He didn’t know what day it was, however, and he didn’t know why accident had put him into a position where he would appear to be looking for his father, or what he wanted his father to be.
“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.”
But was he? And who had he, in his youth, ever sailed with? The sailor’s metaphor was the vessel in which he sailed, which he was, now beached on an exotic coast among the bingo-bongo trees, the natives, as far as the spare voyager from New England could perceive, not unfriendly, though he found their rituals strange. Strange but familiar, as if he had once in a previous incarnation accepted certain premises.
His father had taken him to church in Winota. What church it was he probably never knew, but he remembered being impressed by the ceiling and the singing, and somewhere he had learned a version of the Lord’s Prayer: Our Father who aren’t in heaven, hollowed be Thy name, and this version seemed to conform to something his father must have told him—that God the Father is here, everywhere, not in some faraway place called heaven. No, He aren’t in heaven, and His name is hollow; God is hollow because we are inside Him and He is all around us. The biblical exegete at four or five years old.
Now the beached ship, or sailor, rerove his rigging and remembered a green canoe sailing swiftly over a cold blue lake, a canoe that wouldn’t have existed except for him and yet was not his, and at its helm was a slight, winter-pale girl whose claims upon him, even at this continental distance, could be felt. They were like fine webs that might easily be broken, quietly broken and forgotten.
23
The summer grew into its green and heat, the heavy kind that forbade much physical effort, but all major projects had been completed. Debbie had subsided into a sullen but steady worker. She didn’t want to go back to Leah and have to look for another summer job, so she just stayed on. Werner spent most of his time sailing, alone. He told Dory, when their anger at each other had cooled, how the Bremen had steamed first to Murmansk, in Russia, and then slipped through the British blockade and arrived safely in Germany on December 13, 1939, its captain, Commodore Ahrens, a hero. That year his family lived in a beautiful house in the Grunewald, and he sailed his own small catboat on the Wannsee. He could sound pleased and straightforward, as if in one of his moods, or poses, he were still eleven or twelve. But then would come the self-satisfied arrogance. “So you see why I’m so good at handling a sailboat.” Dory’s window faced toward the southwest, so the still, heavy dawn came over the house behind her and lighted the far shore of the lake and the tops of the pines on Pine Island. She had an hour before the Big Ben alarm clock would clatter, so she left the window and went back to her bed. In the window screen were the tiny words I LOVE YOU. So she was loved, the E backwards. When Dibley could, he came near her, without volunteering to speak, as if proximity were enough for him. It no longer made her feel so uncomfortable.
Cynthia was bright and happy, talking all the time. She and Yvonne sometimes held hands, and Dory thought how Cynthia had never considered Leah, New Hampshire, to be the real world. Like John Hearne, she had been brought here as a child, against her will. She’d never thought to stay and had never cared very much about Leah’s judgments. She was headed for the city, for “culture,” where all foibles were forgiven. It had been Robert who wondered if Cynthia and Yvonne’s relationship was “unnatural,” and that had made Dory think of it that way, too, a vision of female bodies in a naked embrace, hands and lips who knew where. Again came that sweet wrongness, like a sense of loss.
She thought of love, and sex, and touched herself; it was and had always been him. He was still two persons, the John Hearne she had imagined all her life and the real John Hearne who melted her and pulled her inside out. She loved them both. But why should he come back just because she yearned to have him back? She lay naked and alone in the sultry morning air, smooth as if she glistened with oil, languorous, having him here now, his smooth weight, the surge of his concentration upon her. She did bend him and move him, just so, now. There was the turning in her, but soon it was just her own hands and imagination. He was not there. With this, her small room was suddenly a strange place, suggesting anxieties and responsibilities.
Robert was the one who had changed the most. He had always been honest, phlegmatic and dependable, but he’d grown nervous and odd. He’d lost weight. He always seemed to be thinking about something other than what he was doing, so that he became awkward and had accidents. He broke one of the iron wheels of the reel lawn mower by running it straight into a boulder. He cut his finger with the sickle and bumped his head on a low tamarack limb. He wiped one dish too long, until Debbie took it from his hands and suggested he try a wet one. He thought it wrong to do what he wanted to do with the Princess, but she acted as if everything was “just plain nice,” he said. She would touch him and then be sort of sweetly indifferent to him. He couldn’t talk to Dibley about it, so he tried to talk to Dory about it but was embarrassed. “I’m afraid I’m going to do something terrible,” he said. “Sometimes I think I don’t like her anymore. She acts like the feelings I have had never been invented.” But the Princess remained affable and normal, in her own fashion, to everyone. Dory had no idea what the other guests thought was going on, except for Jean Dorlean, who gave her knowing, smirky looks, as if they were allies after all. Dibley had been worried that he might be fired for having grabbed Jean Dorlean’s beard, but of course nothing came of that.
John Hearne was going to finish college and go somewhere, everywhere through his life without her. There was no reason, ever, to be unrealistic. The world was the world and she was alone in it except for those she had to look out for. That was the clutter you possessed in this life—the addled and the helpless, the enthralled and the blind. She couldn’t think of a way to interfere with what the Princess was doing. She couldn’t say anything to the Princess, and what could she say to Robert?
Harry Morrow, the senior in whose car Debbie had drunk beer after the prom, showed up one Saturday night, with two of his friends, wanting to take Debbie out, or for a ride. Debbie said no and they drove away. “See?” she’d said to Dory. “You know what they want. That never happened to you, did it? Where’d they get the idea I was the town pump? Maybe I let him feel a little after the prom, but that’s all. What did I ever do?”
She could think of no way to suggest to Debbie that her raucous laughter, her sarcasm, her smoking, her slang, like “town pump,” her arrogant sway of the hips—all those flamboyant gestures of hers added up to what the Harry Morrows thought. It would be like telling Debbie to change her life, and there was no way to change a life.
“What did I ever do?” Debbie said. “I can’t help how I look, how I got big boobs. Sometimes I want to be dead.”
“Oh, Debbie.”
“It’s always like that, isn’t it? ‘Oh, Debbie,’ ” Debbie said.
“I’d like you to be happy,” Dory said, but that was so easy to say and she felt helpless. She felt helpless because she couldn’t make herself have the energy to enter into Debbie’s life, and she was close to tears.
“Dory, I don’t hate you,” Debbie said. “I know you’ve got your troubles, too, and I’m sorry if I called you names before. I’m just like that. I’m an asshole.” Then, embarrassed, Debbie had turned and left her.
John Hearne might be with a girl right now. He would think only of that pretty girl, there, wherever he was, in sunny California, on a golden beach with a golden girl. He’d be tanned all over too, his hair bleached nearly white, and their golden skin would shed little grains of sand, one jewel at a time, and he would touch her gently, falling in love with the most beautiful girl in sunny California, in the warm sunlight. He would transfer to UCLA, where she went to school.
She had expected at least a postcard from him, bu
t none ever came.
She went down to the kitchen to get the coffee going; that was what she could do. It was degrading to be jealous. The coffee was perking when Robert, looking peaked, came in and sat on a stool. “God, it’s hot,” he said. “A weather-breeder. I think I’ve aged ten years this summer already. By the end of August I’ll be as old as she is.”
“You’ve changed,” Dory said. “We’ve all changed, though.”
“I swear,” he said, “I think I’m beginning to understand the Swede.”
But Robert didn’t throw the Princess on the stove, or end his life “by his own hand.” That afternoon Dory came up from the boathouse and sensed a general consternation as soon as she entered the living room, where all the guests except Werner and Mrs. Patrick sat looking at each other.
“This affects much planning,” Ernst Zwanzig said without his usual punctuating laugh. “Who can talk her back to sense?”
Then Mrs. Patrick came in and gave a report on the Princess, who was in her room having hysterics, saying in coherent moments that she was going to close Cascom Manor and return to New York.
“What happened?” Sean Patrick said. “She’s not the flighty sort.”
“It was the boy, Robert,” Mrs. Patrick said. They all looked at Dory, who turned and went up to the Princess’s room, knocked on the door and went in without waiting for an answer. This was the largest bedroom, with three windows, wardrobes and an antique canopied bed, upon which the Princess lay on her side under a crumpled sheet, her black hair a disorganized tangle. Lipstick was smudged over her mouth and chin. She moaned and turned, kicking the sheet to rearrange it, billowing it out to reveal a flash of her black pubic hair. Her silk slip was bunched up under her arms and she was fever-wet, gleaming as if varnished.
“Oh, oh,” she moaned.
“What’s the matter?” Dory asked with a tentative amount of sympathy.
The Princess looked at her, wanting something Dory couldn’t yet identify. It was a defined, not hysterical, look. But she moaned again, “Oh, oh .” She sobbed, those breathless, hiccupy noises that were strange unless you uttered them yourself.
“What happened?” Dory asked, with the feeling that in her own impatience and even exasperation she was breaking protocol, as she probably had by coming into the room without permission. “Was it Robert? What did he do?”
“Yes, yes! He forced himself upon me! He overpowered me and violated my body!” Then she shuddered and sobbed, tears running from the outsides of her blue-white eyes that even now looked at Dory with an intelligence independent of outrage; she was examining Dory for judgment.
There was a light knock on the door. Dory went to it and it was Robert. Dibley waited a few feet down the hall. She let Robert in and the Princess whimpered with an edge of possibly real fear.
“I’m sorry,” Robert said. He was beyond worrying about whether Dory or anyone knew what had happened. There was a smear of incriminating lipstick on bis mouth. “We were straightening the picture,” he said, glancing at a gilt-framed landscape with cows that hung between the windows.
“You were what?” Dory said.
“We were straightening it for half an hour,” Robert said. “She stood on the chair and I had to hold her and then we’d go sit on the bed and see if it was straight, but it was never quite straight, and then I lost my mind. I’m sorry.”
“And you…did it to her?” She was afraid she would have to ask incriminating questions all her life, like her mother, but somewhere deeper than worry was a painful pressure of laughter, like air caught in the throat, or below the throat.
“I went crazy,” Robert said. “I don’t know. I just lost control of myself.”
The Princess cried, “I couldn’t stop him! I struggled with all my might! He hurt me!”
“Listen,” Robert said, blushing. “I kind of thought she wanted me to. I didn’t know it would hurt. I thought because she didn’t have anything on underneath she wanted me to. I saw it, you know, and…”
“I might become pregnant! He is a beast! I thought he was a kind and gentle boy, not brutal, not an animal!”
“I never did it before,” Robert said. “Honest to God, Dory, I didn’t even know where it was. I thought it was more on the front. I thought she wanted me to and I thought her being old and all she’d be prepared or something.”
“He opened his trousers!” the Princess cried.
“Anyway,” Robert said, “it only lasted about three seconds.”
“He penetrated my body!”
Dory said to the Princess, “He’s only seventeen, and you had him in here, alone, and you had nothing on but your slip…”
“I am the victim, and now I am being accused!” the Princess cried with trembling eyelids, tears and whimpers. She seemed as consistent in this mood as she had been in her old one of imperturbability.
“I’m awful sorry,” Robert said. “I’m disgusted with myself.”
Suddenly Dory wanted to hear no more of it. She was only seventeen herself, and she had to try to make sense of these giant children. “Oh, be quiet now,” she said. A horrid bubble of mirth was caught in her throat like waterbrash, and she hated that mirth and where it came from; this was not how it was supposed to be. Wasn’t all laughter, like this within her, born of violence and misfortune?
At the door appeared a delegation from downstairs—Mrs. Zwanzig, Mrs. Patrick and Jean Dorlean. The two women went to the Princess, one on each side of her bed, and began to care for her. Mrs. Zwanzig arranged her pillows so she could sit up, and Mrs. Patrick took a silver comb and began to straighten out her hair. With Kleenex and cream, Mrs. Zwanzig then began to cleanse her face of makeup. The Princess accepted these services without comment and looked apprehensively at Jean Dorlean, who stood at the foot of her bed.
“There is, Princess,” he said, “a certain ambivalence among your guests as to the assignment of culpability in this unfortunate affair, and also a strong desire not to have their plans disrupted. They have chosen me, if Your Highness has no objection, to act as a sort of mediator, or referee.” He, too, contained his sardonic humor.
“Again I am being accused! Oh! Oh!”
“Hush, now,” Mrs. Patrick said. “Hush, now, dear.”
Jean Dorlean looked at Dory, raised his eyebrows and tilted his hairy face as if to say that his expectations had been confirmed.
From the Princess and the two women who sat tending her came a pulse of feminine heat, cosmetic and musky. The Princess was subdued now, and wary. Her pale face, cleansed of red, seemed succulently fragile, like cauliflower. She was afraid of Jean Dorlean, that was clear. There were levels of authority Dory hadn’t quite been aware of, things she really didn’t want to know.
Jean Dorlean said, “We also agree that Werner shouldn’t be told about this.” He looked at Dory and Robert to see if they had heard him.
What business was it of Jean Dorlean’s that Werner not be told? Shiftings in her perceptions bothered her. Dreams that weren’t night dreams were dangerous. The world, which she was powerless to control, began to slide beyond her understanding.
“When you play with fire, you often get burnt,” Jean Dorlean said.
“Did you intend to make a big hullabaloo over this?”
The Princess said, with self-pity, “I didn’t intend anything!”
“You didn’t intend anything but the boy’s delicious frustration, you mean?”
“Cruel!” Mrs. Patrick said.
“Well, what have we here?” Jean Dorlean said. “The seduction of a minor? Or rape? In any case, it is my understanding that you wish, Princess, to break your contract with your guests, close this place and return to New York. Might I remind you that there are certain kinds of freedom royalty does not possess, especially, in the light of the recent, dubious past, Austro-German royalty.”
The Princess said nothing. Mrs. Zwanzig turned, looked hard at him and barely shook her head.
Dory was astonished by his tone; no one had ever trea
ted the Princess this way. Someone could have, maybe, but no one ever had.
The Princess cried calmly.
“I concede that Robert will have to go,” Jean Dorlean said.
“Don’t worry about that,” Robert said. “I’ll be gone all right.”
Dory could see Robert’s great relief—maybe he’d expected reform school, or at least the notification of his parents.
Jean Dorlean turned to Dory. “You see? There are some very strange alliances in this modern world. Your friend Robert rapes a princess and gets off scot-free. In the not so distant past he would have been lovingly flayed alive, drawn and quartered. But now? For the dark deeds of the past, for justice and its punishments, substitute the politics of the hour.”
“Ah, go away and leave her be,” Mrs. Patrick said. “It’s disgusting, this posturing about.”
Robert was certainly eager to leave the room, and Dory followed him. Jean Dorlean came along too. Once the door was closed he chuckled and made other small sounds of satisfaction. “Well, Robert, my lad,” he said, “I suspect you can always say that you lost your cherry on a princess. Oh, ha, ha, ha! Listen, as far as I’m concerned she got what she deserved. What is the term—prick-teaser?”
Robert blushed.
After supper, at which the Princess didn’t appear, Dory drove Robert and his things to Leah. “I’m sorry about all the trouble,” he said.
“Dibley can handle the mowing and the heavy stuff, though. He’ll do anything you ask him to do.”
“It’ll be lonesome not having you around,” she said. “I don’t see much of Cynthia anymore, Debbie’s still down on me and Dibley’s practically mute.”
“You’ve been a pal, Dory. I mean it. You’ve always been a pal, even when you found out I was a…I mean…” His voice had grown strained. “I mean rape! My God! I can’t laugh about it like that creep Jean Doriean. It was weird, and it’s weird to remember. It’s all wrong and shameful and puky, but it felt too good, even the part when she was saying no and I went ahead anyway. You know me—I’m not one of those hammerheads that get a kick out of hurting people. You know that, don’t you?”
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