She said nothing, proceeding to fix her bra.
“Working late tonight?” he said, lingering there.
“Don’t I always?”
“Can’t you ever get your own mother to give you better hours?”
“Why would she do that?”
“Yeah, she’d have to pay someone some real money.”
It was old banter between them, but, preoccupied, Marian let her end dangle. Ron enjoyed digging at her mother, more than she liked, though Marian had been the one to identify her job as a graduation gift she had never asked for, as indentured slavery, as security for life, her life. More than once, feeling frisky over drinks, she had raised her glass and recited, “Happy graduation. That’s the cash register, those are the customers, enjoy your life.”
Proceeding to dress, Marian wished Ron would just go away. When he did not, when he remained about the doorway, a harder thought crossed her mind: she had no wish to tell him what was happening because she did not want him as the father of her child.
“I have to hurry,” she said aside.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said and finally retreated downstairs.
It’s true, she thought: her one, deep-seated problem with having a baby was an awareness of Ron being locked in as husband and father. Not wanting him may have been grossly unfair—he was the father—but he was also the one who personified grossness, immaturity, who appeared doomed to being unable ever to grow up. What if the baby were a girl? Marian thought. Dear God, what if it was a boy and Ron indoctrinated him to car repair, and the two of them compelled her to live in a world of rusting hulks in the yard?
At last, giving Ron a good-bye kiss on the cheek and stepping into the unusual autumn air, Marian’s thoughts ran to her father, as they nearly always did on some perception of sky, breeze, or water. They were the forces with which her father lived as a lobsterman, and though she had spent but one summer working with him on the boat, their presence remained indelible. And now, of course, as if she did not have enough on her mind, she knew that her father was sick in some way and knew, too, that she needed to take some action, call or visit, or raise questions with her mother. There had been his cornhusk, wheezing cough the last time she spoke to him—she called every couple of weeks; he never called her—and only yesterday, entering the Weathervane for lunch, Debbie Savan, from high school, exiting, had said, “How’s your dad? I saw him at the clinic.”
Fine as far as she knew, Marian had thought, and a moment later, recalling his cough, began worrying, then knowing that something was wrong with her father. What clinic?
Hey Jude, help me out here, will you? she imagined saying. She had bent into the driver’s seat, and in new awareness of her belly being near the steering wheel, it came to her that she had to get people told or the evidence would rise like dough and tell on itself. That and her father. And Ron. Jude, what good are you if you can’t help a person erase a few problems?
As she backed around, yet another lingering problem touched Marian’s mind: the old charge of being spoiled. She’d heard it many times, felt guilt over it often, and, every time it surfaced, wanted to call time out and declare that the charge was not quite fair. So a person happened to be born other than poor, or came into the world with modest advantages; did it mean a person wasn’t subject to fears and frustrations like anyone else? Jude, tell me you understand, she imagined adding, while Jude, not unlike any friend she had ever had, elected for the moment to be occupied with something outside her window. When you started complaining about advantages, distractions along the road always had a way of capturing your audience.
Why did so many things have to be so troublesome? Marian wondered. All on top of having a baby, and here, all at once, coming to the fore: guilt over her father. Responsibility had her in its grip—he was her father—and was refusing to leave her alone. She had to talk to him on the phone, call his doctor, speak to her mother. If something were wrong, would anyone in the world be more likely than her father to deny it, even to himself?
Turning onto the highway, speeding up, then slowing down, it also occurred to Marian that her car—a ragtop Miata, the real graduation gift from her mother and Virgil—was too zippy and sporty and wasn’t her anymore. Like her fear for her father’s health and her wish to make up with him, everything seemed to extend from her condition. Her life was becoming an emotional, maternal bubble, threatening more each day toward popping.
Was it the baby, she wondered, catching herself straying toward the center line, or was she herself coming of age? She imagined her mother and Virgil grinning, noting that something like the latter might be the case. She could also see her mother taking it all too seriously, getting her aside and asking if she couldn’t try a little harder to be more personable, more upbeat—did she see how good it was for business, how each customer was an individual friendship to be formed, how customers might come back for years, might send their children and grandchildren back forty years from now? Did she know that hardly fifty years ago old Leon Bean himself had had but a family enterprise given to high customer satisfaction? Did she see how simple it all could be? Didn’t it just make her blood run to see what could be done if you put your mind to it?
Yeah, right, it made her blood run, Marian thought.
The sorry truth, she feared—following around the Kittery traffic circle—was that she wasn’t cut out for commerce at all. Her mother had but vaguely minded her not studying marketing and sales in college—the acquisition of the degree itself had been key to her mother—and for her part Marian rationalized that she would grow into business, while, in fact, now more than ever, she’d rather sit on a dock on a lovely day like this and commune with Virginia Woolf or Annie Dillard, or a book of poems, than crow over record sales of holiday goblets. She knew it made her more like her father, for whom the quiet independence of fishing was everything; it wasn’t something she’d readily say to her mother, but she knew it was true.
Warren
Headed for the Blue Fin loading dock, he guided the Lady Bee at a speed hardly raising a wake. Resting against a swivel stool he had installed years ago, he kept a hand on the ’68 Buick steering wheel, took in the air, and gazed within as he maintained a course he had followed into Portsmouth Harbor several thousand times— in childhood, adolescence, young manhood, maturity. His cough erupted then like a bark from an old dog, broke from his lungs as if from the depths of the sea. It’s happening, he thought. He was turning the corner.
Still the air remained calm, and he couldn’t help thinking yet again how satisfying it would be to putt unto an October horizon forever. All he had ever worked for would be gone from him before long, and he wondered once more if it had been his impulse to possess her that had cost him that prize of life in the first place. A country song he’d heard at the diner—she’ll never be yours if you can’t let her go—came to mind, and he knew he was guilty to a degree. His being possessive was what she had charged, while he believed, still, that her disloyalty with that eel who was her boss lay at the core of their marriage being such a failure.
Well, what does it matter now, and why keep fighting it? Nothing can likely be made right with her anyway, and what a dream it would be to sail on forever and have the old disappointments and resentments disappear in his wake.
The Lady Bee pulled along a dozen gulls like kites on strings. They squawked, flapped, dove like fighter planes as Warren eased a quarter turn to starboard to make a cross-tide approach to the wharf. He coughed some more. Passing a channel marker, he glanced beside the Lady Bee’s windshield; the hull slapped water and, as usual, delivered a spray of mist to his face, and the balmy air kept suggesting a peacefulness at odds with the tangled lines in his heart. Helen at the diner. Divorced with two children. She was long gone now, who knew where, but something in her smile, in her refilling of his coffee mug, had told him he’d have had a chance with her. Wasn’t she the kind of woman a fisherman was meant to marry?
The hull plowed on, and the breeze was counte
ring by less than a knot. The swollen harbor yet again resembled a glassy infield tarpaulin, and back to the south, Warren thought, in Baltimore, New York, wherever it was, vendors and groundskeepers were gearing up for an afternoon game. Early fans would be loitering about a greasy ballpark’s shaded ramparts and balconies, avoiding their seats for a while, and both wanting and not wanting the players to trickle forth and engage in infield and hitting practice on a precious green lawn. There would be the intoxication of youth, soil, grass, while the game—a lesson he knew too well—could only conclude and disperse the loitering fans back to the hard streets and jobs they had escaped, never having touched foot or finger to the youthful turf or its sandy border and manicured infield. Leaning out from the protection of the windshield, Warren all at once thought he detected a sound, a stadium’s roar rising over the harbor—a chill raced down his spine—and he wondered why a sound of the kind might be visiting at a time like this. Could there be a supreme power after all, and was he being given a sign?
Baseball had been big in Warren’s life, though long ago, and he sensed a circling back as if in a dream. The ball field had been his boyhood preoccupation until his father died, when he had put away his bats, cleats, first baseman’s glove, and never unbagged them again. And though he listened to their games, he had declined giving his heart to the Red Sox in the intervening years; he had been too serious as a player to be a fan and hadn’t been to Fenway Park more than half a dozen times in three decades, always alone and always feeling haunted. He had been only once with Beatrice, when they were a young couple and the guests of her first employer, State Representative Virgil Pound, and his wife, Abby. Warren had hardly had a clue about illicit love or political power at the time, and he wondered still again, barking another cough, how things might have gone had he had but a notion of the skulduggery of which Virgil was capable. Being so attentive. His constant smile. The mere thought of him, after all these years, had Warren tightening his jaw yet again. If he could go back in time, he’d pound that politician into lobster bait, he thought. He and Beatrice would have a life without him. Like night and day. Sailing with the breeze. Senator Pound swallowed by the shimmering sea.
It was early to be checking out—not even ten o’clock—and Warren’s catch was meaningless. Less than a dozen, and all small. Still, and but for his coughing, he proceeded into the old routine without complaint. He hadn’t told a soul of the biopsy and what was happening—as if he had anyone besides Beatrice in mind. There was Marian to tell, though Beatrice had so attached their only child that Warren remained uncertain even today if Senator Pound had not cast the deciding vote there, too, no matter the crazed blood test of two decades ago.
Easing back the throttle, letting the Lady Bee obey her onward motion, Warren saw, alas, that underneath it all he was inclined toward accepting his fate; so much of his life had been given to tasting the salt of rejection. Whatever you do now, go with dignity, he told himself. Don’t even think of what’s happened because it’s history and may never be undone. Rise above resentment and go as a gentleman. Cuckold will be one perception, but some people, if you let them, will understand. What choice do you have than to hope that a handful of fellow fishermen and a few strangers will understand and validate your life?
Letting the engine bubble as he tied alongside, Warren turned off the motor and set about counting and checking the bands on his meager catch. Nine chix. His numbers were coming up short in all ways, and not one of the little baseball gloves out of the deep would make a pound. Not earnings enough to cover bait and gas, though that was an old lament and he had bigger fish to fry. What did he care if he made gas money? And why that roar of the crowd at a time like this? Did his unmedicated condition have him hallucinating? A siren call urging a manly way out? Should he go down to the sea with his boat and gear and take his memories with him? Should he let some bubbles, and oblivion, be his only reply? Did he have a choice?
Hefting the crate onto the dock, Warren extended his feet and climbed out, his breath filling his own ears. Using both hands he lugged his catch into the weighing station to receive credit on the books and a chit to place with others—money in the bank—in that certain location in his wallet. To think that modest lifting and climbing of this kind would exhaust him. If his capacity to breathe was going so quickly, how could his diagnosis come up anything but hopeless—and would the doc grant him not a measure of months or weeks, but merely of days?
There was water on the cement floor, and, in the big tanks, dark lobster shapes crawled the backs of others. The room remained empty until DiMambro Jr., minding things for his father during the off-hour, came out to check and weigh his catch. “Mr. Hudon, how goes it?”
Warren couldn’t help grinning at the strapping young man who had been a schoolboy ballplayer himself, famous for lacing line drives over the fence at Leary Field. “Gone better,” he said.
“Well, think of the days when there’s nothing at all.”
“Seen my share of those,” Warren said. The remarks had been repeated down through the years, while no one would address the obvious—that he was checking out early and had to have left traps unattended. Questionable work—like failing health—was something any fisherman would notice and never mention to the guilty party. Among fishermen, your business was your business. Still, they all knew what was up, and Warren knew they knew. You kept such things to yourself.
Loners all, Warren thought, returning to his boat. If you weren’t a loner in the beginning, fishing would have its way with you in time. If your wife didn’t hook up by shortwave, who but yourself would you ever have a chance to get to know?
Cranking up the old straight six, Warren untied and pushed off, motoring once more through the warm autumn air. How many times had he headed home like this—thinking of Beatrice? His life as a fisherman had been marked by smells, and in the early days when he returned home from boat, bait, and fish, there had been aromas about her he had found hard not to lick after like a dog. Perfume, cologne, hair rinses—they were as fresh as petals opening on shore— and from the beginning he had loved the idea of her as his wife, had relished the smell of her. The odors of fishing were usually foul, while her smell, like her smile in those early years, had been irresistible to him, even magical. To think he had loved her as madly as any woman might wish to be loved, and that she had turned away and taken up with someone else. To think that on a hundred occasions, passing on the stairs or in the kitchen, thoughts had stolen into his mind of taking up a butcher knife and plunging it into her chest. They were the surprises of life he had never been able to sort out. Dear Beatrice. He might forgive all she had done if she would let him, but then it came to him again, a vision over the water, how helpless he was against both loving and despising her. Would she even care that his life was ending? Why in the world would she?
Beatrice
Leaning for a view through her office door to see Marian arrive, unlock the second door, and turn on lights, she called, “Morning, honey, be out in a minute,” and returned to finishing her things-to-do list. A minor item: yesterday afternoon, there in her office, she had snapped at Virgil for speaking unkindly (again) of Warren and was wondering if she owed him an apology, however offhanded it might appear. Snapping was out of character for her, certainly with Virgil, which had her thinking a word was in order. “I did marry him,” she bristled when Virgil had remarked, “Has he ever planned anything?”
At issue was the possibility of Warren being sick—it was nothing they had mentioned to Marian—and, if so, if he knew the extent of his own health benefits through the Fisherman’s Co-op? “It feels awful to hear things like that about him,” she told Virgil, as the exchange had opened the vein of guilt she tried always to keep closed. “You know I bear responsibility—he didn’t have to turn out like that.”
After a moment, Virgil had said, “As matter of fact, I don’t think you do bear any responsibility at all. Warren made his choices. He’s not a child.” They frowned if off, and Beat
rice had begun at once to think she had overreacted.
Yes, she’d apologize, she thought, but then, as it happened, when the phone rang and it was Virgil calling to set a time for lunch, he was immediately telling a joke. “Listen, do you know the epitaph the hypochondriac had put on his tombstone?”
“Epitaph on his tombstone—should I?”
“It’s cornball, but I’m trying to brighten your day here.”
“The epitaph on the hypochondriac’s tombstone?”
“See!”
She chortled.
“A little before one,” he said. “And how about the Galley Hatch—it’s a drive, but it’s always pleasant.”
Virgil was right; he had brightened her day. “I’m anxious about this talk,” she said.
“With your nerves of steel?”
“Don’t I wish.”
“The Thomaston account doesn’t make you anxious?”
“What’s a few hundred thousand dollars next to giving a talk to a roomful of nineteen-year-olds? It’s the half-educated girl giving-a-speech syndrome.”
“You’ll know five times as much as all of them put together, believe me,” Virgil said. “It’s natural to feel some stage fright. Take it from a veteran—it’s positive energy and will feed you like a drug. You’ll be a hit, and we’ll celebrate at lunch.”
Before going on the floor—to let Marian know she’d be taking a ninety-minute lunch—Beatrice continued to feel amused and anxious as she browsed through folders for her afternoon appointments. Scandia, Parker-Smythe, the computer tutorial. Nothing pressing, but she also wanted to study before the computer kid came and thought she was a dope about broadsheets and accounts payable; it seemed to be his angle on things, though it may have been her own self-consciousness. The twerp. At the same time, Virgil more than broadsheets was occupying her mind. Where did he come up with that malarkey—and his self-confidence? It had impressed her in the beginning and did so still. Talking to him was like turning on a TV game show host who never missed a beat. She liked it; she’d have to admit, though, she knew some people thought it was slick. Sour grapes, she thought. Life was grim enough, and as long as you got the job done what was wrong with being quick with social skills and having a good time? They were Virgil’s gifts in any case, not that she’d tell him (he whom Marian and the clerks called The Virgil) for he was conceited enough as it was.
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