More News Tomorrow

by More News Tomorrow (retail) (epub)

  They don’t talk.

  Above them, the woman Linda stands holding Oona’s hand. She has taken off her boots and rocks back and forth in bare feet.

  Thunder in the far distance, the light dimming, and Thomas looks up.

  A moving cloud covers the sun.

  Georgie finishes loading in the gear and stands, stretching her back.

  “Getting chilly,” she says.

  “I hope it’s not going to rain.

  The woman makes her way down the hill, walking slowly toward the river where Thomas is pushing the canoe into the water, holding on to the rope.

  “You know Roosevelt McCrary, don’t you,” Linda, says.

  “I have never met him,” Georgie says. “But I will.”

  “He told me he was meeting you,” she says. “I know him too ever since I was born and I am forty-two.”

  Up close and in the sun, she is ravaged, but her wide-set brown eyes, strong bones and straight back suggest another woman than this one.

  Georgie reaches out her hand and Oona takes it and climbs into the bow.

  Linda does not resist.

  “Storms come in and out,” she says. “Sometimes two or three short ones a day, so if that thunder you are hearing moves much closer and the day gets darker, paddle the boat to the bank and tie up and wait it out,” Linda says. “Don’t stay on the water.”

  “Thank you,” Georgie says.

  “I was lying about the gun,” Linda says, and turns away from the bank. “I told you I had a gun, but I do not.”

  Georgie follows her.

  “Wait,” she calls. “I want to say goodbye.”

  The woman turns, standing very straight, something courageous about the way she looks at Georgie.

  “Thank you,” Georgie says. “Thank you for taking care of Oona.”

  And then, without a thought, she wraps her arms around the woman’s shoulders.

  “I am so sorry,” she says.

  Linda starts to speak but stops herself, shaking her head.

  Georgie can feel Linda watching her walk down the bank to the river.

  “Linda McCrary,” the woman calls, and Georgie hears Linda McCrary clearly, but she does not turn around.

  At the bank, Georgie wades into the shallows of the river and climbs into the bow, Oona between her knees.

  “Ready,” she calls to Thomas, and picks up the paddle and does not look back.

  From the Memoir of Thomas Davies

  (for publication)

  Strange the way you can walk the surface of the earth, one step at a time with a clear destination in mind, and suddenly the dependable planet opens without warning and drops you into a black hole.

  My father died by inches.

  I do not believe in heaven and if I did, I’d know we will all be fine and so will Oona. No problem because we will be in heaven and get to see each other sooner or later.

  Honestly.

  People believe this kind of thing.

  What I do believe in is reincarnation. Or thermodynamics, which is sort of the same thing if you want it to be. Even my father, Dr. Richard Davies who was a scientist, told me when he was dying that, in fact, his death would not be the end of him. He told me that the first law of thermodynamics says that the total amount of energy in a closed system (like the body of a man is a closed system) cannot be created or destroyed although it can be changed from one form to another.

  So that is what I believe.

  I think of Georgie as young although she isn’t young. But the total amount of energy in her closed system of energy is so electric that I can feel it.

  We were sitting at breakfast one morning after I moved with my mother from our apartment in Chicago to live with Georgie and anyone else who happened to knock at the front door to ask for a place to live.

  Georgie would open the door wide and say: Welcome. Come in. There’s a bedroom free on the third floor with a private bath. No worries if you’re a serial killer. Or a prostitute. Or have a jail record. Everyone is welcome at the Home for the Incurables.

  I hated it.

  I had moved from a small, quiet apartment in Chicago to this hotel of lost souls—that’s what my mother calls it.

  “But it’s not lost souls, just people who are looking for a home” is what Georgie says. “And I give them one. Why not?”

  I tend to agree with her now.

  Why not?

  It makes them happy and except for the garlic in the refrigerator, it makes me happy to come home from school and know that in the house, there will eight, nine, ten people who know me at least a little, who say “Hello, Thomas” and “How was school?” and “Do you have a soccer game this weekend?”

  Once even, Mr. Adlerhouse gave me a signed copy of The Odyssey.

  “Signed by whom?” Uncle Nicolas asked.

  “Homer,” I said, opening the book to the title page.

  “To Thomas Davies, Good Luck and Godspeed and for goodness sakes, don’t leave home like I did. With love and admiration, Homer.”

  That’s the kind of person who comes to live with us because of Georgie.

  They pay attention because we all live in the same house.

  But this particular morning was right after I moved to Washington and I was unhappy about everything—about the city, the plates at dinner, the living room, my bedroom with a round window overlooking the street, the school, the kids that went to the school, the dreadful teachers, the cats, six of them floating around my feet, the flowers all over the house in vases and teapots and mugs, the smell of cookies baking, the light coming in the living room from the west.

  Everything that was not Chicago.

  Georgie had made scrambled eggs and bacon and her own blueberry muffins, and I was sitting at the table looking at breakfast in front of me and out of the blue, I swiped my arm across the table, and the plate with breakfast slammed to the floor, scattering the eggs, shattering the plate.

  Georgie did not even turn around from the dishwasher which she was loading.

  “I hate eggs,” I said. “Especially yours, which are mushy.”

  I grabbed my backback, put it over my shoulder, kicked the eggs and broken plate out of my way and headed out the back door feeling better than I had felt for a long time.

  Georgie was home when I got back from school, so it must have been a Friday when she didn’t have to teach and was working in the living room, which she likes to do, her feet on the coffee table, a computer on her lap, Beethoven’s piano sonatas playing, always the same ones.

  “Why don’t you have your own office?” I asked when I arrived, crabby again once I walked through the front door.

  “This is my office,” she said.

  “It’s the living room,” I said. “In most families the living room is where people live, not where they work.”

  “I like to be in the middle of my home,” she said. “So I’m here when everyone comes back.”

  For a long time after my father died, I was not a nice person.

  “Who says we want you to be here?” I asked her.

  That’s the kind of talking I used to do, and honest to God, Georgie never took me to the mat for it. Not because she is so patient. She isn’t really patient at all.

  “I want to be here” is what she said.

  That’s all she said and went on pecking at her computer without looking up.

  Later that night, after dinner, after the boarders had gone upstairs to their own rooms and my mother was in her room and maybe Venus in hers or maybe sleeping with whatever boyfriend happened to invite her to spend the night, Georgie in the kitchen, drinking tea with honey and dark chocolate, which she did every night, I came in the room and asked for tea.

  “Sure,” she said, putting on the water.

  I remember it was a hot night, the lights in the kitchen were on the dimmer. One of the cats, a long-haired gray one with a growly face, was sticking his paw in the honey jar without correction—music on the Bose, always music on the Bose�
�and I sat down across from Georgie, seeing her for the first time that I can remember, actually seeing her as beautiful.

  Somehow, seeing her like that made me feel visible.

  THE NIGHT BEFORE we left Washington to come to Missing Lake, Wisconsin, there were fights on the telephone with Georgie and Uncle Nicolas, with Georgie and Nicolas’ wife, Olivia, who is appearing at the Folger Theatre as Desdemona, with my mother who said she was coming down with something like flu and maybe it would be better if she stayed at home and Georgie went to Missing Lake with me and Venus.

  “No, that isn’t what is happening,” Georgie said. “We are all going to Camp Minnie HaHa tomorrow morning as planned.”

  I was in the kitchen watching the steady rain roll across our windows, thinking of Annie Bayly in seventh grade with her long chestnut-colored hair (I’m not sure that’s the color of her hair, but I like the sound of it) and gigantic blue eyes looking directly at me, unflinching—sort of chilly eyes and beguiling (I like the sound of that too), and she has one of those long, floaty bodies that seem to be tumbling through the air.

  I am in love with her.

  “Are we going or not?” I asked when Georgie put the phone down.

  “Of course we’re going.”

  I was suddenly a little nervous about this trip. I didn’t like the fact that my mother had decided at the last moment to pretend to have a cold and thought nevertheless that it was perfectly alright for me to go with Georgie.

  I’ve had enough trouble to wonder about life, to consider how to live it the way I want to live it without disaster or failure or disappointment or regret.

  And something else.

  Georgie has this way of making everything seem possible. But everything isn’t possible.

  Uncle Nicolas says this all the time.

  Not possible.

  That worries me.

  Not the impossibility but the possibility. How can you believe something will come to be and at the same time with the same mind and the same heart understand that it might not come to be at all. How can two contradictory ideas exist in one small white mass of brain with little roads to everywhere inside the skull. But no way out.

  I slid into a chair at the kitchen table beside her.

  “I’m wondering,” I began as she packed up her books in her tote and turned on the water for tea. “We are going on a trip and on this trip you think we are going to discover something about your father’s innocence. But maybe we won’t. Maybe we’ll fail. Maybe Roosevelt is not who he says he is. Maybe your father did kill your mother. Maybe you discover nothing at all but disappointment.”

  “If I didn’t believe I was going to discover something, then I wouldn’t go,” she said.

  “So the truth of what happened with your father doesn’t matter?” I said.

  “It matters, but what is more important is the trip itself— believing that I will find something but knowing that I may not,” she said.

  MISSING LAKE

  June 17, 1941

  William

  The tent flap was open and in the distance, William could see a circle of light meandering across the landscape in his direction.

  James.

  He lifted his hand from Josie’s, folded his arms across his chest and watched as the outline of a figure moved toward his tent.

  Only James Willow would be up this late wandering the campsite—a surprising boldness in a young man timid by nature as if he were the one in charge, free to peer into the tent where William could possibly be sleeping. Or Josephine. Or they could be sleeping together.

  Now that was a joke! William thought.

  Besides, what did James know of the lives of adults—a boy really. A smart and capable boy but with no sense of intimate lives, no instinct for the complexities between men and women behind closed doors or tent flaps, as if what happened between them were all a fairy tale and James an instrument of dreams.

  William heard his footsteps now sliding along the damp ground cover, light arriving in a splash through the tent flap spreading across Josie who was lying on her back and William, his head propped by blankets, looking straight into its brightness.

  “James?”

  “Yes, William. I was just checking. I wanted to make sure.”

  “Make sure of what?”

  “That you’re settled. I heard a terrible sound in the woods.”

  “You actually heard something besides the light wind?”

  “I did. Minutes ago.”

  “There was no sound whatever in the woods, James,” Josie said. “Just your invasive curiosity about our lives.”

  “I’m sure you’re right. No sound,” James said breathlessly. “But I’m a little agitated. Something about the night, William. I’m sorry to disturb you.”

  “I was disturbed before you arrived,” William said.

  He watched James move away, heard his footsteps behind their tent as he went up the hill and toward the tree line where his own tent was pitched.

  And then the trace of light was gone, the sound of footsteps.

  “I dislike him,” Josephine said. “I cannot help myself.”

  “I know you do.” William assumed a gentle tone of voice.

  “He is in love with you,” she said. “Every summer, the same thing. James Willow panting after you like a sick puppy.”

  There was a sudden heat in William’s body. A rush of blood.

  It angered him to think that Josie was right.

  “You have that way with men and women,” Josie said in a voice loud enough to carry to the tree line. “They want to be with you.”

  William stretched, raising his arms above his head and down, consciously down, letting his hand drop once again on Josie’s, drop gently, barely a weight on her skin.

  “I would like to be with you.”

  She was quiet then, her free arm resting across her forehead.

  “I don’t really believe you, William,” she said in a near whisper. “Here we are in Missing Lake, Wisconsin. A homosexual and two Negroes camping with us in this remote wood beside an angry river. A test of fate.”

  “And a Jew.”

  “Yes.” Her voice less accusatory than resigned. “A Jew.”

  He looked over at his wife. Enough light from the stars slipping through the tent flap to see her face clearly, even the flat blankness of her eyes.

  “Don’t do anything to hurt me,” she said quickly.

  “Why would I do anything to hurt you, Josie?”

  “I don’t know.” She turned her head slightly toward him. “Sometimes I am afraid. You are an angry man.”

  He lay very still.

  Perhaps.

  Perhaps he was an angry man.

  He had a temper. He had always had a temper.

  High-spirited, his mother said. But, his father insisted his temper was unacceptable and punished him for it—occasionally with a belt.

  William was born with a temper, his mother would say in argument with his father. Like brown eyes or long legs—what to do?

  His father would shake his head.

  Brown eyes and long legs—you cannot cut them off. But a temper you can control.

  As a boy, he had incidents of rage. When going about his ordinary life in the village, something would upset him. Something unexpected.

  He remembered one particular spring morning when he was ten or eleven walking with his father to synagogue. His father was talking about the meaning of Passover, and William asked him to please not speak any longer about the goodness or the courage or the long suffering of the Jews because it made him angry.

  “It should make you proud,” his father said.

  “But it doesn’t make me proud,” William said. “It makes me angry.”

  And drawing his hands into a fist, he hit the trunk of a tree until his hands were bloody while his father, the doctor, stood calmly in attendance, his own hands clasped behind his back.

  “Do you know why it makes you angry?” his father asked.
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br />   William was sobbing.

  “I am crying with fury,” he said. “You will never understand.”

  “I will probably understand,” his father said, taking William’s bloody hand in his own. “Do you understand?”

  They were walking to the synagogue at the far end of the road, walking past the cottages of the other Jewish families on their way to synagogue, the men and boys spilling out of the houses, waving, calling out to the Geringas, Dr. Geringas and his son William,

  “Good morning, good morning.”

  Tears of anger rushed down William’s cheeks. He averted his face.

  “I don’t like victims,” he said to his father as they walked up the steps to synagogue.

  “I didn’t say we were victims, William. We are not victims.”

  “You said long suffering. I don’t like long suffering.”

  “Maybe you aren’t ready for this conversation.”

  “I am ready for this conversation, Papa. If someone hits me, I will hit him back. I will break his nose,” he said. “Maybe I will even kill him.”

  His father dropped his hand.

  Later he told his father he was sorry. Deeply sorry. He understood and was proud to be a Jew.

  And that was true.

  But sometimes when he felt powerless, he could not help himself. He wanted to be a god of war.

  “There are many ways to be a god of war,” his father said to him. “Many better ways to fight than that.”

  WILLIAM LAY QUIETLY concentrating on the stillness of his mind, the weight of his body on the damp earth. He did not allow himself to think of his village, where his father at this very moment was possibly in the hands of the Nazis. Or dead.

  Perhaps he should be thinking about Clementine. Her long legs and straight back, her graceful hands and slender fingers— the way she cocked her head.

  But such imagined thinking was not possible with Josephine beside him erupting with contempt.

  For him. Even for herself.

  Since they left Chicago, his body had been on fire.

  He closed his eyes, took hold of himself, flaccid between his legs.

  “I’ll be back in a moment,” he said, too agitated to lie next to her.