Shining Sea (5 page)

He stuffs the canteen into the top of his pants, bundles the two boxes up with string, and carries them, one by one, out to the car. He didn't even understand what was so funny about what Luke said. Maybe it didn't mean anything. Maybe it was Luke making fun of Mike somehow.

In the kitchen, his mom is trying to get the oven to light. The oven hasn't worked properly for more than a year. Sissy follows him down the hall to his bedroom. “Read me this?” she says, climbing onto Luke's bed and sticking the book in her hand between Luke's face and novel.

Luke pushes the book's bright green, red, yellow, and blue cover away. “I'm already reading something. And
Goodnight Moon
is a baby book. You're not a baby.”

“I like it.”

“It's a going-to-bed book.”

“Please, Luke.” Sissy crawls up beside him and tucks her bright head against his shoulder. “Luke, Luke, Lukie-Luke.”

Luke sighs and sets his book down.

He shoves the canteen under his mattress. It makes a big lump. His mom should have given the canteen to Mike. Mike plans to join the army in two years, or at least go ROTC. He may be the only one tall enough ever to wear his dad's suits, but Mike's the one who will
be
like their father.

“A bowl of mush?” Luke says, looking up from his reading. “Why is there mush in the room where the bunny is going to sleep, anyhow?”

He hastens to lie down over the lump the canteen has made in his mattress, to conceal it.

“What's mush?” Sissy asks.

“Some gross thing Mom probably ate during the war when there was rationing.”

“What's rationing?”

“What you should do with your questions.”

Sissy purses her little mouth. Her red locks stick up in the air. “So you mean mush is like tapioca pudding?”

“Exactly.”

“Hey!” Mike says, marching into the room in his grocery-store shirt, making straight for his piggy bank. Clink-clink goes his tip money. His big brother is saving to buy a car for college. Patty Ann is supposed to be saving her tips for use at college, too, but their mom says she wastes it on buying sodas and hamburgers for her good-for-nothing boyfriend. Luke spent most of his last paycheck on books, including two novels by Kurt Vonnegut. “Why aren't you listening to the game? The Dodgers are playing the Mets.”

“That's it, kiddo,” Luke says, dislodging Sissy. Baseball is one thing Luke and Mike never disagree about. Neither of them misses a game. “I'll read the rest to you tonight before you go to sleep.”

“You're almost done!”

“I'll finish what I haven't read after the game, and then I'll read it all the way through again. Deal?”

Sissy smiles and jumps up. For a three-year-old, Sissy knows how to drive a good bargain.

Alone in the bedroom now, he extracts the canteen from under his mattress. The surface is smooth and silver in his hand, flat on two sides and rounded on the others, with small dents here and there where it must have banged hard against a Far Eastern rock or a ship deck. Only the chain securing the cap is rusted, a little bit along the seam where the curved top joins with the bottom.

It was once in his dad's hands. His dad lifted it to his mouth and drank from it. Other soldiers may have, too.

“Aren't you going to join your brothers listening to the game?” His mom stands in the doorway, watching him.

He slides the canteen back under his pillow. His mom is always trying to get him to do stuff with the others.

“Francis?”

His mom's dark hair bounces gently against her chin. She tips her head and smiles at him. He can almost imagine her stepping off the pier herself, throwing herself into the air, way above the water, her sudden grin, the toss of her head. She'd be mighty unhappy if she knew he'd done it, though. People have killed themselves jumping off the pier.

“Okay, Mom.”

He follows her into the living room, sprawling on the floor next to Luke. Mike is sitting on the sofa with Sissy stretched out beside him.

By the third inning, his little sister has begun gently snoring. Even though it's August, and warm, his mom lays a cotton blanket over her.

“I can't believe it!” Mike says when the game ends. Through the open window, they can hear the next-door neighbor cursing:
The Mets beat Koufax! The lousy Mets! Son of a bitch!

Sissy jumps up, pretending she wasn't asleep, shaking her golden red sprouts of hair. She knocks over the framed photo of their family, that last one from Palm Sunday, his dad standing directly behind him with one hand on his shoulder, Sissy still in his mom's tummy. He gets up onto his knees and rights it.

Luke clutches a pillow to his stomach and groans. “Who is this new pitcher, anyhow? Tug McGraw? Who's ever heard of
him?
”

“We're going to hear about him now,” Mike says grimly.

His mom shuts the living room window against the neighbor's shouting. “You didn't hear
that,
I'm sure.” She looks meaningfully at Sissy. “Dinner is ready. Where has Patty Ann gotten to?”

“She's not home yet?” Mike says.

“Uh…duh,” Luke says. “Like she could have gone through to the girls' room without your seeing her.”

Mike ignores him. “I thought her shift was done at four today, like mine. That's what she told me this morning.”

His two brothers look at each other. Whole blocks burned down in Watts. People were even killed.

“Don't worry, Mom,” Mike adds quickly. “Lee was picking Patty Ann up. Nothing could have happened to her.”

Lee is Patty Ann's steady. Skinny and dark-haired, in jeans and boots even when it's hot out, Lee's only job this summer seems to be driving Patty Ann to work and taking her parking after. Their mom says the worst part about Patty Ann not getting a scholarship to Vassar is that it means not putting the whole of the United States of America between the two of them. She says if their father were still alive, he'd have sent Lee packing a long time ago. Their mom doesn't like Lee much.

She and Patty Ann had a fight about him again just this morning: in fact, Lee is what they mostly fight about.
At least CSU will get Patty Ann to a different part of town,
his mom said after Patty Ann went running out the door into Lee's Dodge Matador.
With a different sort of boy.

“Right,” his mom says now. “She's with Lee. That makes me feel miles better.”

There's no way to reach Patty Ann if she's left the coffee shop. Maybe she and Lee went to the movies, or maybe they're just hanging out in Lee's car—although, normally, Patty Ann would have said if she weren't coming home for dinner. If anything, Patty Ann seems to enjoy telling his mom when she's staying out with Lee.

They go ahead and eat. Afterward Mike does the dishes without protest, even though tonight is supposed to be Patty Ann's turn. His mom bathes Sissy and tucks her into bed, and Luke goes to read to Sissy as promised while he stays in the kitchen to dry the dishes and help Mike put them away. When the kitchen is all cleaned up, he and Mike return to sit in the living room again, Mike pulling out a deck of cards. Soon, his mom joins them.

As the night crawls in, his mom gets more and more irritable. She smokes one cigarette, and then lights another. A little before ten, Mike taps the cards neatly into a pile, slides them back into their cardboard box.

“Good night, Mom,” Mike says and disappears to their bedroom, yawning and stretching.

The house is quiet around him and his mom now, just the radio, the crickets outside, the low hum of the fridge. She starts folding laundry on the dining room table, something she normally never does at this hour. He sits in his dad's old armchair, listening to KHJ. The DJ is talking about the Beatles playing the Hollywood Bowl this weekend. His favorite band is the Byrds, though, and he waits patiently for their new song, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” to come on. He knows it will eventually. McGuinn's voice sounds like no one else's, and his guitar is reedy and twangy, almost like the little piano-organ at church. He's never heard a guitar sound like it before. If only he had a record player, he'd buy the 45 for “Mr. Tambourine Man” and listen to it over and over again.

Maybe he'll get a job after school this year, so he can buy a guitar and learn to play it himself. So he won't have to wait for it to come on the radio.

But what kind of job can he get during the school year that'll pay enough for a guitar? Could he start bagging groceries on weekends already? Or washing cars after school? Delivering newspapers before school?

Eugene will have an idea. Eugene always needs money.

At eleven, the phone rings.

“Can you get that, Francis?” his mom says, looking hard at him from the sill of the dining room. She reaches into a pocket for her cigarettes.

She doesn't follow him to the phone, but he can feel her expectation trail after him.

“Hello,” he says into the receiver.

“Francis? Is that you?” Patty Ann's voice sounds funny—faint and crackly—but it's definitely Patty Ann. He glances at his mom. She has her hands on her hips, smoke trailing from her cigarette, watching him.

He speaks low into the receiver. “You missed dinner.”

Patty Ann laughs. “That's not the half of it. Guess where I am?”

From outside the house, he can hear night sounds, a creak of a screen door, a lone car driving past. There's noise behind Patty Ann's voice, too, over the telephone line, but he can't make it out. “I don't know. With Lee.”

Patty Ann laughs again. “And how! We're in
Las Vegas
.”

He turns away from his mom, as though she might otherwise be able to hear, and the receiver slips in his hand. He grabs it before it hits the floor. This time Patty Ann is really going to catch it.

“Francis? Are you there?”

He looks out the picture window, through his reflection and into the dark glow of the street lamps, avoiding the feel of his mom's eyes on his back. Why did he stay up? He should have gone to bed when Mike did. He really would rather not be around when she finds out about this. “Yes.”

“Were you guys listening to the radio this evening?”

“Yes. It was a bad game.”

“No, I mean
the news
. Did you hear the news? Did Mom hear the news?”

“I don't know. I don't think so. We were listening to the baseball game. She was listening with us.”

“Well, Lee and I weren't. We were sitting in his car…and a newscast came on. President Johnson signed an executive order this afternoon saying couples married after midnight tonight will no longer be eligible for the draft deferment for married men without children.”

“So?”

“So we drove straight to Las Vegas. Me and Lee. We got married.”

For a few moments earlier today, he was air, he was lighter than air, he was as free as the tern that skimmed right over his and Eugene's heads. He felt no fear. He felt no weight. There was nothing but his body moving through the sky and then into the water.

And then he plunged into the cold, and the sea pushed him back up.

“Hold on,” he says. He can't slip out the door unseen now. Could he hand over the phone and make straight for his bedroom? Or the bathroom, like he needs to pee? He'd need to be peeing for a long time, though. What comes next isn't going to end swiftly. “I'll put Mom on the phone.”

“And Francis! Don't tell her. I want to tell her myself.”

That will not be a problem. He cups his hand over the receiver. “It's for you, Mom. I mean, it's Patty Ann.”

He holds the phone out, stretching his hand into the night, waiting for his mom to take it. Figuring out how he can make like air. Like water.

T
HE
D
ODGE
M
ATADOR
PULLS
up to the sidewalk in front of the florist's. Behind the steering wheel, Patty Ann's face, too pale for Southern California, strains over the head of the baby to see out the passenger window.

“Mom,” Patty Ann says.

She bends down to look in at her daughter. “I was starting to worry.”

She stows the basket of daisies, daffodils, and blue carnations in the backseat, then tucks the bouquet of roses and baby's breath in next to it, pushing them close together for stability. They look like odd lovers snuggled there, one sunny, the other red and formal, against the dirty vinyl. She lifts a wad of papers and other trash off the front seat and slips in, scooping the baby onto her lap.

“Jeepers, Patty Ann. A person could catch something just sitting here.”

“So which bouquet is for which?” Patty Ann says, ignoring her complaint, surveying the flowers through the rearview mirror. “I mean, don't you think it's a little
weird?
”

With that, Patty Ann tears away from the sidewalk.

She clutches the door handle to keep herself and the baby from jerking sideways. The baby plays with the cheek curls of her bouffant, then grabs for her cigarette. So maybe the timing is a little strange. The bottom line is Jeanne couldn't come out to California twice but was determined to be here for both events, to show no hard feelings about her getting remarried. Also, Father O'Malley wasn't available any other afternoon over the Memorial Day weekend.

She takes a last puff of her cigarette and tosses it out the window. “Ronnie doesn't like my smoking.”

“No?” Patty Ann screws up her nose.
“Ronnie.”

She won't point out that if it weren't for Patty Ann, she probably wouldn't be marrying Ronnie McCloskey later today, a few hours after they get back from the cemetery. She might never have picked up the phone to ask him for help with the oven. After Patty Ann ran off to Las Vegas to get married, she was just too tired with trying to make everything work on her own.

“That's enough, Patty Ann. I am lucky to have Ronnie.”

“Nothing to me,” Patty Ann says, reaching over to turn the dial up on the radio. “I won't ever have to live with him.”

The streets of Los Angeles roll by, the jacarandas in full bloom. She would watch the wings on this car before Patty Ann ran off, day after day, as it pulled up in front of the house and Lee honked. She'd say to Patty Ann:
Hmm. What has wings and honks? A duck.
But Patty Ann would gather up her sweater and books and rush out. The Dodge has started to take on a rusty look since, and now there's the baby sitting up front with Patty Ann—while Lee is off picking up a few dollars here or there, anything but a decent day's work.

Someday Patty Ann will go to Vassar with her aunt Jeanne,
Michael used to say.
Or any
college she wants. My smart girl.

She couldn't have tied Patty Ann up inside the house, though. She couldn't pick the cost of tuition at Vassar off a lemon tree. If only she'd called Ronnie sooner. Maybe he would have fixed more than her stove. Maybe he would have fixed her oldest daughter also. It will be such a relief, not having to do all this on her own anymore.

“The jacarandas throw the whole city into a purple haze,” she says.

Patty Ann laughs. “Purple haze, Mom?”

The baby—Kennedy, Patty Ann named him, like some sort of joke—sneezes, and a stream of snot rolls from his little nose. It glides freely, spooling into the down of his upper lip, into the sweet of his mouth. Patty Ann looks over at him, and suddenly the car is lurching toward the curb. Her daughter jumps out, short skirt pulling against her thigh, just a bit plumper than it was in high school, runs to the metal-weave garbage can on the street corner, and vomits.

Her heart sinks. And then, because this should be a joyous thing but there's no way it can be, her heart sinks a little further.

When Patty Ann slides back into the car, she hands her the hankie she used for Kennedy, neatly folded over the wet spot. “How long?”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“How long?”

“I don't know. Five weeks.”

“Does he know?”

“Of course.”

“And?”

“And Lee's fine with it. We're both fine with it. We're happy!”

But her daughter sounds anything but happy. At the christening, Lee and Patty Ann told everyone they had the baby cause President Kennedy had put married men with children on the very bottom of the call-up list for the draft and LBJ hadn't changed at least
that
yet. But Patty Ann's tone turned from triumphant to defensive soon after. A second baby can't be good news when they can barely keep the first one in disposable diapers. And forget using cloth—Patty Ann and Lee's tiny bungalow, in Venice, doesn't have a washing machine. Patty Ann and Lee's tiny bungalow doesn't have anything.

With Ronnie moving in his leather living room set, she can give them the sofa. She can give them the Melmac plates and rocking chair also. Too bad Ronnie's apartment doesn't have its own washing machine. She could have given them that, too. Ronnie wouldn't have minded. Ronnie is generous to a fault.

“You know,” she says, “what's done is done. But there are things you can do to avoid this happening a third time, Patty Ann. Easy, effective ways that are now legal.”

Patty Ann slams on the brake. The baby jolts forward and lets out a wail.

“Mom!”

She rubs Kenny's back and checks over her shoulder to make sure the flowers are all right. “Well, I'm just saying. You're modern in all these other ways. Why not be modern in a way that's useful?”

“
Mom
. Anyhow, what about
you?
You're certainly no model of family planning.”

“We are not talking about me. Your father was a man of faith, and the only method the pope approves is the rhythm method. Which doesn't work unless, like the pope, you're celibate. Proof positive: Francis, Sissy.” She ignores Patty Ann's grimace. The kids want to do all this love business themselves but don't want to think their parents ever have. “Besides, and most important, you were all wanted. And we were able to care for you. We didn't know your father was suddenly going to die. That's not something we
chose,
Patricia Ann.”

“We want our babies, too. Money is not everything, Mom.
Love
counts for something also.”

She takes the baby's fingers out of her hair again, turns him around, and sits him down on her lap facing forward. She won't rise to the bait. Marriage is a lifelong partnership, not just a weekend adventure. That's the part Patty Ann overlooked. If only Lee
had
gone to Vietnam. Not only would Patty Ann not be in this mess, the army might have made a man of him. And Patty Ann would be in college, as planned.
Everything
would be different.

But a house can't be built on “if onlys.” Nothing can be.

They drive past the Woolworth's and turn right. Two girls stand on the street corner, waiting for the light to change, laughing. One, in a short pink skirt, holds a tiny white dog in her arms. She was once a girl like that, not in a short skirt but a freshly ironed yellow dress, passing out magazines to the returning soldiers, dreaming—without for a second actually imagining—that her future husband might be among them. And then there Michael was, propped up in a hospital bed, gaunt but so calm, so handsome.

This life of hers as a grown woman happened, bang, just like that.

Patty Ann should be a girl like those girls, a little dog in her hands rather than a baby, and dreams in her head of a future yet to happen. Why didn't she and Patty Ann have this conversation
before
Patty Ann went and got knocked up? And still before
that,
before her daughter went running out to that stupid car, honk honk honk, with Lee sitting behind the steering wheel? Why is it women aren't allowed to talk about private things with their daughters when they can still use the knowledge?

“I tried the Pill,” Patty Ann says. “It made me fat.”

“Having kids makes you fat,” she says.

She jogs her feet up and down to make Kenny giggle. His warm, chubby hands grasp at her fingers. Having babies hasn't made her fat. At forty-one, she feels lighter than she did as a girl, as though each child she's given birth to has taken away several pounds of her flesh. She thought Ronnie might want to have a child with her, too, while it was still possible, but he insists being stepfather to her children will be enough to make him happy. With Ronnie, the rhythm method seems likely to work just fine. She and Michael could barely keep their hands off each other long enough to sign their marriage certificate. Ronnie holds her hand, then kisses her cheek good night.

It's been five years since she became a widow. Five years is a long time. She really wouldn't have minded a little more than a kiss on the cheek from Ronnie, especially now she's agreed to marry him.

She flicks the thought away as though an ash from her cigarette. In some ways, Ronnie feels more like a friend than a soon-to-be new husband. But a friend is good. A friend is what she needs. The last thing she wants is to try to replace Michael.

“You know, Mom,” Patty Ann says, “you didn't go to college. You were barely any older than I was, and you were perfectly happy married to Dad, right? And it's not like
you
didn't rush into marriage. I mean, at least I
knew
Lee.”

She snaps out of her dirty thoughts. “Don't you compare your father's and my marriage to your and Lee's. Don't you ever.”

They have arrived. Patty Ann drives through the front gates of Holy Cross Cemetery, and they continue in silence toward the mortuary. The parking lot is full today. Young families button sweaters over little kids, middle-aged children assist wobbly grandparents. Everyone looks impossibly alive. In the first row of cars, Mike leans against Ronnie's Chevy—her station wagon is in the shop again. Sissy plays on the ground by his feet. The top of Luke's head is just visible, slunk down inside.

A few feet away, Jeanne and Molly stand on the lawn. Molly is holding the flowers Jeanne bought at the airport with one hand, her mother's arm with the other. Jeanne's doing a bad job of not crying. It's her sister-in-law's first time back to the cemetery since Michael was buried.

The rest of them—they come every Sunday after church. Sometimes she stops by during the week also, just to make sure everything is being taken care of properly. Sissy knows this place as well as the school's playground.

“I can't believe Ronnie let Mike drive his big fancy car,” Patty Ann says, maneuvering through the lot, looking for a free space. “He hasn't had a real license for even a year yet.”

“It's not half what Mike could be driving someday.”

“Damn, Mom! How can you let him?”

“Do what? Serve his country? He'll still start at Claremont McKenna in the autumn. The ROTC will even put him through medical school.”

“He'll get sent over.”

“He'll get sent over anyhow.”

“Not if he's in school and not ROTC. He could get a deferment.”

“How do you know they aren't going to change that rule tomorrow? They've changed the rules on graduates. And on married men, for that matter.”

Patty Ann angles her clunker into the last open space. “I
don't
know. The SOBs. But if he goes ROTC, Mike will be trapped for certain.”

“Not trapped, Patricia Ann.
Committed
. Now, don't you dare say one more word to me about it.”

She pulls up on the door handle. Not on this day, of all days, and not from Patty Ann, of all people. What was the point of Michael's death if service isn't worthy? She checked his chart after they met: malaria, beriberi, starvation. There were so many things listed she can't even remember them all. And the pills they had him take! Maybe it took fifteen years to happen, but Michael died for his country. The war ruined his heart. That's the long and short of it. His service has to mean something.

“Where is Francis?” she says to Mike, handing him the bouquet of daisies. The roses are alone now in the backseat of Patty Ann's car.

“I'm sorry, Mom. I couldn't find him.”

She sighs. “Why is there always one or another of you missing?”

“That's not fair.”

“You're right.” Mike is reliable. So, in their own ways, are Luke and Sissy, stubborn but predictable. Even Patty Ann—except for that one time. It's Francis. Always Francis. “I'm sorry.”

Sissy looks up from moving pebbles strategically around in the dirt, some game whose rules no one else knows. “Francis is scared to come to Daddy's grave.”

It kills her how Sissy calls Michael “Daddy” despite never having met him. She'd like to pick her five-year-old daughter up and give her a squeeze, but she's still got Kenny on her hip.

“What's there to be scared of? There's no such thing as ghosts. And even if there were, your father would be the nicest ghost who ever existed.”

Sissy hops another pebble. “Not of ghosts. He's scared of Daddy being dead.”

Desiree—the name was Michael's idea:
In case the baby turns out to be a girl.

“Look at you, Desiree,” she says, handing Kenny to Patty Ann and lifting Sissy onto her feet. She starts to brush the dust off Sissy's smocked pinafore, but at the sound of her hated real first name, Sissy balls her hands into fists and steps away.

“You haven't told him, have you?” she says over Sissy's head to Patty Ann.

Patty Ann sighs and shakes her head. “No.”