“Where are you going?”
“I have to pee,” he said.
“You’ll be back?”
“I’ll be back, of course.”
Pulling up his trousers, he ducked out of the tent, tripping first over the low folding chair where Josie had been sitting and then on the extra rope for anchoring the canoes. He folded the chair, tossed the rope beside it and walked toward the wood.
He should have brought a flashlight to go into the darkness, he thought, but he would pee on the edge of the forest.
Afterward he leaned against a full-grown pine, heavy with branches, and waited to feel his temper dissipate, descending the tunnel of his body and out through his feet. That was the way he thought about anger, as an electrical current shooting through his body and out.
He needed to make love to Josephine Grove, to lay claim to her as his wife.
Closing his eyes, breathing the damp air deep into his lungs, he was beginning to feel the possibility.
WILLIAM WAS THE ONLY Geringas son still in Lithuania in January 1930, when he left for New York. His brothers had been in England for two years and his parents, both anxious to keep him close and also to push him out, had made arrangements with his father’s brother Irving Geringas, now Grove, a physician in Washington, D.C.
“Finish your studies and come home,” his mother had said to him. “Don’t find an American wife. She would never be happy here.”
“Maybe I won’t come back,” William said. “Just stay in America with my American wife.”
“Oh, you will be back,” his mother said, giving him a slap on his behind for emphasis.
“Or maybe you won’t,” his father said. “Irving didn’t come home. He has never been home. Once he became a doctor, he stayed and that could happen to you.”
They were walking through town together as they often did. His father liked to walk, and he liked to talk beyond the hearing of his wife, who talked often but seldom walked except to the market.
“As for an American wife, she should be Jewish.” He shrugged. “For company. You will need company.”
In three years, January 1933, Hitler would be appointed chancellor of Germany, as the leader of the Nazi Party hostile to the democratic policies of the Weimer Republic, advocating extreme nationalism, promoting anti-Semitism.
But even in 1930, thinking men in Lithuania like Dr. Geringas were aware of underlying dangers for the Jews.
“Consider carefully what you do and say in America. It is a democratic country, but there are feelings everywhere,” his father said to him on this long walk.
William listened but with half an ear.
“There is a human desire to be better than others, to stay on top, to push others out. A need to have a tribe and stay with your own people. It is the way we human animals are.”
At the train station when William was leaving Vilnius, his parents were on the platform, his mother, his small plump mother, stood very straight and did not weep.
His father took his face in his hands and kissed him on the lips.
“Goodbye, my son,” he said. “Be who you are wherever you may go, and watch that temper that it doesn’t run away with you.”
The last he heard his father’s voice.
Many letters. Many, many letters and cards and photographs. But not his voice.
It came to William as he walked through the darkness under the high pines whining in the light wind and ducked into the tent where Josephine was lying, that he would never hear his father’s voice again.
THE BONE RIVER
June 18, 2008
Georgianna
Thomas leans back, his paddle at an angle, guiding the canoe to the left into the middle of the river, headed north. A swell. They feel it hammer the hull of the canoe.
In the bow, Oona is pressed between Georgie’s outstretched legs, Freddy in her lap. She wraps her arms around her grandmother’s calves and chatters.
“I was sleeping,” she is telling Georgie, “and then I was having a dream and the dream turned into these arms all around me, lifting me up and the person named Linda who smelled just terrible was holding me and I squiggled and squiggled and she didn’t even drop me—she had very strong arms wrapped around my arms and I kicked her and she flung my legs out away from her so I couldn’t really kick …”
“And then she stopped holding me too tight and told me she had asked you, my grandmother, could she take me to see her house where she had lots of toys that had belonged to her own little girl and you said okay.”
She took a deep breath, resting her head against Georgie’s knee.
“She did not hurt me.”
“Were you worried when she said she had a gun?”
“She didn’t tell me she had a gun, and then when you and Thomas came, she told you she had a gun and it turned out to be not a gun at all. And then you hugged her.”
“I did hug her.”
“So you were friends.”
“We did not know each other before this morning.”
“So you didn’t give her permission to take me?”
“I would not have allowed her to take you to her house, no matter about the toys,” Georgie says. “But yes, I hugged her.”
Before Georgie can think of how to tell Oona about the sudden rush of love for Linda that had overtaken her, the child has fallen asleep, her chin resting on the orange life preserver.
No one, not even Thomas who is too young, or any of her children, except possibly Venus, would understand.
THE DAY IS pure and glorious, a deep blue cloudless afternoon, the sun almost hot on Georgie’s shoulders. Dip swing, dip swing, dip swing—she is conscious that on the return swing her paddle just grazes the top of the quiet river. Her body from the waist up is straight, so she is pulling the paddle in the dip deep enough for a long pull, precise along the hull.
The ordered repetition settles her.
Oona, in a deep rag-doll sleep, is humming.
Georgie feels a kind of ease in her body like relief but more buoyant than relief. As if she is emerging from old skin discarded in the pine wood. As if the warm tears filling the corners of her eyes, rolling down her cheeks, were extract—the essence of a new and extra hour extending the day, delaying the fall of night.
“Are you thinking about Roosevelt?” Thomas calls from the stern.
But Georgie doesn’t hear him—the splash of water off the paddles, the light wind, the distance between them in the canoe—she doesn’t wish to interrupt this moment, this unfamiliar moment of … is it happiness?
And does happiness, pure happiness like this, only come at the expense of almost losing everything that matters?
Or is happiness itself just a visitor that might at any moment fly away or, unattended, remain but briefly, not always recognized for what it is.
Losing and finding Oona was at the center.
Losing and finding.
Is this what it means to be truly alive, so the past is never past and the present ever expanding its square footage to accommodate tomorrow in the same fluid space?
IN A MATTER of an hour or so, she will see Roosevelt. He’ll be on the dock. There must be a dock. Waiting for her, looking out over the river, his heart full, his thoughts crowded with imaginings of Georgianna.
They will walk together along the paths to the cabins, to the lodge, to the campfire, into the woods. Talking and talking. He will tell her everything he knows and she will listen.
Suppose he says that her father did not kill her mother. That actually it was James Willow and then James went off to die in a plane in the Second World War.
Or possibly Roosevelt tells Georgie that her father did kill her mother for a reason or no reason at all. In a fit of rage. A moment of anguish for his own and real family.
Would knowing have made a difference to her life? Would it now?
Whatever happened to the urgency of this trip to Minnie HaHa.
Or has she already discovered what she had hoped to find but has yet to fi
nd the language to name it.
“Georgie,” Thomas calls out, shouting over the sounds of the river. “Look! Look up!”
Georgie lifts her head.
Above, a bright, clear afternoon sky. Ahead, a wide black stripe descending on the horizon as they move toward what is most certainly a storm.
A summer storm moving in their direction, a light rain advancing the storm, skimming Georgie’s skin. The air is quite suddenly cool.
The swells under the boat lift to waves from the bowels of the river, splashing against the hull, rocking the canoe.
The promised storm. Sometimes two or three a day, the woman Linda said.
Oona raises her head.
“It’s raining all over my arms.”
“Turn in,” Georgie calls out to Thomas. “Head us to the left bank.”
“Lean forward,” Thomas calls back. “Paddle as hard as you can.”
And then their voices cannot be heard above the wind.
Georgie pushes Oona to the bottom of the canoe: “Stay down,” she says and, resting on her knees, she spreads her body forward, stretching over starboard, her torso on the gunnel, forcing the paddle into the water as far as she can reach. She holds tight to the bottom of the shaft where it meets the paddle—dip, swing—the swing nearly impossible against the wind.
But they are moving left toward the bank.
Georgie is counting. “One,” she says aloud. Two. And Three. And Four. And Five. On and on and on to a hundred. Five hundred will get them to the bank if the wind would only cease its pounding, pushing them back, each time they move forward in the current.
One stroke forward, one stroke back.
The canoe is turning in a half circle, heading south in the direction of Missing Lake. The bank to which they have been headed is now on the right of their boat and they are moving left.
The banks on either side of the river which had seemed to be a short distance apart are separated now by miles. Georgie cannot even see through the film of weather to the other side.
She shouts right and the sound reverberates through the wind like a growl in her ear.
But Thomas cannot hear her.
She tries to put her paddle in the water directly away from her body, pulling the water toward the boat, but the storm is too strong. Her body cannot unfold to upright in the wind, and she falls against the side of the canoe now going in circles, rocking back and forth, shipping water.
She rights herself, leans forward, tries to submerge her paddle in the river, but she cannot move it against a wind that has the strength to whip the paddle into the air, out of her hands, and it is gone.
They are going to capsize.
She pulls Oona up from the floor of the canoe, secures her hand on the straps of Oona’s life preserver so she can’t slip away.
“We’re going to tip over into the river and I’m holding on to you so you won’t go under and I’m in my life preserver and I won’t go under so we’re going to be just fine.”
She speaks in Oona’s ear.
The boat rolls, ships more water into their laps, dipping backward. The stern must be under water now, the bow up and Georgie is in the river, the straps of Oona’s life preserver tight in her fist.
“Keep your head up above the waves,” she shouts at Oona, stretching her own neck, her head tilted back, the river splashing over her face.
A dim flicker of light skips across the top of the waves.
The wind on her skin is icy cold, the rain falling in sheets straight down from the heavens. She cannot keep her eyes open.
“Head up!” she shouts at Oona again and again.
And then below the surface of the water, where Georgie’s legs hang twisted by the current, something is happening. Some settlement, as if in the river’s depths at the muddy bottom a switch has been turned to OFF.
The sheets of rain move behind them. She can even feel their departure.
A battalion in lock step pushed south by the wind.
There’s a brief drizzle, the waves relax to gentle swells, the sky reflected on the water brightens.
And then the sun.
Treading water, Oona beside her, Georgie makes her way to the bank ahead through the current gone almost still.
THOMAS IS ON HIS BACK, half-sitting, his elbows ballast as Georgie, gripping the strap of Oona’s life preserver, reaches the bank.
He sits up when he sees them.
“Are you guys okay?” he asks.
“Well … yes. I think we are.”
“Pretty terrifying,” he says as Georgie makes her way up the muddy bank with Oona.
Georgie takes off the life preservers and lays them on the bank to dry.
“How long do you think that took?” she asks, sitting beside Thomas.
“The storm? Ten minutes?”
“Not even,” Georgie says. “It went by like a freight train.”
She is lying on her back now, her arms over her head looking up at the sun shifting west.
And then she remembers.
“The canoe!”
“You climbed up the bank right beside it and you didn’t even notice?”
She lifts her head.
Anchored to a tree, the canoe rocks in the light breeze. Georgie’s paddle is gone, but the paddle Thomas was using is under the seat in the stern of the canoe, where he must have stored it when he went into the river.
“Only one paddle,” Thomas says. “But I can get us to Minnie HaHa with one paddle.”
“Did we almost die?” Oona asks.
She has taken off her wet clothes, now naked, her arms spread in a V up to the sky.
“We did not almost die,” Georgie says. “The storm went away quickly and now we’re safe.”
“You weren’t freaked out?” Thomas asks.
“I didn’t have time.”
“Are you ready to head to the camp now?”
Georgie stands, stretches, shakes the water out of her hair.
“Put something on, Oona,” she says. “Maybe just your underpants.”
“They’re wet.”
“Put on your wet underpants.”
Thomas picks up his backpack, one strap around his shoulder.
“What happened with you and that woman, Linda?” he asks.
“It just happened.”
“Completely weird,” he says. “I looked over and you’re hugging her as if the two of you are the best of friends, and I thought as I usually think with grown-ups, you make no sense at all.”
“I don’t know what came over me,” Georgie says, making her way down the bank to the canoe. “She broke my heart.”
THEY SHAKE the life preservers, buckle them and push the canoe off the bank. Walking against the tide through the shallow water, they pour themselves into the boat—first Georgie with Oona, careful not to tip the canoe.
The boat moves quietly up the middle of the river into an afternoon bright enough to see the land curve in the distance, opening to a deep cove.
Georgie, on the ribbed bottom of the canoe with Oona between her legs, leans against the seat.
“Now Roosevelt!” she says.
THEY MOVE EASILY into the curve of land circling to a cove. At the end, a half-circle and a dock jutting into the river. Squinting into the sun, Georgie makes out a hill, a rise of land dotted with small square structures, probably cabins and a long rectangle of a lodge.
Is this familiar, Georgie wonders, thinking she remembers exactly this picture, or is it the picture on all the postcards from Roosevelt that she has received since December zipped up now in her backpack.
People are standing on the dock, small spots of color sprinkle the horizon.
Oona stretches, her arms high, and she rolls toward Georgie.
“Guess what?” she says.
“Well?” Georgie asks.
“I’m here.”
“I see you here right in front of me looking just like yourself.”
“And where is here?”
“Here
is the Bone River and Thomas is paddling our canoe up the river to Camp Minnie HaHa and soon we’ll be there.”
“What is going to be at Camp Minnie HaHa when we get there?”
“Your father, your brother, Aunt Rosie, Aunt Venus. Roosevelt.”
“I don’t know Roosevelt.”
“He is our friend whom we’ve never met.”
“And will we just sit at a table while the grown-ups talk and talk and talk like happens at your house?”
“You’ll look around, go swimming, eat dinner, meet Roosevelt and sleep over,” Georgie says. “This is exactly the place where I was going when I was four years old, but I never arrived and now I will.” She rests her chin on the top of Oona’s head. “With you!”
CAMP MINNIE HAHA
June 18, 2008
Roosevelt
Roosevelt stands at the top of the hill above the dock, shadowed by a stand of pine. From the distance of the river, he fades into the woods, and in semidarkness he seems as wide as the stand of trees.
He is taller than Georgie has imagined, and still, as if painted onto the landscape. What appears to be a cane leans at an angle against his leg. A dog lies at his feet, her nose resting between her paws.
Thomas steers the canoe into shallow water, jumps out waving to his family on the dock.
“Oona is here!” he shouts, pulling the boat to shore.
Knee-deep in the river, Nicolas is waiting.
He lifts Oona out, into his arms, and buries his head in her chest, walking along the shoreline away from the family.
Rosie sits with Venus on the edge of the diving board, their legs dangling, their shoulders touching in more intimate proximity than Georgie has seen them since they were girls.
“Oona?” Venus asks as Georgie climbs up to the dock. “Is she okay?”
“She is fine.”
“Fine?” Rosie asks. “What happened?”
“Did she get lost?” Venus asks.
“Not lost exactly.”
Georgie stands next to them, watching Nicolas walk in the river along the shoreline, holding Oona like an infant in his arms.
“So what happened?”
“It was … maybe a misunderstanding,” Georgie says, wondering as she speaks how to tell the story about Linda. Why misunderstanding feels right in spirit if not in fact.
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