by Jeffrey Lent
She sat alone in the music room for an hour and a half until Edgar Sloane arrived. Although it was still late afternoon he took her out to a restaurant that was dim and cool with ceiling fans and dark polished wood. It was the first time since New Hampshire they had been alone together. Sloane was poised and calm and gentle and she sensed a tremendous tension within him and guessed he felt himself in some danger to be seen with her and his taking that danger unto himself touched her and she was very formal with him. They sat over food neither wanted and he asked her what she intended to do and she told him she did not know. And he asked what she thought her options were and she told him, having spent the time alone in the music room with those same options revealed to her as simply as a tight fist opening to reveal a spare handful of pennies. She knew what she would not do. And she knew that continuing with Virginia Reeves was not a possibility. And she would not ask and did not expect anything from Sloane either. She outlined to him what she saw her choices to be, the words not as brave or clear as the thought behind them but she did not apologize for the paucity of her opportunities. And again, he asked which of them she felt most likely. And again she told him she did not know. He then lifted his napkin and pressed it to his lips and folded it and laid it aside on the table and told her what he could do.
Early next morning he called for her and she was waiting, slipping out the door in the late-summer chill dawn with only the cheap valise she’d left New Hampshire with, not having seen or spoken with Virginia Reeves since the afternoon before. Joey had written a note of thanks and regrets and then folded it small and carried it away with her in the pocket of her dress, believing Virginia Reeves would view the gesture with contempt. They traveled east by train to Orleans, sitting side by side and not speaking. What his private hopes for her had been she did not know and so could not read if he was reconciled or relieved but either way she knew he was engaged now in an action called for not so much by the fact of her as by some theory of conduct, a notion of comportment. She knew his action was enough, a measure of some devotion or passion mute in his soul.
At Orleans the summer coaches were still running and they rode north again in a cluster of strangers. If there were any among them that Sloane knew he did not speak to them and no one addressed him either. At the store in Truro he bought a stock of groceries without consulting Joey who trailed him along the shelves and then went outside to stand on the porch and wait for him. When he came out he stood silent a moment before explaining the groceries would be delivered with ice later in the day. Then he took up her valise and led the way out through the dunes to the beach and they trudged south more than a mile, she trailing him to watch the water and the sky and the birds skittering along the waves’ froth. At the house he went through it quickly, explaining the water system and the small cookstove and the icebox and then hat in hand he stood before her and told her to stay until she knew what she would do or the weather drove her out, told her then also that if she needed anything more, anything at all, to contact him at his store and he left a card for the business on the table and then they stood looking at each other and she knew she wouldn’t see him again and guessed he knew it also—guessed he understood her well enough to know it was true. So she stepped forward quickly and kissed him and as she took her mouth away a small groan of anguish came from him. Then she stood on the porch and watched him walk away down the beach.
Finally, without preamble or apology she finished by explaining that since she’d left New Hampshire she’d fashioned herself Joey Pelham. That she had taken his name long since.
The day had gone into pale blue and slate twilight. From the sound she knew the tide was coming up. He’d sat on the floor without moving through her telling, the bottle of warm beer untouched beside him. With his bare feet and pants rolled up he shivered from time to time as the porch breeze came off the water. She wondered if he’d brought his shoes up somewhere into the dunes or on the steps; if he’d left them on the beach they were gone. When she was done he sat some time without moving or speaking, his face confused and strained, soft as a young boy, she wrapped in the quilt, wanting to go down to him, to touch him. After a time he spoke.
“Did you screw him?”
“If I told you yes or no would that change how you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“If I told you no you’d always think I was lying. If I told you yes you’d use it on me, always, come a hard time. So, you sure you want to ask?”
“I guess I pretty much already did.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what to make of you.”
“All right,” she said. “So you want me to answer? You want the truth?”
“I believe I do.”
“Up home. This summer. He wanted me bad. And he talked such a clean honest idea of what he could do for me. It wasn’t like most fools. So the truth is that if it had come down to it I would have. But most men, most all their lives except maybe once or twice it’s only the one thing they want and then they lose interest in anything else. And I wanted what he was holding out. So I made him wait. And I was right about him. If things had turned out different who can say? But they turned out the way they are. And here I am. Your short answer is no but I would’ve if I’d had to, if it’d come to that. You live with that?”
He was silent. The twilight had gone all slate. He looked away from her, around the confines of the porch as if at floor level he’d discover something sought. Then he looked back at her. “You’re going to have a baby.”
“It looks that way.”
“My baby.”
“Both of ours.”
“What do you know about babies? I don’t know anything about them. Never been around one much now I think about it.”
She grinned at him then. “I never was either. I guess you just have it and then one thing comes after another.”
“Seems there’s more to it than that.”
“I guess there likely is.”
They were quiet then. It was near to full dark. A piece of moon hung out over the water, making light there and throwing a pale thin gray light into the porch. The wind had fallen off and it was not as cold, the air heavy as if charged or someway filled by the presence of endless ocean. After a time he spoke. “So you want to come home?”
“Yes,” she said. “I do.”
He stood then, coming up smoothly but he did not come to her, turning to stand instead at the screened side of the porch, his back to her. He stayed like that some time. No longer shivering. Finally he turned. She had not been waiting for him but watching him, knowing he was sifting and sorting, allowing all things to align within him—she sure his answer was known sometime before to him as well as her. He said, “It’s awful pretty, isn’t it? The times I imagined the ocean wasn’t ever anything like this. I guess you couldn’t imagine a thing like this, not really. You think?”
“Not until I saw it I couldn’t.”
“You want to take a walk down along there? As long as I’m here, I’d like to see it some.”
“You lose your shoes?”
“No. They’re out the front of the house. But I’d go barefoot to walk the beach.”
She came up then, off the daybed and stretched herself, her arms up over her head. Then brought them down and hugged herself. “Let’s go walk.”
He took a step toward her. “You’re sure it’s all right? For you?”
“To walk?”
“Don’t laugh at me.”
“Jamie, I’ve been swimming naked out there every night until this one. I can’t see a walk would hurt a thing.”
“Swimming in the dark?”
“Swim out and ride the waves in.”
“All that water,” he said. “It’s fearful.”
She went toward him then, did not touch him but went past to the door and opened it and stopped and turned. “It’s delicious. It’s fear and everything else all at once. You’ll love it. Come on.”
“You want to swim out there?”
“I want to swim out there. With you. I want you to see what it’s like.”
“Go swim naked out in all that?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Aw, Joey,” he said.
“It’s not dark out there. You won’t believe how much you can see. And what you can’t see you don’t care about. See the moon? Come on.”
He stepped toward her then and she turned and went down the steps into the swells of sand atop the dunes and turned and looked back at where he stood on the top step, his hands in his trouser pockets as he looked down at her. He said, “So you called yourself Pelham.”
“I did.”
He nodded, his head in the moonlight a dipping luster of face then salt-torn hair. He said, “People hate a French Canadian, don’t they?”
“I was trying to be smart.”
“Pelham’s a stout old name.”
“I wasn’t trying to take anything from you.”
“Oh no,” he said. “Whatever good it did you, you’re welcome to the use of it.” He came down to stand beside her in the sand. She could smell him again, an odor she couldn’t recall away from it but couldn’t place herself apart from when he was there. “Mostly,” he said, “people are cruel, given the chance.”
“I know you think that.”
“I know it. You do too, good luck aside.”
“I guess maybe I do.”
“Tell you what,” he said. “Let’s walk a ways.”
She wavered before him a moment, then took his hand and turned and led him down through the dunes to the sea.
Foster was born the next March during a storm that began with a foot of wet snow before turning to frozen rain that glazed over the snow and then the temperature dropped and three more feet of fine soft powder fell and on the third day the sky cleared and the world was white, crystalline, placid and heaped. Somewhere during those three days there had been a terrible eighteen hours with no hope of help and Jamie stood at one point in the kitchen beating his head with his fists as the thought came that he should reenter the soiled awful room and choke her with his hands to end it all. Then went back in and knelt for some period of time and took from her bloodied thighs and bedclothes a wet child into his arms also soaked with blood and a clear slime and the child cried once, only a soft mewl, and then went happy to suck. And Jamie then washed Joey and cleared the bed and slipped under her fresh bedclothes and went to the kitchen and used the last of the heated water to clean himself. Finally at the end of that day stepped outside, forcing the door against the piled snow and stood gazing at the storm around him. From the barn he heard the hungry horses and thought he could do no more and turned to go back to the house and then turned back and went through waist-high snow to the barn, each step breaking through the hidden crust and bruising his legs. By the time the storm cleared, the next day or the one after, he was never sure, he no longer wanted to go anywhere, wanted nothing more than to stay right where he was.
Foster was named for no one. It was a name they liked. She had suggested only once his father’s name. Then days later out of the blue asked how he liked Foster as a name. Three years after that a girl was born to them. Without question or conflict they named her for Joey’s mother. Claire.
Six
For a time in the summer of 1919, following the winter of influenza that left the two of them alone, he left the boy at home and paid the youngest Flood girl to walk over each day and tend him. Jamie thought this Sharon competent to watch the boy. Perhaps even felt he was offering her something in return beyond the small wage. Some refuge away from the reek of dung and constant bleat of the sheep, beyond whatever hand it was she shrank from. And she was convenient. Until the afternoon he returned to the house and found the boy halfway up one of the hemlocks, spraddle-legged on one of the big limbs, his back against the trunk, his feet dangling. The girl Sharon seated on an upturned crate, a bar of handsoap clutched like a Bible. She told Jamie, “I was frying up slabs of that cold pot roast for his dinner. He was pestering me to eat. So I told him take the pan off the stove and set it on the table while I cut bread. And he grabbed hold the pan handle and burned his hand. Then he said a bad word. I told him not to speak like that around me. He said I wasn’t his mother, he could speak as he pleased. I told him I was paid to mind him, and he’d mind me. I told him foul language can’t come from a clean mouth and I took up the soap. He ran out here and climbed the tree.”
Jamie stepped to the base of the tree and looked up at his boy. “Foster. Come down here.”
“No sir. Not with her waiting.”
Jamie stroked his chin, still looking up. “Come down here. Let me see your hand.”
Foster looked from his father to the stout girl, weighing things. Then came down the tree. Jamie heard small gasps break from his mouth as his hurt hand caught against the rough bark. Then he was on the ground and turned silent to hold out his hand. Grimed with pine tar the pink spread of fingers showed a broad band of yellow sear, the burn hard. It would be days before it would fill and blister.
Jamie said, “What happened?”
“She told me put the pan on the table. It was moved to the edge of the stove. I didn’t have any idea it was still so hot. It hurt, was all.”
“What else?”
“Well. She wanted to cram that soap in my mouth. I wouldn’t stand for it. She chased me out of the house. I climbed up this tree here.”
“What else?”
“Sir?”
“What did you say? Made her want to do that?”
“I said Shit. When I grabbed onto the pan.”
Jamie took up the offered hand and bent to study it, with both children watching him. Then he let go of the hand and said, “Go on to the house. Wash that sap off your hands, put some butter on the burn. Go now.”
The boy would not be alone in the house. The world was changed and most nights now Jamie was home but the few he was called out he took Foster with him, the two of them in the Packard Twin Six, the boy for the most part riding silent. Sometimes he would hum, snatches of tuneless sound. Sometimes short phrases of songs his mother would have once sung around the house but never did he sing the words but only offkey humming, a high child’s rendering. Thoughtless. As if the phrases were some part of him unconnected to anything else. Sometimes the humming would drift off to nothing. Other times it would stop mid-phrase. These times Jamie would glance over. The boy might be gazing straight ahead out the windshield into the night. Or his head turned to the side window. Or lolled down sleeping against the door upholstery.
Now with the Flood girl gone Foster rode along daytimes as well. At least for the remainder of the summer. The two of them in a world unmoored.
The previous November the four of them had driven to Littleton for ceremonies marking the armistice signed in Europe. After the false armistice something arose in them and prompted an urge to celebrate that might otherwise not have occurred. For the war itself had been more hindrance for Jamie than anything else—the hotel trade had fallen to some token resemblance of its former self—and while he was close-mouthed about it outside of the house, inside he so often said that like everything else it was all about money that Joey would sometimes mock him by finishing lines he’d just begun. Still, that November day was bright and warm, with the new snow shrinking already when they departed the house midday, the winter birds, the chickadees and jays, darting with evident delight as if winter was not just held back a day but coming to a close, and there was a spell of adventure over them as they drove to the festivities. Later, Jamie would attempt to attribute the unease he felt to some premonition, some foretaste of knowledge.
The Littleton streets were frothy with autumn mud, leached of frost by the day, farmers with their wagons and teams moving easily to the side to allow a sputtering churning flivver to make its own rough way. The big Packard went through the mud as if rolling over a lawn. Flags flew on staffs angled over the street every twenty feet. The oper
a house had a great swoop of bunting across its front for the event. It was filled with people dressed in winter clothing against the late-afternoon trip home. The building was overheated. People rasped with the dry air. Behind Jamie a man punctuated each segment of the ceremonies with wet blasts into a handkerchief. The choral society performed “Over There” and “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” and “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” A state legislator made remarks. No active-duty soldiers had yet returned to the north country but a veteran youth with a finely trimmed mustache and a slim cane made sly remarks about the Huns and Paris and the old home town. A lovely girl swathed in layers of a gossamer cloth with her hair piled atop her head and a silk banner of red white and blue sang the national anthem as the men removed their hats and strained to discern the shape of her breasts beneath the swathing. A reverend minister spoke a prayer for all who had suffered and died, for all those maimed and unfortunate, for the loss of homes and destruction of cities, for the boys on troopships coming home, for the mothers and fathers awaiting them, for the continued munificence toward the great nation, for the state of New Hampshire, for the people of the town and finally for the state legislator. As prayers went Jamie thought it was similar to those few others he’d heard: too long. Still his unease was gone. They went out into the falling dusk of midafternoon and the sharp chill and drove home toward the leafless mountains with the rose wash of sunset over them. Joey was ebullient, flushed. He watched her cradling Claire asleep on her lap. Joey saw him watching her and said, “That girl was lovely, such a pretty voice.” He thought I need to get her out more often. Figure out how to do it. She was too willing to allow the children to be an excuse. He thought, We can do it. It’s not such a big thing. Just some weeknight out. Go to the pictures for christ sake.