The Moon Pinnace

by Thomas Williams

  John Cotter was short, dark and quiet, almost immobile at times, like a woods animal listening for danger. Davy Whipple was the handsome one, whose self-confidence was a wonder, who always, for instance, went out with those girls who tended to stun ordinary mortals with their beauty. His sister Kate was of this category; maybe that was the reason for his confidence.

  When the three of them were together they were, as always, aware of potential judgments that might be unsaid but could never be ignored; each had more relaxing acquaintances, he was certain. That he should have met these particular friends on his last night, with Dory on his mind and his quest or flight ahead of him, was the sort of coincidence he associated with Leah, the town of eyes and ears. Or of conscience, though he attributed no particular virtues to Leah. “I was born in Minnesota,” he said once in high school. “Land of the sky-blue waters; land of ten thousand lakes.”

  “Hey! Really?” Davy Whipple said.

  John Cotter said, “ ‘When my father got me, his thoughts were not upon me.’”

  Davy Whipple added, “ ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ ”

  Maybe they had influenced each other. Pretension, except for theirs, perhaps—their brand of it—would always be identified. One of them had discovered Isak Dinesen’s “The Deluge at Norderney,” and they could still quote from it.

  “Father,” I said, remembering again how we had sailed together, “is Baron Gersdorff my father? Do you know the man?”

  “Leave the women’s business alone,” he said. “Here you are, Jonathan, a seaworthy ship, whoever built you.”

  Last night his friends had been in a somber mood. They asked about his plans and were not inclined to scoff at his hints about the epic nature of his voyage. Each had his own romantic troubles. John Cotter’s were well known; his girl, Jane Stevens, had married a hero of the submarines, a handsome, good-natured idiot who had been discharged while John Cotter was still in the Army. Davy Whipple was in love with a girl in Chicago who was six years older than he was. They all took this age business seriously; when he’d be twenty-five, she’d be thirty-one; when he’d be thirty, she’d be thirty-six; when he’d be thirty-six, she’d be forty-two. In other words he’d have this old lady on his hands, and yet he loved her. Letty was her name. Dark looks across the smoky room.

  Futzie’s Tavern was a workingmen’s place few of their contemporaries ever patronized, though they might in later years when the flexible charms of youth wore away. Old men in work clothes ate hard-boiled eggs and drank draft beer at grimy and mismatched tables. Some played cards. None of the men spoke much, but from the radio behind the bar, never fiddled with but merely turned on, came romantic ballads, news, ads, whatever—a veil of sound that gave privacy. Futzie, an old man whose ethnic origins were vaguely Baltic, had been disconcerting when they first knew him because all of his communicating was done at the level of a yell, but he liked them and sold them beer after legal hours from a basement window out in back.

  “On the other hand,” Davy said, “my sister informs me that Johnny Hearne, here, is something of a cradle robber.”

  “In Leah everybody thinks they know everything,” John said.

  “She was at the lake and saw you and Dory Perkins sail by in your canoe. Now, does that mean everything? Is that prima facie evidence of everything?”

  John Cotter looked from one to the other, reserving comment and even expression. Davy watched, waiting for some kind of answer but not about to force the matter. It would have been easy enough to indicate to them that the subject was closed.

  “I guess I’m pretty serious about it, to tell the truth,” John said.

  So they were all serious about it. They gave him permission, for the moment, to be as serious about it as he wanted; that was what friends were for. “Maybe I’ll marry her,” he added. Saying the words made them official and the concept suddenly adult, generational in its implications, enormous, as though distant cathedral bells rang in a new life or tolled for lost boyhood.

  “Well, good luck, Johnny, whatever happens,” John Cotter said.

  “We’re all going off somewhere and I suppose we’ll all come back to Leah once in a while, for one reason or another.”

  “Funerals, mostly,” Davy Whipple said.

  “Lugubrious. Lugubrious,” John Cotter said.

  “Weddings, then.”

  “Concupiscence saps a man’s juices, makes him soft.”

  “Afterwards, you mean.”

  “Soft as a daisy petal drooping with dew.”

  At closing time they briefly considered buying some beer from Futzie and continuing elsewhere, but no one had a subject to talk about. The general excitement, partly of the war and their having grown up, had faded now. They were veterans at twenty-one, but that claim, if made, would be for show, or for some other purpose not necessarily honest. It was a time to go off alone, probably; grand events, if there were such things, were controlled, or more likely uncontrolled, by their elders far away. As for John Hearne, he would try to find out where he’d been before he could speculate about the future. Best to head out alone.

  As he rode across Vermont another phrase began to sound in his head, and he was surprised to find in it nostalgia. Was Leah, in some disputed way, home? Was he that far away from it already? The repeated phrase was Spanish: agua caliente, agua caliente. Every year in deep summer the old man who came with a scythe to mow the high grass along the road to the cabin sharpened his blade with a long stone, helve against his breast, the stone singing on the blade, agua caliente, agua caliente. The words, he finally discovered, came from a name he must have seen long before on a map, a place in Mexico called Hot Water, but before that definite information had arrived he’d heard them very plainly, over and over, in the old man’s lifelong ritual of stone and blade. With the memory came the heavy heat of summer and the sweet new-mown grass.

  Toward noon he was hungry in a dry, abstract way, the vibrations and wind a whole way of existing; if he stopped he might grow dizzy in that silence. He ought to stop in the next town, check his fuel and oil, and if he could swallow against the dryness in his mouth and throat, put something into himself. As he came to the summit of a long hill, almost a mountain, he saw weather ahead of him, a line of darkness approaching from the west. From his high vista the distant clouds with their blue-black roots seemed below him, but his road led down, and they were coming on.

  The words agua caliente, agua caliente formed in his dry mouth, evoking the summer blue of Cascom Lake. The road descended past farms and fields, evergreen woods and groves of hardwood. He made his long, shallow descent toward the storm that would be the first of many. Wintry temperatures would return within that turbulence. He could be at Cascomhaven, the musty smell of winter not yet baked out by summer, a fire in the fireplace, watching a spring storm smear the water and bend the tall pines along the shore. Before he met this storm he must stop and put on his poncho, but to stop now might be dangerous to his resolve. At the lake, when he was alone there—and then with Dory—there were known rights and proper rituals. He deserved the cabin because he maintained it, but now he was leaving what he knew; there would be New York State, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and farther, where the people would speak differently and not know him. There was the question of his right even to ask to pay for food and shelter. He had never spent a night in a roadside cabin or a motor hotel, though in books and movies people did it without a twinge, as if it were an absolute right. And a motorcycle was not as respectable as a car. Wild and crude men rode them, oil-stained and wind-grimed people not to be trusted, who would soil the sheets and pillowcases.

  He had with him a blanket bag and tarpaulin, so he could sleep out in an emergency, but among what plants and animals, poisonous or crawling? He would have no right to make the smallest fire on someone else’s land, or even to stop there. Maybe in a desert among scorpions and rattlers, a place so forsaken and remote no one would care. But it was all maybe; he didn’t kno
w. Meanwhile he descended a long Vermont hill toward the storm.

  The storm was a frontier. He could turn around and go back; though it would catch him he could ran with it, not meet it head-on. Veils of rain hung from the distant clouds, curved swaths like blown gray curtains in a photograph. Lightning, behind the front, revealed higher cloud canyons that grew like geological uprisings to the west and south. Ahead and below him a mile or so, still not within the storm, was a little town, partly hidden by a fold of hill, white houses and the red brick of its business street gleaming in the last sunlight.

  As he came into the town he heard the flat deep crack of thunder over the noise of his engine. The sun went out as if it had set, and twilight came sliding over the town as he stopped at a restaurant on the main street. He was unsteady on his feet as he set the motorcycle over on its kickstand. His ankles felt brittle, still tingling as if they had absorbed electricity from the magneto. It took him the few steps across the sidewalk to the old storefront restaurant to get his land legs again. It was the first time he’d stopped the engine since he’d started it with Dory watching, nearly a hundred miles ago, on a hazy blue morning in Leah.

  13

  Dory’s responsibilities at Cascom Manor were great, but they were a little less worrisome because everyone else was so disorganized that her own arrangements were usually best. The person who presently owned Cascom Manor, or supposedly ran it, or who was merely its decorative hostess, was the Princess Ganz-Lengen. She had many Christian names, but her title was always used by the guests, most of whom were previous acquaintances of the Princess, or Prinzessin, or Princesa, depending upon the language spoken at the moment. Whether or not she was a real princess Dory wasn’t altogether certain, because there was a sometimes frowsy exuberance about the guests that suggested make-believe. Or maybe it was her own feeling, that princesses existed only in stories, or back in history, dressed in strange costumes, and were the daughters of kings. There were, or had once been, principalities in Germany, she knew, and in War and Peace there were odd princes and princesses who had no thrones, but that was long ago. She hadn’t asked direct questions because it seemed a matter of her own protocol not to be nosy, that asking might be construed as disbelief, and that one simply didn’t inquire about royalty’s antecedents, which were, in the end, all that royalty had.

  The Princess was a slender woman in her forties with soft, powder-white skin. Her hair was so black that it seemed unreal until you observed that the silky hairs on her forearms, though so fine as to be invisible from a short distance, were also jet black. She never shaved; it was as if she had never heard of the custom. Some of the fine hairs on her legs were several inches long, and from the crotch of her bathing suit came a curl or two of coarser black. In a sleeveless dress or blouse her armpits flashed black fur.

  Softness, though, was her most remarkable quality. Her fingers seemed to have no weight at all, but floated away from touch like waterweed fronds. Her skin took into itself the finest detail of a seam, even to the stitching.

  Her accent was English, but the slightly harsher, or at least different, sounds of German came into certain words, like “bread,” or “book.” She smelled of spices Dory couldn’t name—not the flowery scent of perfume but perhaps things like camomile, or sandalwood. She wore bright red lipstick, which made her face as striking as a flag—red, white, the pale blue of her eyes and black.

  Before Dory had taken over, last summer, there had been “the Swede,” a man who had acted as if he and the Princess were lovers, or ex-lovers. He drank, was surly, brutal with objects, dented the fenders of the Cascom Manor station wagon on the Scotch pines along the driveway and finally disappeared after having thrown the Princess on the kitchen stove. While the Swede was disappearing, Dory treated the mild burn on the Princess’s hip and buttock with tannic acid. The elastic of her panties had cast its image deeply into her skin.

  “He was so upset!” the Princess said. “So disturbed! One really worries about the poor man!”

  Dory had been more worried about what the Swede would do next; his anger and frustration had a convincing intensity, as if they were justified. But he did disappear, driving off in his old car. Sometime during the winter he died, “by his own hand,” the Princess wrote to her on stationery with a coronet and coat of arms. Ex aequo et bono was the motto beneath the coat of arms, which was a shield with quarterings, one a checkerboard, another a fish. The letter asked Dory if she would continue with the duties she had assumed on the Swede’s disappearance. She would get an increase in pay to thirty-five dollars a week, room and board.

  It had been while she applied the cool tannic acid solution to the Princess’s soft white hem-etched hip and buttock with cotton batting that she’d thought more about the idea of one’s antecedents. It all seemed un-American, yet she knew many people, including her friend Cynthia Fuller, who took great and continuing pride in their ancestors. Cynthia was a “Mayflower descendant,” and this knowledge was always there for sustaining purposes whenever Cynthia might need it. Dory’s own name, Perkins, and her mother’s maiden name, Sleeper, seemed perfectly undistinguished, lines of amorphous toilers going back, back into the repetitious murk of time. But here was the Princess, her printed cotton skirt up to her waist, her rayon panties halfway down across her white buttocks, looking, from this angle at least, the most ordinary haired, pored and creased female. Still, she did seem more valuable, all of her, even the ancient crater there of a pimple, long healed; even the imagined manipulations of hand and toilet paper had a dainty grace about them, and the effect came from a veil of nobility that Dory could not quite remove from her mind. The Princess’s accent was a specific difference between her and ordinary mortals, but in all the rest, even to her ignored wiry hairs, she was merely a forty-two-year-old woman with rather poor body tone.

  The Princess had hummed a little and trembled nervously at what must have been minor pain, but was not modest or skittish at all about having her panties down and her behind revealed, maybe because Dory was a commoner, or servant, or New Hampshire peasant. She wondered about that; a note of Yankee Doodle disdain sounded faintly in her soul like a distant bugle.

  But the Princess was amiable, in her distracted way. She didn’t seem capable of anger, “rising above” leaky roofs, plugged plumbing, being thrown by a madman onto the black gas stove, its burners, though out, still hot enough to sear her regal skin. The Swede had been more impressed by his act than she was. After a while Dory had come to understand that the Swede, no matter who he was or how he’d come into the Princess’s service, could not be fired because princesses did not hire and fire; it was as if their people were inherited, like servitors or populations. But the Swede had left her service “by his own hand,” and this summer Dory would have to oversee hiring and firing, maintenance and provisioning, among her other duties. The Princess’s cook, a man in his sixties named Kasimir, couldn’t speak much English or drive a car. He could speak French, and Dory had built upon the slim knowledge of French she had gained in high school until she could understand his lists and even some of his conversation. On his day off she did the cooking.

  On the day John Hearne left Leah her mother drove her out to the lake and around through the little town of Cascom to Cascom Manor, whose wooden sign and mailbox, she noticed, because she would have to fix them, had been knocked into the ditch by a snowplow during the winter. The long driveway was bordered by Scotch pines, aliens planted twenty years before by a previous owner. The lodge was a farmhouse of three stories that looked taller and more massive than it was because on each higher story the windows were smaller than the ones just below them. The roof didn’t have much pitch to it, which caused leaking around the dormers that had been added in 1911, when the house had first been used as an inn. This sort of knowledge came from the research of curious and proprietary guests who wrote, some of them, long essays in the Cascom Manor Log, a thick blank book kept on the pine mantel in the library.

  Her mother drove aroun
d to the front of the lodge, which looked through a frame of tall tamaracks to a broad field leading down to the wooded shore of the lake. No one else was here yet, but Dory had the keys. Before her mother could leave it was necessary to see if the telephone worked so that she could begin the process of awakening the old place from its musty winter sleep. Her mother came in with her, a little hesitant, quieted by this public place with its large rooms and with Dory’s responsibility for it. “Them people,” she always called the foreigners from the south. “When are them people going to git here?”

  Dory was on the phone calling King’s Garage in Cascom to have them bring the car battery, which had been in their care all winter, and install it in the ’39 Ford station wagon. With the phone and the station wagon working she could begin.

  “I’ll pick up the Princess and Kasimir in Wentworth Junction Thursday,” she said.

  “The Princess!” her mother said, with a quick laugh; her strained belief was something like Dory’s own.

  It was a good clear drying day so her mother helped her open shutters and windows, and then, getting water from the old hand pump at the well, they made coffee, which was a little stale from its long winter in a paper sack, brought out wicker chairs and sat on the long screened porch. Her mother had to be back at work soon, but Dory felt in her a desire for questions and answers, the ritual giving of warnings and admonitions that made a mother feel that she had at least tried to do her duty. While the stale air of the lodge changed they sipped their black coffee and looked down at the lake. Dory searched the far shore, two miles across the water, for the cove where Cascomhaven was, but all she could see was a wall of black-green pines. Pine Island, where she had been so apprehensive of the wind, was closer, still sail-heavy but uncapsized. Today the lake was so calm and blue no one could be afraid of it.