Fishing the Jumps

by Lamar Herrin

  I don’t know, Ellie half whispered, her voice hoarse. Maybe. We’ve talked about it. Then she reminded me, You know, I’m a mother, too.

  I needed reminding. Members of extended families tend to get fixed in one of their roles, and for me, I had to confess, Ellie Whalen was still a child.

  I know you’re a mother, I told her. I’m thinking about the girls, too, I’m thinking about my aunt’s granddaughters. You’re not all she’s worried about.

  In a lowered and only halfhearted voice, Ellie said, Mother worries too much.

  You’re all she has left, can’t you see why she’d worry, here … at the end?

  Make her comfortable, relieve her of her worries while there’s time left, don’t make a mistake you’ll carry with you for the rest of your life—I was on the point of saying all of that. I might have gone on, You’ll pass by her grave and hate yourself for what you denied her at the end. Don’t let that happen, don’t do that to yourself, Ellie. Instead, another question occurred to me, the right question, and it must have brought a scowl to my face. Do you love this man, Ellie? I said. Before she could answer, I persisted: How do you love him, Ellie? How can this be?

  People say that faces go blank, but I’d make the distinction. I’d say that faces go vacant, which isn’t the same. Ellie had vacated her face and stationed herself somewhere else, and I found myself peering, looking for the right light and the right angle, and you’ll never guess, Walter, who I thought of then. Do you remember the other Ellie, the spirit waif of Hollywood? In the midst of all that stale and single-minded ambition, the girl I knew who flitted among it all like a hummingbird, little iridescent Ellie. Do you remember her?

  I remember, Walter said, and I’m not interested. That was Hollywood. We’re done with that. What did Ellie Whalen say when she came back, when she “reoccupied” her face?

  She never fully reoccupied it. She was a little dazed. I might have struck her with a precisely calculated blow. She said she thought that she did. And I said, Love him, Ellie? Really? Not the circumstances, not as a defense against all that’s ganging up on you, but this man, this … Leland Oldham?

  And hearing his name spoken amounted to another blow, coming from me, both an outsider and, generationally considered, someone present at the start of it all.

  Back when the snake struck, you mean.

  Walter, I should never have told you that story.

  No, you probably shouldn’t have, but you did. Too late now. So back to the matter at hand. When did Leland Oldham show up?

  Did he?

  Ellie had to twist around, you didn’t. You were sitting with a direct view of that front door. You would have seen him coming first through the screen, Leland Oldham materializing from behind that black mesh.

  Out of the blackness, Walter?

  That’s what she’d been waiting for, wasn’t it? That’s what had her so edgy. And your “mistake” was in letting her choose the restaurant, which she could then communicate to Mr. Oldham, who would certainly be keeping tabs. Not that our Ellie wanted him to come barging in. Just to feel secure, she had to know that he knew where she was. It had reached that point.

  You’re good, Walter. I never doubted it.

  So when did he?

  Not before I had a chance to make my case, and Rosalyn’s, to not marry the man, a man old enough to be her father with a family of all but grown children no one knew anything about. I urged Ellie not to do that. She had her own family to consider, and by that I meant her girls. She was vulnerable, she was on the rebound, he was twice her age. If she didn’t see how someone could be wooed and falsely won from behind a front of church-sanctioned good deeds, I did. All sorts of scoundrels had sought the sanction of the church. History was full of them. Leland Oldham—and I paused again on the name—might not be one of them, but there was a modern-day way to be sure, we no longer had to be victims of history repeating itself, and in the most reasonable tone I could manage I began to talk to her about prenuptial agreements, which I presented as commonplace, a modern-day given, in no way indicative of distrust, especially when there was a large and complicated sum of money involved that Ellie, as a tribute to her father and all he’d accomplished, should want to protect. We were so used to thinking of money in the abstract, as figures in a bankbook or on a computer screen, figures that go up and go down, that we forget that it was her father and then her brother who devoted their flesh and blood to that business. Whalen Apparels at one time had been the livelihood of the town, all of us in this family of ours, out to the most remote of the cousins, had thrilled to what her family had accomplished, going right back to World War Two, which we had won partly due to the uniforms and parachutes and pup tents that her father had pitched in to produce. I didn’t want to exaggerate, I said, but Ellie’s inheritance was that history, and her mother would rest so much easier if she knew that her country’s history and her family’s part in it would not be forgotten, that it would be protected, that it would be left intact. So, if she must marry, would Ellie please have a prenuptial contract drawn up, it was simple, it was routine, it was what everybody was doing nowadays, and her mother would be so relieved, it would be such a loving kindness to her there at the end …

  Dusk was gathering. You heard not yet the loons but the remaining canoers paddling for home. Walter quietly freshened our drinks. The wicker crackled quietly, not so much in agitation or suspense as in rhythm with our breaths. The tinkling of the ice that had yet to melt struck the cleanest and clearest of notes.

  You should have sold encyclopedias, Walter said.

  I did.

  But you didn’t sell her.

  I thought I had.

  What made you think so?

  She loved her family. But one of the liabilities of being born so late in her parents’ lives was that her family was dying off all around her. She could protect her inheritance, defend it against so much death, or she could let someone else take care of it and suffer the consequences. What she didn’t really understand was that her family wasn’t just her immediate family, it was all of us, it kept reaching out.

  So she was debating it, Walter said. She was vacillating. Draw up a prenup and please her mother. With a prenup, even though she married she remained in a Whalen. The town had a Whalen left, a real Whalen, second generation, straight from the patriarch’s loins, and the family fortune remained intact. Rosalyn would no longer be around, but that wouldn’t stop nephews and nieces and more and more distant cousins from making a sort of pilgrimage to an otherwise unremarkable town and holding out their arms.

  Walter—

  El Dorado—and those golden eyes.

  You were right. Leland Oldham did indeed show up, and I saw him first through that screen—

  The toad.

  He was short, but not squat, pudgy but not really fat and not round. Dark-haired and balding, but through the screen I couldn’t make out the features of his face. I had to take Rosalyn’s word for it that he had a goatee. It must have been very sparse. He wore a sports shirt and pants that might have come from the Whalen plant. He’d arrived at a moment when Ellie was not twisted back around, but there was no doubt Leland Oldham saw me see him. He stood there until …

  Until Ellie saw you looking and read the expression on your face.

  I was probably squinting to make out what I could. And probably tightening my jaw.

  And then she turned around.

  And a cloud shadow passed over her face. She seemed to let out a long breath. She risked a glance at me, and I felt for her then. She was like a spoiled child who couldn’t help herself, who knew she was asking for just one more little favor, after which she promised to behave. She did say, I’ll be right back, please don’t go anywhere, with a hoarse flutter in her voice, which she needed to clear and try again, and then she walked up the Chambers House’s main hall to the front door, more steadily than I expected.

  And didn’t come back.

  Oh, she did. Five minutes later. She wasn’t
out there long. Under one of the live oaks, I suppose, which a hundred miles farther south would be hung with tatters of Spanish moss, blowing in the breeze.

  With her beau, the toad-man, with that little wisp of Spanish moss hanging off his chin.

  She came back, she smiled, she went on, Oh, Jim, it’s so good to see you, so, so good, don’t be such a stranger, practically breaking into song as women down there often do when they have nothing more to say.

  Or maybe the toad slipped her something from his flask out under the Spanish moss.

  There was no Spanish moss.

  Rolling in the kudzu?

  Walter—

  I’m sorry. I just hate what’s going to happen. I’ve told you. I’m very partial to your aunt.

  Ellie came back. The check came, and it came to her. They knew her there. There was no way I was going to be allowed to pay. She paid with large bills, two twenties, one might have been enough, and that did occur to me, that under the oaks Leland Oldham had slipped her the twenties, which she had at hand, that already he was that much in control. I said, Ellie, please think about what we talked about. There’s no reason to marry now, you know that. And if you do marry, there’s certainly no reason not to have a prenuptial agreement drawn up, it’s a mere formality, your father and your brother wouldn’t think twice, in fact they’d be amazed if—

  And she cut me off, she interrupted me in the quietest of voices, conversational, as though out of consideration she needed to remind me of something. It may be a formality up north, Jim, she said, but we’re different down here. She smiled. She wasn’t taunting me. She’d been talked to. She’d gotten some coaching outside. Tell me the truth. Isn’t that why you keep coming back to see us? Don’t you like us the way we are?

  It was only when we were outside that she named him and identified him as the shadowy man behind the screen. Leland was so sorry he couldn’t come in. He had to run. He’d love to meet you, though. Can’t you stay another day? Then my littlest cousin, pouting, slipped into the little girl. Oh, why can’t you, Jim? I smiled and shook my head. You’re just being a tease, she said. You always liked to tease, especially when you grew that beard.

  So you do remember that, I said.

  You looked like a man from the mountains.

  My beard was trimmed, I said. Mountain men don’t trim their beards.

  Now everyone has one. Please come back. Promise me. Please do.

  Ellie, I came to see your mother. I forced her to meet my eye. It’s very possible I might not see her again.

  She flinched, but recovered. She was brittle but she didn’t break. In fact, I believe she was convinced I owed her something, which I didn’t dispute. How could anyone in our family dispute the fact they were in debt to the Whalens? And I don’t mean for just shirts and pants. She said, I want you to promise me one thing. I’m not saying there’ll be a wedding, but if there is, I want you to promise me you’ll come. You missed my first one, you know.

  Well, judging by the outcome, Ellie …, I said, trailing off on a sympathizing note.

  Which she picked up on, the sympathizing, that is. She tried to laugh, but the laughter caught in her throat so that, more a sigh of sadness than a laugh, she had to try again. This the daughter of a woman whose laughter rose as cool and clean as a spring from the inner earth that no one in the family thought would ever run dry.

  In the end I didn’t even attend my aunt’s funeral, I told Walter. How in the world did Ellie think I’d come see her marry the toad?

  What are you saying? Walter was genuinely nonplussed. You attended her son’s funeral and her husband’s, but not hers, your favorite aunt?

  I failed her, I said. It was as simple as that.

  How can it be that simple? What were you thinking, Jim?

  Neither the funeral nor the wedding. Thrift, thrift in absentia, Horatio, which I wasn’t sure Walter would pick up on, lawyers, unlike certain princes, not being prey to thoughts accompanied by their counter-thoughts, otherwise how could they ever argue a case to a conclusion, much less win it? But it didn’t really matter, because it was in that moment that we heard a series of slashing chords coming out of the near darkness, at which point, in answer to Walter’s question, I said, If it isn’t Byron Wainwright trying to play “Rite of Spring” on his cello, I have no idea what it is.

  But of course Walter was right. It wasn’t that simple. The family gathered for the funeral, and if I wasn’t the only one missing, I was the one that mattered, and it was talked about. It wasn’t her daughter’s marriage to a man she found loathsome that had tipped my aunt into her grave—for, as in Hamlet, the funeral preceded the marriage by a month—but it was my acknowledged failure to protect her daughter and her daughter’s fortune that brought on her end. I was told my aunt had given up. Not that nature had taken its rapid course, but that she had paved the way for it. I don’t know how that can be said. I’d reported back to her what had been determined and not determined at that lunch, and of course Rosalyn sank in her chair and whatever color was left went out of her cheek, but that’s not the same as my aunt saying, I surrender, you win, Mr. Toad, take it all, the pot’s yours. She thanked me for my efforts, she tried to get me to spend the night, her son’s boyhood twin beds where Phil Hodge and I had slept were still there, perhaps unslept in since then, the room unchanged, a shrine within a shrine, the sheets twenty-five years clean, and I turned her down. Briefly, she tried to hold me there with family gossip, talk of Howie’s children, three of whom had taken their millions, spent it, and scattered over the map. The oldest, Alan, had come and gone and had presently gone again, but she asked me to guess who had come back, in the wake of a failed marriage, and—and that was when I learned what had happened to Howie’s lakefront house, how Laurie Whalen had realized that as long as it was known as her husband’s death house it would never sell, so she took it off the market and in what was regarded as a pique of self-impoverishment tore it down, only to get all her money back by selling off the land as five narrow lakefront lots, cheek by jowl. My aunt told me Laurie had come by to see her, but it was hard on her, on both of them. Lacking Howie, and three of the four children seemingly gone for good, they had little to say to each other. My aunt had an address, a crosstown condo. Why didn’t I spend the night in Howie’s boyhood bed and then the next morning drive over there and see if I could find her? And how could I begin to explain to my aunt that crossing town now would be like Achilles trying to catch up to Zeno’s tortoise, I could run and run and never get there, never catch up to that turtle, never get to Laurie’s condo, halve the distance, halve that and halve it again, that my only recourse was to drive out of town along the route her husband had once traced on a map, Big Howie Whalen, who had wished me and my Yankee friend good luck and sent out a state trooper to see us on our way, and damned if we hadn’t caught fish.

  I kissed my aunt. She was slumped in her chair, the steel gone out of her eyes. Her maid May met me at the kitchen door, the same door Big Howie had been trying to reach when he’d collapsed partway up the walk. You come back now, you hear, Miz Ros-lyn be waitin’ for you, which was half true and half false, or perhaps entirely true in that, snakes coming in all shapes and sizes, Rosalyn would be waiting for me to come back and finish what a little Boston bulldog had started. Or did I think life was one long series of handouts? Didn’t I know there was a price to pay?

  I stepped outside while Walter prepared a stew whose ingredients he’d brought from home. Byron Wainwright appeared to have played himself into submission and either sat spent on his dock or had gone back up to his house. But I didn’t walk down toward the lake. I walked back up toward the car, passed it, and in the darkness started out along a path leading into the woods. Whether in or out of coverage I didn’t know, but I took maybe twenty-five or thirty paces into the woods, where leaves rustled and the path felt mossy and damp, and stopped when I came to the first widening and I smelled before I could hear or see it a small stream. Then I heard it, on a frequency
all its own, water slipping over shards of shale, and the smell was clean, rank and clean, earth and water and stone.

  I had coverage and I made the call. The face of the phone cast its alien glow into the surrounding foliage until I put it to my ear. Elaine answered by asking, Where are you, Jim, and I told her, Off by myself, talking to my ex-wife who remains the only woman in my life while our mutual friend Walter Kidman makes supper, and Elaine laughed. Where exactly, she said, and I told her I’d just stepped into a dark wood. She was about to laugh again, but caught it. She had the sort of voice that came through clear on a phone, for which a phone served to filter off all impurities so that you heard the voice’s music, and frequently I’d called her for no more than that, to listen to her speak. She said, How dark, Jim, and I told her my eyes were adjusting, it was all right, as always it was good hearing her voice, and it had been very good spending this time with Walter, whose cooking—and she interrupted me. Jim, why the dark wood? For a moment I didn’t say anything, I let her hear the passing stream, the insects, the breeze in the trees, three orders of nature, wind, water, and a tiny, multitudinous pulsing of life, before answering, Just for some privacy, before we sit down to eat. She caught a second laugh. I could picture her face, she had dark eyes, which when her expression turned serious had a leveling effect, she settled the way a bird settles on a nest, she spread out and then there was work to be done, eggs to hatch, and no humoring her. Are you getting along, you and Walter? I answered, Yes. Fishing? Once. Cards? No. Sightseeing? A half-empty town. Drinking? Yes. Too much? Not so far. Yet you’re passing the time. I’m telling Walter a story, I said. It was never actually a fishing story, even though that’s how it began. Now it’s something else. A story you haven’t told me? No. Yes. A story I haven’t told you. A guy story? Well, that’s also how it began. And you’re worried you can’t keep it up? You don’t want to disappoint our friend? You’ll keep going and keep going and then it will be—what? A shaggy dog story, I said. Elaine said, You know, I’ve heard that expression countless times and never quite been sure what it meant. A story, I said, with no point and an anticlimactic end. A story that arouses large expectations and then abandons them. A joke on the listener, which some listeners never forgive. Actually, Walter brought the expression up. Then he gave me a second chance. Elaine and I held a silence. I held it, then passed it on to her. A dove began to coo overhead, a deep-breasted, chuckling sound. Finally, I concluded, the joke’s on you. Your story goes nowhere. When you have a chance to end it, you don’t. What goes around comes around, and before it’s over your shaggy dog has bitten you in the butt. Walter would never do that, Elaine objected, he’s not going to allow your shaggy dog to bite you in the butt, Jim. Then she didn’t check her laugh, healthy and deeper in her chest than her voice would lead you to expect. What’s he making for supper? Some sort of stew, I believe. Enjoy it, she said. Better go before he rings the supper bell. Before she could hang up, I said, I might call you again, Elaine. Don’t be surprised if I do. There was a long pause as the forest sounds swarmed in, accompanied by the passing of that stream. Then she said, Do you want me to drive over there, Jim? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? That wasn’t what I was trying to tell her, not at all, I really did just want to hear the sound of her voice. But what I ended up saying was, Not yet.