by Luanne Rice
“I try.”
“Well, then,” Mrs. Kaiser said positively, her chin up. “That’s what you have to do, if you want Josie to be oral. You know the alternatives.”
“My husband has a hard time talking to her.”
“Keep after him.”
“And my family,” Cass said. “My mother’s all for North Point.”
“Heavens,” Mrs. Kaiser said. “Luckily, Josie isn’t her daughter. I’m sure your mother’s intentions are good, but I think that is the wrong program for Josie. Josie does hear. She does talk. Communication is difficult for her, but not impossible. Not at all. We don’t want her closed off in a school for the deaf. We want her to live in a hearing world.”
“I know,” Cass said, twirling Josie’s hair while Josie walked Barbie down Cass’s thigh.
“Josie has another year before kindergarten. By then she and I will make excellent progress, and she’ll enter with other children her age.”
“Are you sure she’ll be ready?”
“She will have to be if you don’t want her in North Point or Special Needs,” Mrs. Kaiser said ominously.
Not for the first time, Cass thought of how much Mrs. Kaiser resembled Cass’s first-grade teacher, who had reminded her of a witch. An old lady who used sweet talk to hide a mean streak. What was Cass doing, leaving her daughter with a witch every week?
“Special Needs,” Mrs. Kaiser said again, shaking her head.
She made the words sound like a curse—which, in a way, they were. If Josie didn’t qualify for real kindergarten at Mount Hope Elementary, the school would stick her in the Special Needs class, where she and other deaf kids would share a room with Down syndrome, autistic, and emotionally disturbed children—kids with all different special needs grouped together.
“We’ll make sure she’s ready,” Mrs. Kaiser said. “Now, why don’t you leave us for half an hour, let us get some work done?”
Cass looked from Mrs. Kaiser to Josie. “I’ll be back soon, sweetheart,” she said, watching Josie.
“Bye, Bob,” Josie said, sliding off Cass’s knee. She seemed to enjoy Mrs. Kaiser, speech therapy, everything in the office; she never minded when Cass left.
“Uh, Mrs. Kaiser,” Cass said, rising. “Could I help you with your zipper? It’s just a little undone.”
“Oh, thank you, dear,” Mrs. Kaiser said gratefully, turning slightly, throwing Cass a real smile that a true witch could never have managed.
Cass smiled back.
3
Sheila Keating wakened with the sense of falling from the sky, and she grabbed her glass locket in a panic. Holding it against her chest, she felt her heart beating. It fluttered fast and unsteadily; it made Sheila feel she had a moth inside her trying to escape. When she opened her eyes she checked her knobby hand for silvery wing dust. She stretched in the easy chair where she’d been napping and tested the feeling of her feet on the floor. She wanted something cold to drink, but she wasn’t ready to move yet.
The glass locket felt warm in her hand, and she peered down at it. Nothing but a milky blur. “Goddamn it,” Sheila said out loud. She hated her cataracts. She’d been thinking about having them removed until Eileen Conway had hers done. Dr. Greaves had peeled off the cataracts, and now poor Eileen wished someone would turn out the lights; brightness poured in from everywhere, Eileen said, making her eyes blink and water, and she felt like a cunner in a fishbowl, longing for deep water and nice dark rockweed.
“Goddamn it!” Sheila said louder, because no one was home. Jimmy and Mary were off to work. Sheila shook the glass locket and watched the pearl rattle around. She wouldn’t want to bruise the pearl, but she liked to watch it move. When she had her hearing aid turned on, she could hear it rattle.
Eddie had given it to her the day they’d met: June 6, 1920. He’d been clamming on Easton’s Beach, showing off for Sheila and her friends from Providence. After he’d filled his bushel basket full of cherrystones, he’d shucked one for a snack. Right there, in that pink clam, he’d found a pearl. He’d walked straight up to Sheila on the boardwalk and handed it to her. Placing it in her hand, his fingertips had brushed her palm. It was the first time a boy had touched her.
Just last month, lighting a candle in church, Sheila had put her palm near the flame and thought of that first touch. She had felt heat, and if she’d left her hand there, she would have burned it. What Eddie had made her feel was a surge, and Sheila should have known she couldn’t recapture it with a candle in church. Sometimes, if she closed her eyes and imagined her blue straw hat, the sound of waves breaking over the Easton jetties, and the smell of clams, she could remember the surge. Not feel it, certainly, but remember it.
“Eddie, I hate it here,” Sheila said out loud, but of course Eddie couldn’t hear her. He’d been dead many years. She wondered what he would have thought of her freeloading with Jim. He had never approved of their friends who lived with their grown children—not because he objected to their imposing on their children, but because he couldn’t understand how adults could give up their privacy.
“Well, I’m alone all day, for God’s sake, that should be enough privacy for anyone,” she said crossly.
“Who are you talking to, Granny?”
Sheila’s eyes flew open. She’d forgotten Eddie wasn’t here. Cass and Josie stood there instead, grinning at her.
“To myself,” Sheila said to Josie. “Don’t you ever do that?”
“Oh, yes,” Josie said. She climbed onto Sheila’s lap and stared at her, wide-eyed. Sheila gave her a squeeze. This was her youngest great-grandchild. She could hardly remember their names, but she knew Josie. Cass brought Josie to visit almost every day.
Sheila wished Cass wouldn’t dress like a boy. Cass was her prettiest granddaughter, all pink and gold. She had the coloring of the inside of a seashell. She had a beautiful figure, but you’d never know it from the dungarees and baggy shirts she went around in.
“You’re my favorite grandchild, you know,” Sheila said to Cass.
“Granny!” Cass said, embarrassed.
“Well, don’t worry. I won’t say it in front of your sisters.”
People never admitted they had favorite children or grandchildren, and Sheila didn’t know why not. You wouldn’t announce it to the world, but privately you had good reason for loving one more than the other. One might be sweeter, one might have the soul of Ireland, one might be a car thief. Of her two children, Sheila had loved Edward better. She loved Jim, too, but Ward was her elder, her kinder, her smarter son. From the day he was born until the day he died, a golden light had shined on him.
He had amazed his mother by never crying, by talking early, by exhibiting an interest in everything from ice-skating to clamming to watching her make pie crust. Sheila would let him flute the edges, and she would always make him a grape-jelly tart from the leftover crust. Although they’d started off calling him “Eddie, Jr.,” as time went on they changed his nickname to Ward; it was the stronger, more commanding half of “Edward.” Changing it was his father’s idea. Ward aced anything he did. Tests in school, sports—he could have played football for the Providence Steamrollers.
Sheila couldn’t see it from here, not anymore, but across the room hung a painting Ward had done in high school. It was a beautiful watercolor of two boys clamming the flats at Easton’s Beach; Sheila had always assumed Ward had meant the boys to be himself and Jim. He had caught perfectly the colors of a summer day, and he’d painted the boys to be strong, with their basket nearly full of clams. That painting was Sheila’s safe. Behind the painting, taped to the frame, was an envelope. In it she kept her children’s birth certificates, various deeds and IOU’s, and Ward’s death certificate.
When Ward was sixteen, his father founded Keating & Sons Fish Company and made Ward a full partner. The plural “sons” turned out, at first, to be optimistic; Jim hadn’t wanted any part of the business. Jim joined the merchant marine, and no one heard a word from him for five years.
Sheila opened her eyes. Cass was saying something. “What?” Sheila asked, blinking to get her in focus.
Cass’s mouth was moving, but all Sheila could hear were whooshing noises, like waves on the beach. “What? I can’t hear you.”
Josie reached up and grabbed Sheila by the left ear. The expression on the child’s face was very intense, as if she were concentrating on an important job. Thumps and screeches filled Sheila’s ear, and she realized that Josie was turning on her hearing aid.
“Can I get you anything?” Cass asked, the words suddenly clear enough to hear.
“A ginger ale,” Sheila said. “That would be very nice.”
There were ways and there were ways to catch swordfish. The method you chose depended on how much money you hoped to make selling the meat. The easiest, laziest way was longlining. You set a long line in the middle of the sea, with fifty or so baited hooks hanging down from red plastic buoys at ten-foot intervals. You checked your loran position, so you’d know where to come back to, and then you left the line overnight. When you returned at dawn you’d see a necklace of bulbous red balls bobbing in the distance. You’d pull up each red ball and its hook, one at a time. Hanging from a few of the hooks would be swordfish. Dead swordfish. Some chewed by sharks, others just dead and beginning to bloat.
Longlined swordfish didn’t fetch as high a price as harpooned ones. Sharks could rip out fifty dollars’ worth of swordfish meat, leaving a jagged hole. Even if you trimmed the edges, people didn’t want to buy raggedy fish. Not only because it wasn’t appetizing, but because something primeval in the customer twigged that the fish had died an ugly death: drowning with a hook in its mouth while sharks ate it alive. At least, that was James Keating’s theory.
Today he and George Magnano wanted to harpoon a fish off the books, to cut up and store in their freezers. Christ, just for the fun of it. What a day: clear and fine, diamonds on the water. Jimmy stood beside George in the tuna tower while George drove. George owned a hell of a boat, a Grady White 25 with twin Yamaha 250s. There wasn’t a ripple from here to Montauk; they were bound to spot fins. Jimmy pulled his cap down low, to keep the sun off his face. He had a skin cancer on his nose, and Mary made him wear the hat and Sea & Ski.
“What’ve you got there? A softball team or something?” George asked, flicking the peak of Jimmy’s cap.
Jimmy took it off, handed it over. Blue mesh, it had a patch with the words “Keating & Daughters” in gold script. “Little League,” Jimmy said. “Cass’s and Bonnie’s kids used to play. I still sponsor the team.”
“They got you managing?”
“What, are you kidding? An old man like me? No, that’s for the young guys. This is a smooth ride, George. This boat drives like a Cadillac when she’s on her plane.”
“Hell, on a day like this you could take a Boston Whaler to Block Island and you wouldn’t feel a bump. Flat as glass.”
“You’ll pound your nuts off in a Whaler, no matter what the weather’s like. Cass’s boy T.J. gave me a ride in his last week, and I can still feel it.” Jimmy and George laughed at the painful memories of what a Boston Whaler could do to a man.
It felt pleasant to zoom along with no particular destination. Jimmy Keating felt free and young, the way he always did in summertime. Fishermen were transformed with the summer solstice. The instant the sun crossed the Tropic of Cancer, grown men would skip out of work, climb tuna towers, joke about their balls.
Throughout the dark winter and muddy spring, Jimmy had been having deep money troubles. He could barely keep his fleet going. Mount Hope harbor had been iced in for the first time in twenty-one years, and a lot of boats were damaged. Even Lobsterville’s profits were off. It sure felt good to get away, to stare across the waves at an empty horizon.
Back in Mount Hope, Jimmy would sneak out of work and walk along the waterfront until he came to old Doc Breton’s pier. Doc had run an icehouse when Jimmy was a kid, and Jimmy had liked to hang around, listening to Doc tell about sailing around Cape Horn on a whaling ship and bringing ivory from Africa to Deep River, Connecticut. Doc was so old, he didn’t have a tooth in his head. His shipmates had called him Doc because he had a knack for first aid. He’d known how to apply a poultice, how to use a tourniquet, how to brew a broth that would settle any stomach in gale seas.
Jimmy had wondered whether Doc was a magic man. His stories had put a spell on Jimmy, made him itch to go to sea—itch so bad he’d toss all night with his skin burning. All because Doc had conjured for Jimmy the pure beauty of a ship on the sea and the peace of endless distance. Because of Doc, Jimmy joined the merchant marine.
When Jimmy Keating had told his parents he’d be leaving them for a few years, his mother had cried. But his father, Eddie, could understand Doc’s power. Once, lobstering in January, Eddie had gotten frostbite in his fingers. By the time he’d made port, four of them were turning black, and he’d been sure he would lose them. But Doc had made him soak them in cold salt water, then salt water he’d heated in the kettle, then cold water again, until finally Eddie’s fingers turned white. They’d never really gotten back to being normal finger-colored, but at least he hadn’t lost them. And so Eddie had staked Doc some money to open an icehouse.
Now Doc’s pier was tumbledown, a ramshackle mass of splinters and concrete. It was the last abandoned pier on Mount Hope’s waterfront. Wind whistled through, and it sounded like a person talking. Jimmy would stand there, all alone. He could almost hear Doc’s voice; it was the only place on land he could go to achieve the peace of an empty horizon.
“You and Beverly ever think of moving to Florida?” Jimmy asked.
“Never,” George said. “Who needs swamps and funny red fish? Besides, we’d miss the winters up here.”
“Right,” Jimmy snorted.
“Seriously, Bev is a Christmas freak. She’d never leave New England. She’d miss the snow and the fireplace, all that cozy shit. She’d miss the kids.”
“Same with Mary. Mary could never leave the girls.”
“What about you?”
“I’ve thought about it,” Jimmy said. “But we’ve got the business.”
“The girls could run it, but you want to keep your hand in.”
“That’s right,” Jimmy said. He thought he’d spied a fin up ahead, but it was just a rogue wave. A few puffy clouds were forming in the north.
They cruised along in silence, taking it easy. Sure felt good to be on the water, Jimmy thought for about the fifth time since they’d left the dock. “Sure feels …” he started to say.
“What?” George asked.
But Jimmy didn’t answer. All of a sudden he realized that he was trying to trick himself into having a good time: the summer day, the beers, the boat. But anytime lately he wasn’t actively trying to rip the head off some insurance guy, or juggle the ledgers, robbing Peter to pay Paul, he worried that he’d return to Mount Hope and find that the whole dock had washed away. Everything out to sea: his father’s fish business, the restaurant, his wife and daughters, his mother, everything. Keating’s Wharf would be as abandoned as Doc Breton’s.
Jimmy Keating squinted at the horizon with extraordinary concentration. He refused to look down. He had the weirdest feeling that if he looked straight down into the water below, he would see his lobster tanks and his father’s oak desk floating by.
“I’m thinking about selling my boat,” George said.
“This one?” Jimmy asked, surprised. George had been saving for
this sportfisher his whole working life; he’d just taken delivery in March.
“No, the Rover Mar.”
Keating wondered whether George was feeling him out. Did Keating have any use for a seventy-five-foot Desco with a six-cylinder Gardner diesel? Frankly, he had always thought the boat more suitable for southern waters.
“Billy’s been talking to me. He’s looking to buy,” George said.
“Holy shit. Our Billy?” Jimmy asked, bowled over.
“Yeah. But it’s just talk,” George said. “You know how young guys are. They’re always dreaming about going off on their own.”
“Billy works for me,” Jimmy said, cut by the news.
Jimmy had known Billy since he was five years old and used to play with Cass after school. Billy had followed Cass around starry-eyed for years. They seemed polar opposites: Cass, fair and slender; Billy, dark and stocky. Mary used to call them “the batteries,” the charge between them was so obvious. Sometimes Jimmy would watch Billy drive Cass away in his Camaro, and he would wonder how it felt to fall in love. Jimmy knew love, he knew devotion. But when he watched Billy and Cass, he knew that he had missed something in life.
Jimmy had three terrific daughters. He hated to categorize them, but he couldn’t help it. Nora, his eldest, was Miss Independence, with a temper if you crossed her; Jimmy had given up hoping she’d get married. Bonnie rolled with the flow. Her life with Gavin and their kids seemed to make her happy. Keating wouldn’t give two cents for Gavin’s fishing talent, but he was a decent son-in-law. What more did he have a right to expect?
When Cass was little, Jimmy would have called her his most carefree daughter, his tomboy. Back then he would never have believed her to be the most complicated. He pictured Cass’s life in a fast-forward blur: the braces she’d hated so much she took them off herself instead of waiting for the orthodontist (one thousand dollars down the drain); the summer she’d swum one hundred miles for charity; her eighth-grade dance with Billy, of course, the last time she ever got home before curfew; sneaking out to be with Billy; the punishments he and Mary meted out; more sneaking out; Jimmy threatening to send her to a convent; her suspension from school for stealing a marijuana cigarette during Drug Awareness Day; Billy’s mother calling every night to ask if the Keatings had seen her son; Cass’s graduation, thank God; six months at the University of Maine; the day she came to work for Jimmy; her wedding day; having the kids. Cass, his spark plug.