by Joan Silber
“Oh, no, not necessary,” he said. “Meeting them, I mean. Not needed, doll. Not at all.”
I knew then that he was going to slip away from me, a thread without a knot. I pleased him greatly—his dark-browed face always brightened when he saw me—but he had no plans for us. I was going to have to watch out for myself, since I had chosen to go into this unguarded by family. We were not lovers, but I had to be careful. I relinquished all private settings for us. I would only go with him to a pleasantly underlit speakeasy near his hotel, very quiet in the afternoons, with its shadowy murals of monkeys and parrots and its thick mauve-brown rugs. At our dark table, we nuzzled and squabbled; he told stories about what the drunken drummer in the band said to the man with a dog. Perhaps he never thought I would linger with him even as long as this. I was a surprise to him in every way.
IN THE SECOND YEAR in Florida my father was always consulting with someone about how to raise funds on property whose value was not what it had been. To save money, we had to let the cook go, and my mother took over the kitchen and made great efforts to fuss over my father. Would he only eat more breaded pork chops? Wasn’t banana cream pie his favorite? It was a very tender time between them. My father looked like a weary old lion, squinting in his chair, and my mother cajoled and teased him.
MY PARENTS WERE disappointed when I sent away a young man they’d introduced me to, a real estate investor, who’d proved coarser and less intelligent as I’d gotten to know him. My mother said, a little sourly, that my father was working hard for me—he knew a girl needed a dowry, even a pretty girl—and I wasn’t doing all that I could to help my own chances.
“A dowry,” I said. “Oh, Mother. That’s from a different century.”
“I always thought,” she said, “that Ted in Kingston might have proposed if you’d had more of a fortune behind you.”
“That wasn’t it,” I said. “Absolutely not.”
“Not to you, perhaps,” she said. “But who’s to say?”
This was not at all like the sweet dullness I’d been raised in, the poky upstate life in which my father read to us from Emerson’s essays and much family humor rested on the showy hats and affected speech of our neighbors. What was happening to my family? I loved Florida, but I thought that my mother, of all of us, should not have come.
MY BROTHER TO ME:
At first all the people I met here were Buddhists—you would admire their lovely little temples—but it seems that on the southeast coast a good many people here follow the Mohammedan faith. They believe in one God only and think the Trinity is hogwash (just like us Unitarians) and their Paradise (which their prophet dreamed up in the middle of the desert) is a place of lush, ever-watered gardens—just like the Siamese-Malayan jungle I’m in! There the trees droop with delicious fruit, from branches never failing and never out of reach—according to Zain (rhymes with fine), my Malay factotum. I quite like being around their calls to prayer—Allahu Akbar, La ilahah illallah—being a foreigner lets me hear the beauty of it, without anyone expecting anything of me. Oh, the luxury of foreignness! I saw a wedding party in Pattani—no liquor and everyone sitting on the ground to eat. Would you like that for your own nuptial gala, do you think?
I hardly let out any sort of shriek when Artie announced, “Corinna, my girl, I’m moving on. Going to St. Louis with another dinner orchestra.” I was a good sport, a champ of a girl. “Poor lamb,” I said. “Chilly winters again for you. But business is crummy here, everybody knows.” I probably overdid my heartiness in wishing him the best, but I saw no other way not to be entirely absurd. I might have torn my heart out and handed him its pulpy mass and he still would not have stayed.
My anguish was protracted and private, and I stayed home and read novels until I was dizzy and headachy from the marching blocks of blackish type. I sent pressed hibiscus to my friend Helene at home, with blithe remarks about the tropics, though everyone knew the bottom had fallen out of the land market all over Florida. Not far from us was a field of deserted construction sites, dug-up hillocks of dry dirt looking sadly expectant, a street that was not going to be a street after all.
I kept a flask of Cuban rum in my room for the nights when I really could not sleep. I did not like resorting to it, but some nights—especially in the electric restlessness before late-summer storms—it was the only thing that helped. My father, who had nothing but a chain of lying buyers who’d defaulted on his Miami lots, had enough of his own troubles. My mother tried to keep us going with jolly talk and an excess of pie, but when my father wasn’t home, she was a morose companion. She said to me, “You’ve let too much time go by.” Where would I find a husband now?
MY FATHER HAD taken to blaming the tin-canners. These were the hordes of people who’d driven to Florida from who knew where and stayed in auto camps and lived on tinned food and carried their extra gas and water in big metal cans. “They don’t buy land,” my father said, “and they’re too temporary to contribute to anything.”
“Well,” my mother said brightly, “they’re making the tin company that Owen works for rich. They’re his customers!”
“Drifters are a drain,” my father said.
“Didn’t we drift in?” I said.
“If you can’t be civil,” my mother said, “I’ll have to ask you not to speak.”
It was not like my mother to snap at me so harshly, and I understood from this that my father was really not doing well at all. I had my own disdain for his failed cleverness, his solid science that had come to dust, but his suffering was real.
“My girls are pulling together,” he’d say, as my mother and I swept the house or waxed the furniture. I might have worried more about him, I might have shown more feeling for the melancholic spectacle of half-built houses on abandoned land, I might have tried to raise my mother’s spirits, but I was caught up in my longing for Artie.
I HARDLY DREAMED on those nights when sips of rum with lemon water were my friendly soporific, when the swampy smell of summer weather outside took me into an utter blank until the head-splitting morning. So I was surprised when I half awoke in my bed to the percussive noise of smashed bottles, as if a speakeasy owner were throwing out his trash. When I opened my eyes, the night sky was oddly lit up, and the window across the room was cracked and broken. A gust of wind was flapping at my coverlet, tugging it across the bed. I heard the rain begin then, a beat of heavy drops that sounded torrential within minutes. Water was splashing through the broken window and hitting my bed. People hadn’t said a hurricane was coming—or had they? Did I ever listen to anything? Was this what a hurricane was? I could not get my door open—the wind was blowing it closed. When I wedged my way through at last, I lost my balance and fell down the hall. I had to hoist myself up with a bruised shoulder and crawl along the carpet. I wanted to get to my parents.
My mother looked like a ruffled bird, a terrified chick, coming out of their doorway to find me. “Honeybunch! We’re all okay! There you are!” she shouted. She was wrapped in a blanket, and my father, in his undershorts, was standing behind her.
“Shouldn’t we be in the basement?” I said.
“You’re bleeding,” my father said. “I think we should stay as we are.”
I thought I might attempt the stairs if I went down on my bottom, the way I used to on the steeper mountain trails, but from the top step I saw that our living room was by now under a flood of water. This frightened me more than anything else had. I lurched back to the room where my parents were huddled under a table. My mother said, “What’s the purpose of such weather, do you think?” What purpose indeed, what bullying. We had misread the air, the violence waiting in its soft currents, the wet gunpowder in its humidity.
My father got up and tied a sock around the bruise on my shoulder. He tried to keep us calm by pointing out that the last hurricane, in July, had been nothing and soon this one would be too. He put on his robe to wait it out. But I was angry with my father, whose boyish itch for more than we needed had brou
ght us here, where we didn’t belong.
WHEN THE STORM ENDED, very early in the morning, we went down to the living room in the early bluish light. The water was up to our knees and our brown velvet sofa was pitched on its side, stained and drowned. There was no electricity and my mother sloshed through the dim hallway with her wet nightgown billowing. In the kitchen she found some oranges for us to eat where we stood. How bright they tasted, no fruit could have been more astounding. I was so grateful to my mother for them. I thought that our shared treat in the ruined parlor was like wartime, and I thought of my brother, who’d been in France during the war. From the parlor windows we could see a house down the lane with its entire roof gone. Gone where?
My father wanted to go outside to see what had happened to our house and to check on our neighbors down the road, and so we changed to our day clothes and put on boots. Under the white sky the landscape was gouged and wrung out—palm trees torn up by the roots and my father’s black car upended in a ditch like a giant insect—and everything dripping muddy tears. We all stood speechless at the way we’d been dopey admirers of the prettiness of nature, silly tourists feeding saucers of milk to a tiger cub.
My father walked us toward the main road, though no one else seemed to be out yet. A huge, thick cypress tree had fallen across the spot where our little lane crossed the larger street, and my father thought we should try to roll it out of the way in case a vehicle needed to get through. The efforts of all three of us did not seem to get the trunk to move. “You didn’t know your dad brought us here for manual labor, did you?” my mother said. Adversity was rousing her.
“Inspiration is ninety percent perspiration,” I said, pretending to wipe my brow, though a breeze was picking up and we were not really so hot.
My father—“our mighty leader,” my mother was calling him—was reasoning out another angle for our pushing when the rain started again. “Leave it till later!” my mother called out gaily.
We were splashing our way back to the house as the wind blew the gushing rain back into our faces. My father slipped, and I had a hard time getting him back up. “Too much pie, Dad,” I said, but he couldn’t hear me over the wind. My mother and I screamed when a utility pole was knocked over and crashed to the ground half a block in front of us. “Go on,” my father shouted. I didn’t see why we were going straight into the wind, but I did what my father said. “We’re the Charge of the Light Brigade,” I yelled. The pole rose from the ground as if it wanted to right itself, and my father tried to pull us to the side—until the pole swung into the air before us, a monstrous stick of creosoted wood, twice the height of our house, flying much too close, no matter how we screamed at it.
I WOKE UP WITH a great pain in my arm, and above me was a ceiling tiered with gilded plaster garlands, festoons of sculpted ribbons. I knew that there were other people in the room, and I thought at first that we were at a wedding inside the ballroom of a ship. I drifted in and out of a haziness of sleep, angry that I had been taken to a celebration when I was clearly not well at all.
People spoke to me from time to time, and while they made very little sense, by the time I was ready to open my eyes I had begun to piece something together. I was in the McAlister Hotel, where my mother used to watch me dance, but I was lying on a pallet on the floor with other people next to me. My parents were not there. No one knew where my parents were. A woman in a brown skirt said that someone would come and tell me sometime, but I was not to move.
So I didn’t. Why didn’t I? I might have shouted and dragged myself up and lurched out of that silk-paneled hotel-turned-clinic to find them. I was unspeakably weary, but I shouldn’t have lain there, still as a stone, as if it didn’t matter whether they were alive or dead.
It was not until the second day, when I could sit up and eat some kind of thin oatmeal, that I plagued a sallow-faced young man from the Red Cross about the urgency of informing my parents, who would be worried sick. My head ached and my arm was swollen and scraped and some fingers were wrapped in bloody gauze, but really I was fine. “Right as rain,” I said. My parents needed to know.
Everyone said my people would find me, but I had the idea, once I was strong enough, to insist that a volunteer drive me back to our house. The water was not so deep in the streets anymore. From two blocks away I crowed to see the roof still on. “My father had a good house built,” I said to the man driving me. Then I saw the utility pole lying across the road, and under it was a very large dark leaf, which was not a leaf, when we grew closer, but a jagged piece of the India-rubber jacket my father wore. I knew then—or was afraid I knew—even before our neighbor came out of the house down the lane and tried to tell me what had happened to my mother and father.
SHE SPOKE IN a respectful whisper—a woman I hardly knew, a snappy young matron with spit curls—and it took her a while to explain—she had to say first how happy she was that I was all right—but the words, So sorry, so sorry, they were lovely people, were clear enough. Killed. Both. My dear. Oh. She called me my dear.
I covered my face with my hands because I did not like being surrounded by strangers at this moment. I was angry that my parents weren’t there to help me, now of all times when I needed them most. I let the neighbor lead me away. What was her first name? I heard myself thanking her.
I WOULD NOT LET anyone stay in the house with me. It seemed indecent to have to talk with strangers. But I did not really know what to do with myself once the others left. All the rooms downstairs bore the marks of flood, furniture swamped against a wall, the Persian rug a darkened sponge. The house, with its smell of dirty water, had no noise in it. I was alone (as my mother would say) with my thoughts.
I sat on the soggy lower step of the stairs and heard my own moaning, an animal sound ridiculous with no hearer but the maker of it. At the bottom of the well where my mind was, I wanted very badly to have my brother with me, which was not possible. I got up to phone the telegraph office, but the telephone line was still dead. The emptiness in the receiver made me feel crazy and I crouched on the floor in defeat. The carpet under me was already turning to algae, to rot; everything human-made had given way, been pulled apart and separated from itself. The house had been churned into swamp, sunk back to its old form.
I rallied myself enough to change into decent clothes, and I walked to the center of town, where the Western Union was. It was a walk of perhaps forty minutes and it was a good idea. The wreckage was so general—buildings collapsed against each other and turned into ancient ruins, mothers leading small frightened children through reeking mud—that it reminded me (though I could not truly absorb it) that mine was not the only woe on earth.
On the way I composed the message that I would send to the Bangkok bureau of my brother’s company. I did not know how long it would take to reach him in the south. I had to be as short as I could and yet present the news without cruelty, and the labor of this served me as a form of devotion. Hurricane here. Very bad news.
BY THE TIME OWEN answered me, I was already back in Kingston with our relatives, though I’d had to wait weeks until the railroad was running. His telegram was forwarded to me from Florida. He wrote:
Cannot believe. Are you all-right. My dear sister. Letter coming.
The letter took five weeks to arrive, and I was very glad to get it. I was settled in with my Aunt Leonie, in her big house by the river. She was a widow, my four cousins were grown, and she said I was good company, though I was hardly talkative. When she spoke of my mother, she called her Francie, and the picture of my mother as a young girl came to me with particular pain. Aunt Leonie liked to distract me with games of checkers. I was too weak to do anything but be polite, but I was seized by a longing to hide. I could not really remember why people bothered to speak to each other, actually. My brother wrote:
Two things are much on my mind now. Why did I choose to be so far away? And are earthly ties broken by death? I don’t think I should plague you with my speculations (too many nights alone in my
tent?) but I wish we could talk face to face. How are you now? I hope you’ve stayed in Florida. You seemed to like so much the warm climate and the lush vegetation and the subtropical life. I haven’t heard about the will (hard-to-find creature that I am) but I assume you are well provided for. Father would want this, we know. But I think you are probably comfortable, if that word can be used at a wrenching time like this. I imagine you having your quiet days, sitting out on the patio you described, gaining strength bit by bit.
It is my hope (I think quite a good deal about this) that our father did truly think well of my venturing forth into the tin mines of Siam. I know it was very hard on Mother.
I READ THIS in my aunt’s cozy, overfurnished parlor, with a lap robe keeping off the chill. My friend Helene had told me I had to be careful or I could remain there forever, the maiden niece. My brother was not at all right about my father’s estate, which was mired in debt and encumbered by the sale of a house no one cared to buy. I had wanted all the unpaid bills settled and I’d had a dispute with the estate’s lawyer, who saw no need to pay anyone who’d worked for my father or sold him anything. He hadn’t listened to me, and I couldn’t think of anything to do but reason and weep, both of which failed. “He believed it was in your interest to cheat,” Helene said. “Any gain seems responsible to such men.”