Matey thought wildly, Not Mrs. Logan and Mrs. Reed, not Mrs. J. Howard Burnham too! Oh Mr. Bee!
“Well,” she said, grinning fatuously at his blind face, “I’m still here. I hope I’m always here. I love it here.”
He turned noncommittally and got into his car.
Sarah waved as it coasted down the hill. The bitch ran heavily along the road after it for a few feet and then turned and walked with caution toward her bowl of water on the patio, the other dogs after her. Matey stood waiting to hear the baby cry for light and air and la vie joyeuse after a long nap.
Everything was pretty much as it had always been: the wax-man had come; she had ordered with her usual lavish disregard of present supplies, oppressed by the thought of his long loyal drive up the hilly road; she had suffered and then been rewarded by the inimitable coincidence that the wax-man’s name was, as it had always been, Mr. Bee, an unforgettable name forgotten annually.
But five years were not annually.… Matey thought of the two new children and the coming puppies, and of the emptiness and the smudged outlines of her present life, the undusted floors and the unpolished nails and the unwashed heads of sweet babygirlhair, and then for a minute she rose above all that at the memory of blue-lipped Mr. Bee getting up so cautiously from the dirty rug of his last faithful old customer, and she was young and strong and happy and well-beloved. She knew that as fast as her husband could, he would come home to her. She knew that the floors would shine again, and the children’s heads, and her own well-formed fingernails. But as she heard the cry she had been waiting for, the one full of hunger and sleep from the younger girl, she turned toward the far white mountain that had betrayed the wax-man into weeping, and for a minute or two she could easily have wept, herself.
Another Love Story
For six years after Marnie Allen’s divorce, she and young Susan and Holly lived with her father in Los Angeles, where she had been a child too. Her mother had died, and after that withdrawal her father went into a slump, himself increasingly withdrawn. So Mrs. Allen and the children went to help him and themselves, and it was fine for all of them; the household came to life, and they each emerged from their sadnesses, more often than not, and laughed easily together.
But then he died, too. Even with the little girls there to warm him, he longed to have the Supreme Being, as he referred to an outer power, put an end to his grief, once and for all. Finally it came about, with a certain length of agony because the old body that had once been so potent and handsome put up a strong fight against its mortality. During the last few days of this battle, their mother sent Susan and Holly away, because the house was full of nurses and occasional hoarse cries of furious protest. (Later she regretted this self-saving gesture; her girls had loved the man deeply, and should have been left aware of his last jaunty revolt, she realized.)
After her father died, there were many lawyers and mourners hovering, so for a few days Mrs. Allen closed the doors and fled with Susan and Holly. They piled into the car with some clothes and food and drink, and headed north to Morro Bay. It was a fairly long ride, but they felt a growing buoyant freedom. The old man was out of his long sadness and final struggle, and they were out of the hollow house, and the early spring air was winier by the mile.
The little village, which has a big rock to help form a natural harbor, was in about 1950 a small tight settlement dominated by abalone fishermen and by a pier that was lined in the offseason with old men dangling poles and occasionally catching peculiar things like leopard sharks and flat evil stingrays. In one of the few motels the family found an apartment with a small kitchen. Ghosts of numberless other transients dampened some of the woman’s first heady feelings of escape from all the sad pother southward, but the children seemed unaware of them, and headed almost at once to rent fishing poles, ask about what baits to use, buy milk and cornflakes.
There were no other people aged seven and nine out of school, but that did not matter. They settled in the way cats do, and by the end of the first full day knew where to sit on the pier, near which old man: which would be all right, which to stay clear of. They practiced the art of silent watching, and soon they could bait their hooks neatly, and tell whether the tide was coming in or going out, and when not to talk—that sort of thing.
The second day, one of them caught the first fish of their private season as well as their lives, and several of the other sportsmen on the pier went over and admired it flapping there, and showed them what to do next. That was the hardest part, at: least at first; but by the time they came back to the motel, they had three nicely cleaned and scaled fish about eight inches long. Mrs. Allen found a skillet in the kitchenette (which proved that they were indeed in a beach town), and the girls ran to the market for more butter and some lemons and cornmeal, and their catch tasted ambrosial, although it was probably only bass.
After another two days, though, they all grew a little weary of eating the catch, at least at table, and still the children seemed to be having a streak of fertile luck. Mrs. Allen suggested that because tomorrow would be Saturday, with some other kids undoubtedly on the pier, they give their fish away.
Susan and Holly looked at each other for a minute, silently exchanging hurt, resignation, and their own private maledictions. Then Susan said, “Well, Mr. Henshaw says that we are the best fishermen he ever saw, for our ages.”
“Not only that,” Holly said. “Not only that! He said that we have brought luck to the whole bunch over there, and that some of those people need it, and today he himself helped a very old weak tired man gaff a striped shark at least three feet long!”
“Three feet, seven inches, Mr. Henshaw said. It bled. All over.”
There was a patient pause; plainly the girls were waiting for their mother to ask who Mr. Henshaw was, which of course she did.
It seemed that he was one of the nicest men they had ever met, and that everybody knew him, because when he wasn’t taking people out in his little putt-putt, he spent all of his time on the pier, watching and talking and helping out. He knew how to bring in the big fellows, and where to hit their heads once they’d been landed, and then he usually cut them up right there, and always wrapped the tail end in newspaper to take home for himself. It was by far the best part, he said, and of course he had earned it, and all the men on the pier agreed.
Susan said, “And what is more, Marnie, he wants to meet you, to ask if he can take us on a harbor tour sometime, after the weekend tourists have cleared out.”
“You sound just like an old-timer,” her mother said. It was delightful, and she felt safer and nicer than she had for months.
It was good, the next morning, to get out of the little apartment that was growing fishier all the time. There were indeed “tourists” everywhere, crowding into the bait shop, taking pictures of the abalone cannery, buying polished shells and postcards of the great Rock. The pier was already lined with strangers, most of them pushing and joking, not serious fishermen at all. The girls looked lost, and when they could not spot Mr. Henshaw anywhere they were plainly disconsolate, ready to turn tail.
“Why not just drive out now to the dunes?” Susan said. “We could have an early picnic, maybe … climb around.…”
Holly said, “There’ll be people there too, in all our best places.”
Mrs. Allen said, “Where do you suppose Mr. Henshaw is?” And they told her again, patiently, that he hired out whenever anyone wanted to take a tour of the bay, to earn money so that he did not have to work, because maybe he was not on a pension like the other men. In good weather he made enough on weekends for the whole next week, they said proudly. So Mrs. Allen proposed that they stick around, find a place to sit and fish, even beside strangers, and keep an eye out for him; they could divvy their catch with the less fortunate invaders of what had in a few days become almost private country. It was only about nine-thirty, she reminded the girls.
This came about, with no words glad or adverse, and some little boys squeezed together
respectfully to make room for Susan and Holly. The mother watched them from the roadway, all sitting with their skinny legs hanging over the old pier, their short rods tickling the water solemnly. She forgot to open the book she carried like a kind of medicine everywhere, everywhere but while she fried fish or slept—any book at all, but mostly old ones read long before she had had to learn firsthand about loss and love and other forms of dying. The pure quiet sunlight ran through her veins; it warmed the hairs on her head and the fluids behind her eardrums, so that all the sounds of people laughing and joking and scolding, and of the waters lapping against the shaggy piles, combined with the twinkling of the air over the little port, under and above the few small boats and along the shore, sent her into a daze of acceptance.
It was from a crystal distance that she watched her two girls flip several fish onto the pier, and nonchalantly take them off their hooks and neatly whack them lifeless, and then hand them graciously straightfaced to one or another of the gaping kids alongside. How nice, she thought, how nice for them, this high moment of superiority! We must hold on to it, she thought, and it will help when we have to go home again.
Triumph continued, so that even older people gathered behind the children as, their faces bland, they pulled fish up onto the pier. Nobody else seemed to be catching anything, and fortunately their hooks were much too small to invite real threats, like the leopards and small barracudas that sometimes blundered into the bay for free chow from the cannery. But enough was enough, and what more was there to do? There seemed to be no old men around. What would Mr. Henshaw suggest? “Let’s go,” he would probably say, and as Mrs. Allen was teasing herself for putting words into the mouth of someone she had never even seen, Susan and Holly stood up, reeled in neatly, and yelled to her, “There he is!”
Chugging toward them from past the Rock came a small boat, with a man sitting by its noisy outboard motor, and two fat people and their young boys holding on as if they felt relieved to be near dry land again after a perilous voyage. Everyone watched as the little launch, the Clara, nosed in close enough for them to jump out. And then Susan and Holly were talking eagerly with the slight white-haired man in a battered yachting cap who balanced in the empty rocking shell, his legs apart: as if he were on a rolling sea, very chipper. He pulled a pocket watch out of his pants, talked with the children a minute more, and then sat down while Holly raced toward her mother, her face as dedicated as if she were bearing news from Ghent to Aix. The short rod whipped over her shoulder.
“Mother,” she yelled, “he has passengers in five minutes! Hurry! Get up! Come on!”
Mrs. Allen felt annoyed to be told so flatly what she must do: meet some beat-up itinerant fisherman. The air lost its twinkle. She wondered almost sullenly what her family was doing here, in a weekend crowd of awkward, overfed, unattractive people in cheap clothes, drinking cheap beer, whining and joshing in cheap voices. The motel they must eat and sleep in, with the smell of fried fish in all the folds of cloth, seemed too drab to think about. She wanted to leave, go away, go north—anywhere but south toward the dead house.
“Mr. Henshaw, this is our mother,” Susan was saying with an impressive formality. He stood up in the bow of the little bobbing boat and took off his cap, so that his rather long thick white hair blew up above his forehead.
He bowed and said, “How do you do, Ma’am?” and she smiled politely and said, “Very well, thank you.”
“I’m sorry I have to take some folks right out,” he said. “May be a lull around five o’clock. Why don’t you two young ladies keep an eye out for me then?”
“Mr. Henshaw wants to talk with you about a boat trip,” Susan said.
He interrupted her with a mild rebuke in his voice, so that she flushed a little. “Now, honey, we don’t need to bring business into this! I just want to tell your mother what good fishermen you are, when the crowd thins out.” He put his cap back on, shoved off, and called solemnly, “Very pleased to meet you, Ma’am,” as the motor snarled.
He had nice manners, all right, and a good strong voice: he was a handsome, brown old fellow with large, bright-blue eyes above a thin nose, and a wide mouth full of teeth that were clean-looking and plainly his own, under a clipped white moustache. But for some reason, Mrs. Allen felt rather peevish about standing there, the three of them, watching him sweep around the end of the pier as if they should wave large handkerchiefs and call farewells across the water. In a way that seemed unbearably silly to her mother, one of the girls sighed, “Well, there he goes again,” and Mrs. Allen answered sarcastically, “So?”
Both girls looked at her as if she had disappointed them. She felt ashamed of herself, and fumbled into saying that she was sorry about suddenly being a little mopey and mean.
Susan said, “That’s all right. We all feel that way now and then, alone up here. That’s why I like Mr. Henshaw, probably.”
“He cheers me up, too,” Holly said to her. “You’re not the only one that’s alone.”
“We’re not the only pebbles on the beach,” Mrs. Allen said, calling on an old family trick to divert a possible plunge into general gloom.
“We’re not the only fish in the sea,” Susan added quickly, on cue.
“I got six,” Holly said, with the air suddenly cleared. “Did you watch? Those kids all around us couldn’t believe it. Susan got six too, and we took up your idea and gave them all away, to poor people who had no luck and nothing to eat.”
“Oh, they all had lunchboxes, and one boy asked me to go get a hamburger with him,” Susan said scornfully. “Anyway, I’m starved.”
“I mean, they didn’t have anything to take home. And what about us, tonight? What can we fry?”
Mrs. Allen suggested they might go to the one restaurant and eat a steak. It was a big night in town, she pointed out, and there would be a lot of people, and French fries, which were an unknown delicacy at home; and anyway she had left all the windows open to air out the fumes, so it would be chilly in their place. That sounded nice, the girls said, and they all headed for the car, the dunes, the noon picnic.
It was a good one, after they found a windless hollow without lovers in it. “Tourists. Weekends. People, people kissing,” the girls said disdainfully. Things tasted salty and good, and they lay on the hot white sand in their little hidden valley and then walked out along the beach until it ended. Finally Mrs. Allen felt that the question of Time was in the air, and maliciously beat the girls to it by saying that they should head back to the car if they were so eager to see their Mr. Henshaw.
“You’re teasing us,” Susan said, and Holly said, “I don’t think you really like him much, Marnie.”
“I’m not teasing. Not really. And as far as I know, I do like him. He seems like a nice old man.”
“He’s not so old,” one of them said flatly.
He was sitting at the bay end of the almost empty pier, talking with two or three regulars who had turned up, shabby but with their Saturday shaves, perhaps to catch supper. When he saw the Allens walking toward him, he waved and came to meet them.
“Thought you’d forgotten me,” he said to the girls, who beamed blissfully at him, speechless, probably saying inside Oh never never, how could we, you are too wonderful, too nice, dear Mr. Henshaw.
“We went on a picnic,” Mrs. Allen said, feeling rather foolish herself.
“That’s a good idea, in good weather. Good to get away on Saturdays and Sundays. Not a very good crowd here then. Too many of them, anyway.”
“That’s what we decided,” she said, and the conversation slowed, while they all looked intently at another elderly thin man shuffling out toward his friends, a tackle box dangling.
“That’s Jim,” Holly said finally.
“Yep,” Mr. Henshaw said.
“He’s one of the nice ones,” Susan said.
“You bet he is,” Mr. Henshaw said. “Jim’s all right.”
It was as if the four of them were dozing off.
Suddenly Mr. H
enshaw said, in a brisk way, “Well, I was wondering, Ma’am, if sometime you and these young ladies would like to go out in the Clara to see more of the Rock and maybe go up some on the inlets and watch some wild birds. I charge two dollars per head, but for my friends it is half price, for about an hour’s ride or as long as you want, on weekdays.”
They were awake again. The children looked in a kind of blazing way at their mother, polite but as urgent as the smell of vinegar, and she said, “That would be fun. Yes, thank you. When?”
“Tomorrow!” both girls cried. “Early tomorrow.”
“Naw,” he said, smiling a wide smile under his white moustache with his white teeth gleaming. “Susan and Holly, you should know by now that Sunday is just like Saturday—no time for a real ride for you! Tourists.”
Mrs. Allen felt startled that he knew their names, that he was in a private world with them. But why should he not be, after the three or four days, or weeks or years, that they had lived in this dreamlike part of their several lives? And how could any of them—the children who had never seen her near a boat, the old man who had never seen her anywhere ever before—know that she had never stepped into any craft as small as his in her life, and was fairly sure that it would sink under her like a stone, or roll over like a whale with her clamped into its belly? How could anyone know how terrified she was of any ship shorter than, perhaps, the Île de France?
They met at the pier at ten-thirty on Monday morning. The girls had proposed an earlier hour, but Mr. Henshaw was firm about waiting until the air was warm. “You see more then,” he said.
“We’ll just mosey around now,” he told them as they clambered off the pier. Nobody seemed to notice that Mrs. Allen was as swaddled in self-control as if she were at another funeral, as she settled herself cautiously in what she called the tip of the boat, which surprisingly had not lunged, capsized, rolled over as she edged into it.
Sister Age Page 6