The Souvenir Museum

by Elizabeth McCracken

  “The feeling persists,” said Louis.

  “Dad.”

  “I’ve lost your name,” Louis said gently.

  “Daddy!” said David.

  Louis realized he’d said the wrong thing. “Of course I haven’t. Don’t be daft,” he said, as though he’d become the Scotsman he’d wanted to be.

  “Why did you say that?” said David, aware of the anger in his own voice. He understood what was happening, in a way; he knew it was an occasion for sympathy, not fury, but the sympathy he had—inexhaustible!—was buried beneath a layer of fury, and he had to tunnel through, he had to scrabble to get at it. He had to go back in time to before his father had forgotten his name, when he was saying unforgivable things. “Dad,” he said again.

  “I didn’t. David,” he said. There it was.

  Louis knew what year it was, and he could do nearly everything for himself, but thinking clearly when he was daydreaming was like standing while asleep—he could not do it. The puffins hopped in and out of burrows, as if into stockrooms. His confusion hung between them; they both understood they wouldn’t speak of it. Not till they’d been home for some months, and even then, it would be cautious. Dad, you’ve forgotten. Yes, I suppose I have.

  “You got up here!” said a woman. “Good for you.”

  They turned to look. It was the mother of the Eastern European family. Her English was confusingly accentless: not American nor English nor Scottish. “I wore the wrong shoes,” she said, lifting her foot to display a white sneaker half-browned with mud. “I didn’t understand.”

  “No,” said David.

  “Still it’s lovely. Puffin therapy,” said the woman. “They call it so.”

  “I can understand that,” said Louis. He turned to look at the puffins. “They’re peaceful. They give you a sense of peace. Don’t you think, David?”

  Well, yes, David looked at them and he felt better and he resented them. The birds indeed had the curvilinear heads of his father’s family. He could believe that they thought things, which he had never believed about birds. (Some people love animals for how alien they are—that was Louis—others for how like—that was David.) Already he had convinced himself that momentarily forgetting his name was something his father might have done any day of his life.

  Little brothers. Fraterculi. His mizpocah. No brothers but puffins, no uncles but puffins, no cousins. He wanted to call his mother.

  “It lifts your heart,” his father said to the woman, who answered, “All nature does, no?”

  “No,” said David. He didn’t want it to be all nature. He wanted it to be something you had to travel for, a fairy-tale journey: a boat, another boat, a treacherous approach, an unhappy revelation, a comic one.

  “Perhaps,” said Louis.

  “Cormorants,” said David. “They’re not uplifting.”

  “They are!” said the woman. “When they fly—”

  “I’m not interested in birds when they fly,” said David. Then, to change the subject, “Where are you visiting from?”

  “Tomorrow we fly ourselves. To Helsinki.”

  “That’s home?” Louis asked.

  “That’s home.”

  “Ah,” David said, “you’re Finnish.”

  “Finnish,” said Louis. “Like a fish.”

  “Just so,” said the woman. “Ah, here are my people.”

  Here they came. They seemed to have multiplied during their time on the island, led by the girl, laughing. She saw Louis, and waved, then her mother, to whom she ran. She said something in Finnish, a language David did not understand and therefore found irksome.

  He repacked the bag, the glasses, the cheese with one wedge cut out. He drank as much of the bottle of water as he could, to make the bag lighter. For a flashing moment he thought, Maybe I’ll just walk off the cliff, then, Maybe Dad will—he didn’t want either of these things; it was all disaster or triumph for him, as usual. Why is life so easy for some people? he wondered, as he had many times in his life, though this time he wanted an actual answer. He thought it might be something you could study for.

  The whole boat understood now: the old American man was their ward till the end of the day. The scramble across the rocks was no easier on the way back except that the picnic bag was emptier and it seemed more likely they’d survive. The Finnish woman took one of Louis’s hands and one of her teenage boys took the other, and the girl with the binoculars led them back. Robby stepped from the boat and pointed at good rocks to step to, as though coaching a game of chess. “There’s a flat one, and there’s another, and another.”

  David knew his mother had not wanted to get rid of his father. Life did. His father had never been able to tell the difference between the two.

  “We’re lucky with the weather!” the Englishwoman with the potato shoes said to Louis as they settled in the boat.

  “Are you?” said Louis. “Good for you.”

  The woman gave a wry smile, then said to David, “Did you get to the top?”

  “My son has a fear of heights,” said Louis.

  “Vertigo,” said the woman’s husband, pointing to himself. They both had white hair that showed the pink of their scalps beneath. “Just found out. Hell of a way to do it.”

  “You’re all right,” said the Englishwoman.

  “I bloody well am not,” he said.

  Staffa was a monumental lump of rock with a green top, vertically ribbed around the middle like a midcentury juice glass: spectacular, hard to make sense of. The boat came round and showed the maw of Fingal’s Cave, dark and glittering, accessible only by a narrow ledge with rope bannister. If you stepped wrong you would end up on the rock below. It looked like the first stop in the afterworld, the place you’d come to in order to get sorted.

  “Oh no,” said David.

  “No,” agreed the septuagenarian Englishman. “You know, a bloke died here a few years back.”

  Again Robby leaned in close to David, to menace or joke man-to-man. “Just the one. German. Backed off a cliff snapping his camera.”

  “Shall we go together?” the Englishwoman said to Louis, then to David, “I’ll take him,” as though this was what happened all the time: the fainthearted, the stumble-footed stayed behind, and a swap was made. The brave must go with the brave. The chickenshit sat with the chickenshit. For a moment David felt a wave of relief—when his father dropped from a height, as he’d been trying to do all day, it wouldn’t be his fault. I didn’t even see it happen, he imagined saying.

  “You’ll be my husband,” said the Englishwoman to Louis, taking his hand.

  “I’ll what?”

  “No, no,” said David. “I’ll come.”

  “Well done,” said Robby, in a voice of doom.

  You walked the ledge on the side of a sheer cliff, till you walked around the corner, and there it was, Fingal’s Cave, a cathedral half-built by fairy folk. The ledge sloped up. Rock face to your right, a drop down to rocks on the left. The walls were built of basalt columns like polygonal organ pipes, gorgeous and threatening. The cave echoed. Some people balked going in, acrophobes and claustrophobes, and turned back and stepped down onto the hard rock beach, also made of the hexagonal rock but sawed off, the kind of geometry you wouldn’t be surprised to see under a microscope, startling when life-sized and out in the open.

  The cave was a vast space with the sea sloshing in; the ledge itself was narrow for one-way traffic, never mind the necessary two: people sidled in and saw what they wanted then turned around and had to negotiate the oncomers, who froze against the walls with unease or skirted the edge and tried not to look down. Why would you do it? It was nearly slapstick, strangers fitting their bodies together (bottom to pelvis, bosom to Adam’s apple), reeling their arms in the air. Gravity is hilarious, until it kills you. Another thing his father had brought him to, full of excitement, that he had hated: silent movies at the revival house. Plimoth Plantation. The Museum of Natural History. The old battleship in the harbor. The graveyard to
do rubbings. The trolley museum. His mother’s wake.

  “This is intolerable,” David said aloud.

  The Englishwoman reached behind with her free hand and took his.

  Echoey commotion ahead. You couldn’t come out unchanged. They should turn back. It was him. He was the weak one. The Finns were deep in. The mother with her muddy shoes looked less brave here, perhaps why she hadn’t gone up the mountain on Lunga, and the daughter with Down syndrome was making little ah-ah-ah noises of care, and so she could listen to her voice echo. David thought he might faint. He tried to get his hand loose. If he did faint, if he did tip over, he would pull the Englishwoman down, and then his father, who might have joined up to who-knows-who in front. A daisy chain of tourists down, not just one careless German. Lunch for Fingal.

  The story of this trip was supposed to be the past: Arlene was dead. He had thought the future was a ways away. She would have hated to outlive me, Louis had told David. The sad thing was she’d been looking forward to it. She loved him, she’d miss him: at least the house would be quiet.

  All of a sudden, without planning to, David was sitting down.

  “Op!” said somebody behind him.

  He crossed his legs and leaned against the wall. Below him the water sloshed. Where did the tide go, when it went out? He always imagined it balling up in the middle of the ocean, but what if it were a blanket tugged between sleepers, first one side of the bed, then the other?

  “Vertigo,” he heard a woman pronounce in an English accent.

  On either side of him people were trying to coax him to his feet. It was too narrow a foothold for kindness. Somebody tried to go behind him; another stepped over his legs.

  “Get up,” the Englishwoman said.

  No. He would have to be pulled from the cave like a tooth. The only solution for fear was stubbornness. His mother had taught him that. She had raised him to believe in the power of obstinacy, and now, on an uninhabited island in a cathedral built by nobody, he clung to his faith. He was the only child of an old man. That had meant one thing when he was a boy, and meant new things now.

  Then his father was there, leaning over, hands on thighs.

  “Well,” said Louis. “What have we here?”

  “I should get up,” admitted David.

  Louis looked around them. On one side, a girl wearing binoculars regarded them. A bird-watcher, perhaps—those were good bird-watching glasses—and then Louis recognized her as one of Sidney’s countrywomen, her face round and flat and, at the moment, impressed at this peculiar behavior. He sat down.

  “This is not progress!” yelled one of the Swedes.

  “Come on, friend,” said Louis. “Let’s stand up.”

  “I’m not your friend,” said David.

  Louis nodded. No, his beautiful, pessimistic son—pessimism is a form of cowardice, but Louis knew better than to say so to his beloved pessimists. “Nevertheless.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “The usual way, I think,” said Louis. Then, helped by a dozen hands, as in a child’s séance, they were lifted up, and the cave was filled with applause, genuine, sarcastic, dutiful.

  Nobody mentioned anything on the boat home. “Subdued!” said Robby, appraising them as they boarded, one by one, then, to David, “You caught the Scottish sun. Rare but deadly. Should have worn a hat.”

  Back in Tobermory they passed a poster for the Highland Games, held that day at the golf course. Already the cabers were being packed up. That’s what we should have done, David thought. By next month his father might not even remember the puffins. But around the world a story would be told, in Helsinki, in Devon, in Malmö: A man panicked. We saved him. Without us he would have died.

  He would have to rearrange both their lives before the worst happened. But not yet. Together they would fly back to Boston. David would go on to Seattle; from a distance he could pretend his father was fine. It’s not an emergency, he told himself, though he knew otherwise, an emergency the way all of life was.

  In front of the bank a teenage boy played violin for money; when David concentrated he recognized it as “Good Vibrations,” heart-lifting and strange. He put his hands in his pockets and found one fifty-pence piece, polygonal like the rocks of Staffa. He tossed it into the open violin case.

  “Got any pound coins?” David asked, and his father dug in his pockets, produced two handfuls of broken things.

  That morning they’d been to the little history museum. Had his father stolen something? Blue, brown, violet: the pottery looked old, older than his father, than Levine’s of Montville. Exhibition old. It was beautiful, timeworn, a jumble. These things had been broken for generations. David could not make sense of any of it.

  “Where’d you get this?” He picked up the headless figure of a cow.

  “There.” Louis pointed at the beach. Low tide now, better picking.

  “What are you talking about?”

  His father gazed upon him with those pale eyes, gone mother-of-pearl with age. He pointed again. “There.”

  The two of them went down the concrete steps, greened from the tides. “Careful,” said David. “Careful,” said Louis. He leaned over, discovered a bit of teapot, with a black-and-white pattern that looked like a castle turret. He pointed to the ground, and David picked up a rhomboid piece of plate painted with radiating lashes of blue. A triangle of yellow plate with dark green flowers. A spout.

  “Where did it come from?” said David.

  “It washes up,” said Louis. “The past. They used the harbor as a dump. Same as when I was a kid. There’s a box of it, in the attic. That will come to you, too.”

  It would all come to David. They both knew it and hated it, and yet: saucer, lip, hand-painted flower. The tide went out, revealing things. The ocean would not swallow them today.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” David said.

  “I don’t know,” said Louis, but he remembered how little they ever agreed on.

  They picked and picked, but they could not pick it all. Mere men could never undo the work of mere men. From the hill the sound of pipers: the games had ended; the pipers were headed squallingly home. The violinist quit; it wasn’t a fair fight. David stood up, looked at the pieces on his palm, turned them all bright side up. A glory, so vivid and so unmendable. His now. The pipers blared louder. When he looked out toward the water he almost thought he could see them, the old people, the auld ones, casting their pottery into the sea just so he, David, David Levine, could find it generations later.

  As for Louis, he had turned to the main street to watch the band of pipers round the corner onto Tobermory’s main street. Dozens marching in time. So young, the pipers, high school kids, boys and girls—it was a girl in the front, spinning the red bass drumsticks. You could hear your own name in the music of the pipes, the names of all your ancestors and descendants, wherever they came from, wherever they were headed. What could be sadder than not loving this sound? Everything swung in time. He was alone on a beach as usual, gladdened, slaked, exhausted. The muscles of his legs twitched.

  Oh, Arlene: it was always about the kilt.

  It’s Not You

  Hotels were different in those days. You could smoke in them. The rooms had bathtubs, where you could also smoke. You didn’t need a credit card or identification, though you might be made to sign the register, so later the private detective—just like that, we’re in a black-and-white movie, though I speak only of the long-ago days of 1993—could track you down. Maybe you anticipated the private detective, and wrote down an assumed name.

  Nobody was looking for me. I didn’t use an assumed name, though I wasn’t myself. I’d had my heart broken, or so I thought; I had been shattered in a collision with a man, or so I thought; and I went to the fabled pink hotel just outside the midwestern town where I lived. The Narcissus Hotel: it sat on the edge of a lake and admired its own reflection. Behind, an ersatz lake, an amoebic swimming pool, now drained, empty lounge chairs all around. January 1
: cold, but not yet debilitating. In my suitcase I’d brought one change of clothing, a cosmetic bag, a bottle of Jim Beam, a plastic sack of Granny Smith apples. I thought this was all I needed. My plan was to drink bourbon and take baths and feel sorry for myself. Paint my toenails, maybe. Shave my legs. My apartment had only a small fiberglass shower I had to fit myself into, as though it were a science fiction pod that transported me to nowhere, but cleaner.

  I would watch television, too. In those days, I didn’t own one, and there is a certain level of weeping that can only be achieved while watching TV, self-excoriating, with a distant laugh track. I wanted to demolish myself, but I intended on surviving the demolition.

  It wasn’t the collision that had hurt me. It was that the other party, who’d apologized and explained a catalog of deficiencies—self-loathing, an unsuitability for any kind of extended human contact—had three weeks later fallen spectacularly and visibly in love with a woman and they could be seen—seen by me—necking in the public spaces of the small town. The coffee shop, the bar, before the movie started at the movie theater. I was young then—we all were—but not so young that public necking was an ordinary thing to do. We weren’t teenagers but grown-ups: late twenties in my case, early thirties in theirs.

  New Year’s Day in the Narcissus Hotel. The lobby was filled with departing hangovers and their owners. Paper hats fell with hollow pops to the ground. Everyone winced. You couldn’t tell whose grip had failed. Nothing looked auspicious. That was good. My New Year’s resolution was to feel as bad as I could as fast as I could in highfalutin privacy, then leave the tatters of my sadness behind, with the empty bottle and six apple cores.

  “How long will you be with us?” asked the spoon-faced redheaded woman behind the desk. She wore a brass name tag that read EILEEN.

  “It will only seem like forever,” I promised. “One night.”

  She handed me a brass key on a brass fob. Hotels had keys, in those days.