The Souvenir Museum

by Elizabeth McCracken

  “We’ll miss the boat,” his son said.

  “Let’s not,” Louis answered, and put the treasure in his pockets.

  He had wanted a kilt and Arlene (née MacLean) had forbidden it: that was the story of their marriage. He was one of those Jews who could pass for a Scot, redheaded and black-humored. Why did he want a kilt so? He liked to sing:

  Let the wind blow high, let the wind blow low.

  Through the streets in my kilt I’ll go.

  All the lassies shout, Hello!

  Donald, where’s your troosers?

  It had never been about the kilt, of course. He was the youngest of seven brothers, none of whom ever married, except him, at the age of forty-seven. Before that, and for years, he and his brothers had run the family department store in Montville, Massachusetts. Back then, their parents dead, the brothers went every year down the Cape for two weeks’ vacation, crammed into a cottage called Beach Rose, until Arlene MacLean met Louis Levine in Wellfleet and took him away. He had deserted one family and only wanted to belong to the next. He’d thought he might wear a kilt to their wedding. “Oh no,” said Arlene. “No kilt.” “But your uncles—” “No kilts anywhere.” “Bagpipes?” “I hate them.” What could be sadder in a marriage than incompatible feelings about bagpipes? Ought they still marry? They eloped, and had a child, and never argued, except for the one thing. It became a running joke: the man wanted a kilt. “I have fine calves,” he said. He immersed himself in everything Scottish: his favorite movie took place on the Isle of Mull, in the Inner Hebrides. “Look at that light,” he would say to his family, who didn’t care for the black-and-white light of the 1940s, not when modern times were right outside the door, and plenty well lit.

  Now Arlene MacLean Levine was two months dead, and his son had taken him to Scotland, to tour Mull, its castles and coastline, its birdlife: today they would take a boat to an uninhabited island that promised puffins. David himself didn’t like birds, couldn’t tell them apart, didn’t want to: it struck him as feeble-minded, to stare at the throats and tails of birds for a flush or flash, just so you could name them. Seagull, pigeon, chicken, hawk, that was all you needed. All other birds were sparrows to him. As a child he’d found his father’s ornithological obsession a moral failing: his father had never asked a single question about his son’s life, or any other living human’s. Louis loved animals, ate them; the mass grave of the local natural history museum had made David a vegetarian at age thirteen. Study me, he’d wanted to say to his father: the narrow-footed David, the bearded Levine, the flat-bottomed vegetarian. Write me down in your book.

  He’d brought his father to Scotland, paid for everything, in attempt to ease the guilt he felt for living so far away, for having preferred distance all his adult life. He’d given his father birds and haggis and properly smoky, properly spelled whisky. A kilt, if it came to that.

  He missed his gloomy mother. Together they called Louis the Infernal Optimist. He’d burn the house down looking for a bright side.

  They boarded the boat in brilliant Tobermory. One of the men who worked for the tour company helped Louis down with a gentle hand. Poor old Dad, thought David. Then the man offered him the same courtly assistance. “Down you go,” said the man, in the analgesic voice of a nurse. The boat was filled with the particular anxiety of paying customers who all wanted the best seat.

  “Here, Dad,” said David. He gestured to the bench along the gunwale.

  David was not superstitious except in this way: he liked to feel lucky. No black cat or broken mirror bothered him, he never crossed fingers or made wishes, but every day was an omen for itself. He oscillated between his father’s cheer and his mother’s dolor: everything was perfect, unless it went to shit. The sun was shining in Scotland, clouds like storybook sheep above them though the local sheep were goatish, angular, weird. It was a good day, which meant it would be a good day, which meant every day for a while might be good. He’d packed the plaid picnic tote provided by the house they’d rented: bottle of water, bottle of wine, truckle of cheese, bread, cookies, fruit. They would picnic among the puffins.

  Over the PA came the voice of the captain, the voice of God.

  “Beautiful day,” he said. “This is our one day of Scottish summer, and you’re lucky to have it. Should be a nice trip to the Treshnish Isles, little more than an hour’s journey. First stop is Lunga, where we’ll have two hours, then to Staffa and Fingal’s Cave. If you have any questions, Robby will answer.”

  Robby was the man who’d helped them into the boat. Now that he had a name, he became particular, a smiling man in oilskins, one starboard dimple, a boxer’s nose. David tried to decide whether to dislike him.

  “Finkel’s Cave?” said Louis.

  “Fingal’s,” said Robby.

  “Finkel,” said Louis.

  Robby shook his head, smiling uncertainly. “Fingal. Guh-guh-guh. Scottish giant. Same hexagonal rock formation as the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland. Basalt pillars.”

  David said to Louis, “Finkel’s Cave sounds like one of your competitors.”

  Levine’s of Montville had closed the year before David’s birth; his father was already managing the benefits office of the hospital. The escalators, the layaway counter, the sliding oak and iron ladders in the storeroom, all gone, the Levine brothers dispersed, dead, buried in a line in the Jewish section of the Montville cemetery. Louis Levine, in the back of a boat headed to the uninhabited Treshnish Isles, was the last bit of equipment: a blinking man, a blinking sign, LEVINE’S, LEVINE’S, LEVINE’S.

  All shipwrecks begin with a ship. David assessed the other passengers. Who would be saved and who lost? His father still went to the Y most mornings to swim laps, could save himself, but David was sturdy and without children and was certain that Robby would deputize him in case of catastrophe. He decided he would rise to the occasion.

  A group of tall Swedes carried their lunches in waist packs and would not sit down, a hale septuagenarian English couple wore matching sensible shoes that looked like baked potatoes. The largest group came from some Eastern European country. It was hard to pick out how they were all related, easy to find their darling, a beautiful ten-year-old girl with Down syndrome. She had dark brown hair and prodigiously thick eyelashes, slate blue eyes, salmon cheeks. A selkie, a very selkie: at any moment she might assume her seal form and dive into the water. She scanned the horizon with binoculars and then, laughing, trained them on the faces of her family. David looked at his father, whose brother Sidney had had Down syndrome, too—Sidney, like all the brothers, had worked at the store until he died.

  But Louis: Louis had forgotten where he was again. This was his secret. These days, when he daydreamed (dreamy Louis, all the time), he lost himself. His brain went along its track and when coming around did not recognize the station. Still, a station: you could make sense of it, you could navigate any train station in the world, despite the language, the local customs. Train stations obeyed. Keep tight till you know where you are, you’ll be all right. Outside the boat, the water flashed, bent, bulged, and fish—fish! He said it to his son, “Fish!”

  “Dolphins!” said David. “Look!”

  Blue sky and dolphins, the wind battering their ears, a laughing girl, a picnic at their feet: a triumph.

  “Will there definitely be puffins?” a tall Swedish woman asked.

  “Were yesterday,” said Robby.

  “Is it guaranteed?”

  “Puffins yesterday, most likely puffins today,” Robby said. “Sir!”

  Louis was leaning over the side of the boat, kneeling on the bench and staring at the water. The Swedish woman grabbed him by the collar of his coat. “Upla,” she said, gentling Louis back on his seat.

  “Hey,” said Robby to David. “Look after your father.”

  “He’s—”

  “Look after him,” said Robby.

  “All right, folks,” said the voice of God. “We’re going to go take a closer look at our friends on that r
ock.”

  The rocks in a line on the larger rock lifted their heads and revealed themselves to be seals.

  “Oh, the sweet things,” said Louis, and the laughing girl gasped, went silent, laughed again. “Puffin,” Louis said suddenly; he thrust his finger skyward at a flying bird—“Puffin, puffin.”

  “Puffin,” the girl agreed.

  “Puffins can’t fly,” said David.

  “Yes, they can,” said several voices in several accents.

  “You’re thinking of penguins,” said Robby.

  “I thought—”

  “Puffins fly,” said Robby firmly. Then he leaned in and said in David’s ear, so the children couldn’t hear, “Don’t confuse them with penguins. They fuckin’ hate that.”

  The website for the tour had said that the path to the puffins was rocky. What they meant was boulderous. Each rock was the size of a human head or larger, and loose, and shifted when you stepped. “Look for the flat ones!” called Robby, who would stay on the boat. People stood on their rocks, trying to figure out which way might not kill them. Disaster, thought David. He tried to keep the picnic bag on his back, but it kept swinging to his front and knocking him off balance. His mother might have been delighted by a fancy picnic; every morning for years his father had stuck a deviled ham sandwich in his back pocket and sat on it till lunchtime, when it was warm and flat and ready to eat. He needed, he had always needed, so little. David started crawling over the rocks on all fours, the bag a ringing bell of stupidity. His father was seventy-seven. They had no business here. The tour company should have warned him.

  “Are you all right?” the Englishwoman called.

  David straightened up to see his father standing like a statue on a rock, facing a little inlet. Marooned. He’d gone the wrong direction.

  “Do you need a hand, Dad?”

  No answer. His father could do this sometimes, get lost in thought, but in an armchair. What happened if an old man broke his hip on the Treshnish Isles? Would he be airlifted to safety? Buried at sea?

  “Dad!” David shouted, then all around him, the voices of his fellow passengers like birdcall: “Sir!” “Sir!” “Hey!” “Buddy!” “My friend!” “Sir!”

  Slowly, his father pivoted. He gave a fluttering wave with the back of his hand and made his way tightroperly across the rocks.

  On the shore, they were confronted with a muddy path straight up a hill. David struggled with the bag. Ahead of him, Louis walked up at an angle, as though against the wind, dipping his fingertips in the mud. Then they stood on a wide green plateau. David turned and regarded the view: blue sky above, slate sea below, grass and—

  —his father said, in a fond voice, “Oh, little brothers. Look, Davey, look at them.”

  White-breasted, orange-beaked, hopping along the ground, birds the size of books: puffins, dozens of them, so many you couldn’t count, or see them as individuals; they constituted mere puffinosity. People walked right up and took pictures. They were not seagulls nor pigeons, who begged for food or stole it: they were merely the locals, accustomed to the seasonal influx of gawkers. Patient, accessible, aloof. They could fly but chose not to. David pulled out his phone. He almost laughed when the bird in front of him appeared on the screen.

  “I didn’t think they’d be so close,” he said. “Why aren’t they afraid?”

  “Because their predators are,” said Louis. This fact was a shard of pottery: it lay there; he snatched it up. “The puffins know that if humans are near, their predators won’t be. They live in burrows. See them hopping in and out?”

  “They’re so sweet,” said David wonderingly. He wanted to pick one up, dandle it on his knee. There was more island to scale—the voice of God had told them that the views from the top of Lunga were astonishing—but why risk it when they were here and already astonished? He set down the bag. The puffins were endearing and ridiculous, with expressions that suggested they thought the same of you, coming all this way to gawk at puffins. He pulled out the cheese in its black wax armor and held it in his palm like Yorick’s skull.

  “Is that your father?” said a passing Swede.

  His father had walked to the edge of the plateau, to the sheer drop that overlooked the bouldered beach. He leaned over on one foot, windmill-limbed.

  The day was lovely, till Dad fell off the cliff.

  “Come back!” called David. His father had once been afraid of heights (one thing they had in common). Now he leaned farther out. David knew he should go retrieve him; he didn’t think he could. “Dad!”

  His father folded his limbs together and pointed behind David, to the island’s peak. “Let’s go up.”

  “Well, I think—”

  But his father was already heading toward the upward path, and David had to follow. He slipped the cheese back in the bag and left everything behind.

  The ground was mud-shifty. You had to use your whole body to ascend. How was Louis moving so quickly? It was not, David thought, that he was acrophobic. He had acrophobia by proxy, which was just as bad. He felt everyone else was about to fall off the mountain: the old English people, the Swedes, above all his father, who seemed to have been bitten by one of the cliff-walking sheep on the Isle of Mull. David cursed his worn-out running shoes. He could not see his father. He hoped that their shipmates—there were several different boatloads of tourists on the uninhabited island—would look after him. The path was narrow. The mud persisted. He tried to keep his father safe with the force of his mind.

  When he got to the top, his father was absolutely fine, not even out of breath, and peering into a little grotto.

  “Nesting cormorants,” said Louis. “Look. Mother and chick.”

  The cormorants were waist-high, with elongated mechanical heads. They looked as though they could nip your hands off like shears. David backed away. Even as a teenager he had understood his father’s love of birds as a kind of religious belief: so deep a longing to see a winged creature it could not be satiated by a single sighting, you had to keep going, you knew you would never reach perfection, you strove for it even so, red-throated, yellow-tailed, lesser, greater. David was like any child of a zealot: he could not compete; he would not be comforted.

  The voice of God was right: the view was astonishing. Boggling. Better than the view below? Yes. All right, David told himself. The walk was worth it. The day was saved. He felt some rigging in his soul relax. He could use some water, but he’d left it below.

  “Beautiful!” said Louis, looking at the cormorants.

  “Let’s go down,” said David, though he was frightened at the thought. Down was always worse.

  Years before, when they were young—not young people, but a young family—they had gone to Plimoth Plantation, where you went to look at so-called pilgrims in their habitat, actors refusing to acknowledge the modern world while they went about their duties. This incensed Arlene, as did nearly anything that involved grown-ups pretending: children’s television, or playing charades. She and David narrowed their eyes at the phonies. What a despicable way to earn your living! But Louis had loved it. The pilgrims’ calmness as they dipped their candles, ground their corn. They reminded him of the Levine brothers. There was always something to do, back in the long ago. His brothers had started to die almost the moment Louis had left the house: he had turned out to be a load-bearing wall.

  It was a pleasure to be among the puffins, who reminded him of the pilgrims, who reminded him of his brothers.

  “Lunch among the little brothers,” said Louis, once they got back to their bag. He had not read about puffins in years. Everything was there. “What their Latin name means. Fratercula: little brother. Because they look like monks, I guess, in robes. Myself I think puffins are Jewish.”

  “Because of the beaks.”

  “Not only. I’m Jewish myself, you know. They’re pelagic. They fish at sea.”

  “Of course.” David opened the box of crackers, which turned out to be charcoal black, like dog biscuits. The picni
c tote even had a cheese board and knife, as well as plastic champagne flutes, cutlery, and plates for four, unnecessary and now comic. He cut a wedge of cheddar. “The company of puffins,” he said.

  Louis said, regarding one, “Arlene’s trying to get rid of me.”

  “What—”

  “She’d deny it.”

  “Dad. She died.”

  “I know that,” said Louis, irritated. “Nevertheless.”

  Yes. She was dead. That didn’t change things. Arlene had not trusted him to live alone. “We have to plan for the future,” she’d said. Who wanted to? Let the future itself do the planning. Louis thought of his brother Sidney, who sometimes bothered the customers by simply existing, his beaming smile, his joy over strangers. “Why don’t you put him in a home?” people asked. “He could be with other people like him.” What they meant was: I am different from him and do not wish to be near. Why don’t you get rid of him?

  Because I want him near. Because he is with people like him, his family. Oh, Louis had never really wanted to leave his brothers, enter the world of ordinary people, life with a woman and all her, what were they, accoutrements. His brothers would have looked after him forever.