Children ran, couples pushed baby carriages and strollers, elderly couples sat on quilts under the black walnut trees and drank lemonade from gallon vacuum jugs. It was all so innocent and quintessentially American, exactly what you thought a village Fourth ought to be. And there were Dan and Coral Knacker, she in her white shorts, high heels, sleeveless pink knit top, and he in his blue sunglasses, forage cap, high-top army boots and camouflage outfit. He had let his hair grow and it hung in snaky ribbons to his shoulders. His silver hook gleamed in the sun. They were both licking double-dip strawberry ice cream cones.
“Hello Coral,” I said. “Where’s Erroll today?”
Coral jumped—I’d startled her. She held the cone in one hand and laid the other hand flat upon her chest. “Jesus, you scared the hell outta me,” she complained. “What was that you said?”
“I asked about Erroll. I haven’t seen him for a long time.”
“Erroll ain’t gonna work for you people no more,” she said coolly, and then tilted her head to get a lick of the ice cream.
“Truth!” Dan Knacker said. “We don’t want Erroll to have nothin’ to do with you types.”
“What kind of types are you talking about?”
“You types. You Pinko types.”
“Aw come on,” I said. “Would we be here celebrating the Fourth if we were Pinkos?”
“Why not? You people are so durn lost I doubt you know the difference. You come up here and play at farming and have no i-dea what anythin’s about. Got too much education and no guts. You hate the war, you don’t want to fight. ’Course not, you want everybody else to do it for you. You make me sick, the lot of you. We ought to run you out of town.”
I laughed, and he took a menancing step toward me. “A happy Fourth to you, too,” I said, and turned away. From the loud-speaker stuck onto the roof of the picnic pavilion came the squawk of a microphone, and a tall thin man in carefully pressed khaki shirt, pants and cap bent to the microphone and boomed out, surprising himself, “Can you all hear me? Well gosh, I guess you can!”
“Liz!”
I turned. Leonard took my arm. I was so surprised. It was like the day we’d met in New York when I’d felt such pleasure in seeing him that I’d scared myself into being a zombie. I laughed and tried to pull away but he held on and began steering me past the booths and games, through the holiday crowd. I said, “Leonard? What are you doing? Where are we going?”
“Over here. To the bridge.”
“But why?” Ahead of us, I saw Sal and Shauna standing close together, holding paper cones of pink cotton candy, and Skip standing between his father and his mother, and Wayne with his arm around May, and they were all looking up at the bridge, at the tall thin figure who stood balanced upon the elaborately-wrought iron hand rail. Seen against the sun, he was both shaded and illuminated—a nimbus of quivering light described his entire body, like a glowing wire. Why, I thought, squinting, with my hand up to shade my eyes, it’s Erroll.
The figure stood with his hands hung loose, and he seemed to be smiling as he looked down into the water. “Oh but Leonard,” I said, “what’s he doing? That’s dangerous, the river’s too shallow. If he falls, he’ll break his neck!”
“Liz,” Leonard said. He tightened his hand on my arm. The music came on again over the sound system—‘California Dreamin’.’
Now as the figure continued to teeter on the bridge’s railing I saw Mr. and Mrs. Loomis look uneasily around, and then Wayne and May and Shauna and Sal turned around, too. An awkward muttering crowd had collected in back of us, someone laughed, and a group of teenaged boys began rhythmically clapping their hands and calling out: “Jump …”
I started walking toward the bridge. “Liz!” Leonard said, following me. “They picked him up this morning. He’s been sleeping in the park.”
“Erroll has?”
“That’s not Erroll, it’s your brother, he’s been sleeping here in the park. The State Police picked him up and then they let him go. He told them he’d come up to see you, but he couldn’t find you.”
I walked up to the bridge and stepped up on it. Sunlight glanced off the shiny black paint of the scrollwork railing. The bridge shook slightly as I walked and the iron under my feet, in the shape of a grid, rang dully with each step. It was John, I could see that now. But he smiled down at the water with such a dreamy look of contemplation that I couldn’t call out, I knew he’d fall. And then a baby began to wail, John turned his head to the crowd, smiled and lost his balance. As one person, the crawd took in a gasping breath. John fell, arms windmilling, but instead of dropping into the shallow, boulder-strewn water, he fell onto the bridge, where he lay for a second and then rolled over and sat up.
“Loser!” somebody called out. As if exhaling, the crowed nervously laughed and began to dissipate. The music surged into “All You Need is Love.”
I squatted down next to him. “Hi, John,” I said. “I thought you were at the clinic.”
He was dazed and sat rubbing his wrist. He looked at me, blinked, and then said formally, “Why hello, Liz. How are you? It’s nice to see you. I was at the clinic, but I decided to leave.”
“How come?”
He squinted his eyes almost shut. “The medications were making me ill.”
“You know that’s not true John. They help you. You just imagine they make you ill.”
His eyelids fluttered closed. “I know what I know,” he said mysteriously, and stood up.
I stood, too. He turned and looked down at the knot of people gathered at the foot of the bridge—Skip looking worried, Wayne looking noncommittal, my mother-in-law looking angry, my father-in-law grinning and talking to Alice, who had arrived late, just in time for the perturbation. “Why, look, Liz,” John said, “there’s your husband. Hi, there, Skipper,” he called out. “How’re you doing, old man?” He waved. Skip waved back. Leonard had disappeared.
We went back to the Farm. For the rest of the day John did fairly well. He made sense, talked plainly and charmingly to everyone, helped cook the hamburgers and hot dogs. Only, occasionally, his face would knot up into a painful grimace, or sometimes while he talked his head would drift back until he was gazing at the sky. I knew that John needed more medicine. The grimaces and rigid muscular movements were side effects of his medication. They appeared whenever the medication level was low.
At five, the Loomises got ready to go. Amelia said through closed lips, “It was a pleasure meetin’ your brother.”
My father-in-law was more straightforward. He drew me off to one side and said earnestly, “Now Liz, you’ve got to do something about John.”
“I can see that,” I said.
“He’s pretty sick. He shouldn’t be running around like this.”
I smiled. He gave me a perplexed look.
The party went on for a long time. It went on forever. People swam and ate and drank, and finally at about nine o’clock the last guests left. Sal and Wayne put up a pup tent for John near the pond. Sal found a sleeping bag. “Ah,” John said, “a night under the stars! The accommodations are perfect. Many thanks, my friends.”
“Jesus!” Skip muttered, “I’ve had it, my friends. I’m going out for a drink.”
At five in the morning I woke up and went outside in my nightgown and mocassins to check on John. Beyond the dark trees the sky was a ruddy pink. I walked through the long grass on the pond’s bank and by the time I got to the tent my nightgown was drenched with dew. I stood outside of the tent twitching the cloth away from my legs and listening for John’s breathing, but I didn’t hear a thing.
“Listen,” Skip said when I woke him up. He said it like a drunk—“lisshen”—he had come in late the night before. “You’re making an awfully big deal out of this. He probably just went down the road.”
“You think I shouldn’t look for him?”
“I wouldn’t. I bet he comes back.”
“Or maybe someone’ll bring him back.”
“Okay, even better
. Or call the clinic and talk to them. They’ll know what to do.”
“When I called yesterday the nurse said she couldn’t release the information about his medication, it was confidential.”
“That was yesterday. Yesterday was a holiday, they were probably understaffed. Try again. Get tough. Threaten a lawsuit. Demand to talk to somebody in charge. For God’s sake, Liz, think. Get Leonard to call his aunt.”
I went down to the kitchen. Wayne and Leonard were drinking coffee and talking about Spiro Agnew.
Leonard looked at me and put down his coffee mug. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“John’s gone,” I said. I turned to Wayne. “What am I going to do?”
He shook his head. “I dunno,” he said.
“I mean, you’re a psychiatrist. Can’t you tell me? How am I going to take care of John?”
“Liz,” he said softly, “I don’t know.”
“Leonard,” I said desperately, “I need you to call your Aunt Louise. Can you do that? Can you tell her what’s happening? Tell her I need to get some medicine for John.”
“Of course I’ll call her, but first, why don’t we go out in separate cars and look for a while? He can’t have gone far.”
We spent an hour driving up and down the local roads, but nobody spotted John. Later, I climbed the Ridge and went through the abandoned house, but I didn’t find anyone, not even Erroll. In the afternoon, I drove around again, and then I walked the county road.
In the late afternoon, feeling tired and depressed, I went down to the “basement” of our house, which was really the old dairy. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, I wanted to be by myself. I had brought from my mother’s house some of her boxes of papers which I’d stashed in the dairy room, thinking I would go through them before discarding. I’d labelled the various cartons with black marking pen: letters, photograph albums, journals and diaries. I opened a box, but I was still thinking bout John, wondering when I should call the police. I looked vaguely into the box and dumped its contents onto an old pine table.
I drew up a wooden chair, sat down, and started looking at the books, thinking, I’ll wait until ten. No. Call the police tomorrow.
In the dairy room, everything was damp and smelled of mildew and yet it was pleasant, too. It was cool in that part of the barn, with its low white-washed beams and white-washed limestone walls. Two small crooked windows let in the light.
I picked up a book and began to skim it. She had written in black ink on the first page, “1938.”
That summer in 1938 she had come up to board at a farm near here. But of course I knew that.
Somewhere off in the distance it began to thunder, but I didn’t look up. At first I felt I was reading about a stranger, but as I went on I got into her rhythm. I could hear her voice. It was as if she were talking to me. In 1938 she’d been about my age—twenty-five. It was the summer she had met my father, and fallen in love.
5.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing. Just reading this book of my mother’s.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a journal. She kept it the summer she was getting over TB. She’d gone to a farm somewhere up here to recuperate and then she met my father. He was going to medical school and he came out one weekend to visit the farmer’s son who was a classmate of his in medical school.”
“I didn’t know she’d had TB.”
“She had it and got over it and smoked cigarettes.”
“Do you know where the farm was?”
“Not exactly. Somewhere in Sussex County. It was a dairy farm. A lot of the farms up here used to take in summer boarders. City folks and invalids.”
“Huh. You’re not coming up for dinner?”
“Not right now. I’m not hungry. I had a candy bar a while ago.”
“So what’s the story on your brother? Wow! What is it about this place, the thunderstorms make you think the world’s coming to an end. Here comes the rain. I’d better go up and shut the windows.”
“I shut them. Skip …”
“What?”
“What are we doing?”
“Don’t ask me,” he said harshly. And then soothingly, opaquely added, “About John you mean? I don’t know. Look at that, it’s a cloudburst. I better run.”
And he did run (but from me, I thought, rather than the storm), first glancing anxiously out of the dairy’s low window and then ducking out the door and scooting up the outside stairs. I could hear the thud of his feet taking the steps two at a time.
It was only six o’clock but the light in the tiny flawed panes of the dairy’s windows had a menacing purple quality, the color of a bad bruise. The rain was coming from the east and beat upon the window glass and ran down in rivulets—already I could hear the downspouts gurgling. In the background there were rumbles and then cymbal clashes of thunder and just outside of the windows lightning danced, not in those great splendid arrows that cleave the sky but in a constant nervous pullulation.
Then the single dangling light bulb went out, went on, and then went out again and from the village three miles away came the eerie wail of the fire horn.
I put my mother’s books away and went to the door. There was a row of wooden pegs next to the low dairy door where a couple of garments hung, one a hooded poncho so old it smelled of rubber instead of plastic. I slipped the thing on and went out and stood on the doorsill for a moment. It was an impressive storm, rain coming in waves, sweeping across the pond. I remembered how, just after I’d come up to the Farm, I’d seen a giant white heron driven before a similar gale and the helpless beating of its large white wings. It had reminded me of sailing in Maine, when you are sailing before the wind, that is, the wind’s at your back, your centerboard is up, and you are carried along at the mercy of the elements. Once John and I went sailing out in the bay and a fierce little storm sprang up from nowhere. We reefed the sails and bobbed like a little cork, up and down on the surly gray swells of Muscongus Bay. I think I was a better sailor than John because I always wanted to do less. My father was like that, too. He believed often enough in doing nothing. He said he had mastered The Art of Waiting. With my mother, life was a fight, fighting was life.
“Liz.”
He appeared to me first as a shadow, and then I saw that he wore, still, the gray tee shirt and faded pants he’d had on the day before, but he was drenched to the skin, his hair and clothes plastered to his body and shiny with wet.
“John? My God, what’s wrong? What happened? Where’ve you been? I looked everywhere. Come inside. What’s wrong with your arm?”
I opened the dairy door—the hinges were crooked, so you had to shove it—and pulled him in by the hand, shoving the door shut again. I blinked the rain out of my eyes, trying to see him in the room’s shadows. He was holding one arm as if it hurt. In a flicker of lightning I saw that his face was swollen and bruised. He had a black eye and a long scabbed cut on his left cheek. I told him to sit down and stay down.
And then I went out again, to get him dry clothes and some food—I was sure he hadn’t eaten.
“What’s the matter?” Leonard asked at once when I came in upstairs. He and Wayne were sitting at the trestle table with a chessboard between them and a candle in a hurricane glass. In the summer parlor there were lit candles on all the tables.
I slipped off the poncho. “It’s my brother. He just came back. I need to get him some clothes.”
I took a candle and went upstairs and raided Skip’s bureau for dry things. When I came back down, it was like the grade school game we had, when you ran or skipped and someone yelled “Freeze!” Everyone looked at me as if they’d been struck by lightning, but Leonard stood next to the door holding a plate covered with foil. “Chow,” he said, tapping the foil with a finger. “Is he okay?”
“Mostly,” I said. I put on the poncho, and we stepped out into the rain. My worry was that John might have gone again, but when we pushed open the dairy door he was sitting on the floor
with his knees up and his head in his folded arms.
“Hey, bub,” I said. “We brought you some clothes and some food.” He didn’t respond.
Leonard knelt and put his hand on John’s shoulder. “John?” John’s eyes were closed; he seemed to be sleeping. Leonard said, “Somebody beat up on him.”
John opened one swollen eye and said, “Thirsty.”
“Right back,” Leonard said, straightening. “I’ll get him a blanket and something to drink.”
Before we left John for the night, Leonard lashed the dairy door shut from the outside. We went back upstairs. In the summer parlor it was like a party with all the candles lit. Wayne was playing his mandolin, Shauna was softly singing, but I was exhausted and went up to bed.
I fell asleep at once and woke up early, before dawn. Skip wasn’t in bed and that made me uneasy. I went downstairs and walked slowly through the gray rooms. He was in the winter parlor, curled up on the Victorian sofa under a knitted afghan.
I went to the kitchen to make coffee. The storm was over but outside everything was sodden and humid, and there was a constant monotonous dripping from all the downspouts.
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