A Ship Made of Paper

by Scott Spencer

  “When I first met you, you were thinking aboutThurgood Marshall.”

  “That was my husband’s idea.Marshall was sort ofa friend ofhis family.Well, there have been many changes oftopic since then.God.All this time offfrom school, all this marriage and motherhood, it’s sort of gummed up my brain.I’m in a state ofconstant confusion.”

  “I never liked school,”Daniel says, though it’s not true.He’s not sure why he said it.

  “I like school.I just don’t like my brain right now.”Her laugh is soft, heartrending.She pushes the sleeves ofher sweater up, showing her ar-ticulated forearms, dark and hairless.“I better get out ofhere,”she says.

  “This is ridiculous.You didn’t even get your coffee.”

  “It’s no big deal.”Her heart is racing;how long will it take him to figure out that the waitress is deliberately not serving her?“Anyhow, you said the coffee’s not very good here.”

  “Well, at least drink the water, the water’s excellent.”

  Outside, they linger for a moment.“Becky was weird in there,”

  Daniel says.

  “Becky?”Iris can feel it coming;he is going to declare himself outraged on her behalf.He is going to be her prince in shining liberal armor.

  “Yes, our waitress,”he says.He feels a quickening, he has found a way to say what he has wanted to say for so long.“The thing about Becky is she’s weird around beautiful women.”There.It’s said.He makes a helpless ges-ture, as ifhe were tossing up his life, seeing where it would land.He doesn’t dare look at her.“Because you are.So extraordinarily beautiful.”

  “Oh.”She says it as ifhe were a child who has come up with something adorable.“Well, thanks.”

  “I still owe you a cup ofcoffee,”he says.“How about tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday,”she says.

  He watches her as she hurries toward her car.Her generous bottom, her funny little run.The sky is dark blue and the autumn sun is warm and steady, as ifpromising that winter will never arrive.A slow breeze moves down the street, carrying the perfume ofthe slowly dying leaves, a nearby field’s last mowing, the river.What can the world do to you with its beauty? Can it lift you up on its shoulders, as ifyou were a hero, can it whoopsie-daisy you up into its arms as ifyou were a child? Can it goad your timid heart, urge you on to finally seize what you most shamefully desire?Yes, yes, all that and more.The world can crush you with its beauty.

  Back in the city, Daniel’s firm had offices that took three floors in a styl-ishArt Deco building on LexingtonAvenue, with astrological mosaics in the lobby, and arte moderne numerals over the filigreed brass elevator doors.But here in Leyden his place ofwork is as humble as his practice, two rooms in a wood-framed building near the center oftown.It’s an ungraceful, stolid sort ofbuilding, the architectural equivalent ofa schoolmarm, a nun, a maiden aunt;it once had been, in fact, a board-inghouse, from1925to1960,owned by two musical, free-thinking German sisters, and run exclusively for local unmarried women—gen-teel shop-women, schoolteachers, and a woman named Marjorie Inger-soll, who had a small private income that she supplemented by giving painting and drawing lessons, and whose cheerful landscapes, with their agitated skies and roller coaster hills and valleys, are still displayed along the stairways and in the hallways.Now, the house has been turned into an office complex, where Daniel rents a two-room suite, where century-old locust trees scrape their branches against the windows at the wind’s slightest provocation.Eight hundred and fifty dollars a month, which back in the city would get him thirty square feet in Staten Island.

  Daniel climbs the back stairs to the second floor, so lost in thought as he replays and what-ifs this morning’s meeting with Iris that he forgets today’s first appointment will be with his parents, who have announced that they wish to review their last will and testament.Daniel is not their lawyer;the meager bits oflegal business they have generated throughout their adult lives have been handled by one ofthe town’s old-timers, Owen Fitzsim-mons, an ectoplasmic old sort with funereal eyes and icy hands.Fitzsim-mons was a longtime chiropractic patient ofDaniel’s father’s, and while Mrs.Fitzsimmons was alive, the two couples took golfing vacations to-gether to Phoenix and San Diego, formed a wine-tasting club that was quite a success in Leyden in the late1970s, and one summer traveled together to Scotland and Ireland, where they stayed in castles, golfed, and came back home percolating with plans to retire and expatriate to what they continu-ally referred to as“the British Isles.”When his parents called for an ap-pointment, Daniel had wondered ifthere’d been some falling-out with Fitzsimmons, though that seemed to him unlikely.Daniel found Fitzsim-mons both vain and dour, a chilly man in a worn blue blazer with some mys-terious crest over the pocket.But then Daniel’s parents—Carl and Julia Emerson—were no less dour, and even shared with Fitzsimmons whatever circulatory difficulty it is that prevents one’s hands, fingers, and particularly fingertips from getting the blood flow necessary to keep them at a mam-malian temperature.Because their work entailed touching people, both of them were continually blowing on their hands to try to warm them.

  Daniel’s secretary is named SheilaAlvarez.She is a stout, round-faced woman.She wraps her dark braids so they sit like a woven basket on top ofher head, and she wears complicated necklaces with tiny stones, bits of seashell, and pantheistic amulets.The least alluring ofthree daughters, she is one ofthose women who get stuck with the task ofcaring for ag-ing, suffering parents, and when they died she was all alone in the world, and too emotionally spent to do anything about it.She has a far-flung net-work ofwomen friends, with whom she is continually on the phone.She is, however, unfailingly efficient, and since getting ill last winter, when Daniel not only protected her job during a long convalescence but also paid for the hospital charges that the insurance company didn’t cover, she is fiercely loyal to Daniel, protective and vigilant, as ifthe office were un-der continual attack, or threat ofattack, though, ofcourse, it is not:it’s just a humdrum rural practice, with one criminal case for every ten real estate closings, and even the criminal cases rarely come to trial.

  This practice barely affords him a decent living—in fact, he’s not really clearing much more than he pays Sheila—and it is as close to his for-mer, sleek professional life as a campfire is to a blast furnace, and sometimes it is remarkable to Daniel not only that he has chosen this quiet, country life but that he finds it so agreeable.True, leaving New York was more like fleeing NewYork, but he could have chosen some-place with more people, better cases, more money to be made.Yet here he is, right back in Leyden, which, for years, every time he left it—dur-ing prep school, college, law school, after holidays, summers, the funeral ofan old grade school buddy—he always assumed he was seeing it for the very last time.Kate, upon agreeing to move to Leyden with him, sensed that Daniel wanted to be near his aging parents, and, despite her misgiv-ings, she didn’t see how she could prevent him from fulfilling his filial du-ties.Though every story he ever told her about his parents made them seem as ifthey were monsters ofreserve, two towering touch-me-nots who treated Daniel as ifhe were not so much their son as their charge, one ofthose boys from a nineteenth-century novel, a boisterous nephew left behind by a floozy sister, an orphan whose parents have disappeared undermysterious circumstances in India, a little human mess it had fallen to them to mop up.

  Sheila hangs up the phone as Daniel closes the outer door ofhis office behind him.She is quick to end what was obviously a personal call, but her smile is warm and unrepentant.

  “Everything okay here?”he asks.

  She puts a short, bejeweled finger over her peachy lips, and then quickly scrawls a note to him on a yellow Post-it.“Your parents are wait-ing for you inside,”it says.

  In truth, he has forgotten they were coming, and hedoesfeel a little dismayed, but he exaggerates his feelings to amuse Sheila—his face a stark, staring mask ofmock horror.He crumples the note, his eyes dart back and forth, as ifhe were about to bolt.What am I going to do?

  His li
ps soundlessly form the words.His hand goes to his throat.Sheila laughs, also soundlessly, and then she leans back in her high-tech swivel-ing office chair, and the contraption tilts back so abruptly that it seems as ifshe is going to tip over, which elicits a scream ofshock and delight from her.

  Great,Daniel mimes to her, and then he strolls into his inner office, where Carl and Julia are seated on the sofa, but leaning forward, their heads tilted, looks ofconcern on their faces.

  “What was that scream?”Daniel’s father asks.

  ”Sheila,”Daniel says.“Tipping over.”He greets his parents with affection, which he presents to them mildly, delicately, with the kind ofreserve you expect in a funeral home or in an intensive care unit.He kisses his mother gently on the cheek, shakes his father’s hand while keeping his own eyes down.He sits at his desk, runs his hands over its clear, waxed surface.

  “So what’s the problem with your wills?”Daniel asks, wanting to take charge ofthe conversation.The last thing he wants to do is to answer their bread-and-butter inquiries about Kate and Ruby, neither ofwhom they have bothered to try to know very well, but whom they would be likely to ask after, for the sake ofform.

  Carl and Julia exchange nervous looks, openly, as ifthey are communicating over a client who is facedown on the chiropractic table.

  Daniel, for his part, pretends not to notice.When he was young, he was curious to discover what lay behind his parents’ceaseless secrecy and re-serve, what horrible little habits they might conceal, what gooey sexual secrets, what hidden morsels ofbiography.Maybe they carried some deep malice, perhaps they weren’t really married, perhaps he was adopted, maybe his father was a quack, maybe his mother ended every evening in bed sniffing at a rag drenched in ether, and just maybe they werefrom outer space.It’s puzzling to him how his curiosity has per-sisted, but now he fears that ifthey were ever to suddenly confide in him he might want to clap his hands over his ears.It’s too late for that.His ef-fort has been to make peace with the people who raised him, the creaky couple who always winced ifhe raised his voice, the punctual pair who had a clock in every room and who marked the passing ofthe hours with their sighs, their meals, theirTV programs.Ifthey were to show him something different now, it would upset that peace, the treaty would be nullified, he would have to start to try to understand them, and he did not care to.

  Somehow, in their little exchange ofglances, it is decided that Carl will present the problem to Daniel.“We’ve made some changes in our will,”he says, in his calm, authoritative voice.“And Owen strongly ad-vised us to go over them with you.”

  “Okay,”Daniel says, stretching the word out.He is looking closely at his father, imagining himself looking like him in forty years.Worse things could happen.Carl is fit, leaner than Daniel is now.His blue eyes are sharp beneath spiky, emphatic eyebrows.There is something strange in the intensity ofhis father’s gaze.When he looks you in the eye it doesn’t feel like frankness, it feels like aggression.His hair is still dark and abun-dant, his posture a living advertisement for his particular branch ofthe medical arts.He looks scrubbed, well rested, prosperous—pleased with life, and pleased with himself.Julia, however, is starting to age rapidly.

  She has become frail, a little trembly, and her once imperious features look surprised by her own onrushing mortality.

  “Well,”Carl continues,“as you know, in the past three or four years your mother and I have become much more involved in theWindsor County Raptor Center, over in Bailey Point.”

  “No,”Daniel says.“As a matter offact, I didn’t know.”Raptor Center?

  And then it hits him:his father’s eyes are those ofa hawk, an eagle, a falcon.

  “Yes, you did,”Julia says, a little accusingly.“Don’t you recall my showing you pictures ofyour father and me at the center? Father had a falcon on his arm?”Her throat seems as ifit were irritated by the work oftalking, and she coughs into her hand.

  “You know me, Mom.I have a terrible memory.But I do know the place.An old friend ofmine from fifth grade runs it.”

  “Lionel Sanderson,”Carl says, with a smile.

  ”Right,”says Daniel.“How is he?”

  “Overworked, but what dedicated man is not?”

  “He remembers you, ofcourse,”Julia adds.“He often recalls the nice afternoons after school at our house.”

  Daniel is both stunned and amused by the untruthfulness ofthis.First ofall, he and Lionel were never close friends and did not spend their time after school in each other’s company.And secondly,no onecame to the Emerson house after school, or on weekends, or during the summer, or any time at all, except to quickly call for Daniel and be on their way.His parents found the racket and clutter ofboys unbearable.The house itself was a meticulous and unfriendly place, and the pictures on the walls were ofskulls and spinal cords, giving the place a kind ofpermanent Hal-loween ambiance—a chilling, childless Halloween.But Daniel knows better than to challenge their take on the past—he has tried it before when other inconsistencies have arisen, and it has caused hard feelings.

  “Well, it’s not that we have any plans to be kicking the bucket,”Carl says,“but we wanted you to know that we’ve decided to leave the bulk ofour estate to the Raptor Center.Right now, the whole operation is squeezed onto twenty-five acres, and there’s not a building on the prop-erty that doesn’t need some major repair.What they would like to do—”

  “Need to do,”Julia says.

  “Is double the acreage, and create facilities that can safely house fiftybirds.”

  “I see,”Daniel says.He senses the injury ofwhat is being said, but he can’t feel it.It’s like cutting your thumb with a fine blade and seeing the little crease in the skin but not yet the blood.“Well, that sounds good.Raptors.”

  “What we wanted to avoid at all costs,”Julia says,“is having you learn about this after we’re gone.And then feeling that we’ve done thisagainst you somehow.”

  “Because nothing could be further from the truth,”Carl adds.

  ”Yes,”Daniel says.“Well.Raptors.You’re not planning some early departure scenario, are you?”He sees the confusion on their faces, clarifies.

  ”You know, ending it all.Suicide.”He raises his voice on that word, star-tles himself.

  “Absolutely not,”says Carl.

  ”But we’re not getting any younger,”Julia says.“Dan, let’s concentrate on what is important here.Ifyour father and I thought you needed money, then ofcourse we would have left every penny we have to you.

  But here you are.”She makes an encompassing gesture, indicating his of-fice, the Moroccan carpet on the floor, the glassed-in bookshelves, the antique oak file cabinets.“The Raptor Center is barely making it.”

  “We’re assuming you must have salted away a pretty penny from that job in NewYork—or else why would you have retired from it?”

  He’ll let that pass.“I just never knew you two were so involved with birds ofprey,”he says.

  “It’s recent,”says Carl.“We don’t want this to cause any hard feelings.

  Your mother and I have been talking this over for months, and that’s the most important thing, that there be no hard feelings.This is in no way meant to indicate what our feelings are for you, Dan.You’re our son.”

  “Our only son,”says Julia.“Our only offspring.Our only family.”

  “Are we talking about every penny you have?”asks Daniel.

  ”And the house,”says Carl.

  ”Not the contents, however,”Julia says, prodding Carl with one finger.

  I couldn’t care less,Daniel thinks.Yet the affront ofthis is unmistakable.

  I’m read out of their will?Why are they trying to punish me? Did I miss a Sun-day dinner? Did I fail to rake their leaves, clean their gutters, haul their empties to the recycling center?And then, in an instant, a huge and unhappy thought presents itselfto him:I came back here to be near them.And, in the next in-stant, the thought is gone.

  Carl has opened his briefcase and produced a manila folde
r containing Polaroids ofthe various pieces offurniture and works ofart Carl and Julia have deemed the most valuable oftheir possessions.The grandfa-ther clock, with its long, tarnished pendulum, which Daniel was always forbidden to touch, the spindly nesting table, which he was also not al-lowed to touch, the blue willow setting for twelve, also out ofbounds, the purple and red Persian rug, which he was allowed to walk across, but only without shoes, the antique hat rack upon which Daniel was never permitted to hang his hat—parenthood came late to the Emersons, and when Daniel was born, they did not childprooftheir house, they house-proofed their child.

  “Whenever you see something you really and truly want,”Julia says,

  “just turn the picture over and put your name on it.”

  “I don’t really see the purpose ofthis,”Daniel says.

  ”We wanted you to have first choice,”says Julia.

  ”First choice over whom?You don’t have any other children.Do you think the birds are going to want your china cabinet?”

  Again, Carl and Julia trade worried glances, gesture back and forth, as ifthey are alone.

  “This is exactly why we wanted to get this done when all three ofus could sit calmly together and hash it out,”Carl says.“We don’t want any misunderstandings.”

  “The thing is, I don’t want your money.I make a decent living—Iam

  charging you for this appointment, by the way.”Daniel laughs but is not surprised when his parents don’t join in.Once, about twenty-five years ago, he made his mother laugh at a knock-knock joke, but he hasn’t been able to get so much as a chuckle out ofeither ofthem since.

  “But you see?”says Julia.“That was exactly our thinking.”

  “You’re doing fine,”says Carl.“You always have.From the very beginning.I hope you realize what a blessing it was for your mother and I to have a son whom we trusted, who did the right things, who kept out oftrouble, and who was never a danger to himself or to others.Believe me.You may think ofyour mother and me as living in a bell jar, but we see what other people have gone through with their children.Drugs and homosexuality being just the most lurid examples.The great luxury you afforded us was that we never needed to doubt your basic stability.It was such a reliefto know that no matter what, you were always going to be just fine.Your head was always screwed on right.”