Random Winds (51 page)

The boy dropped the pump and stared.

“Hurry! Please, for God’s sake, hurry!”

“Miss, I’m not sure I can run the boat. I only learned just now, amd my dad said never to take it out without him.”

“Is your dad home? Who’s home?”

“Nobody, just my grandmother. You can use the telephone.”

“There’s not time. Please! Try, please!”

The boy climbed into the boat and tried the engine. It sputtered and died. Claire got in. The boy bent over and tried again. It sputtered, coughed and died.

“I only learned,” he apologized.

Two minutes. Three. Claire scanned the open water. The sun had come out again and there was only a vast gray dazzle, a sheet of steel.

“There, I’ve got it!”

Triumph. The engine had set up a regular putt-putt-putt. Claire pointed the direction. Hazel’s dog marked the place, shrilly barking again at the water’s edge.

“There! Out there in a straight line from where I was sitting! Exactly straight. Hurry!”

Clouds rolled back over the sun. The air grew chill. The summer sweetness had gone out of it and the water had roughened. The prow pointed to the sky, then fell as the little boat rose and sank through great swelling hills and troughs. Claire shaded her eyes, straining and peering.

“Sure we’re going right?” the boy asked.

“Yes. Yes, I’m sure.” Claire gripped the seat. “You look to the right, I’ll look to the left. She had a red bathing cap.”

“But what would she have been—” he began, and fell silent.

The water came alive as if some huge creature far below were rolling and turning. How could anything as frail as a human being contest its power? Claire hadn’t known the Sound could turn so evil so quickly. Nor had she ever known such terror, such absolute sheer terror.

The boy, holding fast to the tiller, looked around at her, asking doubtfully, “Could she have swum this far, do you think?”

Claire looked back at the shore, where a line of houses stood white and no larger now than scattered boulders.

“Or this fast?” the boy said. “Even though we started later we’d have passed her anyway.”

Claire’s teeth were clenched. Panic, as well as the rocking of the boat, had churned her stomach. But she commanded, “Let’s go a little farther.”

The boat pitched like a roller coaster. “We’ve gone a mile and a half,” the boy said.

“Yes.”

“We’d best turn back.”

“Yes.”

They stared at each other, the boy’s face scared and wondering. Claire began to cry.

“Was she—is she your mother?”

“My stepmother. Oh God!”

The boy became practical and manly. “We’ve got to call the police, I think. And the Coast Guard. That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

The boat tore back toward shore, slapping the water, Claire still scanning the surface from side to side. Nothing. Nothing. Far out, heading north, a cruiser took its leisurely way. People in vacation mood were sitting on the deck, very likely, eating and drinking, maybe even singing in their gaiety, while, only a mile or two from them, another soul had cared so little about life that she had thrown it away. How was that possible?

I didn’t see, Claire thought. All the time she was talking to me, this crazy, desperate resolve was inside her, and I didn’t see. Oh Hazel, poor foolish, suffering Hazel, why did you? What made you? Out here, beyond the surf and at the bottom, they say this turbulence grows quiet. Anything which falls to the bottom lies there quietly. Or do the currents carry it away? Claire closed her eyes. The nausea mounted. At some spot, perhaps here where they were now, the exhausted, driven body had made its last effort, the arms made their last curving stroke, the legs given their final flutter-kick. The heart and the lungs had strained. How had she gone down? Struggling and crying, perhaps, having changed her mind, screaming for help?

The water was dark green, opaque, like sculptured glass. She would have cleaved it narrowly going down, and then it would simply have closed over to resume its rhythm—moon rhythm, wind rhythm—as before. All this morning I was irritated with her. Yes, she bothered me with her queer remarks and her mournful, ghastly air. I wanted to get away from her. I got away from her, politely, with my book. Not that it would have made any difference if I hadn’t. Or would it have? Could it have?

Objects on the beach were growing larger. Some children had come out to play with an enormous ball. The dog was still there, running up and down with a lopsided bounce. Claire and the boy went up to the house. She heard the boy taking charge, heard him at the telephone and in the kitchen, talking to Esther. She sat down on the stairs. She felt empty. The little dog came in and lay down on the bare floor where it was cool. Meat was roasting in the oven. The house looked normal, as it did every day, as
it had looked only thirty, maybe forty-five minutes ago, before everything changed.

Esther began to cry, a high, terrified wail, keening on one note. From nowhere out of a quiet morning, the empty street filled. People came to stand on the lawn and murmur. Cars drew into the driveway. Men came to question Claire. Someone led her to the sofa and brought a cold drink. She looked at the clock. It was noon. Dad would be leaving the hospital for the office just about now. On his desk he kept an oval photo of herself in gown and mortar-board at the Smith commencement. Next to it stood a large color picture of Hazel and the children, wearing Sunday clothes and nice smiles. The telephone was placed to the left of these in front of a comical wooden figurine of a surgeon which someone had given Dad years ago. He would pick up the telephone.

“Claire?” he’d say.

“Yes, it’s Claire,” she would answer. And then what?

Oh, how could Hazel have done this thing and why did none of us know? If I’m a doctor, I ought to understand, oughtn’t I? Then perhaps no one can know what lies inside another, and to say you ever can is a pretentious lie. In the most ordinary people, and some might claim that Hazel was such, for she had no particular distinction, in each of them lie secrets. Such secrets! Old childish hurts that make us what we are, powers that are never exercised, visions of what life ought to give.

The answer is, of course, there are no ordinary people.

The odd thing was that Martin knew so clearly what was happening to him. He understood his own progression from first numbness to most awful pity and self-accusation—(If I had gone back upstairs to talk to her that morning instead of going to work)—through sleeplessness and then sleeping-to-escape, through all of these in a long slide to the somber place where at last depression closed around him darkly, like a curtain.

He had thoughts of falling, of crashing down the cellar stairs, or worse, of opening a door and stepping into an elevator shaft. He could hear his own screams borne away in the wind of the fall. He had nightmares of interminable stairs—stairs again!—only this time going up and coming out at the top to stand on a beam ten inches wide. He was alone, ninety floors above the beams: thin as wires, they were. He woke in a sweat of terror.

He dreamed he was addressing a meeting in some great city, in some enormous, echoing hall. He mounted the rostrum. Hundreds of dark suits and white faces waited respectfully. There were coughs, chairs scraped and programs rustled. He opened his mouth. No sound came. People were staring at him. Oh panic and shame! From the back of the room came the first embarrassed, nervous laughter. It spread, that tittering laughter, that high and hooting laughter, it ran all up and down the hall. Oh God! He woke with a pounding heart.

His children turned to him at table, searching his face. Their eyes asked: Why?

“Eat your vegetables,” he would answer kindly, “if you want to grow tall like Enoch and me.”

It wasn’t fair to link Enoch with himself in the rank of adults. He was only sixteen, and seemed younger. Martin tried to remember what he had been at sixteen, but was
unable to. There are times when the past closes over like waves, is hidden and drowned.

Oh, drowned.

“You spoiled my doll’s hair!” Marjorie wailed at Peter, “and I’m going to tell Mommy!”

Shocked, Enoch looked toward Martin. But Peter spoke first, scornfully.

“Mommy isn’t here anymore. Mommy’s dead, don’t you even know that?”

“Well, when she comes back, I mean.”

“She isn’t going to come back. Don’t you know what ‘dead’ is?”

Enoch choked on his food, put the napkin to his mouth and left the room. Martin heard him go clattering up the stairs. Should he go to the boy with comfort of some sort? Words were needed, many words, and there were none. To die in bed of pneumonia, even to die in a crashing car or plane was acceptable. But to will to die! How to explain to his son that mother had wanted to die?

Nevertheless, he got up from the table and went upstairs. Enoch lay on the bed, his face twisted by weeping denied. Martin laid a hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t hold it back,” he said. “It’s always better just to let it out.”

But Enoch struggled. Like my mother, Martin thought. Like me. Everything held in to the bitter end—disappointments, grief, desires—all held in. So history repeats itself.

“Why did she do it, Dad?” Enoch whispered.

“Let’s not talk about that, shall we? She simply swam too far out and probably didn’t realize.”

“Don’t treat me like a child, Dad, will you? Everybody knows it was on purpose. Please don’t treat me like a child.”

“You’re right. I won’t then,” Martin said softly.

“Then tell me why. Don’t you know?”

“Son, I don’t. I wish I did.” Well, it was half a lie, but only half. Truly, he didn’t understand. How could that business have mattered so much, weighed against this boy and those two downstairs? How could anything have mattered
that much? Yet it had. “Son, I don’t know,” he repeated.

From the yard came the long dry rattle of a locust The evening sun, dark and sickly yellow, glared at the window. Martin wiped his forehead. Fall would be welcome. A chill gray misty morning might be more cheerful. Any change might be more cheerful.

“Let’s go down and finish dinner,” he said. “We have to eat. We can’t afford to get sick.”

Yes, the dinner hour was the worst. Esther had thoughtfully removed Hazel’s chair. It stood now between the windows, facing Martin. And he knew that his puckering mouth and racing heart were symptoms of a panic state. He sat quite still, knowing that in a minute or two it would pass and ease. He studied his plate. Surrounding the mound of string beans, potatoes and meat ran a key design in gold. There were sixteen repetitions around the rim and, in the center of the plate when the food was pushed away, there was another design, some sort of geometric enclosed within a circle. A mandala. Buddhist. O jewel in the heart of the lotus. Something like that. He shut his eyes.

The weight of everything! These poor three! And Claire, too, adult as she was and on her way, but still a responsibility of his. That young man, Mary’s boy, would be arriving soon, and then that would need coping with, God only knew how. All these lives, all such a weight upon him, as if he had to lift them, pushing them up a steep enormous hill.

Things bothered him that never had before. Esther hummed in the kitchen, with a tuneless maddening drone. He wanted to scream: Quiet! You’re driving me out of my mind! In the early mornings, gardeners arrived to mow the lawns all up and down the road. Lately they had introduced a wicked new device, a leaf blower with a sustained blaring howl. Then came the garbage truck and its infernal grinder. Wherever you went in this frantic world you heard metal grating and power vibrating; cars, planes, radios, lawn mowers attacked the ears, the head, the very soul of a man. He could have gone out and smashed them all. And he longed for an empty place, anywhere at all, with no one or nothing in sight, just wind and trees.

Hazel’s dog came whining. It was always sniffing at her closet, although Claire had removed the clothes. Claire had been so tirelessly strong and sensible during those first terrible days, caring for the children, the house and telephone and all the letters to be answered. He had made her take Hazel’s new fur coat, scarcely worn, and a pearl necklace. The rest of the jewelry was in a safe deposit box to be kept for Marjorie. Not that there had been all that much! He worried that he had not been generous enough with Hazel. She had so rarely asked for anything. He ought to have insisted. She’d been such a simple woman. Simple! Oh, my God. So his thoughts ran, like a fox pursued, darting, hiding, running to cover and dashing to escape.

But he must pull himself together. He must. If only he had someone to talk to, someone to hear everything from the beginning! There was no one. He certainly couldn’t talk to Claire, not to his daughter. He thought of Alice, his sister, so much like himself, or so she had been when they were young. Flesh of his flesh; she would, if she were here now, put her hand on him in mercy and love, without judgment Yet had she really been all that much like himself? So long ago it had been; still he could recall in her a strain of Puritan abstinence. He thought of Jessie. Curious that he should think of her now! And yet, in those long days when they had first known each other, there had been no mind more responsive to his own.

Tom ought to have been the one. Damon and Pythias, David and Jonathan: yes, up to a point, they were. Trust and loyalty lay between them. Kindly Tom would claim to understand, but he wouldn’t understand. For he had never wanted very much. Smallness contented him in all things. But he, Martin, had wanted everything—an exquisite love, exalted knowledge, the warmth of a family, all the color and music of the earth. He had been born wanting them.

His hands bore down on the arms of the chair where he sat through that first dreadful week; the pressure was wearing the cloth away. There came a spell of rain. It sluiced through the gutters and splattered on the roof. It dropped in gusts from the trees and churned the Sound. And he sat on, listening to the many sounds of rain. Was there a motif
of water in Ms life? Storm and flood had torn him too early from his mother’s womb and killed those other children, whose faces in old hazy snapshots were so real to him. How had his parents survived their loss? He thought, too, of the story of the scalded child, which, of all his father’s tales, he had never forgotten.