The Moon Pinnace

by Thomas Williams

  “Oh, we’ll get married sooner or later,” Miles said. “She’s such a domineering bitch nobody else wants her.”

  “How come you do, then?”

  “I don’t know.” Miles shook his head. “Love, I guess. By the way,”

  he added, “did you nail Gracie?”

  “No,” John said.

  “Just asking,” Miles said lightly. “Just asking.”

  Later, in his sleeping bag, the muted radio crooning its fantasies but timed to go off soon, John had one more thing to do in order to relieve an ache similar, he thought, to that of impalement. With his hand and his immediate visions of the sturdy blond girl, he entered her as deeply and opportunely as would the reckless, vivid rogue it was not his talent to be. But as his fluids gathered she became, against his will, Doris Ella Perkins, of Leah, New Hampshire, whose passionate synchronous desire, unencumbered by flesh and circumstance, welcomed him into thin air.

  19

  One evening at dinner Debbie dropped a large porcelain gravy boat, a vessel that looked like a pitcher and a saucer but was really all one piece. It cracked on the table edge and sloshed an extraordinary amount of sauce duxelles into the Princess’s lap.

  “Robert, would you help me?” the Princess said calmly.

  Robert put down a tray of oranges glacées, and using the lap of the Princess’s dress and a napkin they walked the hammocky mess out of the dining room. Debbie was mortified, tongue-tied and sullen in her apologies. In a little while Robert and the Princess were back, the Princess in another dress, and the meal continued. Debbie had disappeared, and didn’t show up for cleanup, either.

  Dory supposed she was in the room she shared with Cynthia, but when everything was done for the evening and she went up to look for her, she wasn’t there. Daylight was fading out of the dim old room, the window like the entrance of a cave seen from the inside. She had a chill, partly from embarrassment for Debbie but also, unexpected in these circumstances, from fear of the dark. It could come on very quickly, its intensity surprising her into involuntary twitches of flight that she resisted but not until her skin jumped and chilled. Betty Salmon, just behind her, or in a chair or beyond a shadowed doorway, might stare at her. The strength of Dory’s disbelief in apparitions was, strangely, an ally of cold fear. But never mind; she controlled herself and walked carefully out of the room. When she turned on the lamp at the end of the hall she was safe again.

  Debbie wasn’t downstairs anywhere, either. The guests were in the living room, some having brandy and coffee, a stratum of blue haze from Ernst Zwanzig’s cigarette dipping toward the fireplace and its open damper. Yvonne wasn’t there and neither was Werner.

  “It won’t be long before the Bolsheviks have the bomb…” Jean Dorlean was saying, pleased into mirth by this possibility.

  “That was his largest mistake,” Sean Patrick said, interrupting him.

  “That Teppichfresser? That madman?” Kaethe Muller said in her high, harsh voice.

  “That’s what he said, the columnist; that the New York City Fire Department could take on the whole Russian Army. Can you imagine?” Ernst Zwanzig said this to the Princess, who didn’t seem especially amazed.

  Dory checked the library, but no one was there. She found Robert sitting on the porch railing where he could look into the living room and catch glimpses of the Princess.

  “Have you seen Debbie?” she asked in a low voice so as not to betray him.

  “No,” he half whispered back, acknowledging her judgment.

  “I don’t know where anybody is,” she whispered. “Have you seen Cynthia?”

  “She and Yvonne went down to the lake.”

  “How about Werner?”

  “Haven’t seen him.”

  “Dibley?”

  “In our room. He’s making a ship model and the place stinks of airplane cement.” He got off the railing and motioned toward the field, and she followed him. When they were far enough away from the open living-room windows, he said, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “What does she want from me? She’s always touching me and I don’t know what she means by it. Does she like me a lot, or what?”

  “She likes you—that’s pretty obvious.”

  “But what does she want me to do? Touch her back?”

  “You might try it.”

  “But I can’t! I swear she’d have to ask me straight out, or put it in writing or something. It’s not that I don’t want to, I just don’t dare.”

  “If she didn’t like it she could just say so.”

  “But she’s a princess. I can’t get over that.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather find out and get it over with?” Dory said, wondering why she seemed to be encouraging trouble.

  “I think I’d explode,” Robert said. “Listen. What happened at dinner—I’ve got to tell somebody or I’ll go nuts. We went out to the kitchen and scraped off most of the gravy and then she sort of led me by the arm up to her room and had me help her peel off the dress ’cause it was still a little mucky and she didn’t want to get gravy on her hair and all…” Then he said wonderingly, “I never noticed how small she is. I always thought she was taller, but she only comes up to my chin.”

  “So?” Dory said.

  “The gravy had seeped through onto her slip, so then—I still can’t believe it—cool as a cucumber she asked me to help her off with that, so I did, and there she was, practically naked.” His voice had subsided, from awe. “I mean she wasn’t exactly naked—she had on some stuff. You know. Anyway, she got out another dress and had me zip it up in back. But before we went downstairs she squeezed my arm and looked at me, kind of smiling. God, I wish I knew what she wants!”

  “Why don’t you just ask her?”

  He laughed miserably. “I could no more ask her that question than I could jump over the moon. You know me.” He looked over at her, then straight ahead. “I’m not exactly your John Hearne type, you know.”

  “I know, Robert. I wish I could help. I shouldn’t have gotten you into all this in the first place.”

  “Yeah, but I…I feel funny but it’s not something I want to not have.” He thought this over, shaking his head. “I feel sort of queer about it, she’s so old, like with my aunt or something, but it doesn’t seem to matter.”

  They walked along, crunching stubble, heading down toward the lake parallel to the gravel path. The air was warm and completely still, and mosquitoes sang around their ears. Heat lightning, so far to the west it might be in Vermont, flashed silently behind the shoulder of Cascom Mountain.

  “Storm sometime tonight,” he said.

  “I guess,” she said.

  “She gives me those looks, but I can’t read looks. I might be dead wrong. If she’d just say something—I mean one word more. The way I feel about her, I don’t want to wreck anything. I think I’m a goner, Dory. I’m all hot and bothered and I can’t think straight. I guess I’m in love.”

  “So am I, if that’s any consolation,” she said, and they both laughed with a sort of bitter softness she’d never heard from either of them before.

  When they came into the pines above the beach she wondered if they had meant to come all the way to the lake. Out near the raft, in the very last of the light except for the silent stutter of the heat lightning, was a silvery gleam of wake where a white arm and shoulder rose out of the black water.

  “Who is it?” Robert said quietly.

  A slow swirl appeared next to the first swimmer and Cynthia’s laugh came very clearly across the water.

  “Cynthia and Yvonne,” Dory said. The swimmers approached the shore and stood up to wade. Yvonne’s large breasts, unhampered, swung heavily.

  “Hey, they’re skinny-dipping,” Robert said, and without further comment they turned and faded back through the trees.

  When they were nearly to the lodge Robert said, “They sure are close, those two.”

  “I guess they are.”

  “I don
’t know if it’s unhealthy or not,” he said, “and I guess it’s none of my business.”

  She had been wondering about that, too, unwelcome visions of the two female bodies pushing rudely into her mind. She wasn’t sure what constituted unhealthy—what caresses or writhings or what. It was a vague, sweet, hurtful area she didn’t want to think about.

  She decided to enlist Robert in Debbie’s case. She had to trust somebody, even though she might not deserve his loyalty.

  “Robert, would you do something for me?”

  “Sure. What?”

  “Would you make an excuse to go up to Werner’s room? I’m worried Debbie might be there.”

  “Deb? And that blivet-head? Sure. Anyway, he’s been trying so hard to be friendly it makes my teeth ache.”

  “She feels sorry for him. If she thinks I’m butting in I don’t know what she’ll do.”

  “She better be careful. There’s something slimy about that guy. He’s too polite. He reminds me of a little kid with a load in his pants.”

  While Robert went up to Werner’s room she went to the rolltop desk in the front hall where she kept accounts, schedules and the ledgerlike checkbook from which she made out checks for the Princess to sign. By the schedule she was to give swimming lessons to the Patricks’ two little boys tomorrow afternoon. In the morning she would have to go to Leah for supplies. Kasimir’s day off was Thursday, so she planned a hamburger or barbecued chicken cookout at the beach, if the weather was good. The laundry truck was coming tomorrow; she’d have to announce that at breakfast.

  Robert came back and reported in a conspiratorial voice that Werner’s room was empty.

  “Then where can they be?” she said.

  “How about the car? I’ll go and look,” he said.

  “Then there’s the two empty rooms on the third floor, and the dormer roof.”

  “And the boathouse and a zillion acres,” Robert said. “They could be anywhere. But why do they have to be together? Maybe she’s so ashamed of slopping gravy on the Princess she hitched home.”

  “She’d be more ashamed to do that. I thought she’d just be sulking in her room and now who knows where she is?”

  “She’ll be all right, Dory. She’s pretty tough.”

  “She acts tough. Sometimes.”

  They went through the kitchen to the shed where the station wagon was. It stood below the dark old rafters empty and innocent, its modern curves meant for speed.

  They came back around the lodge to see whose windows were lit up. The heat lightning had spread across the western horizon and flickered constantly, reddish-yellow rooms of it as large as townships, but still without sound. The hills and the mountain seemed to jump to their heights each time and then not be there at all until the next flash and the next. When the sound would come the wind would come with it, but now the air was so warm and still no leaf or needle moved.

  “Their room’s still dark,” she said. “And Werner’s.”

  “Old Kasimir’s still up.”

  Mrs. Patrick came out on the porch and looked toward the west, shaping her belly with her hands. The hemline of her light, loose dress was several inches higher in the front than in the back. Then, as if she had made up her mind about something, she turned around and went inside. Though they weren’t twenty feet away, and were perfectly visible in the porch lights, she hadn’t seen them.

  Something moved behind them, first felt as vibration under the feet, then heard. They both turned smoothly and involuntarily toward the heavy concussive sounds—thuds that had the authority of mass but were not really startling. A horse had come running from the field and had stopped short at the border of grass and gravel. It looked at them as if astounded, its eyes white all around. As they went toward it, it turned nervously, with exaggerated stampings of its rear hooves, so that it was sideways to them. Its dark coat was wet and it drooled a loop of foam. One hoof touched the border log and withdrew so quickly the gesture seemed one of great distaste.

  “Hey, boy, whoa now, boy,” Robert said soothingly as he went up to it. “You belong across the road, now, don’t you, boy? Hey, steady, steady now.”

  Dory had ridden horses and helped harness them and she always had the feeling that a horse was two creatures in one great vulnerable body, that a horse’s basic fear was that it was going to be eaten. This horse wanted to run away but also didn’t want to run away, and out of this turmoil came glossy, violent muscular spasms, a kind of warning to the omnivores.

  But the big skittish farm horse did in some measure want reassurance from them, and allowed Robert to take its tether in hand. Like molasses its dark gray penis spilled slowly out of its body halfway to the ground, then commenced an equally slow retraction.

  “I’ll take him back,” Robert said. When he tried to touch the horse’s neck it shied and jerked the tether from his hand, but it didn’t run away and Robert simply took the tether again.

  “It’s going to storm soon,” she said. The horse didn’t like the flashes, which made its eyes startle in their whites.

  “I’ll get him home,” Robert said. “He needs to be in the barn.”

  Robert led the horse down the driveway and she went inside. In the living room, sitting aside from the others in a shadow, Mrs. Patrick now nursed her baby, her blue-white breast rolled out of her dress, the baby’s mouth centered at an almost separate brown hemisphere. As Dory passed she heard the slight ticking of valves.

  The library was still empty. The talk in the living room was hard, bitter-seeming without her really listening to the words. “So one wog bumped off another wog,” she heard on her way back to the kitchen. They were talking about Gandhi. She took the back stairs, which led only to the second floor, then the main stairwell to the third, where a lower ceiling flattened the same spaces. The table lamp at the end of the hall contained an ancient bulb of clear glass in which long orange filaments wavered fragilely. The wallpaper, vertical columns of twined vines, stained and watermarked, had once been another color but had dimmed to rotogravure. The two empty rooms, as yet unmade-up for guests, were in the back, shaded in daylight by large maples that reached over the eaves. Now the rooms were vault black, and if she entered them the sudden, all-revealing flash of ceiling light would violently change whatever thing or event each contained.

  Debbie might be in one of them. She might be alone, agonizing in her horribly intense and disorganized fashion, or she might be with Werner and in that case it would be like entering a brawl. By what authority she would engage in that conflict she didn’t know. Older sister, parental proxy, reminder of law, boss of the crew—none of these seemed quite authoritative enough to challenge Debbie in her wrath. Though she was barely sixteen, Debbie seemed able to swell like some kind of freakishly evolved fish into twice her bulk and even age; her violence of emotion could be daunting, even if you knew her.

  Should she knock, asking the possibly empty rooms to respond? To ask a question of the vacant dark always caused an answer, the more silent, the more terrible. But she had to ask, and stepped forward on the warped floor to knock. There was no answer, but in her mind it was as if she had disturbed a school of minnows so that they swirled in common alarm through the room behind the door. Then she went in and clicked on the light. The room was empty, full of air; her eyes hurt from the instant clarity of their search.

  She went into the second room more easily, or recklessly, then out the window to the roof in the flashes of the coming storm and found only a blanket Debbie had left there to get soaked or to blow away. She took it in. As she went down the long hallway the bothered darkness followed behind, touching her with its fingertips. She went down the stairs without looking back.

  Debbie was somewhere, troubled or in trouble, as she usually was, but there seemed a more nasty edge to this time and this place. It came from the voices of the guests, a kind of predacious knowingness that excluded them from contemplation or wonder. Even the atomic bomb appealed to their sense of humor, and the mildness of t
he Princess and Yvonne, because of their bland acceptance of whatever was said, didn’t seem a counter to this tone but complementary to it. Of the other women, Mrs. Zwanzig was old enough to have a license to practice sarcasm, but Mrs. Patrick was brood stock, to be used and not heard. Kaethe Muller, with her sergeant’s bearing, was both man and woman, a soldier in mufti. Perhaps in the world beyond Leah, in the great cities, a bitter smirk infected all human intercourse.

  At last she reached her room. With relief, and also the sense of dereliction of duty, she went inside, turned on the lights and locked the door. She was tired of anxiety. Her care for Debbie was in danger of turning into simple exasperation, so how strong was that love in the first place? She should go down to the boathouse and see if Debbie was there —go quickly before the storm began—but she was tired of having to confront Debbie. She was tired of the anticipation of finding her. She sat in her room’s musty, chintz-covered easy chair, feeling small and for a moment even weepy. Well, she was small. Everyone in the place, except the Patricks’ children, was bigger than she was, and in the worst sort of finality that was what counted. All the little rules and laws that created order could be lost in an instant, and when that happened she would have no control at all.

  Her door, behind her, sounded with a tapping she at first thought came from inside her room, and for a moment she felt invaded, but the tap was Cynthia’s—two quick nail taps with one finger, repeated.

  She had to get up and undo the turnbolt before she could open the door. Cynthia indicated the strangeness of this with a quick glance, but said nothing about it.

  “We haven’t talked much,” Cynthia said tentatively. She wore her bathrobe over her candy-striped pajamas, and had been drying her hair with the towel that was draped over her shoulder.

  “Not much,” Dory said, grateful to see her.

  Cynthia sighed theatrically, and with an inquiring but then evasive flick of a glance, as though her mind had changed in that tiny part of a second, sat on the bed. “Yvonne,” she said, getting it over with, deciding to plunge into and over that subject, “has led a terrible life. You know she’s a bastard? Bar sinister? The Zwanzigs adopted her.”