by Kate Walbert
“I’m fine,” she said; Sterling had appeared at the door of her cabin, having bribed a steward to let him onboard. She gripped the edge of the top bunk and smiled. Thin, she looked. What had he been expecting? A pregnant woman, round, cheerful. A wife. She shook her head as if to say, I’m sorry. And for an instant they simply stood, Randall somewhere between them, no more a boy than a fish with wings.
• • •
I fold the stationery, dropping the newspaper clipping’s broken corner into the crease, placing the all of it back inside The Gardens of Kyoto; then I join Betty on the porch steps. The summer after Randall’s death is a particularly hot one, and Mother has forbidden us to leave the house, or to visit with any of our friends. Marjorie Winn, our next-door neighbor, came down with polio in May, her father bringing her home from the hospital and carrying her inside the house as we stood at the end of our walk, waving, Mother hissing from behind the screen door that if we didn’t get ourselves back inside that minute it would serve us right if we ended up in an iron lung. The farthest we could go was the porch steps, she said, marking it with her toe, as if we couldn’t tell for ourselves where the porch steps ended and the gravel of the walk began. I don’t even want you gardening.
Mother, Betty had said. You would think it’s carried in the air.
It might be, Mother said. It might very well be.
Then I won’t breathe, Betty said, pursing her lips until her face went bright red.
Good, Mother had said, leaving.
• • •
“Hey,” Betty says now, kicking her leg out into the gravel.
“Hey,” I say.
I sit next to her and stretch my own legs out.
Betty turns toward me with a sneer. She might mind Mother and sit on the porch steps, but she wants to touch everything that has been forbidden, to scour, provoke. She has half a mind, she’s told me, to swim in Jacob’s Creek, where Rita stole the frogs; or she might pull off all her clothes and run around Old Man Springfield’s orchard, drive the tractor in circles.
“How’s your boyfriend?” she says now, cruelly.
“Dead,” I say. “Yours?”
2
There were several colored soldiers on the ferry—their uniforms the same as the white soldiers’ uniforms, though they were directed to sit in back in the colored section. I watched as one, tall and skinny as Randall, helped a woman who looked to be his grandmother up the metal stairway to the second-floor deck. She held on to his skinny arm and walked so slowly that the colored line hardly moved. The white line went fast, all the white people already sitting in the uncomfortable wooden pew beneath the deck awning, watching the slow-moving colored line and the confusion—men and women stepping out of the order of the line to wonder about the holdup, other soldiers saying they would like to get to Baltimore before sunset—as if watching the screen at a picture show. You couldn’t touch or get close or help the colored people; they were in their line and we had already come through ours. These were the rules back then and for whatever reason people followed the rules.
I was on my way to visit Sterling. He had sent ferry fare with a cryptic note made all the more mysterious by his wavering script. Given my fondness for his son, Randall, he wrote, he believed I might be interested in some recent accidental findings. I should meet him at such and such a date, on the earliest ferry. He had signed it, Your devoted Great-Uncle, Sterling, a gesture so at odds with my memory of him that I half-expected to arrive greeted by a stranger, someone spry and handsome, someone who might, upon seeing me, drop to one knee and fling his cape to the sand.
Perhaps this is the reason I took such care with my appearance. I wore Mother’s old linen wedding suit, which had been brought down from the attic the week before and still smelled of mothballs. The shade of green looked better with her coloring, she said, eyeing me, but it would do fine under the circumstance. The circumstance, of course, was that we were poor and soon we would be poorer, Mother knowing that any day she would get a tap on the shoulder from the foreman. She had already seen it happen to the women in the higher positions, the ones whose jobs were the most appealing to the soldiers returning from Europe. She rightly knew that it would happen to her next.
Anyway, this was a nice linen suit, she told me. It had been purchased at Bergdorf’s in New York City on a buying trip her rich Great-Aunt Maude, Sterling’s sister, had taken her on a few months before her wedding. This was in ’24, she told me. The summer. We took the train, Mother said, Maude insisting I sit next to the window and look out because you never know, she said, when your life might take a turn and you won’t have anything interesting to see again. But then, she loved travel, Maude. She’d been everywhere. Women did in those days.
Mother stepped back and squinted at me, pins in her mouth. Then she stepped up again and bent to the hem.
That was the first time I met Ruby, she said, still looking down, her voice a bit garbled by the pins though I heard her clearly enough.
Ruby, Ruby? I said.
Ouch. Stand still.
I’m sorry.
I stepped closer.
She was a designer in this little hat store in Greenwich Village, she said. Can’t remember the name, but the hats were the cleverest hats I had ever seen. Sterling had given Maude the address. He knew she would adore Ruby.
Did she?
Of course, Mother said, straightening. Everyone did.
Mother smiled, then, confirming my suspicion that my secret was known to her.
Maude was very impressed. Ruby fluttered around that store like a nervous Nelly, hat to hat to hat. She couldn’t decide, she told us, which to take abroad. The shows, she said, as if we would understand. What did we think of the blue?
I stood very still though Mother seemed to have lost interest in my hem. I believe if she had been less caught up in her own story, she might have seen the odd look on my face.
There was a particularly flamboyant one, Mother continued. Red, I remember, with the widest brim I had ever seen and gold mesh netting. I said, Not the blue. I said, That one. And Ruby snatched it up and kissed me. You’re a genius, she said. You must come back and work in the store. No question, she said. It could only be red.
Mother looked back at me then, as if suddenly remembering I was there.
Of course Maude explained to her that we were in New York on a buying trip for my wedding, that I wouldn’t need to work. Funny, isn’t it?
I didn’t know what to say and so I looked down and stretched out my arms. They’re uneven.
You’re slouching.
I locked my knees and straightened my shoulders.
Oh, I said.
• • •
I looked out to the Chesapeake and tightened my hold on my suitcase. It seems strange, now, in thinking about it, that Mother let me travel alone, that she let me go at all. Several months had passed since Sterling had sold the house and moved back to Baltimore; still, I believe Mother must have felt, as I did, that there might be more we could offer him. I remember how, during the estate sale, she insisted that he put his bad leg up on a footstool she carried outside expressly for that purpose, how she propped his foot on a cushion and pulled his drooping sock up to his ankle.
Anyway, Sterling had written that he would meet me at Sandy Point, and that we would from there commence forward, which I had, at the time, assumed meant to Baltimore. Mother and Daddy drove me as far as Love Point, waiting in line with all the other automobiles to get on to the ferry before turning off at the ramp. I was on my own for the crossing, a journey that would take less than an hour.
The ferry engines fired and the great boat shook as if to split in two then settled into a steady drone. We pulled out on the bay. Around us the Annapolis men practiced their drills in sleek blue sailboats—crisscrossing the paths of the uglier victory ships heading north—and fishermen pulled in their hauls of rockfish and crab, the water as crowded as a city road. I shoved my suitcase underneath the wooden pew and stood, wanting
to join the group clustered at the railing, seagulls over their heads like a pack of dogs in pursuit. The early morning, the smell of the water and the fresh, cooler air, had somehow lifted my spirits and made me bold; I was terribly shy then, and normally to join a group of strangers would have been impossible. But I did. I joined the others, my hands gripping the gray-painted metal railing against the breeze of the crossing as if I were in some danger of being blown backwards, as if I might skitter across the bay like a dry leaf. I closed my eyes and tasted the wake spray, imagining that when the boat finally bumped the wooden dock of Sandy Point it would be Randall waiting next to the automobile, leaning against the hood like some kind of movie star, his hand up to shade his eyes from what would then be the near-noon glare. I’d wave, one hand in the air, the other gripping my wide-brim red hat, its gold mesh casting a net shadow across my face.
• • •
But it was only Sterling on the other side. He stood stiffly next to one of the few automobiles parked at the landing. I waved as we got closer; not the wave I would have given Randall, of course. A simple wave. Shy, because I was again shy as soon as the engines of the boat were cut, the sound now just that of the seagulls and the quieter chuck chuck of the readying automobiles. Most of the other passengers had driven on to the ferry and would simply drive off again, continuing down the two-lane road to wherever it was they were going.
Attendants jumped to the dock to knot the thick lead ropes to the piers; everyone frantic in the way of arrival. I was in no rush. I took the steps down slowly, thinking how I hadn’t the slightest idea what Sterling and I would talk about, and though I had been initially curious as to what he had to tell me, I was not so naive as to not know that he was simply a lonely man, a man who would want to bring the conversation around to his son, again.
And so I must have seemed rather reticent at our reunion. Of course I am sorry about that now.
• • •
Mother had prepared one of her pineapple upside-down cakes and I immediately presented this to him. He nodded and placed it in the trunk along with my suitcase, then guided me around to the passenger’s side of the automobile, the tips of his fingers on my elbow as cool as chicken skin, his limp more pronounced, the leg that was sometimes in a brace, sometimes not, shriveled to mere bone, twisted, I knew, beneath his loose trousers; Randall had told me.
Please, he said, opening the door.
I sat down on the hot leather seat and watched him limp around the front to the driver’s side; it seemed to take forever and so I rolled down my window and leaned out to smell again the salt air of the Chesapeake.
“You’ve grown,” he said, getting back in with some effort. He took a pair of leather gloves from the dashboard and carefully pulled on one and then the other. I remember thinking how the leather gloves matched the seat, wondering if the gloves had been purchased with the automobile, which was fine: the steering wheel a highly polished cherry, chrome instruments along the dashboard. The gear shaft, a monstrous thing, stuck straight up between us, its handle sheathed in black leather.
“I’m five feet, seven inches and a half,” I said.
“Taller than I remember,” he said.
“Yes sir.”
“When did that happen?”
“A full inch since spring,” I said, straightening my shoulders.
“And how old?”
“I’ll be sixteen in January.”
“Sixteen.”
“Yes sir.”
We were driving now, climbing the hills that were, on the other side of the bay, less common.
“Do you recognize this?” he asked.
I looked at him but he simply stared out at the road.
“The road?”
“The landscape, yes.”
“No sir.”
“Your parents came here once, when you were just a baby. Rita must have been five or six. You stayed with your sisters and Randall at our Baltimore house; poor Jeannette elected to keep an eye on all of you.”
So I had known him as a baby; I had even met Jeannette.
“Funny. Somebody died. It was the reason for the visit and now I can’t think who.”
We passed signs for clams, lobster. A giant billboard read “Fresh Peas, California-Style,” with a picture of a red pickup truck loaded with tiny green peas and two children, a boy and a girl, standing beside it, their teeth blackened to missing.
“Stupid business, getting old,” he said. “Dumb and stupid.”
“Yes sir.”
We drove in silence after that. I counted the fenceposts that lined one particular pasture and attempted to count the horses clustered near a salt lick, but we were going too fast. Thirty miles an hour, maybe forty; real driving in those days. The dust kicked up from the road.
I wanted to think of something to say, something clever. Rita would have known what; she would have chattered all the way to Baltimore. But I liked the silence in the automobile, the occasional bump as we hit a rock in the road and Sterling broke the yellow-painted line dividing one direction from the other. Every once in a while, an automobile would approach heading back toward the ferry landing and Sterling, or the other driver, would honk, and the two would raise their hands just so slightly in greeting.
It was after about twenty, twenty-five minutes of driving that I felt Sterling shift down, the automobile slowing.
“Look there,” he said.
I couldn’t see what he pointed at; it seemed to me just another field behind some trees, a kite on a flagpole.
“The kite?”
“That’s a wind sock. That tells you the direction.”
He signaled a turn with his hand and we drove down a long gravel road through a narrow line of trees, past the wind sock and up to a low, rambling building. It looked at first like stables and I thought that perhaps Sterling wanted to show me a horse; Jeannette, I believe, had been a rider. But then I saw the silver glint of the wings; this one had a turquoise body and silver wings.
“Always wanted to do this,” Sterling said.
He turned off the engine and sat with his hands on the beautiful cherry steering wheel.
“Are those your flying clothes?” he asked.
And then, of course, I understood.
• • •
We found the pilot tipped back in a chair behind a wide aluminum desk in an office papered with calendars of months past—the stillness there almost matching the stillness we would later feel in the air. He was an old friend of Sterling’s who had been called up from the reserves to finish the job in Germany, Sterling said. I don’t quite know what he was doing in that office, whether he flew his biplane during the week to dust the crops of the farms that spread in every direction around us, or whether this was simply a place he had found for himself and his plane after returning from Europe. He seemed singularly alone, and I imagined that he had flown that plane back from Germany west over the Atlantic, landing here, on the eastern shore, to stretch his legs and his arms, to shrug and move on.
I’m sure he had a name but I have long since forgotten it. What I remember best is how his face looked like scratched glass and how strong his hands were as he lifted me to squeeze in next to Sterling. I willed myself not to be afraid as the pilot patted one of the wings, still scorched with sun, and swung himself up behind the controls. The propeller spat into motion, circling then steadying into a low whir.
“See?” Sterling said, and I nodded, or attempted to nod. He was too close to turn to and besides, we were suddenly in a rush of air, racing faster than I had ever raced, the plane bumping then hovering, bumping then climbing, the trees a black outline beneath us so quickly I barely had time to catch my breath. I had to strain to keep my eyes wide open, the sky all around me a vast portal elsewhere. We flew directly through the clouds. That was what was most astounding. Below us the woods fell away to fields divided by roads; I saw the outline of a circle sliced as neatly as a pie, an irrigation unit, I later learned, though at the time it seemed a
farmer’s whimsy. Silver silos caught the glint of sun and signaled back to us. All of it language, somehow, spoken by what had before had no voice, the water loudest as we swooped low over the Chesapeake, buzzing the ferry that now carried its load of passengers back across to the mainland, then climbing higher, losing the bay’s roar to the silence of that pure sky, that bright light.
It was then, I believe, that Sterling took my hand, and I felt for the first time his fingers like loose die in my palm, never before having touched this man whose son I loved, because I did, truly, love Randall. Cousins sometimes do.
3
It was too warm for a cardigan, but Sterling wore his usual dress shirt buttoned at the cuffs, and suspenders. We stood outside the foundation, near the stone step that had once led to the front door of Randall’s house. Now it rose to nothing. Nearby the few remaining oaks cast their full leaf shadows. If the house had been left to stand it would be cool inside; the way Randall liked it. He never liked the sun much; he always claimed he would have been better suited for England, where they stay indoors all day and read, the weather too lousy to do anything else. A light drizzle, Randall would say, is perfection.
I shivered, something eerily dead about the scene. We had reached the house, or what had become of the house, in no time, landing in a clearing in the field across the road then steering, bumping up the drive.
“Did you know?” I yelled at Sterling as soon as the propeller wound down. He nodded and I might have pummeled my fists on his chest if he had not been such an old man, if his expression as he struggled to get out of the narrow body of the plane had not been one of such deep regret. The pilot lifted me free, then disappeared somewhere; the truth is I could pay little attention to anything but the wreckage before me: piles of brick and shattered glass and upturned roots and a suddenly monotonous view of the neighboring fields, the swath of woods that had once divided Randall’s house from the surrounding farms razed to tree stump after tree stump. Oddly, a single wall from the Gallery of Maps still stood—as if the destruction were a result of a tornado not a wrecking ball—its water stains and spidery fissures untouched, oblivious. I thought of Randall pointing out the various cities he planned to visit. If it were Europe he’d say Verona and Venice. For Shakespeare. If South America he’d point to Chile. Bolivar.