The Moon Pinnace

by Thomas Williams

  But in a very short number of minutes she would begin again to smooth and glow, to move her perfect body through his demented imagination now reinforced by memory. O golden-meaned radii, ivory fulcra, amber hinges. She was here already.

  He was drawn like an addict to the upstairs telephone in his mother and stepfather’s bedroom.

  Debbie answered. “Perkins’s residence.”

  “I’d like to speak to Dory.”

  “Whom shall I say is calling please?”

  She would say that; rote answers would sound expert to Debbie’s class-conscious mind.

  “You may tell your sister that it is John Hearne who is calling.”

  Debbie giggled and faded, calling for Dory. For a moment he worried that Mr. and Mrs. Perkins might think he was too old for Dory, but then, with a slight bit of snob guilt, he admitted to knowing that in their aspirations high school was terminal and the beginning of the breeding period.

  “Hello,” Dory said in the close, capitulant voice of a lover.

  It was five-thirty. If his sociological data were accurate she would be eating supper in half an hour. Come to think of it, neither of them had eaten anything since nine in the morning, when they’d had toast and coffee at her house; they (or he) hadn’t even thought of lunch.

  “Hi,” he said. “Are you tired?”

  “Pooped.”

  He didn’t want to see her tonight. He was too shaky, too cool. He wanted to see her tomorrow, not tonight.

  “Are you doing anything special tomorrow? If it’s a nice day, would you like to go sailing?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll pick you up at nine. We can bring lunch this time. Make yourself a sandwich.”

  “I’ll make lunch.”

  “Okay. I’ll bring a thermos of iced tea or something. Cold if it’s hot, hot if it’s cold. I’ve got this big jug.” The thermos was for his trip West, his escape from what he seemed to be getting into.

  “Okay.”

  The silence between them grew from fond-meaningful to oppressive as it lengthened and itself needed some kind of comment, which he couldn’t think of. And so he would ignore it, revealing his lack of openness, or his confusion, or his lack of a sense of humor.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” he said.

  “Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, Dory.”

  Farewells on the telephone always had frayed edges.

  From downstairs came the louder voices engendered by dry martinis. He’d noticed on the way in that something was in the oven and that the dining-room table hadn’t been set, so he changed into clean chinos and went downstairs to set it. When he was here such ordinary rituals were usually left to him to do, unasked, and he did them willingly because the alternative, getting enmeshed in their conversation, was to be avoided as much as possible.

  Amos Sylvester was a Dartmouth graduate, a building contractor and one of those tall, handsome men whose faces are so pretty they are not accorded the dignity, or gravity, given to tall, handsome men lucky enough to have at least one or two redeeming blemishes. To make things worse, Amos wore a narrow black mustache along his upper lip, below a carefully shaved, classically fluted slope. The effect of this pencil line was so purely, almost touchingly, cosmetic, with none of the coarse naturalism of hair, as if each morning it had to be painted on like a whore’s eyebrow, that it invited a patronizing response. Behind his back he was called, by some, “the Gigolo.”

  But then, John thought, he had never been very charitable toward Amos, even if Amos did aspire to resemble Warner Baxter, and even if his politics were right-wing prejudice and revenge, and even if his favorite poem, recited at length on any suitable occasion, was an interminable jingle called “Pete, the Piddlin’ Pup,” and even if he rarely spoke directly to John, but in his presence relayed all communication in the third person through Martha: “Tell him to watch his goddam mouth,” and even if once, among many similarly painful episodes, when he found that John, aged sixteen, was earning a dollar an hour after school in a wartime woolen mill, declared him independent and threw all of his possessions out into the snow, and so on.

  Since John’s return from the Army, however, wearing on his blouse the usual undistinguished but colorful ribbons everyone was issued in the war, Amos’s attitude toward him had seemed to change, and now there was an attempted joviality which John found edgy and uncomfortable. When he finished setting the table he went, warily, into the living room.

  “So he’s steppin’ out with the gal next door,” Amos said, still having trouble with direct address but signaling broadly with tone and grin that he was being friendly. “Just like in the movies.”

  “Yup,” John said. As a concession to this mood he accepted from his mother a dry martini, a misted, stemmed glass with a Spanish olive sunk in a chilly chemical that seemed to leap directly into his metabolism through his mucous membrane.

  “Little Dory Perkins,” his mother said. “I find it a rather strange choice.” Her expression clearly implied social, intellectual, chronological and aesthetic error. Not much left to poor Dory after that.

  “A girl’s a girl, Martha. Let our young hero have his fun. Ha, ha!”

  “I think he’d better be very, very careful,” she said, then laughed before composing her ladylike mouth to drink. When she drank she tipped her head over her glass.

  How unfair was he being to these people? These observations, these summary judgments…Obviously poor Amos had been unable to cope with the child that had come with his pretty wife, and (here he went again) the pretty wife didn’t mind that passionate rivalry. John often thought that he detected in her hysterical crying (such as when drunken Amos consigned him and his to the winter snow) the operatic fervor of a coloratura.

  What he knew with certainty was that a wrong word from him could turn the coming meal into a riot.

  So why did he come back here at all? Partly, he supposed, it was a sort of loyalty to his mother, who was always begging him to come “home.” There were also those of his friends who were still in town, and it was a cheap place to stay for a week or two. Amos wasn’t really around very much because he worked long, hard hours in a highly complicated, competitive and sometimes shady business in which the defections or incompetencies of his men or his “subs“—his subcontractors—might ruin him at any time. When he did come home he got semiplastered and wanted his wife’s uncritical attention. It had to be fairly competent, believable uncritical attention, though, and given that in her mind she, not he, was the center of the universe, she wasn’t always convincing. Once her collarbone had been broken but that, she had always claimed, had been an accident. There had been other lumps, sprains and contusions, not all of them hers. He remembered their inexplicable pranks, their unstable hilarity, with an ineradicable sense of powerlessness and dread. And yet, Lord, in his short life he had coped with characters much more vicious than Amos Sylvester. As a child, though, the world had sometimes seemed to blow apart in an explosion of gin.

  It had been after evenings like that—evenings not made tolerable by visitors, and he wondered how many children in the world prayed for guests at dinner—that he had reconstructed his father and his father’s world out of fragments as meager as the shards of skull and thigh that were the clues of paleontologists. All he had were the words of his mother, and did these substantiate ape, mammoth or man? Amos, she told him with pride, had made her destroy all his father’s photographs and letters and hadn’t let her write to him. Then maybe his father didn’t know where he was—a tempting thought, but improbable. And where was his father? Somewhere in southern California, when last heard from. “But where? What place?” “Johnny, that was years and years ago, and your father was always quitting his job and moving on. I can’t remember the name of the town because it was just one of so many.”

  She would say, “He was such a marvelous dancer.” Or “I was always such a little fool about a handsome man.” Or “You took after me—short and blond. I mean, you’re no
t short, but not really tall like your father.” She said, “But then Amos came along. We met him at the builders’ convention at the St. Francis Hotel in Minneapolis, and he just swept me off my feet. Your father was ‘fooling around’ with this girl, Estelle Lundgren, and I knew it, so I was vulnerable. And Amos—he was so satisfying.” This information came when he was fourteen. What he got from her was always disheartening and untrustworthy, so he stopped asking.

  His re-creations of his father’s world were different, and each different from the last. The one consistent theme was a legitimate reason why his father could not get in touch with him personally. This didn’t mean that his father’s faithful servants, or his agents, or even sometimes his bosses, didn’t keep a careful eye on John Hearne, Sylvan Hearne’s son. Oh, he was being observed and judged; regular reports were being sent back to headquarters concerning his health, his intelligence, his proficiency at sports, his honesty and his honor. When the time came, all would be revealed. A faint aura of this theme still, occasionally, prevailed.

  Amos had asked him a direct question, and he called it up from a more recent store of memory until it became clear: “Isn’t the lass kind of young—what we used to call ‘Concord quail?’ ” Concord meant the state prison.

  “She’s seventeen,” he admitted.

  “Then even if she’s willing, it’s close to statutory rape, and you’d better not forget it.”

  Amos’s voice now had a derisive edge—challenge and a promise of nastiness. The question was, why would Amos want to do that? He always did it, and with everyone. People would always look at him askance, a quick look consigning him to a doubtful category. Think of that self-imposed exile from ordinary give-and-take.

  In the kitchen the oven timer buzzed mutedly, as if to itself, and John was saved from having to make the demanded response. Dinner was a tuna-fish casserole, a money-saving dish Amos approved of. The subject matter at the table was, to John’s relief, a supplier of Celotex who was a crook, the Democrats, the Cascom River Savings Bank, Jews (in passing, and more adjectival than substantive), lawyers, the federal withholding tax—all the programs and minions of the legions of bloodsucking unproductive sloth.

  By nodding dishonestly from time to time John managed to stay neutral. In this company his responses had to be insincere, and Amos knew it; Amos had to know it. Did it please him to know it? In Amos’s vision all of life was reduced to its fraudulent underside, its creepy adversiveness, its nasty motives. And of course there was enough truth there to work on, but why make a lifetime out of the seamy? It was a mystery.

  For dessert they had plain raspberry Jell-O, one of Amos’s favorites. Perhaps it was the transparency that appealed—the mildest of pleasures to the tongue, but one perfectly expected and consistent texture, no surprises. Amos hated the profession at which he was successful. Sometimes he would come home and tearfully blubber about its injustices, even letting go so far as to shit his pants for his wife to clean up. On those occasions Amos’s sibling had always made himself scarce indeed, but as he grew older and larger he often thought that if he and Amos had been actual brothers instead of the tangled thing they were, he might have gotten to know the man, or even have helped him. If only he had the right to tell him compassionately that he was being a stupid, flaming asshole, that might have been a start. But no one ever did that to Amos, and Amos wandered, forever unhappy, in a limbo of avoidance and hyperbole.

  Ah, but in a week or so, or even sooner, as soon as his check arrived from the Veterans Administration, John would be free to leave here and to cross his country, a vast continental breadth he had seen only in part and intermittently from the windows of troop trains. This time its possibilities lay before him pure as a blank white page.

  7

  That night she held her pillow on top of her, slowly opened her legs and for a long time thought of the way she’d said, “Don’t”—how she’d said it. Was it a flat statement? A request? A pleading request? And what did it mean to him? What if she’d never said it at all? For a moment she was breathless.

  Her pillow had no weight; compared to his warm, gentle force that was to be gently met, her pillow was just dry bulk. He wasn’t there.

  In Leah, John Hearnes didn’t marry Doris Perkinses. If she’d been popular and beautiful it might have been possible, but she was not one of those golden people who formed their own class, whose families could be rich or poor. Even then, that sort of marriage was considered strange and risky. John Hearne might be sort of a loner and not really a Sylvester, but the clothes he wore, or the way he wore them, the words he used, the way he walked, all kinds of things about him showed him to be of that class. He was in college, and would never stay in Leah, as she would. She had taken a lot of the college-bound courses, but mostly secretarial and home ec, bookkeeping and things like that. That she might somehow go to college had never been discussed at her house. No one in her family had ever gone to college. No one had ever considered the expense of college; it simply wasn’t in her family’s budget at all. That she was valedictorian hadn’t changed anything. Valedictorians were just about always girls, usually girls who had taken easy courses, no languages, no math past algebra and plane geometry.

  No, she would stay in Leah and work like her mother, keeping the books at the Public Service Company—something like that. And when, every few years, John Hearne came home from far, glamorous places to visit, she’d be here. She’d be his “old friend,” whom he’d call up, take out to dinner and then for drinks at a dim hotel lounge in Northlee or Wentworth Junction and then…His sad, loving, forever hopelessly faithful woman. Except he’d be married and his wife would be with him and even that melancholy romance wouldn’t happen.

  He’d been surprised that she hadn’t thought of going to college. That afternoon when they’d put their clothes back on they went down and sat on the dock in the sun for a while, until the shadows of the pines came over them. “Oh, you’ve got to go to college,” he’d said, as if it were as easy as that. He’d always known, all through grammar and high school, that he’d go to college. It was normal to go to college. She’d told him that for anyone in her family it was just the opposite. “But you’re bright. You’re valedictorian, for Christ’s sake! I know your parents don’t think you have to go, but you ought to. Come to UNH and we’ll do our homework together.”

  “Where would I get the money? I’d have to take another year of high school just to get in the requirements, and who’d pay for that?”

  “You’d have a job part time,” he said, but what he couldn’t understand was that it was more than just the money, it was something like vertigo that the suggestion caused in her. It was out of the question, impossible. He became angry at her adamancy. “If you could afford it, would you go?” She shrugged. He shook his head, exasperated. She could understand his feelings, but he couldn’t understand hers.

  “Why is it so important to you?” she asked, and at that he seemed to grow shy, or secretive. She saw him choose not to give the true answer.

  “It’s just a waste of intelligence,” he said.

  “I’m not so intelligent,” she said, but she thought she knew the answer he hadn’t given—that she had to go to college in order to be of his class, to be worthy of him. This was, if true, something of an insult and also a thrill, because it meant she might then qualify as a possible mate, with permanent status.

  They couldn’t discuss that. She put it out of her mind, calling it fantasy, dream stuff, foolishness. But if she was so practical, why was she going out with him at all? She wouldn’t have said no to their going sailing tomorrow in a million years. Practicality or prudence had nothing to do with it; she wanted to. Maybe it was spring that addled her. She could smell the green, the moist humus of the garden, cool moonlight and new leaves.

  High school was nearly over. There would be the prom, her date who else but Robert Beggs, class day at South Beach, baccalaureate, graduation and her valedictory, which seemed more and more just simple and marg
inally acceptable. As the end of high school approached it was as though it was all over already and “life” was about to start; she knew life’s form and its schedules. A nine-to-five job someplace, marriage to some boy like Robert Beggs. She would find out the things she didn’t know, like what it was to give birth and suckle a child. Her mother had grown old at what would happen to her—some good times and some joys but mostly work, and at home dishes, pots and pans, brooms, clotheslines, stacks of folded cloth, everything done and then undone, and done again, until you grew older and leathery and lined. Some grew fat, the flesh hanging down into hummocks around the shoulders, hips and knees. Some grew thin in the arms like her mother, the laboring muscles jumping out like ropes. You hoped your husband wouldn’t be a drunk, you grew old and held your grandchildren and eventually you died of cancer and were buried in Homeland Cemetery.

  Tomorrow—this whole episode with John Hearne—was time out and didn’t count. Nothing would ever come of it. She would look at it that way.

  And yet she was special. No one was as conscientious as she was. Show her what had to be done and she did it. No loafing, no halfway measures. She did it and did it right, and if it wasn’t right the first time she started all over and did it right the second time.

  That small note of pride lent her the calm to sleep.

  She woke at first light remembering a dream more vivid than her window. She was at the railroad station in Wentworth Junction, standing on the platform next to a train full of Canadian soldiers, all of them blond, husky, smiling at her from the open windows and the vestibules between the cars. Their rifles all had canvas covers over the bolts and triggers (that must be a real memory), and over the public-address system came a deep, religious sort of voice, saying, “These are the lads who, combat-slain, shall never see their farms again.” They didn’t seem to hear the voice, but smiled on, all of them young and happy-looking. As the train pulled out they all waved at her. It was so sad and lovely she was crying. Her face was actually wet. She must tell John Hearne that dream, if she could do it without her eyes flooding.