Off Season (17 page)
“Daddy!” I screamed. “Daddy! Take the Friendship and go after him! I’ll help, I’ll come too!”
My mother had her arms around Claire Lowell. I ran to her and she put one around me, too, and pulled me against her so that my face was in her shoulder. As it had been, not so long ago, in Jon’s.
“He can’t take the sloop out, honey,” she said. “Jon will see that he can’t sail it and turn around. Just wait a minute . . .”
My father came striding back up the dock.
“I’m going to the general store to see if any of the lobster fleet is out. They’ll have the marine band on. Take Claire inside and call the Coast Guard. He could easily turn back any minute, or just drop the sail and sit still until somebody finds him. But we can’t take that chance.”
He ran on past us and up into the clearing where the Jeep was parked. There was no sound in the smothering fog. And then we heard, lost far out in the fog, the distinct snap of a sail finding wind, and filling.
I don’t remember much of that afternoon. Clara came and made coffee and put out sandwiches, but I don’t think anyone ate them. Jon’s mother sat stiff beside the fire in our living room, crying softly. My mother sat with her arms around her, whispering in her ear every now and then, giving her small hugs, but she did not speak. Even Wilma was quiet, curled at my feet where I sat on the window seat, staring out at the fog. My fist was closed tight around the osprey feather. My father did not come back until much later. I knew he had been at the general store all afternoon listening on the marine band on the radio that was kept on at all times, so that a lobsterman in trouble might rouse other lobstermen to come to his aid. Mrs. Beatrice Glenn, the store’s owner, knew all the boats by name and call number. The store was the first place you went when there was trouble at sea. The radio picked up the Coast Guard’s signal, too. By now, I knew that they would have long been out on the sea from the station at Castine. I knew that they would stay out until they found Jon. I knew, but it did not help the sick terror.
It was just after dark when my father came into the living room. The fog was so thick that we had not heard the Jeep come into the driveway. His step was slow and he did not speak. He did not have to.
I saw that he opened his mouth and spoke to the two women by the fire, but I heard nothing. Nothing but the terrible ripping sound as the fabric of the world was rent, and the cold, windy sucking of the infinite black void beyond it, where everything vanished: the moon and the sun and the cold music of the stars and the wings of children, the warmth of fires and the shapes of islands and the swift, darting white bellies of ospreys, and the soft curl of a feather, and the taste of summer strawberries and the smell of wood smoke and the breathing of the sea. And Jon.
Gone.
I
n the early fall of 1963, the year after we left Edgewater, my mother finally received her invitation to luncheon at the White House. It was not for some little duty affair for Democratic women, either, as she pointed out radiantly, showing us her heavy cream vellum invitation with
The
White
House
engraved on it. It was for “six women who have made a difference through the arts,” and it was signed by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. The other five women were unnamed, but my mother’s friend Tatty Glover told her that
her
friend, Tish Baldridge, had told her that three of the others were Mahalia Jackson, Joan Baez, and Margot Fonteyn. Tish had not been sure who the other two were; probably writers or journalists, Tatty said. But it was generally known in the West Wing that the President planned to drop in unannounced.
“Just unofficially,” Tatty said Tish said. “He couldn’t very well seem to play favorites or anything.”
It was the first time since we had left Edgewater in the early dawn hours of last midsummer that I had seen my mother really smile, or heard the little growl of lusty pleasure she got in her voice when she was very excited. It was the first time, I think, that I had seen any of us really smile, much less seem exuberantly excited about anything. For a moment it was like hearing birds sing again, but only for a moment. The piercing sweetness of the sound whistled in the air of the library and hurt my ears and I snapped the helmet tighter.
Late into the white, fog-felted night when my father had come home with the Coast Guardsmen but not Jon, I woke, still muffled in the damp old sofa blanket and lying in my father’s arms as I had been when I’d finally cried myself to sleep. My father had not moved; was still lying on his side with his arms around me. But they were slack in sleep now, with exhaustion and pain, and he did not stir as I wiggled out of my swaddling and stumbled into the middle of the living room. The fire had burned down to pallid joyless ashes, and the room was cold and clammy with fog. I could not remember at first what had jerked me out of sleep and thrown me out into the room. But then I did, and pain so huge and pulsing that I could almost feel it stretching my skin doubled me over, and I knelt on the threadbare old hearth rug, thinking that surely one must die of this kind of agony, and wishing that it would hurry with me.
Frantic with the pain and the fear of living even another minute with it, my mind battered and scrambled, casting about for someone, something, that could take it from me, I did not care how. Something that would smother me with warm softness so that the pain died with my breath. Something that could puncture my heart and let the roiling toxin rush out. Someone to come and take me into his arms and say, “It’s all right. They found him and he’s just fine.”
But there was no one. My father was sodden with his own anguish. Clara had at last gone, heavily and red-eyed, home, when no more coffee was wanted, or the clam chowder she had kept hot. Jeebs was off cruising the Cranberry Islands with his sail-gifted friend, and in any case I would never have run to Jeebs. We had little connection now.
My mother had taken Claire Lowell home, and was staying with her until her sister and brother-in-law could come from their summer home in Vermont. I knew that by now someone would have reached Arthur Lowell in his sere bedroom or cold quarry office, but I did not care who had, or when he could reach Carter’s Cove. Arthur Lowell died in my mind that night far more inevitably than his son ever did. Canon and Mrs. Davenport left my mind completely, taking Peaches with them.
Still crouched on the hearth rug, gasping for breath and biting my knuckles so hard against screaming out, or retching, that they bled, I had a silent implosive vision of what it would take to enable me to live. I scrambled to my feet and in what seemed an instant was up in my attic lair, breathing in dust and summers immemorial, pawing through my books. I jerked them out of their shelves; they lay in heaps on the floor, spines cracking, pages torn, until my dirty hands fell on the one I remembered. Even as it lay closed in my hands I felt the stretching pain ease a little, the gagging panic recede. Jules Verne’s
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
had been, I think, my grandfather’s book, old when I had first read it, yellowed and warped now by wet sea air and the hundreds of times I had leafed through it. I held it hard against my chest. I had always loved it, and now it was going to save me.
The page I remembered presented itself to me as if it had been waiting. It was smeared and grubby with what looked to be small chocolate fingerprints. I even remembered the time I had put them there: hot cocoa on a night of howling winds that shook the house, and fusillades of rain.
“Heavy, waterproof suits, made of seamless rubber and constructed in such a way as to be able to bear up under considerable pressure,” I read. I could have almost recited it.
It was like strong yet supple armor. The suit consisted of trousers and a jacket. The trousers ended in thick shoes with heavy lead soles. The fabric of the jacket was held firm by copper plates which protected the chest against the water pressure and allowed the lungs to function freely; its sleeves ended in gloves that were supple enough for the wearer to perform any normal operation with his hands. . . . The top part of the jackets ended in a threaded copper collar onto which metal helmets could be screwed. Three holes covered by thick glass permitted us to see in any direction merely by turning our heads inside the helmet.
I could not have said why the passage had always called out to me. The writing was banal, and the picture it painted of the suits was almost industrial, certainly not beautiful. But those suits had lived in my earliest dreams, and they were always dreams of lightness and safety. Somewhere deep inside me, the suits had always waited.
I read the passage over and over. I pored over the illustrations of the men in the suits. I pulled out my old quilt and lay down on the floor, wrapping it around me, and read and read and read. When I had entered the attic I remembered being as cold as I had ever been in my life. When, around four in the morning, with predawn washing the window, I woke, I was warm and dry and nimble and supple, and the suit fit me as if every inch of it had been made for me. Terrible pain still stalked the house, roared like a tiger, slashed at the suit and helmet, but it did not quite reach me. It never did again until many years later, when I heard, dimly, a laugh so joyous and summery that I tossed away the helmet and tore away the suit and left it puddled on the earth behind me like a discarded snakeskin.
No one could see my suit, I knew, but I thought perhaps my father and maybe my mother knew it was there. But for a long while no one commented on it. It muted the world, which I knew now to be a killing place as well as a life-giving one, just enough so that I could walk in it without much fear or even much pain. Without much joy, either, but for a long time I considered the suit to be a fair trade for the world.
Even I knew that my suit was ridiculous: ludicrous, a clown’s disguise, a Halloween thing. Sometimes it made me laugh a little, thinking what would happen if the people in my world could see it. I imagined it suddenly blooming into visibility in my classes, after school at the record shop, at the Chevy Chase Club’s Sunday family brunches. Would people point and laugh? Run away from me? Pretend not to notice at all? On the whole, I thought the latter would be the most common reaction; especially at the club. Somehow it seemed the eeriest, the most awful, thing of all. But as time went by I thought less and less of it, and clumped through my days if not happily, then almost contentedly. It never occurred to me that I, in my suit, walked very closely with a kind of madness. It served.
Of our flight into Egypt with that dawn I remember almost nothing, except that my father, thinking I was sleeping, carried me out to the car and settled me in the backseat with a blanket and Wilma, who was, for once, silent and still. Wilma knew. Of course he did. The whole way home he slept.
It is a very long drive from Maine to Washington, and we made it in a day. I don’t remember much about that day except that I slept a lot and re-read
The Catcher in the Rye
, and ate the Howard Johnson’s sandwiches my parents bought, and stumbled sleepily into rest stops or to walk Wilma. I don’t recall that my parents talked much, either, but they must have, of course. How could they not? I do remember once coming up out of sticky hot sleep and hearing my mother say in a low voice thick with tears, “. . . can’t imagine what will happen to her. She’s lost everything. Both her boys. Her husband, really; he was never who she thought he was. The whole life she lived . . .”
“Maybe she’ll find a better new one,” my father said heavily. His voice had changed. It had somehow, in the space of that day, gone from sometimes a boy’s to an old man’s. “God knows she’s got a clean slate now. She could live any way she wanted.”
“No. She’s lost all she wanted. Would you want to start a whole new life if you’d lost what she has? I wouldn’t. I couldn’t! I think I’d find a way to die. I think she will too.”
“Oh, Liz,” he said. His voice trembled. “Don’t even say that. Don’t ever. We’ll keep in touch with her. She could come visit us. I thought you both had a lot in common, really; that she’d get to be a really good friend.”
“No. We’d have been very good friends, but not now. She won’t come and we won’t keep in touch. Remember when the Garrisons’ daughter was killed in that awful accident in the school parking lot? Janet said once that she simply could not force herself to see anyone who was there, who might have even seen the accident. Sometimes she’d just turn the car around and go back home when she saw one of Delia’s classmates’ mother’s cars coming toward her. She never went back to Saint Margaret’s. Soon after that is when they moved out to Reston. Do you think Claire Lowell would ever want to lay eyes on us again? I don’t mean that she’d be angry, it’s just that she couldn’t stand what it called back. It was our boat, remember?”
“Do you think I will ever in my life forget that for one moment?” my father whispered.
I don’t remember any more conversation between them until we reached our house on Kalorama Circle, late into a hot night, hulking dark against the moon-bleached night sky, looking bruised and swollen and without breath. But I breathed in its lifelessness almost gratefully. Once I would have choked for the breath of the sea, but I knew now that the sea that could give breath could also take it, and I turned my whole being gratefully into the hot, still city.
We did not go back to Edgewater, at least my mother and father never did, and it was many years before I did, and somehow then it was a different house on a different ocean, and therefore possible.
My father came into my bedroom one afternoon a week or so after we had left Edgewater in that awful dawn, looked around, and went to my windows and rolled up the shades. I had not opened them since we got home. I had never spent a summer in our house in the city; I could not imagine seeing our quiet lawn and my mother’s garden in the searing light of midsummer, and I felt that to do so would let in some inexorable sun-scorched reality with which I could not deal. Always, my summer windows had framed rocks and islands and sea and sky. I felt that a wilting rose garden and dingy white cast-iron lawn furniture would send me plummeting out into endless space.