The Vagabonds (7 page)
“It’s not a joke,” she said, “it’s a funny story, maybe,” and Tommy said, “People laugh. ‘
I count the legs and divide them by four.
’”
He had been—she knew this even at the time—completely without talent; his voice was high-pitched, his delivery too broad, and his gestures and timing were off. Nonetheless Claire laughed, or tried to, at his repertoire of sheep-jokes: the one about the shepherd who preferred his ewe to the ladies in town, the one about how dumb sheep were and how they believed they were goats. Now, lying in her single bed, Claire calms herself by counting sheep, remembering Little Bo Peep. But what she remembers instead is the way Tommy stood practicing a monologue about his devotion to his mother; he had admired Woody Allen and wanted to do Woody Allen routines.
Their courtship had been brief. She had liked his curly hair, the way he cared for her opinion and wanted her to laugh with him and worked hard at making her laugh. They slept together for six weeks, from Homecoming Game to Christmas break, and he told her jokes. When she failed to laugh he stood in front of her, naked, or in his Mickey Mouse boxers, waving his hands in the air and doing the routine about Minnie Mouse fucking Goofy. The lawyer says, “Hey, Mickey, here in California insanity’s not grounds for a divorce.” “I didn’t say she was crazy,” says Mickey Mouse. “I said she was fucking Goofy!”
These are one-liners, Claire told him, not jokes, and they certainly won’t be routines. They simply aren’t funny, she said. In January of junior year Tommy left college and spent a season in L.A. working as a waiter and trying to break into movies; he called her daily and then weekly and then not at all. The last she heard of him he had a job on a cruise ship as backup comic to the crooner and the dancing girls . . .
She will not think about it. She thinks about her daughters: which pictures they might choose or what furniture select. She does not know. She wishes she could be at home, in her own kitchen, with a wedge of cheese on table water crackers and those cured black calamata olives you can buy at Hiller’s Market, with Jim downstairs on the exercycle and Becky and Hannah—one or the other or, less likely, the two of them saying, “Mom, what’s for dinner, when’s dinner ready, I’m
starving
!”
There had been a time, of course, when she had known just what to cook or buy for them—known all their habits, their hearts’ desires—and they would smile and shriek with glee and clap their hands at what she bought and wrapped. Birthdays and holidays were a bonanza, an overflowing cup. In December, she had driven to the farmers’ market in order to purchase a Christmas bayberry wreath. As always she took Division Street and turned left on Ann, and there were a group of men huddled waiting for soup at St. Andrew’s, shivering but orderly: the homeless and the wretched of this earth. She had offered up ten dollars to a toothless black man on the corner; it had been sleeting, Claire remembers, and the streets were slick . . .
But now she cannot imagine what matters to her daughters: which cats she should take from the shelf. Therefore little by little, imperceptibly, with her hand on the small of her back and her mind on the counting of sheep and the telling of jokes, then the waters of the Caribbean, green and warm and lapping at the bright white beaches—Caneel and Cruse and Montego Bay and Negril and others she had traveled to that second winter with Jim—with her mind awash and drifting to the little pink drink with salt on the rim and an umbrella and a cherry and a slice of lime awaiting him, awaiting them, Claire knows she is falling asleep. And when she stands in that black scoop-necked bathing suit he liked so much, wearing her sun hat and sandals and touching the rim of her glass to his glass, SOHCAHTOA, when she laughs and laughs at the flock of four-footed sheep on Division Street she knows she has been dreaming, has fallen asleep in the furnace-generated warmth and sees her mother’s powdered face, the lipsticked mouth, her past, their past, the past.
Her brother and sister have changed. David has thickened and Claire has lost weight, but when Joanna pictures them she sees the way they used to look when young. Her brother is a handsome man, with that air of aloofness about him arrival from a distant place confers. She had watched the waitress shift her hips when tending to their table, the way she came back needlessly to ask if everything had been OK, if anyone wanted anything else. Her nose ring looked like Leah’s, and Joanna hopes that, years from now, Leah will not wear a nose ring and not be waitressing; she lights a cigarette.
When she told her daughter, “Granny died,” the girl had been sweetness itself. That’s one of the things about Leah-Artemisia: you never can be certain which card will come out of the deck. Joanna had been waiting, and as soon as school was over, while her daughter shrugged out of her backpack, said: “It happened. Granny died.” In a heartbeat the girl became Li-li again, the hard abrasive shell of her sliced open and shucked free. She said, “Oh,
Mom,
” and flung both arms wide and they hugged each other and didn’t stop hugging; then they drank tea and honey in the kitchen and sat together, knee to knee, staring at the wallpaper and discussing how long Joanna would need to be away. Li-li offered to skip school and go to Saratoga too, but they were doing
West Side Story
and she was playing Anita and opening night was this Friday and it would be hard.
“I’m sorry, Mom. It’s, like, the pits.”
“Don’t even
think
about coming along.”
“I’ll stay with Stacey, OK?”
“OK.” The wallpaper was trellised grapes, and Joanna had been noticing where the trellis matched and where it failed to and where the pattern was curling and would have to be reglued.
“It’s tech rehearsal, and then dress. Will you be back by Friday?”
“Yes.”
“Promise?”
“Promise. Cross my heart and hope—” She stopped herself. “Claire and David will be there.”
Her enormous-eyed daughter was crying, a little, and she herself was trying not to; snow drifted past the pane. She would leave for Saratoga in the morning, said Joanna, and spend a night there, maybe two, then return by curtain time. “We’ll make Harry hold the fort.”
Leah did a little stutter-step and twitched her hips. “
A boy like that . . .
”
Joanna stood. The thought of Harry alone with her daughter was not one she wanted to have while away.
“
Stick to your own kind,
” the girl was singing, doing her Anita- accent. Then her face grew grave again and she kissed her mother on both cheeks. “I’m sorry.
Desolée.
”
“Maisie knows. Both Maisie and Tom know where I’m going, and you call them if you need to, right?”
Leah collected the teacups, nodding. She turned on hot water and washed out the cups, rinsing twice and settling the white porcelain into the dish drain carefully. “Don’t worry, Mom, we’ll be fine . . .”
“I love you. Break a leg.”
Now she finishes her cigarette and drops the stub in the fireplace ash. Above her head Joanna hears her sister and her brother moving, settling in their rooms to sleep, but she herself will stay here and watch the fire die. She can remember Claire when young, defiant in a party dress, refusing to come to the party. “You can’t
make
me do it, you can’t,” Claire would say, then throw herself back on the bed. Why can’t we just be friends, Joanna wonders, why should it be so difficult? She herself has always had the gift of friendship, an easy back-and-forth with strangers at her B&B. But Claire resists her, adamant; Claire is having none of it and drinking ice water, not wine . . .
The fire is red embers now; Joanna shuts her eyes. She tries to remember this living room full, the noise and bustle of guests when she was five or six years old and wanting to serve canapés or, later, drinks. She would go from visitor to visitor and do her little curtsy or simply stand there waiting till they looked down and noticed and she’d ask, “Would you like another canapé? Can I freshen up your drink?”
This was the expression her father taught her for parties, and it always got a smile. If a guest said, “Thanks, I’m fine,” there would be nothing else to do, but if the guest said, “Thank you, yes” then Joanna had to ask what kind of drink was in the glass and remember which was which. “She’s the life of the party,” they said to her parents. “A real little charmer, that one. I bet you two are proud.”
They were, they said, they both were proud, and Joanna can remember her parents in the living room, standing together and greeting the guests and making people welcome turn by turn. Then she would play her waitress-game and try to be a charmer, a real little firecracker, that one, and then be sent upstairs. If she couldn’t fall asleep she’d creep to the heat register, and with her ear against the grate would listen to laughter, the chattering adults and din of the party beneath. Or, later, on the top stair of the stairwell, wearing the nightgown with the red cherry pattern and trying to determine from the noise below whose voice belonged to whom . . .
On the screen of her shut eyelids, now, she sees her father lounging in the doorway, resplendent in his white jacket and bow tie and straw hat. He has just returned from—or perhaps is just about to leave for; in the instant of this memory Joanna cannot tell—the track. She catches the faint whiff of gin. She does not recognize it yet, will only learn years later that the high sweet acid odor of his breath is the tang of gin and bitters, or gin with just a splash of vermouth or gin straight up with a twist. She cannot remember him falling-down drunk or anything other than courtly, ever, but always with a flask or cocktail shaker near to hand. “The juniper berry,” he tells her, “it’s the gift God gave to men. That, and the apple,” he says. “Nothing like them for sweetness,” he says.
He smells of lilac vegetal and talcum powder and, if he is returning, sweat; he bends down toward her and holds out his arms and scoops her up while she wriggles and giggles and kisses her smack on the cheek. “How’s my precious J-J girl?” he asks her. “How’s my little firecracker? Have you been behaving yourself?” If he’s leaving she says, always, “Daddy, take me with you,” and if he’s returning she asks, always, “Daddy, how much did you win?”
“Enough for an ice cream, J-J,” he says. “Later.” Then he pats her on the bottom and deposits her on the floor again although she keeps her arms, or tries to, locked around his neck. On summertime Saturday mornings he takes her for an ice cream to the Dairy Queen, or the Saratoga Dairy Bar, walking down Broadway and holding her hand and, if she is very tired, hoisting her up on his shoulders and telling her hold tight now, hold tight as you can to the reins.
Then Claire was born, and David, and then the four of them would walk down Broadway, her brother riding pickaback, so she would walk in front. For all the years of her childhood and, later, growing up and growing away from her parents—their constant squabble, their drawn lines—Joanna took his side of things, adoring his swagger and laughter, his gallantry and ease. Her father was a charming man and she loved him very much and all their guests did also, but her mother was unmoved. “For better or for worse, in sickness and in health. That’s what we agreed to when we married,” said Alice, “and nowadays everything’s worse . . .”
She had tried to take her mother’s side, trying to see the car crash as the last in a series of insults, the final reproof and slap in the face—but all Joanna felt was sorrow and all she was was bereft. When she tasted her own first dry martini in a bar on East 69th Street she understood on the instant that
this
was what her father drank, and the boy who had been plying her with gin was rewarded when he took her to his room not with compliance but tearfulness, not with sex but rage. You cannot be angry at dead men, she knows, you should save anger for the living; you cannot hate a corpse. “I don’t,” her mother answered when she asked, “I don’t really hate him. It’s only there’s a kind of peace in knowing it’s all over now, and it can’t happen again.”
It could; it did; it would happen again. For years she could not enter a car without an image of her father and some stranger with her skirt hiked up, the two of them driving away from a party with a thermos of martinis and smashed into a tree. When he died she had been seventeen and old enough to know how long her parents had been angry at each other, unhappy in the life they shared yet unwilling to divorce. Theirs had been a tight-lipped silence or the noise of argument and, on her father’s part, evasion and, on her mother’s, disdain. When Joanna asked, years later, while her own first marriage was falling apart, if she herself ever thought of divorce, her mother said, “Of course not, no, there were many things I thought about but divorce wasn’t one of them. Maybe revenge. It wasn’t the way we behaved back then, or at least not the way
I
behaved. So not divorce, no, that was never in the cards.”
“Why not?” she’d persisted. “If you were—incompatible.”
“David,” Alice said.
“David?”
“You were old enough. Claire too. But David wasn’t old enough,” she said.
1916
T
he Vagabonds’ progress has been unimpeded: thirty-five miles since they broke camp at breakfast and nothing untoward. They have been under way, now, four days. That this region of the country should have well-paved arteries was no revelation to Edison, or less a revelation than a confirmation of his long-held faith in the all-leveling impulse toward advancement in and of the populace:
take that tree, that hillside, that mountain stream and cut and level and ford it.
He laughed. He must remember to tell Henry of the happy nature of such wordplay, the accident of nomenclature that caused them to ford the ford in a Ford, though regrettably not as yet with.
Nor would it be affordable for most. Their caravan, if neither ostentatious nor excessive, was—it must be admitted—not small. Those who journeyed to America while it was yet a newfound land took what comfort they might find in numbers, the solidarity of fellowship: not for the Pilgrims isolation except insofar as enforced. And, later, with the pioneers, those wagon trains that flourished did so at least in part because of size: the more the merrier.
My wheel has broken, brother; might I pattern a new one on yours? My jerky and biscuit have furnished a saltwater banquet for rats; might I sit at table with you, o dear companion, instead?