neat pattern of assembly for a good look at my girl’s ashes, is almost too much to bear. I dial Greg’s office, but Betty says he has gone over to Petal’s place to talk about the baptism. The number she gives me rings until I hang up on Kelsey Oliver’s answering machine. Jenny comes to the phone after I insist the school secretary page her.

  “Did you know about this?” I demand.

  She doesn’t answer for a beat. “Didn’t Greg speak to you about it?”

  “He mentioned a service but not a tea party for Carolyn and company!”

  Jenny’s apology rolls into an explanation and then a hasty defense. Nobody, she says, really planned it this way—it just sort of took on a life of its own. It is probably going to be only thirty or so people, even less if the damp gets the better of everyone’s arthritis.

  “I should be so bloody lucky,” I snap.

  “I will gladly call them all and tell them it is going to be a private ceremony,” she says. “Nobody will hold it against you.”

  “It’s just that I—I don’t know, Jen—it’s not a spectator sport, that’s all.”

  “You’re right. How about a compromise: whoever you want goes to the beach, and the rest joins in at the reception.” She thinks she has mediated a settlement, but the only thing to feel well and truly settled is Sal’s marital status. It’s unmistakable—his giddiness—even if it weren’t confirmed by the postscript. Sal has chosen the dance of Dionysius, and he’s going to take his chances.

  I SPEND THE WEEKEND keeping track of the reports about the weather, the contaminated water in Honolulu Harbor, the roads pockmarked with potholes, the flooded houses on the Ewa Plains. Everyone wants the rains to go. Everyone except me. But go they do. Today, five days before the service, the skies are clear and a rainbow straddles every valley from Pearl City to Hawaii Kai. Blooming a month early, the shower trees decorate our street, and Ronnie is out on the ladder again, clearing out the eaves. I call Buella and tell her that I won’t be coming into the office, that I will be working at home today.

  The keyboard sits quiet and the computer screen blank. The words are not coming today, only thoughts of birthday parties in the park, mothers who are happy with the forecast, calling friends: “We’re on for Saturday.” Wedding coordinators, glad not to have to face “Plan B,” will give the brides thumbs-up for beach thongs. And the nurse aides at Belmont Village will wheel out the comatose along Kuhio Boulevard for a whiff of fresh air. Cooped up, my grandmother used to tell me. “You’ve been cooped up too long.” And she would shoo me out of the house and into the garden, where I didn’t have a clue what to do. Which gets me to thinking about children in boxes, in coops.

  I rush upstairs and reach under the bed for the treasure that used to be my child. It is only when I feel the rucksack beside the box that the idea comes, quick as a beetle from under a rock. Pulling them both out from under the bed, I mentally check off the plan’s bullet points. The box, wrapped in my favorite old T-shirt, and the water bottle fit together snugly in the backpack. I throw in a snack bar, and before my head clears and the edge dulls against acrimonious voices shaming my plan, I run out of the house. Mrs. Chung calls out a greeting and I wave hastily, and instead of turning right to go down the hill to town, I make a left.

  There is nothing to mark the head of the south Nuuanu Trail, set behind the water tower, so if anyone hikes it it is bound to be a
local or someone who has stumbled upon the Division of Forestry and Wildlife’s outdated brochure. Several years have passed since we last hiked the trail, and even then not all the way to the ridge crest but to the halfway point, where the lookout under the monkeypod tree gets you a view of the city in one direction and the Ko’olaus in the other.

  The trail is muddy in many places, with puddles of water in the dips of the path, and earthworms, half drowned from their waterlogged burrows, litter the way. A gaggle of Hawaiian nene is startled by my intrusion and quickly crosses the path and disappears into the bush. The morning is limp with humidity by the time I reach the lookout, but it seems too soon to stop. And too late to stop. Turn back, says a voice, and for a moment Greg’s sad face flares up, and I almost do. But then there is Carolyn’s face—or is it the Lord’s face? I can’t seem to tell them apart, so I press on.

  There are parts where the trail is completely lost, covered with rocks and deadwood, and it is purely by accident that I find it again. Mosquitoes flicker about and the forest is tangy with the smell of mold. After climbing over a boulder that has come to rest against the trunk of a koka tree, I see that the path heads suddenly and steeply downward. Giant ferns with curlicued fronds elbow for room next to plants with bathtub-sized leaves. Spiraling around each tree trunk are pothos vines, and mossy monkey tails hang from the branches. The trail widens as it flattens out, and what I thought was freeway noise becomes the unmistakable sound of rushing water. I follow it past a patch of bamboo and over the hollowed trunk to where it has tumbled from a ledge two hundred feet above the rocky pool. The mist catches the sun so that it streaks down in rays as if from a children’s picture book. The spray is so luminous and light that if you had never seen snow, you might believe this was it.