His name was Steve. Steve Stevens. And he was a scout, sent ahead. Alone.
She moved him through the sand, up over the boulders and hills that were the arms and legs of the bear.
John Keane, leaning over his knees, watched the children carefully, seeing that they behaved and then, reassured, allowed himself to lie back on the blanket. The sky was blue. They were nicely out of the wind. He placed his fingertips on his wife’s back, just lightly. The football had reminded him that he was not (he would have said) entirely pleased with the behavior of his two sons. It upset some notion he had of order, of rightness, that Jacob, the older, was the smaller of the two, the lesser athlete, the lesser student. It made something unkind, even cruel, about Michael’s efforts to outdo him. Michael’s triumphs over his older brother—and the self-satisfaction they brought him—came too easily. Jacob’s defeats seemed too indicative of a certain kind of future.
He kept his fingers on his wife’s back and placed his forearm over his eyes. The wind was just above them. It seemed to skim the tops of the surrounding dunes, bending the grass. But here the sun on his knees and on his forearm felt warm.
His love for his children bore down on his heart with the weight of three heavy stones. There were all his unnamed fears for them, and hopes for them. There was all he was powerless to change, including who they were—one too mild, one too easily tempted to be cruel, and the little girl (it was the weight of a heavy stone against his heart) a mystery to him, impossible to say what she, through her life, would need. And soon one more.
He hoped the fourth would be another boy—although he would never say so to his wife. What he had in mind most especially was a daughter’s wedding day and the pall an absent father casts on the scene, that sad tincture of mortality that mixes with the bright day when the bride appears at the door of the church on the arm of an uncle (as his own niece had done) or an older brother—it would be Jacob, of course.
No equal ghost appears at the ceremony, as far as he can recall, when it is the groom’s father who is missing.
Enough reason, he thought, for a man his age to wish for another boy. But it would be another stone, nonetheless.
He could hear the two of them now, softly crying orders to their men, even as they interrupted themselves to provide machine-gun fire and exploding hand grenades, the sound of the ocean and the wind and the occasional cry of gulls lending a certain authenticity to the scene with their steady indifference.
Then his wife’s voice, startingly close and yet oddly distant, specked with disks of black and gray as well as gold. “Pick him up and put him on the blanket,” she said to their daughter. “He’s full of sand.”
And then she stirred, moving beneath the lightly placed fingertips of her husband’s hand. The baby moving as well, roiling like a wave under her skin, pressing an elbow into her ribs, a heel against her hip.
“Thank you,” she said to her daughter and took the forgotten bear and shook it and brushed the sand from its worn fur and then set it carefully beside her, against her hip as if to offer it comfort, as if it were itself some spurned youngest child. The baby turned again even as Mary Keane glimpsed the drama of Steve Stevens (he had gone down on his belly behind a stalk of grass as Adolf Hitler drove by) on her daughter’s small face.
“Is anyone hungry yet?” she asked, and only Annie, who was never hungry yet, said No without raising her eyes. The boys, who had heard her, she knew they had heard her, ignored the question. Michael was crawling up the side of the dune, his plastic machine gun raised. Jacob—how like him—was watching his brother’s progress warily, his arms encircling his small platoon of green men, protecting them from the sliding sand. They both had heard her.
She looked over her shoulder at her husband. His forearm was thrown across his eyes, his mouth was slightly open. His fingertips, lightly, were on her back.
She leaned down to the bear, or leaned as much as the hump and heft of her belly would allow. “Are you hungry?” she asked it. Her daughter, compelled as equally by whimsy as by drama, suddenly straightened up and turned to her mother. “He’s not answering, either,” Mary Keane told her daughter, and they both smiled.
“I guess no one’s hungry,” Annie said gently, and here the mother glimpsed some future commiseration between them, some future understanding they would certainly share of what passed between women while the men in the world were distracted, unheeding, unconscious.
She shifted again, leaning her weight onto one thigh and then the other as the baby offered its own counterbalance. She moved her hands inside her coat and grasped her belly, the way she might hold a child’s face between her hands to silence tears, or to ask, What is it, what’s wrong?
She stroked her sides, the loose knit of the cotton sweater she had confiscated from her husband’s closet ten years ago, when she was pregnant with Michael and could bear only cotton or silk against her skin. She felt the baby ripple under her fingers. She felt a heel—surely it was a heel here on her left side—press against her skin and then dart away, going under, before she could quite gauge its shape.
It was possible it had something to do with the ocean, all this activity. Something to do with the salt scent of it on the air and on the wind. The tug of some ancient memory—didn’t they say life began in the sea—or maybe some dawning hope that the what-do-you-call-it, the fluid the baby now floated in (which someone had told her was also precisely as salty as the ocean), was a tributary, not merely a pool.
She ran her palms over her taut belly, soothing the poor thing, even as a swift kick under her ribs nearly took her breath away. Or maybe, she thought, it was the hurricane down south, agitating water everywhere—in oceans and bays, dog bowls and cisterns, in the bellies of pregnant women all up and down the coast.
Mary Keane smiled and looked around because the thought amused her, although she knew that in another minute she would not be able to retrace it clearly enough to retell.
Michael had slipped beyond the crest of the dune. Jacob was lying flat out now, on his stomach, his little men all before him, and Annie had followed her single soldier up the dune to a grassy patch where the wind whipped her dark hair and the blowing sand made her squint, even as her lips kept moving—now a conversation between her little army man and a headless creature formed by the two fingers of her right hand. But Michael was out of sight.
She waited. Were it not for the ballast of her big belly, she would casually stand, stretch a bit, casually stretch her neck until she got a glimpse of him. Casually because her husband said she worried too much, fretted too much, and would eventually infect their boys with her fearfulness—had, perhaps, already, in Jacob’s case, infected them with her fearfulness. So she waited, trusting, but feeling, too, the pins-and-needles prick of blown sand on her cheek and her forearm (was the wind changing?) until, sure enough, there was the top of his head, the tip of his plastic machine gun, just over the next dune.
She resisted calling to him, telling him to come closer. Her husband was asleep beside her. She could hear the way he pursed his lips with each breath, something like the soft sound of the football against their palms (although it was softer still), something like the thud of the ocean as it punctuated the rise and fall of the wind. He deserved the rest, poor man. They were alone on the beach. They were perfectly safe.
Michael’s head crested the dune again. Then his shoulders, the rump of his blue jeans, the short barrel of his machine gun. He was crawling on his belly along the top of the dune, crushing the sea grass, filling his shirt and the pockets of his pants with sand. She would have to remember to shake him out before he got into the car.
Down the path through the dunes she could see the pale expanse of beach and then the place where it gave way to sky. She leaned forward a little, toward it, resting the bulk of the baby on the edge of her thighs. It was possible that the sky was darker, out there, to the east. It was possible that they would catch some part of the southern storm. She had an image of her unborn
child, its head up under her heart, its ear pressed to the wall of her flesh, treading water with the flutter of its small legs, listening. It would hear the echo of the waves, the whistle of the wind, the rise and fall of its father’s breath as his lips opened and touched closed.
Mary Keane was more than certain (she would have said) that this was her last pregnancy. These the last weeks she would live with the toss and tumble of a child in her belly, with the unseen future a real presence inside her; the unseen future actual flesh and blood inside her, not, as it was for the rest of the population and would be for her again once this child was born, merely imagination or hope or plan—the man Jacob would become, and Michael, the woman (commiserating with her mother while the men were turned away) who would be Annie. What was moving under her hands, pressing and turning under the taut skin, was the future itself, already formed, pressing an ear to the wall of her flesh.
With a cry, Michael leaped down the dune above his brother, charged, fell, rolled, collided with Jacob’s back and Jacob’s carefully arranged soldiers, kicking up sand. He leaped up again and with his machine gun drawn mowed down sister—who was already crying, her fists to her eyes—brother, green army men, mother, father, and then whatever other advancing hordes came at him from the sea.
John Keane was off the blanket in an instant, crying, “Michael!” Jacob was stretched out on the sand, his legs straight before him, crying plaintively, “Michael!” Annie was heading toward her mother, wailing, her fists—one of them still clutching Steve Stevens—to her eyes. There was sand across her nose and in her hair. John Keane took Michael by the arm and shook him. The boy looked up at his father as if he were an utter stranger, materialized out of the salt air. Mary untied her scarf and, pulling her daughter’s fists from her eyes, gently brushed it over her face. Jacob, resignedly, perhaps, was lifting his flattened men, smoothing an area of sand to his left, setting them upright again.
“What is wrong with you?” their father was saying. “Why can’t you behave?”
Michael—it was not fear on his face, only a kind of disbelief, as if this tall, red-faced, shouting man had materialized out of the wind—looked up to say, “Just playing. I was just playing.” But his father shook his arm with the litany of his transgressions: “Hurt your brother, hurt your sister, ruined the day.” He finally tossed aside the boy’s arm as if it were something to be thrown away. “Why don’t you use your head?” he asked him. “Why can’t you behave?” And felt the pain of his own anger, in his chest, in his shoulder. He moved his hand to his neck, moved his shoulder. It was the arm he’d used to throw the football. He looked to his wife. Annie was now collapsed on the blanket beside her, pressed into her side because she could not sit on her lap, the bright scarf, now spotted with her tears, wrapped in her fingers. Mary Keane was fumbling in the pocket of her car coat for a tissue. She found one, held it to the girl’s nose. Leaned a little to say something into her ear. The girl nodded. Mary reached for the stuffed bear that still leaned against her hip, lifted it, and placed it in her daughter’s arms.
AS SUDDENLY AS THE PEACE of the morning had turned to bedlam, peace returned. John Keane looked around, his hand on his neck, his love for these children three heavy stones against his thumping heart. Jacob was once more bent over his men. Michael, his machine gun hung over his back, was sitting Indian-style just a few feet away, pulling apart a stalk of sea grass, watching the ocean, not crying, his father was relieved to see, but, he suspected, not chastened either. He rubbed his neck. Swung his arm out, shaking it a little. It was the arm he had given to Catherine, his niece, his brother Frank’s only child, at the door of the church on the day she was married. “Maybe we should eat,” he said. And then, raising his voice only enough to be heard over the wind, “Boys. Come over and eat.”
But the wind had indeed changed and as the five of them gathered on the blanket they could feel it prick their faces and their arms. Mary Keane, with Annie still leaning heavily against her and the baby like an iron beach ball in her lap, leaned toward the quilted hamper, unzipped it, and then paused, a single wax-paper-wrapped sandwich in her hand. “Our food will be full of sand,” she said, “with this wind.” And her husband said, “Well, they are sandwiches,” and winked at Michael, who seemed suddenly to recognize his father again.
“Maybe,” Mary said, “we’d better eat in the car.”
Slowly everything was gathered and they made their way out to the beach once more and then over the path that returned them to the parking lot. They placed the blankets and the pillow and the toys into the trunk, depositing as they did a residue of sand that would be there throughout the winter. Standing above the knot the three of them had formed before the open back door of the car—a debate about who would go first and who would get the middle—their mother said, her hand on her belly, “Just get in,” and they did, sliding across the soft fabric of the backseat. Annie was in the middle because Michael moved so quickly and Jacob had put a definite pair of fingers to her shoulder to make her follow him.
Mary Keane eased herself into the front seat. The size of her belly made her legs feel short, as though they could barely reach the floor under the dashboard. Her husband closed the door on her, gently, with both hands, as if he were covering her with a blanket. He crossed in front of the car, his hair on end and the pale scalp at the back of his head exposed. He now looked every bit his age, she thought. As he grew older, it seemed to her that she was not losing sight of his younger self but coming to recognize instead another man altogether, one she was just beginning to find familiar. He opened the door, slid the quilted hamper onto the seat between them, and then got in behind the wheel. He pulled the door closed and the wind became just the slightest rush of air against the rolled-up windows. There was suddenly a pleasant warmth. Their voices, suddenly, seemed rich and sure now that they could speak quietly, now that their words were no longer scattered by the buffeting wind.
Mary, one knee bent up onto the seat—her legs seemed only inches long, her feet in their small loafers appeared no larger than her daughter’s—handed sandwiches into the backseat while her husband poured lemonade from a glass jar into small paper cups. “Careful now,” he said each time he slowly moved the cup over the back of his seat, bending his arm like a crane, awkwardly, because it was the same arm he had used to throw the football and it still seemed to echo with the strain. “Ladies first,” he said and felt his daughter take the cup from him with both hands. “Careful now.” There was coffee in the plaid thermos and, when he had screwed the lid onto the glass jar and placed it back into the quilted hamper, he poured some for his wife and some for himself. She had packed two china teacups, wrapped in paper towels. She would not drink from anything else. He exchanged a cup for one of the sandwiches. The whole thing was a balancing act: cup and sandwich, napkin and wax paper—careful now—the three children in the back (the fourth would have to be up here, in the front seat between them, the hamper on his wife’s lap, or at her feet), his wife and her belly perched beside him, the wind shut out and their voices suddenly gentle and clear. A sweetened cup of coffee, a ham-and-cheese—the bread a little dry but the meat thick and tender. The wind shut out. It was a balancing act, to hold off quarrel and worry, the coming years, the coming months, even tomorrow morning for just whatever time it took to finish a sandwich, to drink the coffee while it was still hot. Careful now.
All around them, the parking lot was deserted, only a scrim of sand moving across the bleached asphalt. Mary Keane stretched her legs and touched her side. “This baby is doing somersaults,” she said and Jacob laughed softly, imagining it. Beside him, his sister put the crust of her sandwich to the line of brown thread that was the bear’s mouth. Beside her, Michael looked through the rolled-up window, across the long and empty parking lot to the dark green pines that seemed to be raising their arms to the wind, shaking spindly fists. His own hands were full, sandwich and paper cup, but the small ivory knob on the silver handle was a temptation. Just a few tur
ns and he could fill the car with the sound of the rushing wind. The hair was mussed across the back of his father’s head, the familiar gleam of his white scalp peering through. His father leaned forward to put the china teacup on the dashboard and then, leaning back, placed his hand over his shoulder, kneading the material of his shirt, raising the shoulder toward his neck, like a pitcher on the mound. “Are you all right?” their mother asked, all their voices grown soft and gentle now that they were out of the wind.
“An ache is all,” their father said.
The wind seemed to come up from under the car, it pressed against the window, muffled, shut out, although they all still felt the sting of it on their cheeks. Michael placed the paper cup, almost empty, between the knees of his jeans and moved his fingers to the ivory knob. His hands were pale, the fingers plump and squared-off, the nails flat and broad, just like his father’s.
He tested the give of the handle with his fingertips. He imagined paper napkins and paper cups, wax paper, cheese, wafers of white bread lifted by the wind, swirled about the car.
Their father took his hand from his shoulder. The wind rattled the windows, careful now.
“Listen to that,” their mother said. “It’s really picking up.”
Above the pines, the sky had turned a deeper blue. In another minute, there would be rain.
“We just might feel the brunt of this hurricane after all,” their father said.
Mary Keane saw how the news made Michael pause, and then change his mind about rolling down the window. He lifted the paper cup from between his knees, took a drink of it. Annie said, “Really?” but it was Jacob who said, “Maybe we should go home,” a crimp of fear in his voice. Her fault. She saw her husband flex his jaw. He did not love his oldest child as he should. There was gray at his temples and a roughened thickness at his throat. His face was not the face of the man she had married, but resembled, instead, some of the men she had worked for when she was single, or a doctor who had cared for her own father in his last days. Closer now, in appearance, to any number of fifty-year-old men she had known than he was to the young stranger he had once been.
After This Page 4