Sure, I thought, why not. If we drove up to New Jerusalem, Maureen would know she had done everything she could to convince Paul to marry her. As for me, I was too scattered to do anything much in the lab. And there was something up there, in New Jerusalem, or maybe on the island, some information I lacked, an important piece of data. One of the samples didn’t fit.
I asked Maureen when she wanted to leave. She fluffed her hair. “I’ll need a few hours to put myself together. I ought to call him and let him know we’re coming. But he’ll only talk me out of it. Let’s just go. We’ll leave this afternoon. About one?” She swung herself into her chair, then rolled across the putrid shag to the bathroom. I gathered up her shoes and tossed them in the closet. I threw away the cartons of rancid food, stuffed the dirty clothes in the hamper. “Need anything at the store?” I called. “Or at the lab? You okay in there?” Steam swirled about the bathroom. In the shower stall, Maureen was slumped on her plastic chair, water beating against her shoulders. “Maureen?” I said. “I know things seem bad now. But you’re attractive. You’re smart. You’re funny. If worse comes to worst, you’ll find someone else.”
She spoke without lifting her head—I barely could distinguish her voice from the shower’s hiss. “Yeah. I’m smart. I’m funny. And I don’t have itty-bitty flippers instead of arms. I should be happy to be alive. I’m lucky to have a career. I’m lucky not to be sitting on a street corner in a little wooden cart begging for change. I’m greedy to want a kid. I’m greedy to want a nice guy to love me and cuddle up with me at night and make sure I don’t fry if there’s a fire.”
I was ashamed to admit I had been thinking just that: my friend ought to be grateful for everything she had. As I ought to have been grateful for everything I had. As any of us ought to be grateful. As so few of us ever are.
I called Yosef at his apartment. When no one answered, I wrote him a note asking him to perform the next few steps on my test, and on Laurel’s test, and to keep an eye on the pregnant mouse. I was licking the envelope shut when he came in. I asked if he was all right; he certainly didn’t look it.
He took out a comb and studied his reflection in the autoclave door. “This morning I remember how, when you call, I talk too much and wallowed in pity for myself. Don’t take any of what I said so serious.”
“You said we were friends. You said you would do anything for me. You were sweet.”
“I was? Okay, that part you can take serious.”
I handed him the note, which he read, squinting at the paper.
“Sure you don’t want I should go with you? Just say the word and I break this guy’s legs. Ha! It’s only a way of talking, but it would be some kind of justice, I put this guy in a wheelchair and let someone dump him.”
“I’ll be glad if you just do the tests and take care of the mouse. And listen. I know this is going to come out wrong, but if I do get my own lab and you ever need a job—”
“You let me be flunky? Sure, every lab needs a centrifuge, a microscope, a Japanese postdoc, and a Russian flunky.”
“Come on. You’d be more like a research fellow. An associate. Until you get your own lab.”
“You don’t hurt my feelings. But I can’t afford this fooling around no more. Today I set up an interview with, what you call them—cannibal? headhunter?” He tossed a handful of pill-shaped mints in his mouth. “I’ll stop complaining. How do you say in America, at least I have my health? I have my mother, even if she lives in a terrible place, can’t buy any soap, my sisters can’t buy sanitary napkins, I have to mail all of this in a big box from America. For them, I can do something. For Maureen, this guy doesn’t marry her, I break his legs. For you? If your test doesn’t turn out so good, what can I do for you?” He put his arm around me. “All I can say is, if this news isn’t so good, I will take care of you. You understand? I will take care of you.”
I wanted to ask him, Why? Why would you take care of me? We’re not even related. You barely know me. “I’ll be back in a few days,” I said. “Don’t say anything to anyone. And don’t let that headhunter talk you into anything you don’t want to do.”
“‘Want.’ This is an American option. You have a daddy with a trust fund, you can do what you want.” He pinched his tongue in contrition. “Sorry, sweetheart. I guess even having a father with a trust fund doesn’t always mean you get to do what you want to do.”
I walked back to the dorm. Maureen, who usually arrived an hour late for everything, sat beside her van. Her hair rose from her scalp, clean and freshly spiked. She wore plain silver earrings and no makeup except for some shadow to camouflage the pink rims of her eyes.
“I’m still too upset to drive. Here, lift me into the passenger seat. Then you can clamp my wheelchair in the empty space behind the wheel and sit in that.”
I did as she instructed. I settled in the wheelchair and tested the levers that had been installed to allow Maureen to control the pedals by hand. It’s okay, I told myself. You don’t really need a wheelchair. This is only temporary. The day was sunny but cold. Few cars were driving north this week before Christmas, so I didn’t need to concentrate. I pictured the test that Yosef was carrying out on Laurel’s DNA. I imagined myself reading the blot and not seeing the marker for the gene, telling Laurel the good news, Laurel throwing out her arms and clutching me with relief. And then, as if performing some act of mental self-sacrifice, I leaped ahead to the scene in which my own blot revealed a smear of radiation where the marker should be. I would keep my appointment at the clinic. I would tell Willie that I was sorry but we could only be friends. He would have to accept this. I was accepting it myself.
I touched Maureen’s hand. “It’s going to be fine,” I said.
She sniffed. “Sure.” Then she turned to face the window and didn’t say another word until I pulled into the parking lot of an orange-roofed Howard Johnson’s, the kind with Simple Simon and the Pie Man on top. I ordered the turkey dinner—stuffing, mashed potatoes, succotash, stewed tomatoes, peach pie. “I’ll have toast and coffee,” Maureen told the waitress, then left the toast on her plate.
We arrived at Paul’s house at nine. While I zipped my parka, Maureen scowled into the side mirror, checking her hair.
“Do you want me to stick around?” I had planned to spend the night with Miriam, or, if she was busy, at the boardinghouse on Front Street. The next morning, I would take the boat to Spinsters Island.
“Thanks,” Maureen said. “This is just between the mayor and me.”
“Well, if you need a place to stay, drive down to Miriam’s and honk.”
She pushed the button on her wheelchair and crunched along the damp gravel to the porch. I climbed the steps, rang the bell, gave Maureen a quick kiss, and hurried off. I glanced back and saw Paul open the door and look down. From the dismay on his face, before he managed to hide it, I knew we shouldn’t have come.
I headed toward the town, walking along the bay in the moonlit dark. It seemed appropriate that I come by stealth. I had stolen information. If the inhabitants of New Jerusalem saw me now, they would demand to know the answers. Saying you’re fine would be easy. But how could I tell anyone that he or she would die?
I reached the two-porched Victorian. A child inside shrieked. I assumed a frantic mother had brought an infant to the house. But when Miriam opened the door, I saw a child but no parent. The baby couldn’t have been more than six months old. Dark skinned, with large eyes and a silky fringe of black hair. He dangled from a harness suspended from the ceiling by a hook, kicking his legs so furiously that his rage propelled him back and forth. I barely could hear Miriam above the child’s screams and the howling of a dog on the other side of the wall.
“I’m afraid you haven’t picked a very good time.” Miriam wore a corduroy shirt with an epaulet of spit-up across the shoulder. She looked more anxious than usual but less dour. “He has a hard time falling asleep. His digestion, I think it is. A pediatrician friend swears by this contraption.” Miriam unbuck
led the baby from the swing and walked him around the parlor. The child wailed like a tortured cat, which set the dog howling louder. Someone pounded on the wall. “Just ignore her. I’ve been listening to those damn dogs of hers for years.” Miriam found a pacifier beneath a chair, wiped it on her sleeve, and plugged it in the baby’s mouth. The pacifier muted the baby’s cries but didn’t stop them. “You hold him, and we’ll try something else.” She handed me the baby and started toward the kitchen. “His name is Raphael.”
“Raphael,” I said, rubbing his back and pacing about the room with the same bouncy step I had seen Miriam use. He kept crying but less forlornly. His head smelled like bananas and vanilla. I inhaled the scent so deeply I nearly reeled. Miriam came back with a bottle of formula. Collapsing in a rocker, she took the baby in her lap. He stopped crying and made a noise—ah-ah-ah—that seemed an answer to the rocker’s squeak. But he wouldn’t close his eyes. I bet myself that Miriam would drop to sleep before the baby.
“There’s a woman who comes in to look after him while I’m seeing patients,” she said drowsily. “But the way he cries all the time, I end up coming up here to look after him anyway. Or else I keep him in the room with me while I’m examining someone, which isn’t exactly ideal.” The townspeople, she said, had been remarkably understanding. “Not a single one of them has asked where he came from. Maybe they think I had an affair with a passing Portuguese sailor. Or they think lesbians can have babies by immaculate conception. Or maybe they’re afraid if they ask too many questions, I’ll pack him up and leave.” She folded her arms across the baby. “Barbara hasn’t been quite so tolerant. We’re not on speaking terms right now.”
If Miriam had seemed fated to share her life with anyone, it had to be Barbara Lewis. It seemed impossible that she would sacrifice her love life with her soul mate to raise someone else’s child.
“I don’t mean to be rude.” Miriam kept rocking so as not to wake the baby. “And you’re certainly welcome to stay as long as you like. But do you mind if I ask why you’re here?”
I said I didn’t know. I wanted to come. I had to.
Would I be going to the island? she asked.
First thing the next day.
She affected a shudder. “I wouldn’t ride out with that Charlie Stacks if he was piloting the only boat to heaven. Stubborn SOB. I’ve offered a dozen times to drive him down to Portland to get those cataracts lasered off. ‘The gods wanted me to see, I’d be seein’,’ he says. I say to him, ‘Charlie, your heart’s not ticking right, I’ll drive you down to Portland, get one of those pacemakers put in.’ He tells me, ‘The gods wanted my heart tickin’ any faster or slower, they’d a’ set it that way.’ Fine for him, throwing away his life. But there’s no reason he has to endanger innocent people. I’ve been trying to get your friend the mayor to find a replacement. But Paul Minot is too good for his own good, if you know what I mean.”
Our voices woke the baby. He stiffened in Miriam’s arms and spit up a milky curd. He started shrieking again. Barbara pounded the wall. The dog barked. Miriam and I were up much of the night, taking turns with Raphael, walking him around the living room. Barbara kept pounding. The phone rang. If “that kid” didn’t stop making such a racket . . .
At least they were speaking again, I thought. All that thumping on the walls reminded me of two prisoners sending messages to each other. Eventually they would find a way to tunnel through the wall.
At three, Raphael fell asleep. I slumped across the sofa and dozed until the post-office clock struck seven fifteen. The boat left at seven thirty. I brushed my teeth, changed my shirt, and scrawled “Thanks” on a pad of prescription forms by Miriam’s telephone.
When I reached the boat, Stacks was coiling a line and pushing off. I stepped aboard and said my name.
“Come back again, have you. Paying her a return call.”
I didn’t ask if he meant Eve Barter. After handing him the fare, I went to sit in the stern. The waves kept flinging up the boat, then letting it drop with a smack. My stomach lifted and fell, lifted and fell. I gagged and retched but managed not to throw up. The ride took forever, whether because the waves kept pushing us back or the absence of landmarks made progress seem slow. I joined Stacks in the cabin.
“Rough enough for you?”
I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of saying it was.
“Think a sharp pair of eyes would do me any better on a day like this? Now, my ears. Wouldn’t want to lose those. Ears is how I know half what’s out there.” He blew a blast on his horn. The echo came back delayed, as if another ship had moaned in the fog to our left. “‘Blind as a bat,’ is it? Bat wouldn’t have no trouble hearing its way in.” He squeezed the horn, tilted his head to hear the echo, turned the steering wheel a few degrees to the right. In this way, we drew close to Spinsters Island, the dock looming from the fog an instant before we would have hit it. He tossed the rope, missed, tugged it back, tossed it again. This time the loop caught. He jumped off the boat and set the ladder. “Just don’t you go around expecting no hero’s welcome,” he told me.
I didn’t expect anything, I said.
“Person’s made a certain way, that’s the way he’s meant to be made. Gets time for him to pass over, he passes over. You go around taking away the things make a person who he is, he ends up not being anyone.”
The road shook beneath my feet. I had intended to walk to Thunder Beach, but the thought of the icy spray made me reconsider. I followed Stacks up the road. The windows of the houses had been blinded with plywood boards and foil. The town had turned its hindquarters to the world and curled up for the winter; disturbed in hibernation, it might gnash its teeth and strike out.
Stacks asked if I was planning on staying or going back.
Of course I was going back.
“See that you’re on time then. There’ll be a storm tonight for sure.”
I walked to Eve Barter’s garage. A light flickered in the kitchen.
“Door’s unlatched!” she called. “Just about finished, Rudy. Come in.”
I went in and found Eve working at a table covered with the parts of a dismantled engine. On a corner of the red-and-white-checked oilcloth sat two baking tins of popovers, a kettle, and a cup. Eve’s hair, curled in rollers, was hidden beneath a scarf. Her breasts swelled from her robe. She wiped the carburetor with a rag, then held it up and peered inside. “I thought you were Rudy Sugar, come to get his DeSoto.”
I asked how she had learned to work on cars.
She wrenched free a spark plug. “Always liked working with my hands.” She blew inside the carburetor and wiped it with her rag. “Sewing seemed just about the most boring thing a person could do. Came time for the boys and girls to split up in seventh grade, I said I wanted to take shop. The principal didn’t have any objections, so long as I agreed to take home ec, too. Which I’m glad I did, because it turned out I liked the baking part just fine. Stuck out my chest and talked sweet to the shop teacher, he didn’t object either. Opportunity to buy this garage came along, I was ready to take advantage.”
“How did you come to buy the garage? May I ask?”
Eve set down the carburetor and picked up a screwdriver. “You come all the way from Boston to ask me that? Is this a business call? Pleasure? Isn’t exactly the best season for a visit.”
“It’s a business call. Mostly.”
“Need some more blood?” There was a catch in Eve’s laugh, like an engine misfiring.
“That’s part of it. There were some discrepancies.”
“Yeah?” she said. “What sorts of discrepancies?”
“I was wondering if you might be related to someone on the island. I know you said you weren’t, but maybe you forgot. Maybe it’s someone who’s only distantly related.”
“I got it, don’t I.” She stabbed the table with her screwdriver. “Didn’t ruin enough lives. Must be laughing in his grave, the cunt-sucking son of a bitch. What’d he ever give me? I ask you. What’d th
at miserable fucker ever give me except this garage and his filthy blood?” She raised her arm to sweep the engine parts to the floor, then reconsidered. “Bad enough what he did to all those young girls here. He gets run off to the mainland and messes up my mom. Fifteen years old and pregnant by a man she doesn’t even know.”
I moved a step closer.
“That cock-fucking mothersucker. Must have had some fit of repentance. Lawyer we never heard of tells us this Ransom guy left Mom his garage. As if she might say, ‘Oh, fine, he left me a garage on some shitty island, that makes amends for what he done.’” Eve yanked off her kerchief and began pulling out her curlers. “But me, I was a kid. Didn’t have much prospects. Sort of curious, owning something and not knowing what it looked like. Mom said to come out and sell it, but I decided to stick around.” She yanked the screwdriver from the table, then jammed it in again. “Son of a cock-sucking, bitch-fucking bastard.”
I lifted Eve’s hands. The back of each was hatched by burns. “My mother had these, too,” I said. “She used to reach in the oven to get out a pan, and her arms would jerk, and she’d burn the backs of her hands on the top rack.”
Eve put her arms around my waist and leaned her head against me. I stroked her damp hair. After a few minutes, she sat up straight and wiped her eyes on the greasy rag. “Don’t feel bad for telling me. Not like I didn’t guess. I just needed a kick in the pants is what I needed. Last thing I want to do is to hang around and end up like the rest of these sorry so-and-sos. I’ll sell the place and get out while I can. Just don’t spread the news. I’d rather not anyone put two and two together and figure out who my dad was.”
A Perfect Life Page 25
