The Moon Pinnace

by Thomas Williams

  Dory had noticed that friendship beginning, even with a moment of jealousy she guiltily shrugged away. Cynthia was her friend and erstwhile confidante, but she hadn’t been honest with Cynthia, and Cynthia suspected it. Think what she might have told her about the “real thing,” a subject they had theorized about so much over the years. Cynthia had come as close as possible to asking her about it, too, but always with a way left open so that the real question could be evaded. And Dory had left it that way, saying only that she’d had idyllic days with him, sailing and swimming, kissing underwater, talking in front of the fire. When in reality they’d never talked much at all, just squirmed together smoothly in their skins. But talk had seemed inferior to what they’d meant; she’d wanted him to do what he wanted. She wanted to be as sweaty and fecund as Mrs. Patrick. She wanted to be flushed, inside out, fluid with his attentions, languid after excess. At least she would settle for that today, in this mood evasive of responsibility.

  “Yvonne is nice,” Debbie said slyly. “Don’t you think so?”

  Yvonne did seem nice. Though her plump cheeks were pale and grainy, she was pretty, and looked pleased by life. When she spoke her voice was soft and came from a little smile. Each word contained that smile, as if it were about to break in two with quiet mirth. She was as tall as Cynthia, but unlike Cynthia she was very narrow in the waist and her breasts were heavy, so that she seemed fragile in the stem.

  “How come she isn’t married? She must have been sort of pretty when she was young,” Debbie said slyly. “Cynthia prefers her to Werner,” she added.

  “Oh, Debbie,” Dory said. “What do you want from Werner, anyway?”

  “I want him to marry me, what else? Then I won’t have to go back to high school.”

  “All right. It was a dumb question.”

  “You know his family’s got a castle in Uberbungenberg or someplace? A castle? Only the Communists got it.”

  They were quiet for a while, sweating on the hot black roof. Dory sat on the corner of Debbie’s blanket, which was soaked, and felt a drop run like a spider down her spine. “I think I’ll take a quick swim before Kasimir wakes up,” she said. “You feel like it?”

  “Sure.”

  She left Debbie on the roof struggling into her bathing suit and went down to the single room she had this year. Her window looked across the field, where Cynthia and Yvonne were slowly walking back. Cynthia was talking excitedly. She looked very happy as she spoke and gestured, while Yvonne smiled and nodded. Yvonne put her arm around Cynthia’s shoulders and shook her playfully, and they both laughed.

  The horse-drawn cutter bar passed behind them, the farmer high on his sprung iron seat. When Dory opened the sliding screen the newmown hay was stronger in the room. She put her head out. “Deb and I are going for a quick swim. You want to come?” she called to them.

  Cynthia nodded and came running across the gravel turnaround, but Yvonne smiled, grimaced and said something Dory couldn’t hear.

  “I’ll lend you my other one! We’re about the same size!” Cynthia called back to Yvonne.

  Werner came out from beneath the porch roof and said, “Swell idea! Are men welcome?”

  “Sure,” Dory said. Cynthia came on, ignoring him, and Yvonne followed, blushing pink because, Dory thought, even though she was so much older, here she was, caught up in this younger exuberance and equality.

  The Princess and the Zwanzigs decided to walk down with them, though not to swim.

  Robert and Dibley were at the beach when they all got there, Robert so lathered up with Ivory soap he looked like a plaster statue. When he saw the Princess his chest swelled and he ran into the water and did a horizontal racing dive, then a few strong strokes that took him to the raft, which he lightly boarded in one motion, ignoring the ladder. He sat there looking nonchalant, but he was really so pleased with himself.

  Ernst Zwanzig said, “Ah, Princess! So pleasing to look at all the young bodies!”

  Marta Zwanzig said something like “Zu vere imden fticka,” and shook her husband’s arm. He dropped his head and pretended to be contrite, then said, nodding toward Debbie, “A true Maillol. Everyone is a realist.”

  “Did you know him, Maestro?” the Princess asked.

  “Oh, yes! We argued, though I was a young man, and very…importunate? He died a few years ago in an auto wreck. When you think he was born in 1861!” His strange, motiveless laughter blatted, ending in ecstatic wheezes. Dory could not find the principle of his humor. That automobiles didn’t exist in 1861?

  When he finished laughing—he still looked at Debbie, who was gingerly wading into the water, her balance shivery and delicate—he said,

  “The human form—why do we never tire of it? Is it beautiful? Who says so?”

  They all stood as if posed, the Princess and the Zwanzigs standing in a row looking at the young ones. It was like a painting, everything hot but the cool lake. Yvonne waded palely, her large breasts compressed by Cynthia’s red one-piece bathing suit. One of her buttocks protruded, caught at the wrong crease; there, she reached behind her with both hands and pulled the leg openings out, that unselfconscious gesture of beaches, a woman arranging her gifts. Cynthia, sinewy and spare, splashed in and got her hair wet, its gleams extinguished. “Damn!” she said.

  Werner, his male bunch gleaming blue in tight rayon trunks, took three formal little hops, or false starts, before he ran into the water. His large legs were covered, as his upper body was not, with reddish-gold hair—one of those people whose halves simply didn’t match.

  Without his T-shirt Dibley was a structure of silvery white tendon and bone. He looked strong without muscle, as though his limbs were driven by his will. He looked at Dory once, then ran like a giraffe into the lake, his jaws hardening, or so she thought.

  “Everybody to the raft!” Cynthia yelled, and Dory ran toward the mild shock of the water. She passed Debbie, who shrieked at the spray.

  “To the raft!” Cynthia called. “To the raft!” Robert pulled Cynthia out of the water as the raft tilted, one rusty drum emerging, and they both fell back in. But soon they were all sitting on the hot planks. Robert reached quickly, self-consciously, into his trunks and produced the bar of Ivory soap, which they passed among them, each as aware of the others’ positions on the raft as a single organism would be aware of its parts. Yvonne lathered Cynthia’s back, Debbie Werner’s. Dibley sat next to Dory, hugging his skinny legs and shivering miserably, while Robert, his hands immobile, preened manfully, interiorly, his superior muscles casting shadows upon themselves.

  The people on shore seemed pleased nearly to the point of applause. Then, Ernst Zwanzig talking, Marta Zwanzig holding his arm, the Princess graceful in her long white dress, the spectators turned back toward the lodge.

  Those moments on the raft were tense, whether of ecstasy, pain or apprehension, but soon they all had to slip back into the cool lake and go to shore.

  In the days that followed Dory grew inattentive to the equation that seemed to have formed itself around her, x’s and y’s of emotion floating here and there—terms she was too self-absorbed to try to define. On her day off she took a sailboat and tacked across the lake to reach Cascomhaven. A car glinted behind trees and a woman lay colorfully on the dock among towels, lotions and magazines—maybe his mother. His little green canoe was upside down on its rack. Before she quietly came about she looked hard at the cabin, past the porch railings to the windows of the room in which she had been used as a woman and the sickness of this love had come over her. With a near-silent little rush of wake the boat turned away.

  On other days, in the afternoon hiatus of Kasimir’s naps, if no one wanted to learn to sail or children to swim, she walked alone or stayed in her room, writing him letters she wouldn’t ever send. Dear John, they began, or Dear Johnny.

  Desire was an itch, an anxiety; it wanted to become abstract, something that had no cause. It was distracting her from responsibility here where she believed she was the only responsi
ble one. She did her duty, of course, but not with the proper foresight, and she blamed herself for this. His absence, after his promises, even though she hadn’t believed he could keep his promises, seemed a betrayal.

  All she had left was her mind, or that part of her mind she thought of as collector, or intellect. This was uncontaminated. She needed words and facts to feed it, as if she were preparing for a life-important examination, and she learned each new unit with an almost visible (through the backs of her eyes, somehow) flash of permanence. Hiatus: a break or interruption of continuity. Maillol, she found in the lodge’s huge collection of old Life magazines, was a French sculptor famous for his big fat smooth graceful nudes. Rodin did “The Thinker,” which had always suggested to high school students a man straining at stool.

  “Dear John,” she wrote on her lined tablet. “We were all on the raft and everyone but me was showing off for someone else. You weren’t there.”

  There were two other guests. One was a Mr. Jean Dorlean, a young but bald and bearded little man who said he worked for the government. “Never mind which agency, my dear manageress. It’s all just alphabet soup.” He’d immediately taken this tone with her, and with it was a look that she could only think of as meaning “What have we here?”

  Seemingly with him, although they were not always together, was a woman larger and taller than he, Kaethe Muller, who stood straight as a soldier. Her feminine clothes—chiffons and bright silks with pleats—and her habit of leaving her blouses open so low that the others could actually catch a glimpse of a great nipple big as a strawberry, seemed incongruous with her posture and her lack of any makeup.

  Dory overheard strange sentences: “He thinks playing ‘Love for Sale’ over the radio is the height of sophistication.”

  “To sign his work with the numeral twenty! What pretension!”

  “Have you heard of a weapon that has never been blooded in human flesh?”

  “He made the death mask of Dollfuss and smuggled it out inside a bust of Schiller.”

  “I first met Labourie at Meudon in 1915; he was then a catamite belonging to the Due d’Alva.”

  “Walter Ulbricht was General Gómez, responsible for the deaths of so very many of the Spanish people.”

  “You will see, in November, how at last the American people have come to their senses!”

  “Catamite” was not in the dictionary John Hearne had given her. In the larger dictionary in the library it was defined as “a boy kept for unnatural purposes,” which she took to be sexual purposes. Dollfuss sounded familiar. Schiller was “German poet, philosopher and historian.” Walter Ulbricht was a blank. Poor little Labourie and the sodomite duke were mysteries that would remain mysteries.

  In his studio-shed Ernst Zwanzig made quick pencil and wash drawings of Yvonne as she walked about, posed and did dancelike swirls with a long, gauzy scarf. This had been an exercise of Rodin’s, it was explained—a model in motion—but it was startling to go by the studio and see that she was naked. On a table in the center of the studio, below the skylight, was a clay-and-stick structure that was going to be a larger-than-life bust of Thomas E. Dewey. After the inauguration Ernst Zwanzig would present it to Dewey at the White House. He had done the same with Herbert Hoover in 1929. Dewey’s mustache, though, and the wide, squashed look of his face were major problems. Great as the leader was, that pubic Schnurrbart of his would be a challenge to the great Rodin himself. “Das Bärtchen sieht aus me Schamharre,” he said. Nevertheless, Ernst Zwanzig would fashion a Noble Roman out of the American clay.

  While Dory and Debbie were alone in the kitchen scouring black iron pans and crusted broiling racks, Debbie said, “You don’t even try to understand Werner. You all treat him like he was a jerk.”

  “Cynthia doesn’t like him very much,” Dory admitted.

  “Cynthia has a crush on Yvonne. But he’s really hurt and nobody knows it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He told me. We went to his room and he even showed me his dirk.”

  “His what?”

  “His dirk. It’s sort of a dagger. It’s all black and silver with writing on it.” Debbie was bragging about this intimacy, yet beyond that she was very serious. “He said it wasn’t his fault he was in Germany. He was only eleven when his family went back there.”

  “Nobody blames him for that,” Dory said.

  “I don’t see why you all treat him like dirt. You hurt his feelings. He confides in me.”

  “He confides in you?” The word jumped dangerously in Dory’s mind, its meaning unstable.

  “He even cried. He said sometimes he even feels like falling on his dirk.”

  “You fall on a sword, not a dirk,” Dory couldn’t help saying, a bubble of totally unsought laughter caught in her throat like a water brash. She didn’t at all feel like laughing.

  “See? Everything he does you sneer at. I think you’re cruel!”

  “Me?”

  “So goddam superior!”

  Debbie, she wanted to say, this is me, Dory. What are you talking about? She reached to touch Debbie’s shoulder, but Debbie jerked skittishly, red with anger. “It’s because he looks kind of funny, isn’t it!” she said.

  “No.”

  “Just because nobody ever made fun of you!”

  “Yes, they have, Deb.”

  “No, they haven’t! You don’t know anything about it!”

  “Deb, no matter what he tells you, I don’t think you ought to trust him too much. It’s just a feeling I have.”

  “See what I mean? Who do you think you are—Ma?”

  “I’m your sister.”

  “Oh, God!” Debbie said in utter exasperation, threw her Brillo pad into the sink and stamped out, shoving the screened door past its traverse so that its hinges complained like overflexed joints—a twinge of care in Dory for the fixable door, for her sister and their history of antagonism and intimacy. They’d had fights, screamings, poutings and making-ups so often, but the time she remembered most clearly seemed to be the one always recalled, when, years ago and for reasons now forgotten, she’d slapped Debbie three times so hard, so unexpectedly to her and to Debbie that the larger one, her sister, that loud, muscular vessel, collapsed to the floor. Her voice seemed all that had been left of her, a cracked clamor of despair so disorganized Dory had felt like a murderer. That she had been justified meant nothing, nothing at all.

  Through the smudged window (that should be washed) she watched Debbie stamp across the field toward the woods, staggering a little in her disdain for the ordinary unevenness of the ground.

  18

  He rode toward Winota through the summer heat of his native state, anticipating the remembered in farmhouses, silos, barns and trees. The country was undulant only in distances of miles, trees along windbreaks higher than any rise of the land. A series of small signs passed on his right, each with two or three words.

  They had driven a lot. His father worked at the Winota Herald, as reporter, space salesman, columnist—how much of this was memory and how much was information given him by his mother, he could not be certain. There was the game of Zit: when you saw a white horse the first one to say “Zit!” got a point. His father’s Chevrolet had a leaping greyhound for a radiator-cap ornament, and the ornamental greyhound was a little loose, so that while they were driving it moved around and pointed sideways. There was nothing to worry about, but to him the whole world was wrong and dangerous when the greyhound didn’t point straight ahead. No matter how they tried to reassure him he cried and begged them to stop. His father did stop the car and took him out to the radiator and showed him that the radiator cap was tight, it was just that the greyhound was a little loose, but still it was wrong and he would not be comforted. He couldn’t remember it happening again, so his father must have had it fixed.

  Once his father bragged that on a trip to Sleepy Eye and back they had averaged thirty-five miles per hour.

  Dust grew on the inside of the car windows, yell
ow-brown talcum that grew up the windows until the panes were soft and blank with it.

  After, or before, they lived in the Park Hotel they lived in an apartment over the newspaper. Men came and asked for Hoover blankets, which were the brown paper wrappings from the rolls of newsprint. Every day men came asking for work and were given cabbage, potatoes, carrots and the like for their mulligans. Sometimes they were given coffee and a sandwich. The produce was barter given the paper in lieu of money. There were no jobs. The paper’s cash came mostly from county legal notices. He had probably been told this. His mother worked at the paper too, and they had a maid who got room and board and two dollars a week. A hamburger at the Loup Qui Parle Diner was a nickel. Brierley’s Orange Drink was a nickel. A small brown pot of baked beans was a nickel. In the evenings on the radio Kate Smith sang “When the Moon Comes over the Mountain.” He sent a dime and a box top to Tom Mix and got back a huge wooden six-shooter whose cylinder turned. He also listened to Skippy and Tailspin Tommy, excruciating when the Atwater Kent squealed and faded as Skippy approached the haunted house, which was almost too frightening anyway. He dreamed that he was taking a leak on an old piece of wood and woke up sopping. Hot lead, silver as silver, the linotypist a man with two missing fingers on his left hand, the shiny stumps round and cataclysmic, a warning. He and Alice Giefer, a little girl with orange freckles, ate sand in her sandbox.

  Once he went down to his father’s office and asked for a nickel. His father looked at him seriously and said he guessed he’d have to get an allowance, which scared him because it sounded bad, but an allowance meant he’d get a nickel a week to spend or save as he wanted. He wanted a beautiful little pot-metal Packard, with real turning wheels. What was the name of those toys? It would come back.

  As he came back. Silver mirages, mirrors of thin water on the cement highway. The water tower rose before the sign appeared. He stopped to look at both. Memory here? Maybe, but he wasn’t sure.