The Moon Pinnace

by Thomas Williams

  He waited until the water warmed, washed himself and lay down on the bed, trying for downy flakes and the sweet somnolence his vibrating motorcycle’s headlong rush had nerved him out of. This was near-exhaustion, and though his journey now seemed plausible, because here he was, somewhere toward the middle of the continent, it also seemed endless.

  The next day he passed below Gary and Chicago, the sky to the north angry and sullen, as if a great battle were being fought there.

  The cement highway was a narrow line floating on mud. Cars passed him at seventy or eighty, pushing him invisibly outward; then a force just as invisible pulled him inward—forces that were predictable yet never quite acceptable. When trucks came toward him at horrendous speeds it was like bashing through a wall to come out the other side amazed that he was still on the narrow gray line of rhythmical cement. Once two motorcycles came up on him from behind, one on each side, looked him over briefly and then sped off at nearly twice his speed. His night in a motor hotel in Illinois was a dream collage of velocities and near-disasters.

  In Iowa, towns could be predicted by their silver water towers seen over the curvature of the earth, like the masts of ships hull-down at sea. Then the highway turned arbitrarily to the north, a right angle that had nothing to do with topography and must have been the jink of a surveyor’s pen. Minnesota surprised him with its name.

  MINNESOTA WELCOMES YOU

  LAND OF 10,000 LAKES

  HAVE FUN—DRIVE CAREFULLY!

  He stopped beyond the sign and looked at the long fields and the scrubby roadside trees. Here he was; the land back there in Iowa was not home, and this land was. Only a child would see the difference, how even the roadside weeds were of home, a more benevolent green. Winota, his map informed him, was forty miles away. He would glide back in, unknown, to the place from which he’d entered all this feeling and seeing. Memories flickered within a more general one, of a long time when there was a child, a mother and a father so related in custom and law that from within the warm unit the outside world could be entered with confident pleasure. He seemed to remember a time when he was more generous and friendly toward strangers. Maybe the town was like that, or the whole state, and it wasn’t just that he had once been a trusting child.

  17

  Dory watched Dibley for a moment. Either he knew she watched him, in which case he must have an eye in the back of his head, or he thought she always watched him. She had heard that he was fairly normal sometimes, but it was behavior she could never observe because when she was near he always knew it. What did he think? He was painting the sailboat they had unmasted and turned upside down on sawhorses. He was strong all right, as Cynthia had said—so strong that when he lifted the boat she’d worried that he might break his long thin bones or herniate himself.

  But what did he think behind his silence? Lately she had begun to believe that she had the power to know what people really thought. She could see printed in the air the words they avoided, or hear and see little sounds and glimpses of words slithering out of choice in the mind as the spoken words were chosen. But Dibley gave her hardly any words at all, so it was hard to see the little tails of the hiding ones. Cynthia said that he liked her, but “like” didn’t have the intensity of his muteness or the immobility of bis face, his pale jaws hard as wood. She just couldn’t get him to talk. Cynthia had lectured him on the subject, but like a prisoner of war he would give Dory his attention and very little else.

  There must be fright in it; perhaps she gave him pain. She couldn’t imagine why he didn’t do his best to avoid her, but he didn’t. If he had “crush” on her, as Cynthia had also suggested, she didn’t think he would be so sullen and unhappy-looking all the time. She couldn’t read him, or find a scale with which to test his attitudes, but he worked hard, now painting carefully, each lapped strake of the hull creamed evenly white, his brush neatly saturated to its metal band and no higher.

  Meanwhile the arrow of her regard seemed to pierce his Camp Washonee T-shirt, an invisible impalement she could not seem to undo. She would leave him with his constricted thoughts, whatever they were.

  Up at the lodge, Robert Beggs pushed the lawn mower back and forth across the narrow front lawn. She went past him on one of his going-away laps, so he didn’t see her, maybe, went to the kitchen and poured two glasses of iced tea and took them out front. “Ten-minute break,” she said to him. He wore nothing but shorts and sneakers and was getting a tan, which made him look better. He had a good build, as they said; it was just his wheyish color that sort of grayed him out in the winter. They sat on the log that separated the lawn from the drive, in the shade of a tamarack. He glistened all over with sweat and looked over at the Princess, who sat with guests on the screened porch. He’d been looking at the Princess a lot, and Dory had begun to read something in his surreptitious glances. She knew the power of foreignness and of royalty because she’d felt them herself, not only with the Princess but with Cynthia when she’d first appeared in fifth grade, and in different ways with John Hearne because of his age and his house and the war he’d been a part of.

  When Robert looked at the Princess he was puzzled by his feelings. Dory could read him well enough, and she suspected the Princess could too. The Princess charmed him, asked him favors, touched him on the cheek with her ethereal fingers; she knew how, maybe instinctively, to acquire allegiance. All this bothered Robert because his feelings were becoming stronger than respect and admiration. Dory wondered how it would turn out, and felt a small but ominous twinge of responsibility.

  Robert had of course known about her days spent with John Hearne. Whenever a girl went out with a boy two or more classes ahead of hers, people became curious and proprietary. Depending upon their natures they thought it cute or something to smirk about. It was marriage time, sex time, just because you left the boys of your own class and went out with an older one. Robert had been hurt but knew he couldn’t compete with a veteran. He’d been morose because it had changed his plans and that upset him, but they’d talked it over and were still friends—maybe more so because now marriage didn’t hang over their heads like some big looming duty. They were honest enough with each other now for Robert to ask, “How old is she?”

  “She was forty-two last summer.”

  “Wow,” Robert said thoughtfully. “She doesn’t look that old.”

  The Princess wore a white dress and laughed gently at something Ernst Zwanzig, the sculptor, was saying, her laugh never an interruption but a sort of encouraging applause, soft as splashing water. They couldn’t hear it from here, but her bright red lipstick formed an O. As a princess she didn’t quite exist in ordinary time.

  “It’s funny to look at a princess,” Robert said.

  “She seems to like you a lot.”

  He was stilled by pleasure and confusion. What she seemed to see was an infatuation Robert himself thought unnatural, and he was not the kind of boy to approve of anything so strange. She wondered if he ever even imagined the unnatural or the perverse.

  “What’s she really like?” he asked.

  “She’s always been nice to me. She never seems to get upset about things. Even when the Swede threw her on the stove.”

  He was still amazed by that story. “God!” he said. “Can you imagine that? To her?”

  “He was a strange man,” she said.

  “Strange! Well, he did kill himself, I suppose.”

  “That’s what the Princess told me,” she said.

  “Throwing her on a stove!”

  He flinched as he said it. When he’d talked to her about John Hearne he’d scowled and flinched in almost the same way. He’d thought her at the mercy of an older man who could not be trusted. Robert really was a nice boy. All through school he’d never been in trouble. He’d always done his homework, as she had, and was always just there—solid, grayish and sturdy. No one, as far back as she could remember, had ever picked on him or teased him very much. When the time came for him to ask a girl to a dance he�
��d asked her, because they were so much alike. It wasn’t that they’d ever gone steady; they hadn’t gone out on any but scheduled occasions. She was the girl he asked to picnics and dances, and when it came time to think of marriage she was the girl who had come to mind. Eventually she would have agreed, too, if it hadn’t been for John Hearne.

  Robert might have been her husband. Strange that she had for him an affection as pure and bland as soapstone. His arms were solid as chilled meat, his kisses misaimed and shovy, like a lamb being bottle-fed. Or maybe it had been that she hadn’t moved for him the way she did for John Hearne, so they’d always had little collisions. She was relieved that she didn’t have to kiss him anymore.

  She took their glasses back to the kitchen. It was two o’clock and the old man, Kasimir, was taking his nap. At four he would come down and begin his preparations for dinner. Debbie and Cynthia, having cleaned up from lunch and set the dining tables, were sunbathing on a flat dormer roof.

  Things had been going better than she’d expected. Debbie, at least for now, would do whatever she was asked to do with a fair amount of cheerfulness. She was impressed by the foreigners and their strange talk, and by the long dresses the women wore, the “New Look” that was still rare in Leah, though they had all seen a thousand pictures of it in magazines, the women suddenly looking like tree trunks down to their separate ankles and feet. There was something peculiar about actually wearing this new uniform. It was not necessarily reprehensible but there was the feeling that its wearers were unreal, that those who showed themselves with no comment or apology in the decreed style were too easily led. But that was too stern a judgment, she supposed. What was, was. One didn’t want to look strange, and if all the women painted their lips vampire carmine and their lashes black, stood themselves on stilts, padded their shoulders, enameled their fingernails to look as if they had just been dipped in blood, perfumed their innocent ears and…She skipped a thought, a breathless pause like a skipped heartbeat; those were John Hearne’s thoughts, convincing and tyrannical, coming back disguised as her own.

  She sat in the kitchen, alone for the moment with her yearnings and doubts. From the screened porch came murmurs that at their source were words, and some laughter. From across the long field leading down to the lake came the whirr and clash of gears and cutter bar as the farmer from across the road took the first hay. Loudest was the high, wheezing laughter of Ernst Zwanzig, whose amusement never seemed caused by anything Dory thought funny. It was said that he had been the last pupil of Rodin, had designed many heroic monuments, and that his works were displayed in great museums. The Princess called him “Maestro.” Always, even while he ate, he had a cigarette going and he wheezed. His white hair was so thick it looked as if someone had carefully piled mashed potatoes on his head. When he worked, in a large shed next to the garage, he wore a blue smock, a red silk neckerchief and a beret. When not working he clothed his short, thick body in black suits with vests, gray spats and a string tie, as though he wanted to look like a posh or an “artiste” in a farcical movie or a comic strip. His clothes and manners seemed to her musty and used, as if both were theater properties too flamboyant for private use, the gestures as worn as the elbows and cuffs.

  With him was his wife, Marta, who was Swedish and looked a lot like him. In bathrobes, from the back, it was actually difficult to tell them apart. Their thirty-year-old adopted daughter, Yvonne, was tall and quiet, with an occasional sweet smile. Yvonne, the Princess had once casually informed Dory, was the issue of a liaison between a Hapsburg duke and a French governess.

  Also on the porch with the Princess was her nephew, Werner Ganz-Lengen, who hadn’t ever been at Cascom Manor before. He was twenty, had been born in New York but had spent the war in Germany, having been taken there by his parents on the last crossing of the Bremen. He said that at sixteen he’d been drafted into the Volkssturm and was taken prisoner in May 1945 by the American Ninth Army. “Was I glad to see those guys!” he’d said when telling them about it, but there was something too shining and bright about his desire to be considered an American. He didn’t quite stand or walk like an American, and he seemed too clean, blond and dignified to be an American of twenty. Debbie thought he was “cute.” Maybe it was that an American with his narrow shoulders, plump face and pale eyes would have frankly looked homely, but Werner acted as if he carried in him some great unspoken superiority and was invulnerable and friendly to all. Cynthia thought he was “vile.” “He says he has nothing against the Jews, for instance. How do you that? It seems to me in questionable taste, at this stage of history, for a German to say anything about Jews.”

  “But he’s an American,” Dory said. “He was born in New York City.”

  “He’s a creep. He makes me physically sick.”

  Debbie had listened to this conversation without comment. Around Werner she became almost demure, and had been seen to blush when he spoke to her.

  As for Cynthia, Werner took her disdain as a challenge and tried to make up to her in all the wrong ways. No matter what she said to him he would never display anger, and this infuriated her. His fiction was that she was a charmingly temperamental girl whose animosity toward him was actually flirtation.

  “I could knee that Hun in the groin and he’d still wiggle his invisible eyebrows at me,” she said. “Doesn’t his head remind you of a cantaloupe?”

  So Werner was fascinated by Cynthia, Debbie by Werner; Robert cast awed glances at the Princess, and Dibley’s vocal cords were paralyzed by Dory. Summer itself caused such tensions, she thought, because it was so short and complete, a whole life out of life with the warm breezes close to everyone’s skin. There was someone’s skin she would like to be close to, but he was not here. The brief summers around Leah were more like different countries than seasons. He moved through a summer far to the west, not this summer in which she had to be so constantly responsible. She wanted to put on him the duty of initiative; he could be here to use her and be used. Something belonging to her had been misplaced, maybe forever, but she didn’t have the authority to go look for it. And now these people for whom she was responsible were all excited by each other. They took off their clothes, strutted and posed in shorts and bathing suits, excited by all that warm skin. Summer was so brief for them, and there was always the loom of infantile paralysis, half ignored, that vague terror no one understood but saw in the pipelegs of children, and in the news of summer. In an iron lung the mirror was the face of the victim. A shudder, but misfortune and death had many forms, and life went on as long as it could. The breath of new-mown hay came from across the wide field and cleansed for a moment the kitchen’s static odors of grease and old gas.

  She got up to look at Kasimir’s shopping list and decided that “8 kitchen boilers” meant eight broilers. “Kitchen” meant chicken; Kasimir was trying out his English more than he had last year. But she’d better get ten, because Kasimir tended not to count on seconds or on children.

  The guests with children were a couple named Patrick who were so involved with themselves and their two small boys and baby girl that they lived a separate life concerned with manners and drool, cleanliness and toilet training. It was a case, as with some birds, where the male fed and taught the chicks as frantically as the female. The man and woman looked distracted and sweaty, and so disheveled that whenever they appeared they seemed to have just had sex and were still a little stunned by its compulsions. They seemed teeming and fertile, even as one or the other reached into a child’s pants to feel for wet, or changed the jerking baby’s diaper at the beach. They ate separately from the other guests, their table a little storm of hushed centripetal passions.

  The Patricks were set and complete with each other, but her crew was not, and she was not. She felt incomplete, even anxious, and had little sympathy for the tensions the others found so interesting. Equilibrium was in danger, and whatever happened would in some measure be her fault, so she had to be alert. She would have liked to shut her eyes and drift thro
ugh the summer in someone’s care. Maybe she was too young for all that she knew and saw.

  The great black gas stove with its many burners and ovens had a nameplate encrusted with baked-on carbon from the spills of the years: BETTY #3. She always thought of Betty Salmon, the suicide by lye, who was to her a presence in this house, a cautionary ghost whenever darkness spread through rooms and hallways. Dark was another season or country, with its own meanings. Betty Salmon’s dumb trick of drinking lye—did she take something like Drāno, mix it with water and drink that churning mixture? What if she’d known all about the agony she chose? With darkness, when the business of the day was over, these thoughts came. She wanted to have sympathy for Betty Salmon, but the manner of her death overwhelmed any easy charity.

  But now it was a sunny afternoon and she had an hour of freedom before Kasimir’s alarm clock would send him with an old man’s Weariness down the back stairs to the kitchen, his fringes of iron-colored hair in clumps he would douse with water at the sink and flatten with his hands. Then he would put on his white full-length apron and his tall starched chef’s hat, another costume, like Ernst Zwanzig’s costumes, that seemed more theatrical than real.

  She went upstairs and out the window to the flat roof of the dormer, where she found Debbie alone, sunbathing on a blanket, her sturdy body gleaming with oil. Debbie had been naked and quickly covered up her lap and breasts with towels as Dory appeared. They were fairly frank with each other on most matters, but there had always been this modesty about nakedness, and Dory thought it might have something to do with their differences in shape and size, as if they were as different as giant and pygmy, or man and woman. With her big bones and broad round flesh, Debbie was sometimes arrogant about her body and at other times almost ashamed of its amplitudes.

  “I thought Cynthia was up here with you,” Dory said.

  “She’s there,” Debbie said, raising up and pointing across the field, where beneath a pasture pine two bits of color could be seen, two people sitting on a boulder. “She’s with Yvonne.”