Finally, we are all on the water, in my father’s boat. It is a twenty-seven-foot cabin cruiser, docked in Gloucester. The family sleeps on it Saturday nights in summer; on Sundays the neighbors come. Before noon, they emerge at the top of the ramp, holding coolers, picnic baskets. But now I am no longer interested in them. It is two summers later, 1967; they have gone from being gods to becoming jokes. Not their fault, entirely, or mine. Even beyond my seventeen-year-old consciousness, a passage was going on. They were all suburban Democrats in Ban-Lon pants, and they were being moved, ungently, from the center of the visible universe to some laughable periphery.
Still, they acted as though they hardly knew this. On Sundays they cooked steaks and drank beer and appeared to me on the other side of the smoke from the grill, men whose clothes no longer fit so well, women outliving their usefulness. My invisibility, once so precious to me, seemed another count against them. I could not understand how they remained so fascinated by themselves and each other. I felt they should turn to me, and stare, perhaps ask a question about the life I was about to go off and seize.
In one of the home movies of his later years, my father did something private, for himself. I came upon it once by accident, looking for something else. On a day when they must have been alone together on the boat, he filmed my mother. She is not doing anything dramatic or particularly interesting. For long stretches, she eats, she puts on sunglasses, she sits staring upward at the sun. She faces him and speaks. There is no sound to the film, so there is only her mouth moving, and the sight of her body, in a one-piece bathing suit. The light is overbright, the water an impossible blue. He holds the camera a long time on her, as though not willing to turn away.
But that was later, all my understanding came later. That day in 1967 I was entirely blind to it. Dolores was still there among them. She might have been thirty then. If there had been delicacy and ripeness to her at the beginning, it was starting to go. Her belly fell into tight ridges that clung to her ribs when she sat. Though she didn’t speak often, her voice, when she did, no longer sounded hopeful and tentative and waiting to hear the great defining thing. She was like someone’s niece who ought to have been at another party, one with young lawyers and daiquiris, but no one had the grace to tell her so. It had to come through an action.
It was a big party that day: us, the Noceras, the Delosas, Matt Romano, Stella and Dolores. Six children altogether. It was my job to steer, which I didn’t mind doing. I kept a transistor radio at the helm: Top 40 blocked them out. They sat in deck chairs; the women put on kerchiefs to keep their hair from blowing in their faces.
We made a wide circle of the harbor, then edged under the narrow bridge into the Annisquam River toward Wingaersheek Beach. For the most part, that day would have been a day like any other. We always anchored the boat along the mile-long tongue of white sand that stretches from the mouth of Wingaersheek. The dinghy we carried on our stern would have brought the women in to shore. Then, laughter as they tried to go from dinghy to sand without getting wet, and my father, on the outboard motor, would have made a joke, and shaken the boat, to make them nervous.
The men usually chose to swim in, to make big awkward dives and thrash through the water, then emerge, sleek-headed and dripping, before a dry, fully clothed woman. Then the women would have stripped down to their bathing suits, blankets would have been laid out, cigarettes lit.
The only awkwardness—too familiar now for anyone to pay much attention—would have been Matt Romano’s emergence from the sea. Dolores stood waiting. She watched him swim in, always, as if at any moment he might be lost forever. Stella would not be so overt: she’d busy herself with the children, the two dark-haired girls. Age had made them lithe, more physical, and Stella was awkward as she ran after them. Little attention as I paid (I stayed on the boat, with one of my sisters; we read paperbacks), I can see the choice as it might have appeared to him that day. Stella, who had put on weight, who rarely in those days allowed herself to be seen in a bathing suit. A yellow or pale green dress flapping against her white legs, the jewelry she was never without—necklace, rings—making a sparkle in the sun. Her hair would fly backward in the wind, her profile standing out, unadorned. Then Dolores, at a distance, arms crossed, a bit impatient. Still, nothing attached to her, no children; she was merely what she was, a woman who had waited a long time for him to make up his mind. One of the men might have come up to her and made a joke—“Look, he’s not as quick as he used to be!”—and then she would have laughed edgily and looked at Matt Romano splashing through the sea until some presentiment of the hugeness of her risk made her shiver. Seeing this, his mind would be made up for him, at least for the moment, and he’d go to her, to reassure.
Out of the corner of her eye, Stella would catch sight of this and pretend not to notice. As practiced at acceptance as the neighbors had become by then, there had to be a moment—very brief, a hairline fracture—when the facade began to crack. Steve Delosa would put out a cigarette, with disgust, in the sand. Everyone would know what he meant, awareness traveling like a shared tremor among them. Matt Romano would register it.
But after a while things would slacken, the rhythms of the afternoon would take hold. Cigarettes would be smoked, conversational topics broached. What might have compelled them in the summer of 1967? The advent of the hippies in San Francisco? Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War? A sale at Penney’s? The words would have floated on the air, the way they do on a beach, important for a moment, then gone. Elena Nocera would have lain back and made a joke about her legs. One of the men would have adjusted his bathing suit to free his balls. They’d’ve watched the younger couples as they strolled this length of sand, or made note of the other vessels, or turned in the opposite direction from shore, where the dune grass glistened in the white heat.
It would have been that kind of afternoon. Insignificant. The sun would have gradually lowered in the sky, and it would have been lost, a day gone. Half a mile distant, blankets would have been gathered off the crowded beach, the small exodus to cars begun, thoughts returning to Monday, to the question and the problem of work. For them merely a reflex, that, and then a deeper sinking into the day, the stretching out of legs. What anxiety did “work” have for any of them? Headaches, yes. Problems with suppliers, arguments, but all this would come and go, it was tomorrow’s business. They were lucky, and they knew it. They had survived to this point in their lives, rich enough, without encountering any of the stickier problems—all but the Romanos, that is. Tonight the men would make love to their wives the way older men do in summer, when the rising of the skin seems to have less to do with a particular woman than with the quality of the day, and you try to get to it in the last light, when the vestiges of some old existence, one you perhaps never actually lived, are to be found in the edges and crannies of the act itself. On the beach the men would have thought of all that, and the group stayed later than anyone else.
By the time they finally gathered their things, the water would have darkened, fishing boats coming in with their entourage of gulls, and their bodies would have gone heavy, resistant to the transition back to boat, to car. My father pulled the dinghy, loaded with women, through the shallows until the water reached midway up his thighs, then he heaved himself onboard. Another joke, more laughter, his head with its gray nest of hair and then his body, as he half-stood to jerk the motor into life, flinging toward me the brief, unwelcome awareness that he was still vital, still fucked my mother, a terrible thing to know but something he was resplendent with as he pointed the dinghy toward the boat, where I waited with my sister and our novels. The women’s faces on the dinghy, the sun behind them, were red, their hair lightened by the salt, and their bodies had the soft-shoulderedness of women who had recently been pleasured. It was as if my father were riding his harem across this weedy patch of sea, a harem of contented, middle-aged women.
Only one thing was interesting that day: Dolores, among them, on the dinghy, and I don�
��t think I’d even remember how she looked if it wasn’t the last time I was to see her. Straight-backed with resistance, she sat in sunglasses, her proud little body thinner than anyone else’s. She would not give herself over to the happy ease of that boat; if once she’d felt close enough to them to joke, to share secrets, those days were over. She had grown careful to mark out her boundaries and to move within them with precision, so that while the thighs of Mary Delosa and my mother might have been touching, their sweatshirted shoulders blurred and indistinguishable, you saw all the space around Dolores.
They came to the boat and unloaded, my father made playful little grabs for their calves, and immediately they busied themselves, putting away blankets, getting out robes to welcome their children, who were still onshore with the men. None of them watched what was going on there, not at the beginning.
My father had returned to shore and was in the process of getting each of the children loaded into the boat, outfitting them first with life preservers. There was just room, with children on their laps, for the three men as well, though it made the boat ride low. After lifting his daughters in, Matt Romano put up his hand in a gesture of refusal. My father made an answering gesture, beckoning him in. These were repeated, until Matt Romano stepped away from the boat. My father looked at him a moment, unmoving, with just the focus of the others on the boat to tell me he was saying something. Matt Romano lowered his hands into the water, and my father started up the motor. Someone, one of the women, said, “He’s going to swim,” and then another—not Stella, not Dolores—said, unworried, factual, “It’s too far.”
The tide had come in enough so that the distance was, in fact, significant. I didn’t doubt, though, that he would make it. He was no more than forty then and had a strong body. He moved out to where the water was waist-deep and watched the progress of the dinghy until my father had reached us and we all had begun helping the children onboard. Only when everyone was recovered did he begin his swim, and I was prescient enough even then to understand that, for some reason, he wanted us to watch him.
My father was still standing on the dinghy, but after Matt Romano had swum twenty or thirty feet he decided there was no reason not to lift it and hook it to the back of the boat. As he did so, a look passed over his face, an annoyed look. Charlie Nocera had come and stood beside me to watch his neighbor swim. I could feel the tension of his body even a foot away, and it wasn’t an ordinary tension. Something was happening. It could have been the most commonplace of things—a man swimming a long distance—or it could have turned into something else. Charlie and my father didn’t know yet. That there was something remarkable about Matt Romano—his occasional, yet highly dramatic, insistence that life could be lived differently than they lived it—was the grit of sand under their suits, the thing they would remove if they could. Yet it was elusive, it might not be at all what they thought it was, so they were denied the clean action that would stop him in his tracks. They could only wait and see.
So he swam, and we watched him, the black knot of his hair dipping, then rising, his Indian’s beak of a nose coming up, his wide back glistening in the sun, until someone started to notice what was happening.
It was barely detectable at first. He was veering off course, but just slightly, and it could have been no more than a trick of light that he appeared to be making no progress toward us. We were so taken in by his impressive swimming that it didn’t seem quite possible that another force—an invisible one—might be rendering all that beautiful effort in vain. “The current’s taking him,” one of the men said, finally. He began to slow down after a while and then you could see it more clearly, how it was pulling him, the late-afternoon tug of the tide, so strong on that part of the river. He must have been fifty feet upriver of us when he lifted his head.
She was beside me then, nestled between me and Charlie Nocera but not aware of either of us. She had come to the railing to look, and still there was that space around her, as if she believed this display was for her alone.
It had that quality to it, his moment of failure, because I believed the same thing, that it was for me. His head was lifted now and he was looking at us as though not yet willing to ask for help. Instead, he seemed deliberately to choose this moment, to hold it still and out of time, as a kind of invitation to all of us to see him for what he was; to be accepted for all that he could not quite do.
We all took it in; there was a silence on the boat. I was disappointed, above all other things. I had needed, very badly, to see him as someone capable of breaking free of this world, if he only chose, but now, as I watched him, watched his face, which made no effort to excuse his moment of shame, I saw that he had been caught by it, was, in fact, the same as them, in love with something closer to death than to life. Finally, he let the current carry him up the river until it deposited him on the shore.
As we watched this, I felt the movement of Dolores’s body in front of me. She’d gone very close to the railing. Now her shoulders lowered, and the bumps of the vertebrae along her back receded. It was enough to let me know something. My father let the dinghy into the water again; his expression was more satisfied now. The rest of us watched to make sure Matt Romano made it to shore, and then my father, floating, asked, “Anybody want to come for a ride?”
As it turned out, both of the other men wanted to come with him. Matt had been carried far upriver, so as they steered toward him they made a diagonal into the sun. I remember their rounded, coarse backs on the boat. I remember, too, how it occurred to me that, for them, this was not entirely unexpected, this turn of events, that all along they had known what would have to happen to him, and had treated him more or less like a child who would, in time, understand. Only I had been fooled into believing there was, for him, some possibility of escape.
It took twenty years before the life he gave himself over to that day finally killed him. Heart trouble had apparently started much earlier, but more than for most men, the passage from age fifty to sixty had a wasting effect. My wife and I went to visit him and Stella when we were newly married; they had dogs then. We were big with our romance, and all I remember my wife and me doing was talking about ourselves, giving details of our domestic arrangements, our studio apartment in New York, places we had traveled and were going to travel. He listened, and at one point I thought I saw the old contemptuous look come over his face. It was just after Christmas, and he lifted one of the opened boxes in their living room. I leaned forward, relieved, thinking he was going to show me one of his gifts, when suddenly, and with majestic fierceness, he used it to sidearm one of the dogs.
That’s all much later; I’m getting ahead. But there wasn’t a lot left to that day really. Memory closes down on it, as if it wants to see the end there. He’s onshore, waiting for them, his hands on his hips. He doesn’t look embarrassed. He’s standing straight, merely waiting. Maybe he’s calmer now. Something has been settled on, after a long effort. They come in close, the three men, and move over for him, and he steps in and settles among them on the boat, and the four of them ride toward us, black, faceless figures with the sun behind them, and when I look again, she is not there anymore. Without my quite knowing it, Dolores has slipped from her position before me, so that as the dinghy comes very near, I feel a shiver of apprehension that there is no longer anything standing between me and him.
THE SECRET LIFE
I
The summer after their second child was born—a boy!—the Augartens found themselves suddenly and—to Theo, anyway—suspiciously popular. Invitations arrived from the Thalers, the Nagles, the Wohls: the cream of society such as existed in their town. “Congratulations on your new baby” would be scribbled somewhere on the cards. They had known these people lightly, marginally before. “What have we done that all of a sudden makes them want us around?” Theo wondered aloud. “All we did was screw without protection.” There were usually a dozen couples at these parties; new decks and porches were lit by citronella candles while, in th
e backyards, colored lanterns hung from the trees. The scene was arcadian, lush; children playing games at the edge of the light, the Augartens’ shy daughter among them. Previously they had driven past such parties, viewed them from a distance, while their daughter, Leah, sat silent in the backseat, clutching a book. For the child’s sake alone, the invitations were a blessing. And who was he kidding? For his, too. But it was awkward: during the winter, in the middle of Anna’s pregnancy, he had begun an affair—a woman his age, a foolish woman; still, it persisted, and would not go away.
Someone, a friend, had once assured him that every married man had a secret life. This was in the early days of his marriage, when he still clung to his male friends. Now he looked around at the men at these parties and doubted the truth of it. There was something wonderful about these lawyers and therapists and anesthesiologists—big-headed, curly-bearded Jews like himself, mostly, but with chests that thrust outward and heavy, ringing, expansive laughs. They gave in to life; they made a deal and kept it. And he, what did he do? For years he’d denied his wife the second child, this sweet Jacob, sleeping in the Snugli. Not that she’d begged. But caution had been his watchword. Alone, he communed with a second, private self he hoarded and refused to submit to the light. Give completely in to life, and what happened to that precious part of you? It was too much to believe all these others felt the same way. What would happen if he were to shout, as he sometimes wanted to, “I sleep with another woman! Three times a week I plunge into her soft wetness”? Would all the men simply nod and say, “So do we!” and would they then move on to a discussion of the upcoming School Committee election? No, it would mean exclusion for sure. And though that was what he felt anyway, he held back. For his daughter’s sake, his wife’s. He drank and talked and carried on like everyone else.
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