Harbor Lights

by Theodore Weesner

  It, was then that it happened, and while everyone laughed, her relatives included, and though several men applauded as if they were townsfolk in a movie starring Gary Cooper, the helplessness and humiliation, the anger she felt would change her life forever, and Warren’s, too, though neither had a clue of that at the time. Warren picked her up—physically—wrapped his arms around her waist and legs and carried her like a squirming child. She had been making a point about something, and all at once he lifted her away. She had always been a small woman, hardly broke a hundred pounds in those days, but wasn’t a child, of course, nor was her life part of a silly movie in which men won the West while women cooked and cleaned, and, going into shock as he carried her off, had madly ordered him to put her down, immediately. He ignored her demands and went on, though her anger had her in tears and thrashing so wildly, it became an embarrassment to all.

  They reached the car in the driveway before he placed her on her feet. She half-froze, her situation impossible in every way. She could not return to the cookout and instruct them to think differently—if they needed to be so instructed—nor could she enter the car with any measure of self-respect yet in place. “How dare you—don’t you ever touch me like that again!” she said, and her outrage was such that the impulse rising in her was to fight back with such ferocity that she would injure him physically for what he had done to her.

  She entered the car in silence. He made sounds of apology, then and later, but no matter, the damage had been done, and, in her heart, their marriage came to an end during the harsh moments of silence on the drive home. She sat there knowing he had given her the opportunity to sever herself from him once and for all, and so she would. In the car and in the moments of returning their sleeping infant to her railinged bed, her heart called to Virgil, and she decided to seize life as it was there to be seized, to forgo husband and marriage no matter the consequences, to convey to Virgil, tomorrow, that she was ready to enter into supreme intimacy with him, that she wanted his love in the way that love from a powerful man might give her the strength she needed to realize the person she believed in her heart she was destined to be. She might be breaking her vows in some eyes, while in her own mind she was being true to herself. She might live a lie, as a woman, but would do so with independence and courage.

  She told Warren that the gap between them was irreparable, but, on Virgil’s advice, did not break from him, which may have been her crucial mistake. Virgil had cautioned against making themselves vulnerable—said his political life and all else would be up for grabs, as would her custody of her precious child, if the love they knew for each other should become known.

  Warren came apologizing every day, and she turned a deaf ear. A week, ten days passed, during which time she refused to speak to him, took comfort in her work, her child, and found fulfillment beyond her wildest dreams in a motel room, a locked office, in the rear seat of a state limousine with shaded windows, went fully into a relationship of passion and heightened political power, of glorious consummation. She became a true woman, and love and passion of an exalted kind rose into place within her breast and mind. She had never felt so alive and, in her impassioned state, did not care what Warren did or said, or if he lived or died.

  He came apologizing still, trying to joke, to understand, begged forgiveness, and begged at last that she at least speak that they might proceed through meals, daycare needs, paying of bills, and shopping with minimum confusion and duplication. She spoke, agreed to speak to that degree. He smiled some, and his eyes glossed up as if the war had ended and she would love him still, or again, though she assured him her speaking was only for the convenience of daily life. Privately, she disdained the tail-between-the-legs puppy-dog love she knew he retained for her and welcomed the power over him her curious victory had gained her. She also vowed in her heart to give herself ever more deeply to the man she loved, to further nurture and bolster him as he was nurturing and bolstering her.

  Hardly a week passed before Warren confronted her again, demanding an account of what was happening, and it was then that she tried to give it to him straight—but for the illicit love which was making her strong. “You took me for granted, treated me as a doormat, and I can’t forgive you for that,” she told him. “You assumed you would lead in all ways, and I would follow, and my earning power is already nearly double yours. You treated me like that in front of my family, and the humiliation was an assault on my person I will never get over. I may not think of it every day, but you should believe me when I tell you I will never get over it, not as long as I live.”

  She reduced him to tears. He tried not to cry, but was unable to help himself. He said he had done it only as a joke, like something in a movie. He said he’d had several beers, in case she had forgotten, was feeling frisky, in fact. Far from wanting to humiliate her, he had wanted to have her in his arms, to love her. He hadn’t meant to humiliate her. Could she never forgive him?

  She paused, and decided to wield the blow she believed would gain her her freedom. “Not even if I wanted to,” she told him, and the words issued as if from a larger power. “I hope you hear what I’m saying. Not even if I wanted to. It’s not in me to be anyone’s possession.”

  He did not hear, however, and confronted her another time, though when he’d been drinking, asking if she no longer wanted him in any way as a husband—and she spoke the truth then, too, though he did nothing about it. She said to him: “Warren, the best favor you could do for yourself would be to walk out that door right now, sleep in your smelly boat, and see an attorney about filing for divorce. That’s what I’d like you to do. I’ll help with the attorney’s retainer, in case you don’t know about attorney’s retainers. I don’t want to hurt you, but I don’t want to be married to you anymore either.”

  What she had neglected each time to mention was that she wanted him to save her the difficulty of initiating a separation, that she had given herself to another, and that it was more attraction to Virgil than repulsion from him that was guiding her. What she couldn’t say was that the elected official with whom she had fallen in love had yet again warned of his vulnerability should it come out that he was having an affair with a married or even a divorced aide. A scandal would destroy him and, ultimately, would destroy them both.

  Warren took no steps to change his life, and time slipped by. He fished most days, leaving before daylight, picked up Marian after school when it was raining, and fixed evening meals, while Beatrice worked late, then spent a night away for the first time, in Augusta, began spending added nights away now and then, and more than a few people in Maine—and occasionally in New York, Boston, Washington—assumed, as they almost did themselves, that they were state representative, then state senator, and his wife, Virgil and Beatrice Pound of the thirty-sixth district of New England’s rugged Pine Tree State.

  At the same time, her love for Warren did not die entirely, no matter her words and actions. There came another summer evening, when she and Virgil were on a pleasure craft in Portsmouth Harbor with a party of ten or so from out of state, and the guests were waxing sentimental over the integrity of Maine lobstermen, and for a moment she was stricken with guilt and her heart went out to Warren—he whose life had only slid more deeply into failure as the years had gone by. Virgil, drinking, had made an unkind aside to her, near the railing there in the twilight. “Hope we don’t see a boat with ‘Cuckold’ on the back,” he tittered, stepping to the bar for a refill, and Beatrice could not help recalling Warren taking her to Narrow Cove in high school to show her Lady Bee painted along the bow of his Jonesporter, and, finding herself stricken with guilt there among Virgil’s guests, could not help breaking and trying to conceal the emotion overtaking her, was unable to escape notice even as she leaned toward the water, and as Virgil tried to console her, told him she’d thought of something, it was okay, she’d thought of something that had made her feel terribly sad. She drank too much then herself, and strove to push her guilt as far away as boats dis
appearing among lights and music rippling from shore.

  Warren

  It came to him like a missing piece of a puzzle that she had known all along they did not stand a chance as husband and wife. He couldn’t get over it. Why hadn’t she done something about it? If she and Virgil loved each other, why had they remained apart? Wasn’t that what divorce was for—despite the Church, or even Virgil’s wife and children? Had he made his own choices, as Beatrice had said? He couldn’t see that he had, believed he was the one who had been manipulated—just as he was being manipulated here again.

  What was she trying to do to him?

  Driving to the store, coughing suppressed for the moment, taking in minnow breaths, the knowledge kept rising within Warren. His gear and fishing grounds were gone, and his capacity to breathe was slipping away. As for getting through to Beatrice—she might as well be on the other side of soundproof glass, so little of what he said seemed to reach her. He had come around to believing they could gain accord, if only in a modest way, but given her words on the phone even that small dream appeared headed for the rocks. She had known all along? Dear God, why live her whole life like that?

  Still, he wouldn’t give up. He would offer forgiveness and extend a hand. However ailing and confused he was, he knew that as soon as he gave in to despair any chance he had would come to an end, and life’s only possible meaning would escape him. And he could make his case in minutes—if he weren’t beset by coughing. From lunch and half an hour, he was down to minutes in a parking lot. A few words, a look in her eye, maybe the touch of her hand. He held to a sliver of hope that she would hear him out, and, alas, would relent and say, “Good luck, Warren. May the next life be better for both of us.”

  He could die then in peace. He would close himself into his room and not bother her again. Nature might have its way while he communed with squirrels digging out ground balls and showing the way into heaven. Leaves and soil. The living sea and time everlasting. A credit at long last for having paid his dues on earth.

  The harbor came into view as Warren traced Kittery Point in his truck, and a moment from the past came to mind. He was fourteen or so and running the outboard for his father—when he wasn’t playing baseball and dreaming he might have the whiplash swing and hawk’s eye of Ted Williams, another player from a coastal city given to fishing. It was a summer evening, and he tied alongside his father’s boat in Narrow Cove to off-load baitfish for the next morning and to take on crates of lobsters to deliver to H. Celeste’s, the distributor to Boston in those days before they had the Co-op.

  Gazing into the past he could as well have been a teenager driving the outboard once more into the harbor marked all around by lamps, lanterns, bobbing inboard taillights, the sun beneath the horizon and the sky ashen, sailboats and yachts with golden cabin lights like a luxury hotel extending bracelet fashion over the water. Gentle music from the tall white boats rode the waves put up by muffled propeller traffic coming and going, and, catching a sign from two men in dark jackets and white trousers on the fantail of a fifty-foot alabaster yacht, he cut his motor and puttered alongside to carry out business within reach but not within touch of the pleasure craft and its aromas of tobacco and whiskey, privilege and mysterious ways.

  “Would you have a dozen you could sell?” the man called down, and Warren saw that it was not a second man in double-breasted blazer and flannels aboard the yacht, but a boy close to his own age.

  “I’ll need a basket, and what size?” he called back.

  “Pound-and-a-halfers is what we’d like,” the man returned.

  Cardboard box received, motor treading bubbles, Warren raised the lid on one of the crates and used his flashlight to highlight plugged lobsters. Selecting a dozen—giving good weight, as instructed by his father—he used both hands to present the heavy drumming box.

  “What’s the going rate these days?” the man called down and, whatever it was at the time, Warren called back the amount and added, “They’re twenty pounds there.”

  Waiting for the money to be passed down, bobbing and holding a hand to the yacht, he overheard the boy say, “You don’t know they’re twenty pounds, Dad—he doesn’t have a scale.”

  “What is it you’re saying—you think he’d cheat us?”

  “He doesn’t have a scale is all I’m saying.”

  “Let me tell you something, son. There comes a day you can’t trust a Maine lobsterman, we’re going to be in a hell of a fix in this world. These people are a rare breed. They wouldn’t be cheating you, not in a thousand years.”

  A rare breed. Words and music had lingered as Warren pressed the accelerator and furrowed away. And the memory misted his eyes here as he drove, as he recalled his father, with whom he hadn’t communed in months. His strong father had faced death in time as he was facing it now, and if there were any reunions in the next world, he’d soon be finding out. A rare breed. At least he had that chit of gold tucked in his pocket.

  Warren stifled a cough climbing from his pickup, then paused, holding the door, to allow his throat to resettle. Raising into focus an apology from himself and reconciliation from her, he started across the parking lot toward Maine Authentic. This was it; he could wait no longer.

  “Warren, I see your wife’s place made the Globe the other day,” a man called in passing, and Warren could neither place the man nor absorb what it was he meant to say. The globe?

  As he walked, Warren’s confused mind was trying to apologize to Beatrice for his assumption of ownership—if he hadn’t already done so, at least with the genuineness he was feeling now. For it was true that as a teenager he had assumed she belonged to him like a glossy new car one acquires from a lot, an object with fascinating gadgets, a convertible top, a curvaceous body to polish and parade among other first-time car owners. It was also true that she alone among the young wives of their acquaintance came to regard herself as a creature perhaps to be raced and bred, and maybe paraded, but never owned, and he wanted to apologize to her in those terms, too. It had hurt him always, and did still, that she withheld herself from him when he desired her so, withheld being his girl and wife in all that it meant, that his attempts to love her had done little more than force her further away and perhaps open her to the advances of another.

  Had she given herself to Virgil in passionate ways she had refused even in the beginning to give herself to him? Had Virgil had the better sense to let her ride at his side in the guise of friendship? In a deep vein of admiration for her, Warren hoped she was a creature never possessed, no matter anyone’s money or position or her desire to get ahead or make a name for herself. Dear Beatrice … he still wanted to love her, wanted to have her in his dreams, if only she would let him do so.

  “Dad—what are you doing?”

  It was Marian, coming between merchandise racks as he entered the store, and returning to himself, hoping not to give in to coughing, Warren paused, exhaled, “Sweetheart, hullo—here for a word with your mother is all. You doing okay? Happy to be having a baby? That’s what I wanted to ask you.”

  “Oh, Dad, it isn’t me I’m worried about. Did you tell your doctor to add me to your file?”

  “Honey, let me talk to your mother for a minute. I’ll do that, soon as I can.”

  Warren saw that Marian was upset, and moved along, wanting to get his business taken care of before something went wrong. He was dressed and shaved; he shouldn’t be an embarrassment to them.

  “Dad, I’m not sure she’s in her office; let me buzz her,” Marian said behind him.

  “Just need to say something before this coughing starts up,” he said, and there was Beatrice, before he’d taken half a dozen steps.

  “Warren, what are you doing here—what do you want?”

  “A minute of your time, like I said—I won’t bother you again.”

  She closed another step, spoke pointedly, softly. “I told you on the phone, I’m busy. I’m sorry you’re sick, but I can’t have you coming in here like this—how else c
an I say that?”

  “Step outside with me for one minute.”

  “Warren, I’m not stepping anywhere, I told you that. You have something to say, say it now and leave. I just won’t have this.”

  “Just one minute of your time.”

  “Warren, I’ll talk to you tonight, like I said. Please don’t make me call security.”

  “You can’t give me one minute of your time?”

  “You heard what I said.”

  “You knew all along, didn’t you?”

  “Warren, if you don’t leave, right now, I’m calling security.”

  Somehow, as he coughed and raised his hand to his mouth, as he glimpsed Marian looking at him, he withdrew, though he seemed to be doing so in a dream world. His offer was hopeless. She wasn’t going to take in his words, wasn’t going to shake his hand, no matter what. How could he have thought she would ever give an inch?

  * * *

  Warren once more saw himself on the harbor of sprinkled lights in his father’s outboard, but the time was forever and he was no longer of this world—as he returned to himself sitting in his pickup in the mall parking lot. Hopelessness was all he seemed to know. There was the everyday activity of pulling traps and coming up empty, the everyday futility of coming and going from house and boat and back again, of not being able to touch her silk-covered limbs and figure. Here at the end, futility was all his life had come to. Empty-handed and alone, coming and going.

  Marian

  Her mind wasn’t on work but on herself, and on her mother and father and all that had gone wrong in their lives. She was cashiering purchases, handling credit cards, wrapping glass and stoneware items in tissue and placing them in bags all the while she was struggling in her mind to not be in the past with her parents, or in the present with Ron, but in the future with her baby who, in dreams she kept trying to create, was always a girl, always beautiful, always peaceful. Her baby had wispy hair, and they were together in a park near the water, a mother and her baby in a world beyond this sea of cares, and she could see the bond that defined them: their love was pure—and the purity in her dream was giving her insight into her mother’s love for her as a child and as an only daughter. Someone for whom to exist. As for her father and a father’s love, they swirled beyond reach.