“Coming about,” John Hearne says, and she ducks her head to let the wooden boom pass over. He has put up with her worries and causes, always as a self-proclaimed ironic observer, though she knows what he believes. Once, in Washington, D.C., they watched the Vietnam veterans throw away their medals and he wept, an act which placed him firmly in his generation.
Pine Island is now, partly because of her efforts, a state reservation. The hurricanes of 1954 blew down half of the great trees, but others have grown up to take their places; it is a sign of age when you know how fast a white pine grows.
He comes neatly about again, lets the sheet go and ties up on a root, surely not the same one, and they go ashore beneath the trees that are like the sighing masts of a schooner. After her mastectomy in June he asked to look, and looked, and said with his quick tongue, quicker than truth could ever be, “Look, Dory. Bilateral symmetricality has never been one of my fetishes.”
How can she understand someone who talks this way? But he did mean it; he told the truth. Now if it is such that she is cured and doesn’t have to die just yet…
Is the world more beautiful for its being at risk?
It all depends upon the risk. He left her once, for a while, because of a fight, or a series of fights, the cause actually forgotten by both of them. And then there was Mary Denny, but he doesn’t like that subject at all; it gives him pain to think how she was hurt, the bastard.
Her left front is as smooth, he says, as a boy’s, so he must be half queer. She will never care for his humor because it sounds insincere, though he doesn’t seem to be. Can time alone prove such a thing? It is like trying to catch a grasshopper.
She opens the hamper and brings out the wine, glasses, sandwiches, salad, silver, napkins and condiments, and puts them on the blanket. She has known him for, let’s see; when would she first have been aware of the boy across the backyards? At, say, three? Then she’s known him for fifty years, half a century. How can there be any secrets left? What is the mystery?
“Our wounds,” he says, touching her ghost breast, where there is none. Her arm is strong enough again. The pines move far overhead, massive and opinionless. Across the broad lake, below the long hills, is Cascomhaven. The little green boat quivers and shakes at its tether. Nothing has ever been exactly right, exactly in control, but she would rather be here than anywhere.
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