“Dock his wage,” suggested Pádraig, with a shade of malice.
Martha put her back to the wall and tucked her skirt neatly around her legs. “I forbid you all to bother me further about this,” she said.
“Oops,” said Elen, and they all relapsed into silence.
The walls of the motel room were white, brightened by the light of sky, sea, and pavement. Occupied as it was by slumped figures and dull faces, it might have been a dentist’s waiting room. Marty Frisch-Macnamara hopped over and pulled the Levolor blind awry to look out at the beach and the Santa Cruz pier. The others, deprived of their wrangle, hadn’t as much energy. They looked at each other.
“I’m sorry,” said Pádraig, speaking to Elen. “To be at hitting people in front of you. I’m not a brute.”
Her small dark face went round through astonishment. “A brute? You, Pat? Perish forfend!”
Pádraig shifted uncomfortably, because he wasn’t quite sure what she had said. His blue jeans gapped a bit at the waist, for Pádraig Ó Súilleabháin had lost weight on this tour.
Martha, leaning against the headboard of the other bed, slapped both hands on her knees. “Eight weeks,” she repeated. “This tour has lasted for eight weeks and taken in nineteen American states plus B.C. I think no one is responsible for anything he or she has said or done in a long while. Except me, for making you all go through this.”
Mayland Long turned toward her. Such was the peculiarity of his attenuated frame that it seemed not only his head and neck that twisted about, but his whole torso. Sunlight glowed against his suit of raw silk and made his pale eyes almost yellow, but the brightness could not touch the skin of his face and hands.
“Are you regretting it, Martha?” The question was wondering, and Long folded his hands together (the fingers extending past the opposite wrists), waiting for her reply.
Martha frowned, eyes unfocused. A moment later she snorted in most unladylike manner. “Regretting it? I am not. Not a bit of it. I knew there would be moments—that there would be sparks—with a group of musicians as able and as different as we are. People don’t do good work if they don’t care about things—sometimes the silliest things—and there’s no musician like a traditional musician for having untraditional opinions. What counts is the music we’ve made.”
She rose from the bed. Her wraparound skirt with tiny sailboats on it was not straight. There was a flat spot at the side of her head where her newly bobbed and waved hair had touched the headboard. But her blue eyes caught the window light like circles of sky and everyone in the room listened when she spoke, even Marty, her granddaughter.
“And I got what I wanted there, all right. We’ve made our little bit of magic. In Chicago we caught fire, and then, last night, in San Francisco”—she scratched her head, a small smile softening her mouth—“we were up to… past our own limits.”
An answering smile came from Elen Evans. She felt her shoulders sink down and realized just how tense she had been, until now. She met Long’s eyes and wondered if he understood the overwhelming importance of the thing Martha had just said. To people like herself, and Elen, and even St. Ives, who simply had to play this music, whether people wanted to hear it or not… .
Long was different. He was not a musician. Certainly he had no Celtic background, to spark his interest in the history of it. One never knew why, with long, for his face showed nothing. That was an advantage, she guessed, in a road manager. Maybe it was easier for a Chinese, or Indonesian or… What was he, anyway?
Besides dotty over Martha. Elen Evans put her face against the box of her triple harp to hide her grin.
“For some of us the limits are easy to find!” It was Pádraig again, and the words were bitter. Before Elen could move from behind her harp to answer him, he was out of the room and gone.
She followed, scooping up her big net bag and dropping the piano-tuning wrench into it. The bag swung and struck against the dresser with a sound of cracking wood. She cursed the thing with a calm and placid curse as the door closed behind her.
“Oh, dear,” said Martha, sitting down hard in the other wicker chair. Long met her eye. “We haven’t heard the last of this,” she said. “From St. Ives, I mean.”
“I’m not having any fun yet,” Marty announced, coming back to Mayland Long’s lap. “I just thought I’d tell you, Daddo. In case.”
Martha gave a rather brittle laugh and threw the Kleenex box across the room.
The ocean was divided; as far as a hundred yards out from the Santa Cruz pier it was a warm jade color, while from an abrupt line at that distance it ran a cold, uncompromising blue. The tide came in great soft rolls, with no white showing. Mayland Long and Martha Macnamara sat together on a bench at the end of the pier. Small breezes blew around them, some scented with flowers and some with fish. Marty stood leaning over a fenced opening through the floor of the pier, whence came the barking of seals. She wore yellow trousers, a white T-shirt, and plastic sunglasses edged in white and yellow daisies. Long’s index finger was locked in her belt loop to keep her from falling in. That black hand was glittering with scales, for he had been helping the little girl feed the seals. No one, not, even Marty, had spoken for five minutes.
Martha let her attention drift with the tide from the blank western horizon to the bright Ferris wheel on the boardwalk, and on to the point lighthouse. She was thinking about Mendocino, where she had lived for the last four years, and wondering why one could get most achingly homesick in a place very like one’s home. And why did a person go out on the road again, when she didn’t need the money, and was old enough to know where she wanted to be? She turned to Long expectantly, as though she had asked the question aloud.
But he was not following her thoughts at all. Instead the dark head was drooped forward, eyes closed. His nose was obviously very sore and his skin tight over the bones of his face: so little flesh.
Martha caught her lower lip in her teeth, for she suddenly noticed the gray hair at his temples. Had she known he was going gray? Dear God, to have him beside her every day and not to notice. No, surely she had noticed, on some level. It was just that she was so tired today. Things didn’t look right.
And what if Mayland was looking older? So was she. She hadn’t made him follow her from city to city and country to country like this. It was his idea. And she hadn’t made him… what he was. Whatever ofttimes sad thing he was.
His eyes opened, focused directly at her. The virus had exaggerated the epicanthic folds at the outer corners of them, making him look more Chinese. “I have no idea why people do the things they do. None whatsoever.”
She was taken aback. Had she been speaking aloud, after all? “Do you mean yourself—why you’re here—or why I wanted to leave Mendocino at all?”
The eyes narrowed to slits and he laughed. “Neither one. I was talking about the altercation in the motel room. One would think I would understand human nature by now, considering how long I’ve been studying it.”
Martha frowned in thought. She could look quite fierce that way, despite her round blue eyes and pink-petal complexion. “You can’t see why Pádraig got angry…?”
“Any creature will react to assault by fighting back, if it can’t run away. No, I more wonder why St. Ives attacks, and why he chooses Pádraig as his victim so often. The boy is no threat.”
The wind caught Martha’s skirt as she stood up. She put one hand against her knee to hold it as she walked over to stand beside Marty. Down below, in the shadow, the smooth lumps of seal with their small-dog faces lay resting on the pier’s cross braces, and floated staring up from the black, swirling water. “No more fishies,” she called down to them, and when Marty let out a seallike sound of protest, she’ added, “No more money to buy fishies.
“Pádraig is not a competitor to George. He’s his natural prey. You can see how George plays on the poor creature’s emotions: all the scale from fury to discouragement to self-loathing. Pádraig is only twenty, while George is almos
t my age.”
“Positively a museum piece.”
“Well—old in his craft, anyway. But Pádraig’s being hit with everything new at once: the geography, the people, this crazy lifestyle.” She shrugged. “And I promised his mother I’d take care of him.”
Long blew his nose. “Don’t be silly, Martha. You cannot be a life-support system for the boy. At least he has his health. That is a great good fortune and a reasonable cause for envy.” He came to stand beside her, and he looked down at the seals. One of them raised its head, barked, and then they were gone in a gleam of disturbed water. Marty let out a yelp of protest.
Martha nudged Long’s side companionably. “Pádraig’s father runs a fishing boat out of Dunquin, my dear, and Pádraig himself is one of the best sailors on Iv Ráth. Dinghy races. He’s taken me out in a naomhóg under sail too. (I thought I would die.) But he’s no good working with his father.”
“They don’t agree?” Long put one hand around Martha’s shoulder and the other hand on Marty’s flaxen head. The little girl shook it off.
“Seosebh doesn’t explain things well. And he has a temper. He calls the boy an asal and—poof!—he is an ass. long ears and all. Makes stupid mistakes with the net. Jibs where he should jab with the gaff—or whatever. It’s no good.
“It’s the same pattern here. I’ve seen him at home, or in the Óstán Dún an Óir, in complete mastery of his material, playing his accordion like six-handed Shiva. The tourists had no idea what they were getting with their Guinness! But…”
“Here he isn’t doing that?”
Martha swayed against the white bar of the paling. “Mmph? Okay, I guess. But he’s scared and miserable, and he plays like a boy that’s scared and miserable. He hears himself and knows it’s no good. Round the circle. What is it Teddy says?”
“‘What goes around… ’”
“Oh, yes. ‘Comes around.’” She touched his mouth with her fingers. “How could I have forgotten?”
Mayland Long sighed. He swiped his nose once more and dismissed the problems of Pádraig Ó Súilleabháin. Leaning gracefully over the rail, he looked for seals. Skin divers went out from the beach, walking like ducks and delighting Marty Frisch-Macnamara. She threw popcorn to them as they passed beside the pier. For an hour the only concern among the small party was the wind in Martha’s skirt.
“Judy doesn’t like old George.” Marty made this announcement as they were halfway back to the motel room. Her grandmother sighed. “Why should Judy be any different than the vast majority of humanity?”
Long looked down at the little girl he was carrying. “Who is… Martha Rachel Frisch-Macnamara, where are your sunglasses?”
She slapped her eyes with both palms and made an outsize grimace of astonishment. “I have no idea, Daddo. No idea in the slightest!”
Martha took her and set her on her feet. “Sometimes she sounds so like Elizabeth I get the chills!” She saw Long looking intently back the way they had come and said, “Don’t bother. We went the whole length of the pier and across the beach and a busy street. Probably by now they’re at the bottom…”
But he had already turned back and was halfway across the street against the light, moving between the ears smoothly, with an odd dignity. Martha watched him slide through the beach crowds, avoiding all touch, yet with his gaze fixed on the far end of the pier. Could he see the ground that fax in front of him? Could anyone?
Martha shook her head. There was no telling what he could do. Here he was, so fine, learned, and wealthy: a live-in babysitter for a three-year-old. Taking beginning keyboard lessons. A millionaire road manager for a group that toured in a dilapidated van.
It was all so splendid that she laughed aloud.
Marty looked up resentfully. Like most people, she disapproved of private jokes. “Judy gets scared a lot. Not like me.”
Marty had been with the group for four days, long enough for Martha to learn something of her grandchild’s outgoing nature. “Is Judy a hotel maid or is she a waitress?”
Marty snorted, sounding just like her grandmother. “Ní h’ea.”
Martha translated this negative in her mind. “So Pádraig has been teaching you Irish. That’s nice.”
Marty grimaced again at the extent of adult stupidity. “Not Pádraig, Martha. Daddo. Only, it’s Chinese.”
Martha didn’t think so, but she didn’t want to belabor the point.
“And did he tell you to call him ‘daddo’? Did he tell you what it means?”
The little girl nodded strenuously. “It means ‘grandfather.’”
Then Martha set her lips and stared after Long, whom she could no longer see,
“Worshipping at the source of all earthly energy?”
Martha gave a little jump. It was Ted standing behind them, the wind blowing through the layers of his hair. He was smiling, and though his face was young, the skin around the corners of his eyes crinkled. He wore shorts and rubber thongs on his feet and nothing else. He looked rather like a young sun god himself, and his exposed skin was the color of fresh cherrywood.
Californians, she said to herself. “Actually, Marty and I are keeping off His Worship with para-aminobenzoic acid. We burn.”
“The skin comes off my nose,” said Marty in corroboration.
He nodded and then sat down on the pavement next to Marty, forcing passersby to step out into the street. Martha was about to say something about this when she noticed that none of the people inconvenienced looked in the slightest put out.
Californians.
“That’s a bummer. But, you know, it gets better. Just you lard that stuff on every time you go out, and the sun will get in so slowly that you’ll turn without ever burning.”
“To turn is casadh,” said the girl. “In Irish, it is.”
Martha stifled an impulse to contradict Marty and say the word was Chinese.
Ted’s dark innocent eyes went even more innocent. “Is it? Like to turn brown, you mean?”
“To turn anything. To turn a tune, fr’insanse.”
It occurred to Martha that Teddy was sailing very near the wind, discussing things with Marty. She was very demanding of grown-ups. If he had shown the least hint of condescension… If he had let her tell him things he already knew. But he never did that; Ted Poznan was a great favorite of Marty’s. Martha was encouraged to add her bit of education to Marty’s little store. “That’s our theme song, Marty. ‘Casadh an t’súgáin’: ‘Twisting the Rope.’ We play it twice every night: fast and slow.”
“I know that.”
Martha wondered if the dismissive quality in Marty’s reply came because she hadn’t sat down on the pavement, like Teddy.
“I talked to George.” Ted looked up at Martha. “I think we can get our friend straightened out.”
Martha would never have called George St. Ives her friend, much as she respected his music. But neither would she have dared to talk about straightening him out. She said nothing.
“I think he’s blocked inside, and then lashes out in pain. Anyone would. Once he opens up, the great, good things can come in: like the sunlight.”
Ted spoke with real enthusiasm. Martha felt a sudden question in her mind whether he was very intelligent. He was an accomplished guitarist, but she well knew that musical ability was a thing apart. She tried to imagine George St. Ives’s bulky and usually unwashed body naked under sunlight. Her mind’s eye, forced in this manner, wanted the image to go away.
“Did you tell him this?”
“Yeah, I did. And, you know, we really communicated.”
Martha blinked. She stooped and began to sit down on the pavement next to him when she remembered her troublesome skirt. “He didn’t curse you out or tell you to mind your own business?”
Ted beamed up at her. He seemed quite comfortable with their difference in stations. “No, Roshi. George doesn’t—”
“Don’t call me that.” Martha’s voice was quite sharp.
“Sure thing, Martha. No
. George doesn’t pull that on me. Or if he does, I don’t notice. Flow-through, you know? Flow-through.
“And I really think I can help him.”
Martha stared out at the sea, which, from this angle, was bright as aluminum foil. “In the five days left on this tour?”
“Sure. Enlightenment is instantaneous, you know.” Martha bit back her angry retort. She managed to say with reasonable calm, “Why? Why bother with him? You never met him before last month.”
Ted turned his face up to the sun and closed his eyes. A fly landed oil his forehead. He ignored it. “George St. Ives is a great musician and an old soul: a repository of the real tradition. I want to do what I can.”
What “real tradition,” Martha wanted to know. It was her understanding that St. Ives had learned from sessions and assorted recordings, just as she had, and as had most living “traditional musicians.” In fact, she could name at least six pieces he did where his sources were in her own extensive disk library. And, she had known his aunt, in Ottawa, and was in some position to separate the man from his image.
She decided to keep this question to herself. After all, George was a very good piper, and perhaps her own resentment stemmed from nothing more than that George had a habit of fighting his way into her solos.
“Here comes the Dragon,” said Ted.
Martha started and spun around, to see Long coming toward them, making his bullfighter’s progress through traffic.
“Why do you call him that?” she asked very tightly.
Ted rocked with amusement. “That’s what his name—Long—means in Chinese. Isn’t that great? Don’t you think it really fits him too? You know, like when he’s looking over a new arrangement or an instrument he hasn’t seen before and his eyes positively glow with passion to have it?”
“Passion?” Martha echoed weakly.
“Yeah. Real passion. Age doesn’t matter a bit, Martha.”
Then Long was with them, and the missing sunglasses were in his hand. He greeted Ted, who bestowed upon the group one last slosh of sleepy affection and then was gone. “One of the earpieces has suffered a little, but no irreparable damage.”
Twisting the Rope Page 2