Peaceable Kingdom (mobi) (16 page)

Her brother Lloyd was killed in Bataan during World War II.

Christmas for my sister and me was cleaning bedpans and checking her for bedsores and doing loads of dirty laundry and turning her and and wiping her chin. That and the restaurant. We closed it down Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and then realized we had nothing much to do. We hadn’t bothered with a tree or decorations and the
exchange of presents Christmas morning took maybe all of ten minutes. For her, a silver bracelet I’d picked out in an antique store in Cambridge. Though I couldn’t have known it at the time, not a good selection. The bracelet made her wrist look even thinner than it was. For me—the lit major—a handsome boxed collection of the tragedies of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus. We sat around the television. I glanced through the books.

“We could go to the Point,” she said.

“Pretty damn cold for the Point. And then what about her?”

“She’d be okay for a while.”

I thought about it.

“Nah. Forget it. Never mind. It was only a thought.”

Osteoporosis is pain, and pain strains the heart.

Against all expectations my mother lasted till April of the following year. I’d visited as often as my teaching schedule would permit and had watched my sister deteriorate by degrees almost as my mother had before her, but without the added problem—or excuse—of physical disease. I could only hope that now that this was finally over Louise could bounce back to something approaching a normal life. She’d never had one.

At the funeral service she was all skin and bones draped loosely in black. I’d only just flown in. My flight out of Logan was delayed and I’d barely made it.

“She wanted to be cremated,” she told me.

“She did? Since when?”

We’d greeted our fellow mourners. There were a surprising number though I actually knew hardly any of them. Some went back all the way to my father’s day as a musician. Louise and I were seated in the front row with the low hum of organ-music in our ears and the closed pine casket to our right. We were waiting for the minister to begin.

“It surprised me too. She said a funny thing, Steven.
Funny for her, anyway. She said she wanted to get the hell out of here, finally.”

“
Let us pray
,” said the minister.

We bowed our heads.

“I didn’t blame her,” she whispered. “So do I.”

And that was my wish for my sister. That was what I was praying for at the funeral home that morning. Not for my mother’s dear departed soul.

But that my sister was finally out from under her for good.

The day she was cremated we took the ashes directly to the Point.

Louise’s idea.

“She wanted to get away from here,” she said. “Wind and water. I can’t think of a better way, can you?”

The sky was the kind of flat slate grey you get with an oncoming storm. I’d have been happy to put this off for another time—it looked like we were going to get rained on any moment. But Louise was having none of that. She got out of the car with the small white heavy cardboard box in her hands and headed up the boardwalk to the dunes. By the time I passed the Sisters of St. Joseph sign at their base she was halfway to the top.

I caught up to her about twenty yards down the jetty, just where the concrete starts to crack and fissure. To our right the Bay rippled gently under a steady southwesterly wind. On the ocean side the whitecaps slapped and then hissed across the flat black rocks. I caught her arm. I had to yell for her to hear me.

“That’s far enough!” I said.

“What?”

“I said let’s do it! This is fine.”

“Just a little more. Let’s do it right. We owe it to her, Steven!”

“We don’t owe her
anything
for God’s sake. She’s
gone
.”

I wanted to say
you
don’t owe her anything but I didn’t.

“Just a little more.”

She stepped out ahead of me. I was right behind but made no further attempt to stop her. The rocks were wet with spray and beginning to get slippery where there wasn’t much of the concrete so you had to watch your footing. And then there was no concrete at all. Walking became treacherous.

We were about halfway down the jetty, out forty-five yards or so. The air was thick and cold with spray.

“Louise!” I thought,
Jesus, sis, enough’s enough
.

She stopped which was a big relief to me and turned and smiled and then squatted and started pulling open the cardboard box to get at the thick plastic bag inside which contained the powder-and-bone remains of my mother and I stepped forward and suddenly saw it building off to her left and started to yell, to scream at her but there wasn’t even enough time for that, she had the bag out of the box and that was when the rogue wave hit her like a huge grey-and-white cat’s-paw and lifted her off the rocks and down to the sea. I slipped and ran my way to where she’d been but as the foam receded bubbling off the rocks all I could see below me were two pale slim hands reaching up empty, clawing through the unsustaining water and then pulled down and under into darkness.

I saw a black form that I knew was my sister race away from me down the breakwater and strike the rocks and then a second time toward the very end of the jetty and once, just once, the sealed plastic envelope riding high atop the waves, a chalky message in a plastic bottle. Then another wave broke hard right in front of me and the rain began and I backed away.

I backed away from all of it.

I turned and walked toward the dunes and toward the telephones at a retreat for an order of nuns.

When the police were through and the report was duly filed I drove myself home declining their kind offer and drank the way my father had, scotch neat in a tumbler, and wept for us all and then in the small hours of the morning I got up and uncovered all the mirrors.

for Mort Levin

Bear with me.

I have a story to tell but first, bear with me. It’ll take just a moment.

Here’s the thesis.

It’s from the mysterious that we make the leap to godly grace or evil
.

And only from there
.

A little knowlege, which is all we’ll ever have, is a dangerous thing.

My wife and I were having dinner with friends one evening some years ago at an outdoor cafe on Columbus Avenue and as sometimes happens even when you don’t particularly want it to happen the conversation got around to religion, organized and otherwise—and I recalled the story about the Eskimo and the Missionary. The Eskimo asks the Missionary,
if I knew nothing at all about this God
of yours and nothing about sin, would I go to hell?
and the Missionary says no, of course not.

Then why on earth, asks the Eskimo, did you tell me?

My wife laughed. My friends, both of whom would go on to be critics for the
New York Times Book Review
, smiled thinly.

But the point of the story I think is not that innocence is grace or even good. The Eskimo is not the Noble Savage. It is that knowlege is never complete, it brings with it a core of mystery, of the seemingly impenetrable—and with that a dangerous complexity of light and dark, brightness and shadow which must be penetrated at least to some degree even to make out everyday objects against the looming sky or teeming earth and, lest we stumble, begin to see.

But there I go, talking like a cameraman again. Sorry.

At the time of our conversation on Columbus Avenue I’d been working for ABC News for roughly five years. I’d photographed the Super Bowl and the Rangers, crime scenes and celebrity galas, floods in Iowa and fires in California, mayoral and presidential campaigns and other natural disasters. I liked the work almost as much as I’d loved my Brownie box camera as a boy, roaming the deep Maine woods. I liked the business of watching, the keen eye, the quick fine moment of reaction when the picture either works or doesn’t, I liked the frame of things and the roiling images.

My wife Laura was a journalist for the airline industry. This meant that we were hardly ever home at the same time. The two of us were always flying off somewhere, Laura to cover a convention or a scandal or a merger, myself to God knows where and to God knows what purpose, at the service of some breaking story. It was the major reason we had no children. I think it was also the major reason we were so happy, at least initially. As newlyweds we had no time to doubt one another or question each other’s decisions, to deal with the small personal peeves
and grievances that can separate two people starting off together. Time was flowing fast and our business was mostly to hang on—and to hang onto one another in the process.

And over time it deepened. There’s a sheer simple joy in cooperating with another living soul under difficult circumstances that’s highly underrated. For two people who are mostly apart and provided that there’s love to begin with, every meeting is glue. It is a soft glue which allows for great elastic pullings apart, thin fibrous stretchings over cities and continents, space and time. But each strand is of exactly the same composition. It
wants
to come together. Its chemical goal is to return to the unity from which it sprang in the first place. And it does.

It did for us.

But in the summer of 1969 we’d been married over a year and we’d yet to have a honeymoon of any real duration. We’d snatch a long summer weekend at Sag Harbor between assignments and say, okay, this is our honeymoon or else schedule a couple of days to rent a car and drive upstate for Thanksgiving turkey dinner at some country inn and that was our honeymoon too. Our honeymoons were like bright Fall leaves in a swirling wind, hard to catch but lovely when you did.

It was August and so hot in Manhattan that most of the cabbies smelled like old salami sandwiches left out to bake in the sun. I’d just finished covering Woodstock, four hundred thousand kids intent on grabbing peace and love and drugs and music with both hands, a three-day sweet-minded nightmare of traffic, rain, mud and awful sanitation. The week before I’d been in Los Angeles covering the Tate murders. I was burnt out and exhausted. I begged a break in the great unending chain of stories and miraculously I got one—five days off. Nine when you counted the weekends.

And where was Laura? Laura was in Athens, working on
an article about Olympic Airlines. It turned out she was nearly finished. I hopped a plane.

We didn’t stay there. Only the most weak-kneed tourists do. Athens was bombed heavily during the Second World War and then jerrybuilt thereafter. Other than Plaka—the Old Town near the Parthenon—and Lycabettus Hill across the valley, Athens is not a fine city. It’s grey and homely to the eye. We spent one night with me recuperating from the flight and the first thing next morning, headed by cab for the port of Pireaus and then by ferry to Mykonos in the Cyclades.

In August inland Mykonos is sere as a desert. You half expect to see a barefoot prophet, staff in hand, walk over the next rise. You’re lucky to see a green thing anywhere unless it’s a tourist’s crumpled pack of Salems. On the shore, though, there’s always a breeze and you can be comfortable sitting in ninety degree weather all day long. Laura and I stayed by the shore, in a small eight-room hotel which overlooked the harbor.

We had a wonderful time. We spent days basking under clear skies and swimming the turquoise sea at a nude beach which could only be reached by ferry, Laura careful of the pale tender breastflesh which prior to then had never seen the sun. We spent warm breezy evenings sitting in the outdoor tavernas over wine and
mezes
, seaweed-green
dolmadakia
, grilled shrimp and calamari, fish-roe
taramasalata
and spicy
keftedes
. Nights we went back to each other’s bodies laughing like street kids with a secret. Or like swimmers adrift in the Aegean, buoyed by ageless waters.

We met French tourists and English tourists and Dutch tourists and many of the locals—those who still retained the fortitude and amiability to deal with all these outsiders three months into the season. We struggled with language. There was a lot of laughing and dancing in the clubs and a lot of drinking and no headaches in the morning whatsoever for either of us.

The night before we were set to leave we had dinner at
the Sunset Bar on the side of the island opposite the harbor and watched a magnificent red ball descend into slowly darkening waters, bluegreen to purple to black. We waved to an Australian couple we knew sitting at a nearby table but didn’t invite them over. We were saying goodbye to the island. The honeymoon—our first real honeymoon—was almost over. We took our time over wine and dinner and creme caramel afterwards and rich dark coffee. We took a couple glasses of Metaxa brandy after that.

I paid the bill and we got up and hand in hand roamed the island in the style to which we’d become accustomed, getting ourselves purposely, happily lost in the narrow whitewashed streets which wound uphill and down and then up again past windmills stark against the seascape and shops and small whitewashed houses with blue milkpaint shutters. Every now and then we could hear music from the clubs spill through the warm windless night, distant echos of Dionysus. Finally our hotel was near. We decided on one last brandy at a harborside taverna.

We sat at an outdoor table. And that was when I realized my pocket was empty.