“Not exactly. I gave it up a while back.”
“That’s very bad of you,” Carolyn said. “You’re too good to give it up.”
“She’s trying hard to make me respectable,” Mac said.
“Just as well,” said Ware. “Music’s a terrible profession. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.”
“What would you recommend?” Carolyn said. “Being the only child of a real estate magnate?”
“Ah, but a sea captain’s life is mighty fine,” Ware said cheerfully. “Shall we give it all up for the gorgeous ‘snotgreen sea? The scrotumtightening sea’?”
Mac winced. The boat gleamed as it rocked through the waves, with scarcely a mark on it, like some exquisite, carved tusk. To own such a boat was not just the boat, he calculated. It was the maintenance, the slip; the expenses alone could probably feed a family. Would he be torn in two forever, half of him loathing any luxury item, half of him wanting to relax and have fun? He didn’t know if he belonged out on the deck or down in the hold, peeling spuds.
“What’s that from, Dad?”
“Joyce. Ulysses. I’m so very tired of my own diction, I could cut out my tongue.”
Here’s the knife, thought Mac.
They passed Alcatraz, and that was when he looked ahead and said: “There’s another island.”
“Angel Island,” Carolyn said.
“All this time, I never realized.”
“We should go there.”
“What’s there?”
An idea was suggesting itself to her. “Isabel,” she called, “could you sail to Angel Island and drop us off?”
Ware said, “What on earth for?”
Molly said, “No! It won’t be fun if you get off!”
Ware said, “She can’t stand me, even in the open air.”
“Would you stop it for once?” cried Carolyn.
“I’m a martyr, what did I do?” said Ware.
“We’ll go, too,” said Molly.
“Girls, I need your help,” Isabel said. “I won’t have you leave me.”
“She’s leaving you!” screamed Molly.
“You’re not leaving,” Carolyn said. “I don’t feel like sailing. I’m tired, I’d rather take a walk. We’ll see you all in a couple hours.”
“Let’s give them some time alone,” Isabel said.
“This isn’t fun,” sulked Molly. “It’s not fun at all!”
“How can you say this isn’t fun?” yelled Carolyn. “Dad, would you say something?”
Ware shrugged.
Isabel tacked toward the small jetty, and Mac liked the idea that Carolyn wanted to be alone with him. They docked briefly and agreed to meet the group there in two hours. They were continuing on to an inlet in the north bay to meet with another old friend. Bye-bye.
“God, I couldn’t stand it,” she said as they found their land legs and straggled up the hill. “I hope you don’t feel cheated out of a sail.”
“No, this is great.”
“I just can’t be around my father right now; he’s really annoying.”
Once again Mac bit his tongue. No kidding.
They strolled arm in arm. Tall eucalyptus rustled and spiced the air. They passed some of the old barracks and even some half-buried artillery battlements.
“Well, Isabel’s a character,” he tried next.
“God, yes. She was one of the first woman surgeons in San Francisco,” Carolyn said. “She’s traveled everywhere; she knows artists and scientists all over the world. She speaks seven or eight languages, including a dialect of Inuit.”
“Superwoman.” It was funny how some people could grab hold of life so much better than others. “What privileged lap did she spring from?”
“Self-made. Her father was a shoemaker. She’s wound up tight as a clock and works as many hours. She’s very fond of money.”
“Who isn’t?”
Carolyn shook her head. “Isabel more than most.”
“Hmmm. Wound up tight as a clock and works as many hours,” he repeated. “Who said that?”
“I did.”
“I thought maybe it was a quote.”
“No, I made it up.”
“Pretty good,” he said.
“Sometimes I have good ideas.”
After they had covered more ground, Carolyn led him down a path off the main trail, to a secluded cove with a great vista across the water of the skyline. Of course, to Mac, all vistas of San Francisco were great. They sat perched on a sandy slope and sipped from the flask he had brought along in his pocket.
“See how it’s all a big system of cooperation?” he said. “The order of the streets, the rows of apartments and houses, the evenly spaced trees, the lanes of traffic—it’s an agreement among the masses on how to live. I find that miraculous.”
“Cool. Now that you mention it, it is pretty amazing.”
“Someday, when there’s anarchy, it’ll seem like a fairy tale. Now I’d like to ask you what the name of this mountain is,” he said, for he had noticed it on the map in the cove.
“Oh, yes. I think it’s called Mount Caroline.”
“There’s an idea.”
He pushed her back against the ridge. She smiled and rolled over and crawled up to the umbrella of a leafy bay laurel. He followed right behind. The sun burned through the suspension of ash and smoke, and she had a look in her eye that let him know what he could do, and he could see the tree and shadows reflected in her eyes, all the while; there were imprints of broken shells and pebbles stuck to their arms when at last they sat up, and she pulled the bits off him that stuck, and he brushed sand off her neck, one little grain at a time.
“When I was a kid,” Mac said, and he picked up her bandaged hand, and kissed it, “I memorized a poem for school. In this A. A. Milne collection When We Were Very Young. It was called ‘Disobedience.’
“James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother,
Though he was only three.
James James
Said to his Mother,
‘Mother,’ he said, said he;
‘You must never go down to the end of the town, if
you don’t go down with me.’
“Anyway, the mother goes to the end of the town and never comes back. Here I was, running around spouting off this poem about my own destiny! The clues were all around me, I just didn’t know it.”
“Like what?” said Carolyn.
“Well, she was communicating to me somehow that she was sick and needed a rest. She’d leave me with this long-faced old woman named Bridie Durkin, who’d been a nun at one point.” All his memories about those times centered on an incident involving a sugar bowl. A violated sugar bowl. An angry face towering over him. The big shiny sugar bowl stood in the way of retrieving anything more about the cold gray house, which smelled of cleanser. “I’m not sure how often I went there or what my mother was doing. But all the while, I guess my brain was making sense of it.”
“It’s true, kids know things, without knowing how they know them.”
“Not just kids.”
Carolyn nodded thoughtfully, and said nothing more.
Walking back to the cove in the ash-laden air, holding Carolyn’s unbandaged hand, he loved how her hand was warm, squeezing his as though she liked him. As if everything in the world made sense. And thus it was all the more surprising to hear her say, “I meant to tell you, Molly and I are flying to New York next week.”
They had reached the trailhead; several sailboats were in the process of mooring and unmooring, and not too far off, he thought he picked up the outline of Isabel’s yacht clipping along at a furious pace.
“Kind of last minute.”
“I’m taking her to look at a school.”
“This has to do with Molly ?”
“Why are you saying it that way?”
“Can’t her parents take her to see it?” he
snapped. “But you probably enjoy going to New York.” He was struggling to say something that sounded reasonable, and it came out like this: “I don’t understand the division of labor in your family.”
“Division of labor?”
They were veering in the wrong direction now; maybe there was no turning back. “So, I guess I’m not invited.”
“It’s not that,” Carolyn said. “You’re not the only one who’s had a hard time. Molly’s had all kinds of problems, you know!”
“What kinds of problems?”
“Do you know how hard I have to work to make her feel normal?” Tears had formed in the corners of her eyes. “Everything I do is for that!”
“What do you mean, normal?”
Carolyn was hiccuping, mashing her eyes on her sleeve. “Forget it!”
“Please.”
“Oh, that she’s not aware! It doesn’t matter, we’ve talked about it before.”
“Aware of what?”
“She’s just—not aware,” Carolyn said, and let out a short, bitter laugh.
The very girl in question had spotted them and stood waving and yelling from the prow of the approaching boat.
Carolyn waved back. What the hell? Molly seemed normal, maybe too normal. She had friends. She was nice-looking (but not as pretty as her sister).
“Come on,” he said. “Carolyn.”
She shrugged and wiped her eyes. “It’s just that . . . my parents couldn’t care less about her.”
The words were so simple, yet explained so much. They also appeared to undo her. “She’s such a sweet, darling person,” she said. “Can’t anyone see that?”
“Sure, of course they can!”
“She’s solid as a rock, and when I used to have nightmares, and I had a lot, the poor kid, I’d go crawl in bed with her in the middle of the night! This big person curling up next to a three- or four-year-old for comfort. Sad, don’t you think?”
He nodded and followed her down the trail, kicking up dust and leaves. He saw that, in speaking the truth, she had shocked herself. Yet the story of the Ware family was as confusing to Mac as ever.
Climbing onto the boat from the dock, he saw a bag full of empty wine and soda bottles, and corks scurried around the deck like mice. Ware’s face was flushed by the wine and wind.
“Ahoy,” he called. “Those who abandon ship must walk the plank!”
Carolyn put on a good face; in short order she described their jaunt around the island in such cheerful terms that Mac wondered how often she wore this mask. It was a stunning performance, and she smiled at him without the slightest hint of what had passed between them. The wind had picked up, and the water was choppy. The plan was to dock at the Marina and have an early dinner there on the boat, and after a tossing ride over, this was what they did.
Isabel seated everyone in the cockpit, on slatted wooden benches on either side, and managed to put Charles next to Saki. He had been engaged in conversation with Bess and Winnie.
“Isabel, dear,” he said, “don’t part us!”
But the table was already filling, and his request was drowned out, and Charles Ware stood there helpless as a child, doomed to dine beside quiet little Saki on one side, his younger daughter on the other. Mac watched his face while he took stock.
“Charles, sit down!” Isabel called to him.
Like a scolded schoolboy, he collapsed in his seat.
Molly said, “We’ll entertain you, don’t worry.”
It was a moment to be savored. Ware was someone who let out a constant stream of emotional flatulence; Molly didn’t notice. Carolyn and Mac sat across from Ware and Saki and Molly. Isabel wouldn’t let anyone help and wanted them all to stay put. Shortly she produced baked artichoke hearts and salad and a basket of bread and a big bowl of linguine with clam sauce. Bottle after bottle of wine came around, and Ware soon realized that no one was entirely out of earshot.
Later in the meal, he again found his stride.
“Now, you asked me about Winston Defries. He lived near Bapaume, in a wonderful stone house with a spectacular view of the valley and the fields and rows and rows of poplars. It was right off the train line from Paris to Calais, and interesting people were always stopping in—I’m sure the entire University of Chicago crowd stopped in. Winston had explicit instructions to hide me away so that I might finish my next novel. I was, of course, working on Parnassus. We found my young wife a flat in Paris, and she did some theater work—she knew Roberta Richards and Lois Springkeet and Renata Monroe—and I’d come into town, and here I was, flanked by the most beautiful women in Paris. Then back to Bapaume to work. Winston would say, ‘Charlie, you’re richer and younger and more famous than anyone I know. You know why I let you live? I’ve seen more beautiful women since you’ve been around than in all my paltry life.’ So he’d gladly entertain these silly young people who stopped by to meet me while I pounded my keys upstairs.
“And then, of course, I’d get my mail—Horace Conrad wrote me dozens of letters. And Townwater Fitzgerald and Clebo MacLeish and Fay Atrose and Reinhold Gurtzbein all wrote. But I’d be waiting to hear from Bill. One little word, and he knew it.” Something in his tone changed. “Do you know how many letters I wrote him? Nearly every day. Some would say I had been preyed upon by the cleverest bloodsucker around—which they did say, of course. And that he had begun to grow tired of it. All that we’d built together, he seemed out to destroy. I had to take the business back from him, before he ran it into the ground!”
“Dad, come on.” Carolyn looked embarrassed.
“My daughter thinks I’m a bitter old man.”
“Why do we have to keep hearing about this ad nauseam? You were close and then you weren’t. Can’t you just get over it?”
“We are close, in the way of brothers. Our attachment is deep and abiding. His devotion to me has been undeniable! It’s one of the great friendships of the ages. They’re writing about it, you know. The book will draw on decades of correspondence, and set the record straight for all time.”
“Who’s writing it?” Mac blurted out.
“Do you know them? Mr. LaPlante and Mr. Rothman.”
“Those guys?”
“Isabel, tell them what happened when I was born,” Molly interrupted.
“Is there any stopping you?” Ware groaned.
“I want Saki and Mac to hear it!” Molly said.
Isabel said, “All right. When Molly was born, I was looking her over stem to stern, and her face was screwed up red as a beet, but all of a sudden she opened her mouth and said, ‘I’m here.’ It was obviously a complete fluke, but I heard it clear as day. ‘I’m here.’ ”
“It wasn’t a fluke,” Molly said. “I was a genius. I could talk from the minute I was born!”
“You could talk, but what did you have to say?” asked Ware.
Mac noticed, in the light from the lanterns surrounding the table, the look on Charles Ware’s face. His distaste for his younger child was expressed in every feature.
“I’ve got an interesting one,” Bess said. “We heard this on the radio this morning. Down near Gilroy someone’s been dumping surplus cheese. Tons and tons of it. They’re reporting a forty-thousand-square-foot cheese slick back in the mountains.”
“How on earth!” exclaimed Isabel.
“Why would they dump cheese?”
“Couldn’t they dole it out?” Sal asked.
“It’s still under investigation,” Bess said. “Nobody is coming forward.”
“I have something.” Ware turned and looked at Mac as if he had an announcement. “Better than cheese patches and nattering new-borns. It came to me—I seem to remember something about your woman.”
“Huh?” Mac didn’t fully register what the man had said. It came out of nowhere. “My woman?”
“He brought me a picture of a young woman the other day, an old picture. It put me in mind of a time.” Ware was addressing the table at large. “You say the girl is your mother?”
“Funny she should have been in that line of work. But we all fall on hard times!”
“Dad, shut up!” Carolyn said.
“Christ,” Mac said.
“Now, sit down, everyone,” said Isabel.
“You’ve got to be kidding.” Mac was trying to yank his legs out from under the table.
“What did I do?” asked Ware. “We were all libertines, back then.”
“You were sending her letters,” Mac said. “What about all those letters?”
Ware’s face softened, as if he was practiced in breaking the news. “Letters, no. But I remember now that she was one of my charity cases,” he said in front of everybody. “It’s the truth! I had a miserable little soft spot for certain types, and she was one of them. Lost and alone. I’d like to believe, now that we’ve met, that you benefited from that.”
“Everyone settle down, let’s have some of that brandy!” Isabel said.
“It’s a lie,” said Mac, and he was out of his seat, stepping behind Bess and Winnie and through piles of rope and life jackets and bags. He wanted to club the man with a steel rod, over and over, until his body was soft like a sack of mud.
“Mac, don’t go!” cried Carolyn, who tripped trying to catch him.
“He lies all the time, why should I believe him now?”
His mouth felt hot, his hands were warm, but the coldest winds of the world blew through his ears. He balanced on the stern and stepped onto the dock.
“You can’t leave now.”
“Carolyn, sit down with your family and think about what you want in your life.”
And then he saw Carolyn do the strangest thing. She sat on the side of the boat and bit down on a dish towel and began to wail with it in her mouth like a gag. Mac was torn in two. Stay, go. He went.
He could hear Ware saying, “I didn’t mean to upset him.”
So there he was, stumbling to his Cavalier; as he left the city, all the shape of it flattened out behind him and blurred into one big, cruel knot of light. Good God, what had he let himself in for? He found himself saying, “Screw it! Screw it! Screw it!” He said it all the way home. He said it so hard he thought he’d push his teeth out of his mouth. He’d never forget the welling of his feelings, the quick fall through the vortex of hope to despair, when he parked in front of Fran and Tim’s, looked up to the front window, and saw, as if it were the Annunciation and she the angel come to him, his own mother. “Mom?” He let himself out of his car. “Mom?” She didn’t evaporate as he ran from the street to the house. “Mom,” he cried, jamming his keys into the unyielding knob, shaking the door in the dark. Tim came and fidgeted with his shiny brass locks. “Hold it,” he griped. And when the door cracked open, Mac pushed his way into this hermit crab’s home of his and fell on his knees in the living room at the sight of her.
MacGregor Tells the World Page 15