The Moon Pinnace

by Thomas Williams

  “So he went out to California,” her mother said. That he could be called “he” with no preamble meant that nothing could be denied.

  “Yup,” Dory said.

  “Is he coming back, d’you think?” Coming back because of her, to make an honest woman of her.

  “He’s probably coming back, I’d say.” But whether or not that meant anything, she didn’t know.

  “I know you ain’t in trouble, Doris.”

  “No, I’m not in trouble.”

  “You might of been, though, God knows.”

  “Yes.”

  Her mother sighed and shook her thin shoulders, or they shook involuntarily. “Well, he’s a nice boy in many ways, but if I was you I’d just go on doing what I had to do.”

  “I will, Ma.”

  “I don’t know,” her mother said. “You’re young for your age in some ways, but here you are taking care of this big place. You’re a lot like me. Of course, I never finished high school. Did you and him have much to talk about?”

  “Sometimes. He wanted me to go to college.”

  “Huh!” her mother said. “You ever thought of going to college?”

  “I never thought I could.”

  “Your friend Cynthia’s going to college, ain’t she?”

  “I know.”

  “You’re smarter than her.”

  “I don’t know about that. Maybe in some ways, Ma, but maybe not college ways.”

  “Puh! You don’t even talk like us. You already talk like a college girl, like that valedictorian speech you give.”

  Her mother was not chiding her for it. Things changed from mother to daughter, though the changes might be superficial. Her mother knew how superficial vocabulary was. And what her mother said about Cynthia was true, in a way. Cynthia never seemed to think of anything that was too deep or complicated to say out loud. What you heard seemed to be all there was to Cynthia. It was traitorous to think this about her friend, who was honest, clever and good-hearted.

  Her mother said, “Maybe you ought to go to college. Northlee State, maybe.”

  “I don’t want to think about it now, Ma.”

  “When do you want to think about it?”

  “I couldn’t afford it.”

  “I can help you with money.”

  “Ma, you worked the last ten years for your own money. You don’t want to give it to me.”

  “Who’s to say?”

  They had no tradition of touching each other in affection, but she was grateful for this offer which she would never take. Never. She got up, went behind her mother’s chair and shaped her mother’s brown hair with her fingers, undoing and replacing a mother-of-pearl barrette. The dull hair was like her own—a sort of universal peasant pelt that was always limp, the color and texture nobody really wanted. Some strands were silver, evenly sown throughout the brown. Her mother’s neck had begun to tilt forward, to settle into her shoulders, the bridging muscles at the nape seeming to grow higher each year.

  “You ought to hold your head up, Ma. You’re getting a stoop,” she said, something she’d said before and which meant that not age but posture caused this slump in the bones. Her mother sighed in response.

  Her mother’s name was Sarah; her father called her “Sare” when he didn’t call her “Ma.” He called her “Sare” when he was defensive about something, “Ma” when the family was more or less in harmony. “Ma,” or “Sare,” her mother was never really in the wrong. She might be wrong about a fact or a process, but not morally wrong. In all her life Dory had never seen a time when her mother should have been guilty because of dishonesty or selfishness. She could not think of one time. It was strange even to consider that there might have been such a time. If her mother was ever unfair or unreasonable it was because of an excess of principle, never a lack of it. There were times when she was hard on Pa, and this sternness might not always have been so pure, coming as it may have from resentment or even cruelty. Sometimes she drove him to anger, but that was what people did who were not strangers, when hurtfulness came up as unawares as nausea.

  Her mother took their cups into the kitchen and rinsed them out, using well water from the bucket. “You sure you don’t need some help with all this?” she asked.

  “No, Ma. There’s a million little things to do but I can do them all right. The crew will be here this afternoon to begin on the rest.”

  “I know you can do whatever you make up your mind to,” her mother said. “Will we see you much this summer?”

  “I’ll stop by when I can, Ma.”

  They went outside, to the black Chevrolet. “You need anything, you give us a call, now.”

  “Sure, Ma.”

  Her mother got into the car. “At least he ain’t here to trouble you. You got time to think about it.”

  “It’s all right.”

  They squeezed hands—proper at a farewell—and her mother drove in a half circle on the frost-heaved gravel turnaround and was gone.

  She was familiar with what winter’s long chill and pressure did to an empty house, so she got busy. Forgotten food, and paper unprotected from the mice was here and there shredded upon their trails and in their nests. The plumbing was simpler than at Cascomhaven but there was one bathroom downstairs and two bathrooms upstairs with all their traps and grimy porcelain to close and clean, faucets to check, the jet pump in the basement to prime and reseal, the gas water heater to start. The worst was bedding—dampish folded sheets heavy as bales, blankets bitter with the gas of mothballs. Then towels and tablecloths, throws and doilies, carpets, dust, dried water stains on sills and floors like topographic maps. Well, she had begun.

  Old Mr. King came with the battery for the station wagon, pumped up the tires with a hand pump, removed the jacks and got the engine running. He thought she ought to bring it in soon for an oil change and grease job, which she promised to do. The dash compartment was a mouse nest, the registration chewed and stained with mouse urine but still legible. With it came a delicate white skeleton stuck to the paper with the now odorless glue of vanished flesh.

  When the crew—three high school boys and the sister of one of them—hadn’t arrived by four o’clock she called the home of the one who seemed to be their leader and got his mother.

  “But, Dory, didn’t they tell you? They all got jobs with the pine blister rust because it pays so much better.” As for the sister: “Margaret decided she didn’t want to do it again this summer.”

  One lived in a world of such people; she knew that well enough. Why should they bother to honor their word, unless punishment was involved? What was an agreement? In any case, she had a problem. The yards, the field, the hedges and flower borders—all the detritus and collapse of winter had to be cleaned up, mowed, raked, repainted. The boathouse and the boats, the beach, the fireplace wood, the docks and floats—she couldn’t do all that by herself. And she needed a waitress. Here was an administrative dilemma. But she had contracted with the Princess to take care of such things, so she would.

  She spent the next two hours on the telephone trying to find a crew. She didn’t like the telephone much because she felt its preemptive ring to be an invasion of privacy, but she had to find some hands willing to work. It was late; school had been out too long and those of any competence had already made plans. Finally she called Cynthia Fuller, more for sympathy than anything else.

  “I’m surprised at Margaret,” Cynthia said. “She might have told you, at least. As for her brother, he’s always been the sort of child who licked the snot off his upper lip. And now he’s going to be a senior next fall, so he wants a man’s job. So typical. Why don’t you try Robert Beggs? He’ll do anything for you.”

  “You know he’s got to work for his father.”

  “Boy children don’t always enjoy working for their fathers. Look, Dory. Let me do some calling. I’ve got some ideas. Trust me?”

  She was tired, and grateful that some effort might be going on without her, no matter how little faith she
had in it, so she thanked Cynthia, who seemed eager to hang up, and went on with her work. Tomorrow she would call the manager of the Community Center, who was also a Scout leader. Often there were notices on the bulletin board from kids who wanted work. She didn’t think anything would come of Cynthia’s efforts, but at least she had an excuse to stop using the telephone for a while.

  She’d meant to go in to the general store in Cascom and get some supplies, but now it was too late. There were a few wintered-over cans in the pantry, one a No. 2 can of baked beans, so she heated that up. The sauce was grainy from having been frozen, but edible.

  It was eight o’clock, the sun low and the air beginning to cool. Gold came through the western windows, held by the lively motes of dust her labors had stirred into the dark-cornered rooms—the dining room’s empty tables and chairs, the chintz-covered couches, chairs and ottomans, the bridge lamps of the long living room, the smaller library through a plaster arch, where most of the books in the glass-fronted bookcases were an ancient red, faded rose. Some of the titles were: The Vanished Messenger, by E. Phillips Oppenheim, The Boy Trapper, by Harry Castlemon, Paris Salons, Cafe’s, Studios, by Sisley Huddleston, and Word Pictures of Japan, by Elizabeth Marker Willoughby. They seemed always to have been old, and to pick one out, take it to her room and read it, as she had done, seemed a journey into an alternate past, one that hadn’t much changed whatever events had led to the present. In those books “the War” was another war, and the cultivated voices that spoke to her flattered and lied, implying that she was one of them. Cynthia would have been more comfortable with their assumptions.

  Cynthia: when the pale, skinny girl had arrived in Leah in the fifth grade she had been accepted because in the fifth grade everyone was accepted, the children then still tolerant of unselfconscious foibles. Ten was a good age, before the second skin of conformity and self-consciousness hardened into dogma, before teachers and most adults became foreign powers. Cynthia was called upon to play her violin in assembly—to them then an interesting skill rather than a badge of queerness. Dory had been flattered when Cynthia walked home with her, as excited as a lover when this girl marked by talent chose her as a friend.

  Cynthia still lived in the small, dim apartment with her mother and younger brother, downstreet on the square, above Trask’s Pharmacy. Her mother was sickly, and didn’t work; their money came from the father, who sent it through the mail. When Cynthia first used the word “alimony,” Dory, because of the sound of it and the way Cynthia said it, thought it meant something like “a disease that was a crime to have,” and that Cynthia’s mother, having this alimony, had been sentenced to live in Leah, a place where she knew no one. They had come from Boston, where they had lived on Symphony Road, a name that was pretty and must have had something to do with Cynthia’s violin. Though Dory had sorted these things out over the years, at some atavistic level that could not be reached for reassessment, she still half believed them.

  In the later grades Cynthia had grown tall and rather gaunt, with bony shoulders and hips, but she had enviable golden hair—not silver blond but a true gold that could never be associated with the word “brown.” She must have taken after her absent father, for both her mother and her younger brother, Dibley—called “Dibbles“—had dark hair, mouse-colored.

  She did her fork and dish at the sink, put them away and walked, just as the sun set behind the hills toward Leah, down to the beach to look at the boathouse and the dock, which was now pulled up and stranded. If Cynthia called she would call again. The gravel path had been humped and disarranged by frost.

  The lake was calm, for Cascom Lake, smooth little waves silently dematerializing upon the sand. The boathouse, formerly an icehouse, a barn improbably close to the shore, had survived the winter, its ancient tilt no more pronounced, she thought, than it had been last summer and the summer before. One double-hung window had fallen right out, probably into soft snow, for not one light had broken. She propped it up against the gray clapboards, to be replaced later. The lake was cool and pink, a corduroy of the reflected western clouds. Near Pine Island a boat trolled for salmon or lake trout, the sound of its inboard motor a slow pulse barely audible even down the wind. Faint hammering came from a cabin somewhere on Merrihew Island. She sat on the beached dock, not minding her solitariness in the falling dusk, though the lodge would be hollow dark when she returned to it, the ghosts of its long past quietly residing in the blackest alcoves. It was nonsense to be chilled by what could never hurt you, but it would be strange nearly to the verge of fright to be alone all night in Cascom Manor, all those rooms silent behind their doors.

  Dew was falling, and she had left some windows open, so she went back to close them and turn on a lonely light or two. She could go home if she wanted to; the station wagon was there in the shed, a magical transport away from all this emptiness into familiar light and warmth. But she wouldn’t go home. Larger concerns, or at least more real ones, always banished the ogres and grues (John Hearne’s words). He must be settling in for the night, alone in some roadside cabin in Vermont or New York State. Maybe he was thinking of her, right now, at this very instant, just for a flash. If so, she wondered what he saw that he named Dory Perkins. If it wasn’t good she didn’t want to know about it. No, she did want to know. When did she ever not want to know?

  At the lodge she shut the rest of the windows and then opened the damper of the living-room fireplace, receiving on her wrist the desiccated remains of a blue jay, the jaunty feathers he had worn still bright but detached from the weevily brown parts of him she pushed with the backs of her fingers into last summer’s ashes. When she had a fire going she turned out the lights and sat before it in a deep wing chair, through doing anything.

  She had never been one to mind being alone, but she said, “I wish he were here,” daring with solitary speech the ghosts who might be tempted to answer. Nonsense, she thought, but the word was not as powerful as the dark spaces at her back. The fire grew and warmed her, her “loins”—did women have loins? He might know that sort of thing, and would do something odd and unexpected, no doubt, if she asked him about the word—something that should have been outrageous but instead would pass over into his new kind of whimsy. New to her, anyway, with the quickly passing shadow of possible resentment at being startled.

  Now the ghosts were gone, because he was more dangerous than any ghost. There was the fear of loss and also the fear of handling him. He had too many advantages over her, was too ironic and slippery, and yet she wanted to be connected to him and have his children. She was too young and there was so much time she could almost wish it away. The firelight flickered down the long room, on the dull gilt frames of paintings, strange on the outsides of lampshades. Her warm thighs made her think of his solidity. It was a terrible surrender, too momentous because she could never separate her pleasure from his pleasure in that humid glandular merge in blood darkness which seemed the willing end of her as she had always known herself. That she’d wanted to do it all the time, anytime, was the measure of her thralldom. Even now she could imagine his presence in such detail that she responded to him.

  There was another vision of them both, suggested by a picture she’d seen in Life of two ocean liners docked next to each other—first the high bow of one and then, behind it, even larger but dimmed by fog, the bow of the other. She thought of their two heads, just there in proximity, looking calmly at something outside of themselves, but forever a pair. That was the final judgment her self had made, which was to surrender to a dreamy idea of perfection she knew was not real life. But she did love him, a strange, ancient situation in which to find herself.

  The telephone at the hall desk rang so hard she imagined it jumping up and down like a furious child. She went to it, turning on an overhead light that made her recent fantasies seem tawdry. The mouth (or was it the ear?) of the telephone looked like a black daffodil.

  It was Cynthia, who said, “I’ve got you two! Two you’d never have thought of askin
g, so only I could have achieved this miracle!”

  Dory felt apprehension. “Who are they?” she said.

  “One is, of course, Robert Beggs—solid, steady, strong, boring—the perfect candidate. The other?” Cynthia paused dramatically.

  “All right. Who?”

  “Me!”

  “You?” Every summer Cynthia went to a music camp where she played in the orchestra. “But what about your camp?”

  “A short, sordid story. Daddy’s had reverses, this being a depression, you know—or at least he says so—and what with college in the fall he claims he can’t afford it. Mother thinks his current popsie—or is it poopsie?—is too expensive. So I must labor for my upkeep this summer. Are you pleased, or filled with consternation?”

  “Pleased. But it’s a lot of boring work, you know. You’ll get awfully tired of dishes and mops.”

  “Paupers can’t be choosers. What’s the pay?”

  “Twenty dollars a week, room and board.”

  “Lord! A fortune! I accept! But what about Robert—are you pleased by that?”

  “I guess so. I’m sure he’s a good worker.”

  “Hmm. He is your devoted slave, isn’t he? I suppose a devoted slave in close proximity could be tiresome. But I suspect there are things you haven’t told me, Dory.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “I mean about a certain college boy you once confessed to having a crush on, who’s been seen on the front of a motorcycle you were on the back of, so to speak.”

  “Yes.”

  “It is serious, then. I can hear it in your voice. If you don’t want me to mention it again, ever, just say so.”

  Cynthia was kind, but she was a little hurt. She seemed to have no reticence and didn’t like it in others, especially in Dory, who had been her best friend, after all, since fifth grade.