Does one try to defend oneself in a situation like that? I think not. At least, I chose not to; but it did set a seed of anger in me toward my brother. Bad seeds always set easier than good, and they’re more easily planted, as all of us know. I felt I had tried so hard to be his friend, and he had never been anything more than mercurial and undependable toward me in return.
The question Berg might have asked that would have been more interesting to me, on that occasion of the champagne and his pernicious comments at the reception, would have had to do with what happened between me and Desmond afterthe encounter. He would never admit it, but on reflection, I feel confident Berg spent plenty of time spying on us. He might say, now, in his self-appointed priesthood as cinematographic artist, that he was only playing the role fate had handed him, as one chosen to record the intoxications of childhood, the warping and interweaving of personality, of sexuality, and so much more drivel. Who knows what he might have hoped to gain, even if he’d got to witness what it was he had hoped to see. Had our island lives proceeded in the way we all naturally had expected—had we grown up together, mother, two brothers, daughter, and sometime father—then I suppose it is possible that Desmond and I, being kids, being profoundly alone, being drawn over time into the secret world that can be created in solitude, might have provided Berg with the dirty secret he so hoped to have, to save, to do with as he might please. Who knows what he would have been capable of saying at my reception had Desmond and I actually provided him with fodder for some flash of catharsis? Who knows what he might then have brought out at just the appropriate moment as barter in some postadolescent blackmail?
Desmond and I visited the osprey nest dozens of times before winter came forcing its inhabitants to migrate, and we became each other’s best friend. We knew no one along the beach road. We were outsiders in school. As my confidant, not only did he learn to believe what I told him about the things I sometimes saw, but his curiosity about it all somehow alleviated my combined hope and fear that the flare man would eventually catch up with me.
“Let him catch up,” I wrote in my diary, in terms that seem to address Berg as much as the flare man. “He can’t do me any harm, because Desmond won’t let him.” I then wrote the facing panel for my diptych, “Things to do on the beach in the summer. Bury my feet in the sand. Bury Mother’s feet in the sand. Bury my whole laughing brother in the sand. Wade. Watch the sand clouds in the water that the waves make. Pee in the ocean, the fish don’t care because the ocean is so big. Watch the brown pelican dive for fish. Make a stick turn into a boat. Make a lake in the sand. Get sun poisoning. Hate aloe, hate your redness, hate the itch in the middle of your back where you can’t get at it and your brother won’t scratch it for you. Cry. Be hungry. Be at the hot dog stand and not have the change to buy a hot dog but eat the vendor’s relish and drink his ketchup when he’s not looking. Be thirsty. Want an ice cream sandwich, or lime popsicle. Beg for these, and get them. Be bored but not want to go home. Be scolded. Sulk, and scrunch mussel shells under the heel of your bare foot. Watch the sailboats come around on their moorings. Watch the windsurfer woman fall over into the blue water and get back up again and pull her orange sail out of the water and try again, then fall again. Watch the seagulls drop conch shells onto the stones on the beach to break their shells. Look at people’s fat. Daydream. Worry and worry if those clouds mean rain.”
What was really going on all along, with us and around us, and we never saw it happening, we children, though I had once seen how it could begin to happen, was that Mother had made another life for herself, right there adjacent to the one she led with us, but one that was growing and growing and began to want not to share her with us, but have her all to itself. Maybe I can forgive myself for not having said or done something about it, because, for one, I was so young, and being young was caught up with the newness of Scrub Farm, the newness of Djuna Cobbetts and Ernest and his boxes of tools, and the newness of the ocean at my feet.
I had experienced a period of nearly a year, come spring 1965, my eighth birthday, of relative health. The megrims threatened—you can feel them, barometric in their distant pressure—but often never materialized. And this, not just to me, but to all of us, was the object of quiet celebration. Faw came on his weekends, and on the holidays. Djuna Cobbetts would produce baked ham and Desmond and I would stick so many whole cloves in it that one could no longer see the meat. Berg, as I say, generally went his own way, whenever he wasn’t watching television or showing us the films that he continued to borrow from a file box, marked with Pannett and Neden’s initials, which was hidden in our father’s closet. Berg was thirteen then, and developed early on his own sense of what mattered, how he might behave toward whatever ends he had in mind—ends that I believe changed daily.
It could be argued that one occurrence was what precipitated the other. And no doubt Desmond’s fall from the treehouse to the paving stones of the porch off the kitchen, did bring every other strain the family experienced to a new level of intensity. What unhappiness my mother Erin had harbored about her being abandoned, as she felt it, was not in fact occasioned by the accidental death of my brother, her younger son; the days that followed Desmond’s fall were pregnant with revolt, though.
Who was to say that had they not moved to Shelter Island, to Scrub Farm with its rotting porch and ancient cistern, Desmond wouldn’t have been exposed to the temptation to climb trees and gamble like most boys do that their limbs will hold them? Aren’t there as many if not more perils in the city as the country? The time for such speculation was past, they knew. Charles could with equal confidence have argued that the boys had not been reined in enough by their mother. He could only do so much from the city, he might have contended—and look at Berg, with his smoking, his runaway pals, his language, look at what an undisciplined child he turned into over the course of that first full summer. If he, Charles, hadn’t taken matters into his own fatherly hands by getting the boy involved with Geiger, where might he have ended up?
When the accident happened it was August, it was a Sunday, which to my mind has always been an unholy day—the day that Faw went back to the city, the last day of the week, the day that my brother fell. It was the second year at Scrub Farm, and so muggy that when evening finally descended after the long hot day it seemed like a double night that shrouded the orchard and whispering grass. The air wheezed and chortled; the opaque beach was an ashen torpor. Desmond had gone outside into the treehouse, wearing nothing in the hot night. Berg would have appreciated the performance, and I would always suspect that it was Berg who taught him all these tricks that led to the accident. He sat out in the night air, looking at the stars, and smoked secret cigarettes stolen months and months before from the workmen maybe, maybe from Ernest, and giggled, waited to window-peek on me but when my bedroom light came on and it wasn’t I, nor Faw or Mother, but this man he’d only met once or twice and whom he didn’t like, the one with the strange name, Gabriel Segredo, he tried to duck down but slipped between limbs, and made no sound as he fell. The men came and had taken Desmond away long before morning. Mother was waiting by the bed, and told me what had happened to Desmond. Faw was nowhere to be found—his telephone rang and rang in the city, and she didn’t know where he was.
You can understand how it was possible for me to take on the burden of blame for the breakdown of our family? Sure, it’s a cliché, sure we all of us are always looking for things to blame on ourselves, when we’re not preoccupied with pinning the blame on others. But why else would they ever have come to that place if not on my behalf, if not because Trudeau and Faw believed this was the only way to get me on the road to health? I know it is never right to blame yourself for things that are out of your hands, but I had never been able to kick this thought that what happened between them—Faw and Mother—was also because of me, but by the time I came to know all that transpired during this period in our lives it was far too late to rectify matters. Even if I could have begun to understand how
Mother might resent our new life enough to set her doing the things she began to do, I would have been helpless to change it. She has never been able to understand how I didn’t, and don’t, resent Faw’s desire to be off, alone, away from us for most of the time, doing whatever it was he himself had to do in order to make his Sprawl. I don’t resent the fact that she couldn’t reach him about Desmond’s death until late Monday. What he was doing back then when the family was moved out to Scrub Farm must have been overpoweringly engrossing. I have come to see, from the perspective of an adult, how buying and selling things out in the real world, moving money around, moving people around, and on and on, how the range of all he was doing might have torn him away from us. He was always kind and good to me, anyway, and I always tried to be kind and good back, for above all I knew that I wanted to be a good girl, probably in my adolescent meditations believing that in this way the megrims might come to a stop.
As for my brothers, they had been so enthralled with building their treehouse in the cherry, into which they could climb from my bedroom window, neither—yes, Desmond included—seemed to care about either Father’s absence, or Mother’s agitation. Berg and I developed a mild rivalry for Desmond’s time, as it happened, given that Berg wanted to build, and I merely wanted to walk, to visit the nest, to go down to the sea. When Desmond favored me, Berg simply ignored us both and went about tending to his own affairs, fixing his bicycle, disappearing out into the woods along the beach for hours at a stretch. Whenever I did have one of my megrims, Desmond, unlike Berg, was always there to sit by, and do whatever Djuna Cobbetts, or Mother, told him to. He didn’t mind standing out along the road in the gusty autumn rain on the beach road to take the bus to school, either. Whereas Berg as often as not ditched us the moment Djuna turned under her wind-pummeled umbrella to make back for the house.
“Big baby,” Berg would chide his brother when he refused to cut school, and I knew better than to say anything in his defense.
Desmond would study the water that pooled and bristled around his shoes grown shiny and heavy in the road-shoulder mud. Neither Berg nor I would have any idea what he was thinking, whenever he withdrew into himself in those moments. He was distracted; we all three of us were. Our silly little children’s worlds were disintegrating under our very feet, and we must have known it, each of us in his own different way. I wonder, now, whether because I possessed some kind of separate, parallel reality—or at least badpossessed such a thing—it made it easier for me to adjust to what was bound to happen. Berg, I must admit, in a real way, suffered some hard blows, as a boy. Though, again (round and round I go) nothing like what Desmond was fated to know.
I wonder what any of them—Desmond, Berg, my parents, even Trudeau and Djuna—would have thought if I had come out and in so many words told them that I missed my light people? There were so many nights when I went to bed, and the window was open, and far, far away I could hear the clanging of the buoy-marker bell and the distant scratching of the waves on the surface of the sand, and I began to wish that the flare man could come, maybe on his best behavior, maybe having agreed not to flash hostile at me, and enjoy such peace. Wouldn’t that have made him, them all, warm—hot—with joy? As often as they had “misbehaved”(I can’t remember whether this was Erin or Djuna) and terrified me, I would find myself caught up tight in my own arms in the bed and rocking myself and wondering how they were faring back in the old ailanthus.Wondering whether they had some new friend to overwhelm with their wild powers. And now I had Desmond to miss, as well.
The church with the old lady at the window, up there on the side of the hill, lighting her votary candle and shielding its flame against the breezes by cupping it in the palm of her hand until it took well into the wick—she was part of a recurrent dream of mine after the dinner. I could see her, all alone, in her rustic adobe church, and she looked out to the sea to keep a keen eye out for the lost sailors. She was a mild figure in my imagination, and had nothing of the authority of the flare man, or my brother. Unlike them, she didn’t seem quite so real. I knew that she was a dream. How peculiar it is that of the three of them, the light people, Desmond, and this vigilant candle-bearer, only she, this last, would prove to have had an actual power. Before I sat down to put this all together I secretly went to find her. Maybe she knew something. The water below changed from the grays of the East Coast to the heavier blues and turquoises that set off the sea south of Cuba. I knew that she would be there. I had no doubt of that. But what else it is that would be there I wasn’t sure. All the threads that seemed to have no purpose, that seemed to lead off into nowhere, I knew might lead to her door. (I don’t mean to be elliptical, don’t want to be mysterious, and don’t care whether I am being intriguing—threads are what they are.) And I thought, It may not be a church, she may not even keep to her schedule of burning those memorial candles every night, but I won’t mind—that part doesn’t matter, in the end. What matters to me is that the overactive imagination that was my burden and my release as a child is not operative now. I refuse to be like the little boy who cried wolf one time too many. This is why all these strands must come together, wild and in disarray as they might seem on the surface. That was, I thought, the only hope I have of sheltering my father the same way he once had sheltered me. When I got there, I still didn’t know how much harder it would be to do what I had wanted to do. The Sprawl by then was too wide for any single wish to umbrella it.
“Ghosts are men and the houses they inhabit are women.”
I wrote that in my journal, which I worked on more and more after Desmond died. It was a way of talking with him, though it was, I knew, only I who did the talking. But since when I wrote it out, everything was silent, I felt I could hear him, or could better imagine what he would sound like if he responded. No one knew about the journal; I found the book, an old calendar book, in the attic. It bore the signature of another owner, one of the Merriams, but was otherwise full of many blank pages. I ignored the dates, as the calendar was for a year long past, and began to concentrate on my own history. In summer 1964, Scrub Farm was a ghostless place. But now that had changed. “I’ll be a house if you’ll haunt me,” I wrote. I think I meant it.
The first time Desmond became an integral part of the megrim sequence, the scent of apricot saturated the room. She—this Grace that was I—reached, pushing against the air in the room with her palms out and her white fingers extended like twigs on a smooth-bark birch, to block it. Faw, who sat by the bed, reading to her, to me, about a man who was turned into a mule, didn’t notice that the room had taken on this odor, and had even changed color. Shahrazad looked on, from a corner; her eyes were upside down.
Grace knew the scent could not be blocked. It diffused across the walls and the bedspread, wafting and waving like a lascivious ribbon until it formed itself into a figure and lay its apricot head beside her head on the pillow. It caressed her hands and hair and it flowed over her childish jewelry—the plastic ruby ring, the friendship bracelet Desmond had given her—which she never, ever took off, not even when she took her bath and went to sleep. It moved tardy and heavy as it began to take full possession of the bedroom. As this sense of thickening occurred, the apricot scent became more like a liquid muscle of wind, like juice, but was not sticky so much as chalky, and—as it rose through her throat and settled on the back of her tongue—what came to her then was the thought of all those apricots, and she would be sitting in a tree of apricots, say, and she saw that she was an apricot too, with the other apricots, meaty and browning and rotting. As soon as she saw herself as unclaimed fruit she fought back toward what she knew to be Grace, to be her, and she swallowed hard and rolled onto her side to stare into the fire that Faw had made in the fireplace.
She stared because she wasn’t too sure she wanted to be an apricot tonight, since usually being an apricot meant that it was going to hurt. So she worked on making up fire-animals that flickered off the logs. A bark ember in the fireplace popped against the screen there, then
fell to the hearth where it paled from peach to white, and shrank until it was no longer an independent glowing bulb but a fragment of char. It reminded her first of the gills of a fish, the osprey’s pike’s gills, the gills on the salmon that Faw had caught on the river in Maine and brought back with him packed in ice. Now the ember became a shrew’s tooth, like the one her uncle Vernon had given her with instructions not to make more than three wishes on it, lest it turn back into a real shrew that would come and get her. For safety’s sake she had never bothered to make any wishes on the tooth, and doubted its miraculous powers, anyhow, since Uncle Vernon was a practical joker, as Faw always said, and because it looked more like just a person’s tooth, stained yellow and chipped. Then she saw the ember turn into a monkey’s face and, last, black as a poppy seed. Faw in the chair by the bed hadn’twitnessed any of these occurrences that had reshaped the room in which he was sitting. Smelling nothing, ignoring the monkey-face fire, he went on reading aloud to Grace, even as she closed her eyes, and left the dying fire behind, and decided that since she wasn’t sleepy enough yet, she would take the apricots away with her into another story, a very different one, all her own.
“That’s all for tonight,” was what her father said. It always startled her when he spoke again in his regular tone of voice, and not in the storytelling tone.
“No, more, please read more,” she pleaded, from a pocket in the megrim.
“You’re sleeping through the whole story.”
“No, I want more.”
The Almanac Branch Page 7