Disciples

by Austin Wright

  We got off at Stump Island. I had never been to Stump Island. We walked through the woods to an open place with a house and another building shaped like a great big slinky except straight. We went into the house. We had a picnic.

  It was time to sleep. It’s your job to watch him Loomer said. Don’t fall asleep a sentry never sleeps.

  I sat down in the corner of the room with a gun Loomer found. It was a rifle. I sat it across my lap while David curled up in a corner and went to sleep and I tried to watch him in the dark and not fall asleep.

  In the middle of the night the rifle went bang and jumped me up. A match lit and David sat up like a raccoon in the garbage and Loomer in his underwear with a lamp. What happened.

  I don’t know I said. The gun went off.

  What made it go off.

  It went off by itself I said.

  Be careful with it Loomer said. Trial in the morning. We don’t want anybody miss that.

  18

  Lena Fowler Armstrong

  Harry says we didn’t and I thought we did, so who’s wrong? He sleeps in his hotel a few blocks away while I wait in bed until it’s time to get up. Even after fifty years, how could he forget the trellis, the car, the front room when Mother was out?

  My mistake. Merging Harry all preparation with Clark all fulfillment. First one, then the other. Plus Ted before either of them. I remember now. It was because I never told Harry about Ted, allowing him to believe me virgin like himself. No such drag on Clark, who knowing all went zip to the point. Imagine forgetting that Harry was Harry and Clark Clark. I suppose I never did tell Harry about Ted, so to this day he thinks. Never mind. My, how memory returns when you look at it.

  If he didn’t know about Alice Trent and Mother no wonder he thought I panicked because of sex. He wouldn’t have thought that if he knew about Ted. But his own panic about rectifying the omission makes me wonder why he came, taking all that trouble which I didn’t ask for.

  The brightening sky, the house on the harbor bluff which I can see from the bed. Plan the day for Harry, at least he’ll stay over a second night. If I don’t scare him again.

  When he walked off the boat, I looked for a ripened facsimile of the guy I remembered. It didn’t occur to me he’d look like a seventy-year old man, though I knew he would. I recognized him and thereafter couldn’t remember what he used to look like. The old Harry who was young swallowed by the new who is old. He had more trouble recognizing me. So have I changed more than he? My red hair. My adornments. In the restaurant I saw him searching me for the sweet shy child we both used to know. I don’t know where she went. Truth is, I don’t remember him very well either. Mainly I thought he was nice and we got along all right. I thought I was in love but I don’t remember why.

  Seven-thirty at last and I call him at his hotel. Woke him, I guess, his voice froggy and confused. Sorry, Harry. I wake so early these days, then lie in bed waiting for the rest of the world. The reason for my call, to invite you to breakfast.

  He comes to the house looking good for seventy. Out of breath from walking, not so good. We sit on the sun porch. He’s embarrassed, I must relax to relax him. He notices my silverware in the sun, the view of my trellised garden, the mirrored globe, bird bath, feeders. I see him thinking. It occurs to him I’m rich. He wonders would he have been rich if he had married me?

  My robe is red, my furry slippers peek out under the hem. I see myself in his thought as he looks at me and murmurs politely. Too polite to tell me how grotesque I look. The paleness of my face against my lipstick like a clown. He keeps looking for old Lena. My hair flares out, my body hangs like canvas on my bones.

  I was the girl with the soft brown bangs. My large blue eyes go pop. I used to lean forward familiarly, charming, now my face looks like a horse over the stable gate. There’s a hump in my shoulders, not conspicuous, but he sees it. I was hoping he wouldn’t. I would like to smile at him. Harry, I say. My voice sounds like a man’s. It was a mistake to bring him here. Why has age treated me so much worse than him?

  The thought makes me mad, a familiar irritation. I am infinitely superior to when I was twenty.

  What will I do with you today, Harry? Our horoscopes are auspicious. He winces, warning me, be careful about something. All the things that may have happened to Harry that I know nothing of. First I’ll drive you around the island. You can read the Times while I get dressed. Do the puzzle if you like.

  Upstairs naked in the mirror I squint to blur the view. My face is more battered than the rest of me, otherwise you might have trouble guessing my age. If you ignore my breasts and shoulders and arms and legs and hump. Dim the focus. The dark is best for both of us.

  Lena the good hostess. Down I come to him on the sun porch, dressed in white pants and a Mexican cape of spicy colors. Turban around my hair and red rimmed sunglasses. Car to the village. Along the shore in front of the affluent beach cottages to where the road crosses to the other side. The sandy parking space for the beach out to the point. The houses behind us and the dunes, almost out of sight. Step out and walk? Foggy over the water, and though the opposite shore is not far you can’t see it today. The beach is cold this time of year, the wind blows, Harry pulls his jacket around him. It doesn’t affect me. I’m probably healthier than he. Shivering on the sand in his jacket, he bulges. Old men are bigger than young, their necks are thicker. He’ll probably have a potbelly like a pregnant woman when I get him out of his clothes, if I do. He’ll be at least as embarrassed about that as I’ll be about my paps unless his male vanity blinds him. If it does, educate him. Show him his ugliness first, then show it doesn’t matter.

  I don’t care. He follows me onto the sand. It seeps into our shoes. He shivers and huddles, I swing my arms and stick my head up addressing the shrieking terns. I charge him where he stands reluctantly in the sand. He thinks I’m going to grab him and dodges like a quarterback avoiding a sack. He laughs but doesn’t like it, I see it in his face like a moralist. Too old to be playful, he puffs. Too cold for you? Back to the car.

  Come, I’ll show you the town. The Whale Shop with posters and scrimshaw and fish nets. Pots and model seagulls. Introduce Marjorie Billings. Meet Harry, I say. My old boyfriend, he precedes not only Homer but even Clark. So glad to meet you, she says. Harry tilts his head cute, like Dopey or Bashful.

  Fifteen Minutes of Fame, shop full of blouses and sweaters and silk things purple violet and orange. Pennants and turbans. Meet my first love, I tell the girls. Think of that. When your first love comes back fifty years later, I say, remember us.

  On the sidewalk he remonstrates. Really, Lena, he says, it’s not as if I were free.

  Well, we’ll think about that. I take his arm and sweep him into Gordman’s. Sporting goods. Girls, my oldest and dearest friend. Linda and Lucille look at him shrewdly. Isn’t he sweet? I say. Well young man, Linda says, take good care of Lena, she deserves all the good care she can get. Aren’t friends nice?

  Library, beauty salon. Art store, where I get my supplies. He doesn’t know I paint, so I tell him. Oils and watercolors. I also weave and embroider. I quit the piano, arthritic fingers.

  Suddenly it’s lunch time. Mrs. O’Bannon’s Tea House, with the gazebo view over the harbor, where the ferry comes in, loads, and goes out again. I explain vibrations and emanations. Radiations which no scientific instrument has picked up because science hasn’t yet discovered the medium in which they travel.

  His skeptical look is normal for one who has worn the blinders of science for fifty years. The question is whether this has ruined his open-mindedness. We’re talking about the spiritual realm, I explain. It’s outside science because science is physical whereas spirit by definition is non-physical. It has its own science, spiritual science, which is what interests me.

  He eats his eclair with a funny look on his face. I hear a word that sounds like “bullshit.” What did you say? It couldn’t be that. He stitches a hem into his voice with a look saying, You don’t really believe that st
uff, do you?

  Harry, I tell him, it’s my life.

  Oh dear. See how his eyes disappear into his forehead, gesture sweeping away flies, expression like despair. Oh dear, how are we going to get around a little chasm like this?

  No words for a while.

  Are you one of these science bigots? I ask.

  Bigots? he exclaims. That stirs him. The flare of rage out beyond rage snorting like dragon fire, what can I do but laugh? The laughter quenches the fire and he sinks.

  Has a gap opened between us in the last fifty? I say.

  How can an intelligent woman like you believe that stuff?

  What stuff are you calling stuff?

  What are we talking about? Astrology?

  Absolutely.

  What else? Crystals?

  I maintain an open mind.

  Spiritualism? Mediums? Trances, sessions around a table? Lena, he says. I can’t begin to tell you what I think about such things.

  You don’t have to, I know what you think. You used to have more imagination, I say. I’m sorry this has happened to you.

  He draws his breath to explain the basis of science but stops, seeing it won’t do any good.

  We don’t have to agree if we love each other, I say.

  He brushes at the flies in his head. He’s just been interviewing a man who calls himself God, he says.

  You mean his name is Mr. God or he thinks he’s the deity?

  His name is Miller and he thinks he’s the deity. He lives at Miller Farm with his followers, who agree with him that he’s God. I ask how he snookered them into that and Harry asks why I believe my crystals but not Miller. I need to see for myself, I say. So how did this Miller get his followers to follow?

  There are enough fools around for every charlatan, he says.

  At the table in the bay window of Mrs. O’Bannon’s Tea Room while the other guests disperse and waitresses clear their tables, Harry tells me about a man named Oliver who stole Harry’s granddaughter and took her to Miller who calls himself God. Also a young black wooer who went in pursuit and saw Oliver fall mysteriously to his death down a waterfall. Then Harry himself went to Miller to get the child back, and Miller gave him the opportunity to ask God all the questions he ever wanted to ask.

  It sticks in my mind like a crippled kite on the wires, the idea of asking a man who claims to be God everything you ever wanted to know about God.

  The Daisy Girls meet at three-thirty. I leave Harry to entertain himself. Tonight I’ll cook him a wonderful dinner. When I go, he’s on the couch in my west-facing living room where the sun is bright on my furniture and curtains in shades of white. Go ahead, he says, I’ll be fine.

  My mind wanders through Mrs. Manchester’s paper. I can’t tell you what it’s about while I think about sex like a girl. Not quite a girl. For the record, if we didn’t do it then, make up for it now. To complete the list. That’s how men think, right, Harry? Like having a trip to Europe in your history to look back upon. You’ve seen plenty of pictures of the back of Notre Dame, so it isn’t as if you don’t know what it looks like. But the record says you were there, and that’s what counts.

  At some point he’ll talk about his wife. Her name, Sheila, Beatrice, escapes me. There are two possibilities. His marriage is breaking up and our old engagement is about to be fulfilled. Or we’ve reached the age where sex no longer matters. Marriages as old as his like an oak tree indifferent to games in its shade. His wife Sheila Beatrice Barbara (it comes back) has been away a few weeks. She won’t care as long as we don’t chop down the oak. Which is it? By tonight I’ll know.

  We can avoid the chasm by not mentioning it. Censor myself for a night. After censoring myself for Homer all those years.

  Back from the Daisy Girls I find Harry asleep in the chair, his mouth open, the New York Times sliding off his knees. He looks old and dead, so why was I fancying romantic thoughts? The crossword is unfinished, he fell asleep in the middle. He pops awake, startled, apologetic. I laugh.

  I cook dinner while Harry sits on a stool in the kitchen. Hustle like my mother, though I’m more organized than she. Harry on his stool is a child, converted from an old man. It’s the route to death, a U-turn you make somewhere in old age to zip childward back to the universe gate.

  He talks about a paper he wrote attacking everything I believe in. You’re too old for me to educate, I tell him. We have lots in common anyway. If we can make our memories agree. Our good nature and tolerance of difference. I don’t mind if you’re a science bigot as long as you don’t argue with me. He laughs at that. As long as you don’t convert me, he says.

  While we talk I wait for his news, the real reason for visiting me on Anchor Island. The break in his marriage or some other break. It doesn’t come. I catch his unspoken thought. He’s holding back his news until he can unite an old image with what he sees of me now. He remembers the summer haze trembling in the hot tar at the Marble Hill station. He remembers the summer afternoons buzzing in my mother’s living room and a certain girl timorously interested. He remembers the rich summer foliage of Sherwood Forest-on-Hudson like a green stain in the air. I see it in the old man’s head while he sits on the stool.

  Meanwhile I work, demonstrating what an able woman I am. I tell him my life. The heart attack that killed Homer and liberated me. The three world-traveling children, with achievements for the annual xeroxed Christmas letter. I tell him my cooking skills, my dinners, entertainments to conceal from the snoopy public the state of things between Homer and me. Harry says I have turned into a different woman. Though he doesn’t elaborate, I know what he sees: the seasoned woman of life I’ve become, hearty and sensible. I see the shift in his emanations. He is surprised to realize he likes me. Not the magic girl of long ago but the present me, the woman he sees before him. He likes me.

  At last he talks about his family. Barbara, Judy, Baby Hazel, Barbara’s old mother in San Diego. Still the news doesn’t come. A perfect home, ideal children and wife. I approve, admiring whom he admires, how happy to have such nice folks.

  He boasts about his career. Tedious but a good sign. His vita, his awards, his books. Promises to send copies. I lose details in the proliferation, he’ll think I wasn’t listening, and in truth I am too busy not burning something on the stove.

  He has his vanity, but he is milder than Homer. Life with him would have been less tempestuous. We would not have had the fights, at least not the shouting and screaming. Life with him would have been duller, but I would have welcomed the peace, unless I needed to go through Homer in order to appreciate it.

  As he talks I detect the melting of his resistance. Not from his words, just my intuition picking up a warmth in the old man that he hasn’t felt in maybe years. He is converting the magic girl of memory into me, with a spontaneous erection as he sits on the kitchen stool amazed at his luck.

  I don’t actually see the erection. It’s concealed in his clothes and I couldn’t see it unless I made him stand up. But I don’t have to see to know there’s an erection in the room.

  Dinner’s ready. I light the candles. We sit on two sides around a corner of the table. He compliments me on the elegance. The tastiness too, yum yum. Lena, this is really good.

  Don’t ask if it’s better than Barbara’s.

  Eat and talk, all energy now, free enough even to joke about our astrological differences if we don’t follow up. His conversation with Miller God and my collection of Angel Voices. He doesn’t believe in voices and I ask are Bernadette of Lourdes and Joan of Arc liars? All the visions of Mary, and he says something disrespectful, but it doesn’t matter now. I wonder if I can count on him to make the first move. If he doesn’t I’ll have to. I need to think up a move since time is roaring now.

  Dinner done, clear the table, while time shrieks like a dishwasher. Load it up, do the pots and pans, put things away. Back and forth in the kitchen, dodging collisions, avoiding opportunities to touch because it hasn’t been brought up yet. We are now crossing a
field between the woods, after which.

  Living room, sit down. My God I’m trembling. How calm he looks, more than before, a bad sign if it means he has given up the idea. Leaving it to me. Why am I trembling, I with my rich and rewarding love life? Is it all behind me now?

  How to do it? Old and wise, the simplest way just ask. Else surrender to death which is on its way. We’re on the couch. A snifter of brandy, another tactic. Harry beside me where I patted the seat when he tried to sit in the opposite chair.

  Take a breath. Do it.

  Harry, I say. Will you go to bed with me?

  Pop eyes. Shock, fear. Oh dear.

  Oh my, he says.

  Tragic though it be, I laugh. No? I say.

  Back off, divert the embarrassment before it’s a flood. That’s all right, I understand.

  I’m an ugly old hag. The emanations of his disgust, automatic repugnance. It burns me up. If I’m an ugly hag, he’s a scarecrow. Who the hell does he think he is, to think he’s more attractive than I? He didn’t say that, be fair. If I asked he would say it’s his wife. So much for finding out what brought him to Anchor Island.

  He’s worrying about my feelings. Before he leaves he repeats: Don’t think I wouldn’t want to.

  So I try again. Don’t want to change your mind? I say, bright and smiley. I shouldn’t have said it. The terror which is impossible to conceal, with its humiliation for me.

  Pretending nothing happened, off he goes to his hotel, that is, I drive him there. We’ll see each other once more only in this life, which is tomorrow at breakfast. I’ll have breakfast with him at the hotel and drive him to the ferry.

  In the night I take it back. Perhaps he knows he’s a scarecrow and thinks I’m a bird. Sea bird. The egret of regret.

  At breakfast, I apologize for being impetuous and embarrassing him. I was foolish, I say. He mumbles, still no more articulate than last night though he can talk about anything else.