My parents keep talking about enlarging the cabin and making improvements, but for the moment my mother is glad to stay home, and at that time in my life I have better things to do than take vacations with my family.
But Robbie and my father fall in love with the place. They have spent most of Robbie’s teenage years fighting—the usual arguments over music, curfew, car. It wasn’t terrible, but it was bad enough; at its worst, Robbie moved out and lived with his friend Mark’s family for a month. My father has never been the world’s most amiable man, even on a good day. He has a few things in common with his brother Bill. But on the island a spell is cast over them both. They become what they have never been before: buddies. They fish, sit in the sun drinking beer, listen to staticy baseball on Robbie’s portable radio, play endless games of frisbee and two-handed poker.
“You may not believe this, but Dad is actually not a bad guy,” is the way Robbie puts it to me. But for a brief, strange, wonderful period, the trips to Maine change my father’s life.
“I’ve got my boy back,” he says to my mother after their first trip together. He has dropped Robbie off at Dartmouth and come home filthy, sunburned, sand in his hair, his clothes stinking of fish. “I was beginning to think I’d lost the kid for good,” he says. “But it’s like old times. It’s better than old times, because we really talked to each other. We really listened to each other, that was the amazing thing.”
My mother tells me about this conversation the day after Robbie’s funeral—about Dad’s fishy clothes, and how for days after he got home she would catch him grinning at nothing. “I don’t know if I ever saw your father so happy before,” she says. “I didn’t care if I ever set foot on that island again, but I have to admit I was a little jealous.”
But things get cool again between Dad and Robbie. Their arguments are predictable and inevitable, given the times, given their personalities, and no number of fishing trips can change things. They disagree about the war in Vietnam, about Nixon, about Robbie’s ponytail, about the girl he brings briefly home on semester break that year. My mother is worried about Robbie; he is flunking chemistry, flunking German; he looks thin and unkempt; he is silent and withdrawn. When classes let out, he heads straight for Maine. He says he’s spending the summer in the cabin, alone. He needs to think, to get his head straight. My father hates that expression, he hates all Robbie’s trendy slang, and he makes fun of it mercilessly. “He’d get his head a lot straighter if he’d cut off some of that hair.” My father is also angry that Robbie won’t be working—both of us have been encouraged to work since the days of baby-sitting and paper routes—but Robbie has a job during the school year in the dining hall at Dartmouth and makes plenty of money, so there’s not a lot Dad can say. Robbie says he’s going to write some poetry. Take some photographs. Get in touch with nature. Figure things out.
My mother worries all summer—that summer I’m home working in the motel and mourning Pierce. There isn’t so much as a postcard from Robbie. One of my mother’s fears is that he has some girl with him and he’ll get her pregnant, but her greatest fear, the one that keeps her awake at night, is that he’ll flunk out of school and be drafted. My father says, “That would put his head straight for him all right.” We watch the Democratic Convention on television, the riots, the police bashing long-haired boys like Robbie over the head, and my mother says, “I suppose I should be thankful he’s safe up in Maine.”
His body isn’t discovered until late in August. One of the islanders calls the Maine State Police, they notify the Jamesville police, and we get the news from Ralph Jarrett, whose wife taught both Robbie and me in third grade, and whose daughters worked at our motel as maids all through high school. Ralph rings the bell late one hot afternoon, refuses the lemonade my mother offers, and says, “I sure wish I didn’t have to be the one to tell you people this.” His voice breaks. I’m standing in the middle of the kitchen. I push past Ralph and out the door, and head down to the pond where I watch the water-striders skim over its silver surface.
After the funeral, my mother goes through a period where she needs to talk about Robbie all the time, mostly reminiscences of his babyhood, his boyhood. I’m the one who has to listen to her, to cry with her at the kitchen table, passing the tissue box back and forth; it’s one reason I leave home again and go back to live in New Haven. My father quits talking completely unless it’s absolutely necessary, and he never speaks my brother’s name again until that New Year’s Eve when he calls James Robbie by mistake.
“If this were a movie, I would be the victim of a conspiracy. You and Alison Kaye would be in it together. Alison and her Filo-Fax would have been intentional—I was meant to see it, she sat down next to me deliberately. And the Mr. Pierce thing at the Frick was staged. And you knew me so well, you knew I’d pursue it.”
“I’m Pierce, and I staged my own death, and I’ve been biding my time all these years, cooking up this deal with Alison—and who else? The Mafia? The CIA? The PLO?”
“Sure. Why not? This is a movie.”
“And what’s the point of it all?” he asked. The Pierce smile on his face. “What’s behind this crazy scheme?”
We were in the Metro. I was wearing new clothes: a silk paisley skirt and a long-sleeved blouse with what the saleswoman called Cossack sleeves. I had spent a day prowling Macy’s and the Hello Boutique and the new, cute little shops on Chapel Street, and I had come away with a dress, a couple of skirts, blouses, a tailored jacket, sheer pale stockings, and leather: honey-colored shoes with little heels, and a soft brown bag like a mailman’s. I hadn’t worn leather in years. James admired the clothes, and his only comment about my buying leather again was, “So who can be perfect in an imperfect world?”
I felt good dressed up, looking normal. I felt pretty. I smiled back at Orin and said, “You’re probably involved in a plot to defraud me out of my fortune.”
“You don’t have a fortune.”
“If this were a movie, I would.”
He did something he had never done: leaned across the table and kissed me.
I said, “I wish this were that movie, Pierce. I really do. I’d hand it over to you without a struggle.”
He said, “Christine.”
I said, “I’m sorry.”
I begin by plaiting what Mrs. Spooler calls a cookie server out of folded strips of newspaper, but she sees I have a knack for it and lets me go on to a simple splint basket of flat reed. Then I make a cheese basket and a series of potato baskets. I learn fancy splintwork, the Deerfield border, advanced coiling (lazy squaw, Peruvian coil) based on Native American techniques. I make ribbed melon baskets, which are tricky, and a large clothes hamper. My hands become raw from working with wet reed. Mrs. Spooler says no one in her experience with craft therapy has ever caught on so fast, or made so many baskets in such a short time.
The time doesn’t seem short to me. I’m in the hospital for three months, and in that time I see Denis only once. Emile is divorcing me. He is taking Denis with him to France. Lucy’s Pup, not yet published, has already been sold to publishers in England, France, West Germany, Sweden, Japan. Emile comes to see me, tells me he is taking Denis, tells me exactly why.
“Are you going to contest it?” he asks me.
I only look at him. “What do you think?” I know Denis is better off with him, though I can’t believe Emile loves our son more than I do, or as much. I don’t know whether to believe it or not when he tells me Denis doesn’t ask for me.
That’s all I say: “What do you think?”—wearily, from my chair by the window that looks out on the parking lot, the brown roofs of New Haven, the smoky blue sky over Long Island Sound. I cried all the time when we got back from Plover Island—that’s partly why I’m here—and I still cry constantly, but I stop when Emile visits me. The sound of his voice, the things he accuses me of—all of this numbs me, gives me a kind of peace. He leaves, and his footsteps going away down the hall say to me that I have lost my son. I begin cry
ing again.
Basket-weaving is such a cliché, such a joke, but I can’t deny that it’s both restful and involving. It soothes me better than any medication. Sometimes I think I shouldn’t let myself be soothed, I should get help. Mrs. Spooler, Dr. Dalziel, Silvie—someone should know what Emile is doing. But there seems no point. I know that I don’t deserve to have Denis. It’s true that I’m unstable, I’m a bad mother, I’m good for nothing but sitting in a chair looking out the window, or making baskets. I have no idea what I’ll do when I leave the hospital, or where I’ll go. I have few friends, my parents aren’t nearby, my husband has left me, my son is gone.
I think constantly of Denis. I also think of Pierce, and of the visitation from Robbie. For years I wondered, and now my mind has been set at rest. Pierce is blameless: he remains my perfect, my own Pierce. My son is gone, but I have drunk tea with my brother, and Pierce has been returned to me.
I weave the wet, flat reed into shapes that please me. I learn twining and make raffia baskets with covers that fit precisely. I make a series of Shaker baskets in graduated sizes. I stop the constant weeping that has accompanied everything I do. I can eat the wretched hospital food. I sleep better. When I get a copy of Lucy’s Pup in the mail (with a printed card inside that says “Compliments of the Author”), all that’s left to me is a distant, desperate wish that I had a child on my lap to read it to.
Hugh invited James and me out to his place for dinner one night. He said that he and Helga wanted our advice: they were thinking of moving in together, and they were scared stiff.
“You’re our ideal couple,” Helga said to me on the phone. “Tell us how you do it.”
Helga was blonde and glamorous and a fund-raiser for one of the New Haven theaters; Hugh was a scruffy carpenter with a passion for stray cats. They seemed an unlikely couple—though perhaps no less odd than a watercolorist and an ex-accountant turned pizzateur.
“She’ll have a hell of a commute,” James said as we drove up to Hugh’s place. He had ten hilly acres in an area north and west of New Haven, miles from the nearest highway. “That’s the only drawback that I can see.”
It was a Sunday night. When my train had gotten in the night before, I went straight to Jimmy Luigi’s. My trips to New York were beginning to makes James uneasy: he was quiet and wary with me, and curious, though he wouldn’t question me directly. While he ladled out sauce and sprinkled cheese, I told him in detail about George’s reaction to my new group of slides. The truth was that I had talked briefly to George (who was interested but distant) from the phone booth at the Metro. With James, I made George into a joke. I exaggerated, I went too far. I could feel this happening, but I was unable to stop it. James looked at me oddly—I kept getting the feeling he was watching for me to slip up—though the only questions he asked me were practical ones about the possibilities for a show at the Aurora.
In the Metro, a tall, skinny black man who looked like Raymond walked toward our booth, and I put the menu in front of my face. “It’s a big town,” Orin said, taking it away. “Do you know what your chances are of being seen with me?”
It wasn’t Raymond, anyway. Then, walking through Central Park, I thought I saw Silvie.
“Relax,” Orin kept saying. “I’m your cousin, I’m an old college chum you ran into at the Modern, I’m the husband of some friend of yours and we’re on our way to pick her up. What’s the matter? Don’t you have any instinct for this sort of thing?”
I thought of my frantic fabrications about George Drescher. “I’m not much of a liar.”
He squeezed my arm. “Stick with me, baby.”
James exited off Route 8 and drove toward the minor highway that led to the back road that would take us to the lightless road that petered out to dirt just before Hugh’s place. “What should we advise?” James asked me. “Do it or not?”
“We’re their ideal couple,” I said. “If we say do it, they probably will. It’s a heavy responsibility.”
“So what do you think?” He looked sideways at me, quickly, then back to the dark road.
I turned toward him on the seat and pulled his little pigtail. “Sure,” I said. I wanted so much to be natural and affectionate with him. “Why not? We’re doing all right, aren’t we?”
He reached over and patted me on the knee through my jeans. I could see him grin. His relief filled the car. “I think so,” he said. And then he took a breath and added, “Maybe we should surprise Hugh and Helga. Maybe we should announce that we’re actually going to get married.”
“Is this a proposal?” My voice was fond and playful, and I listened to it with contempt. I looked out the car window at the black night. In the darkness, everything was menacing, it was impossible to see how beautiful it was out there: classic New England, with stone fences and red barns and trees just coming into leaf. I had spent a whole sleepless night after my return from New York trying to think of a way to tell James we should split up; now the idea filled me with terror.
“It’s more of an attempt to open a discussion,” he said. “What do you think, love?”
Love. I thought; I don’t deserve to marry James. I sniffed back tears. I was afraid that if I cried and he comforted me, I would tell him everything. Tell him what? I never think about you any more, I never think about anything but this man, I sit in bars with him, we kiss, he might be Pierce, he isn’t Pierce, he reminds me of Pierce, he brings Pierce back to me. He brings back my youth, James: maybe it’s that simple.
I said, “I’ve been thinking about Emile a lot, lately, maybe because of the possibility of Denis coming to Yale. That whole thing—I know it was years ago, James, but—it just made me feel so wary of marriage. I can’t help it, I associate marriage with Emile. With various kinds of betrayal, I guess. I think I just need more time.”
The more I talked, the more I felt like slime, like garbage, like something subhuman: I felt like the time Bridget made me flush her ailing fish down the toilet—a red Siamese fighting fish who had fought himself into a nasty, incurable case of the ick. I could remember how he had leapt in disbelief, in protest, in pain at the coldness of the water. “I know it was the humane thing to do,” Bridget had said. “But better you than me. You’ve got the stomach for things like that.”
James was silent for a moment. He said, “You’ve been divorced twelve years.”
“Eleven. Twelve next October.”
“How long do you think it’ll take you to get over it?”
“Oh, James—”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He touched my knee again. “I’m sorry, Chris. Believe me, I’m not underestimating what that bastard put you through. All that stuff with Denis. Taking advantage of your mental state. I can see where it would take a while to get over that. I just think we belong together. Lately I’ve had this feeling that I’m losing you, you’re so wrapped up in your painting. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Let me just say that whenever you’re ready, I’d like to do it. Get married.”
I couldn’t stop myself from crying, and he pulled over and took me in his arms. I remembered the day we met, how lonely we both were, how he took so seriously the idea that a couple of cats were what I needed. I cried as if some physical problem had just been fixed that had kept me from weeping all my life.
“I’m sorry if I’ve neglected you,” I said finally.
“It’s nothing,” he insisted. He took a tissue from his pocket and wiped my eyes with it. “It’s just all these trips to New York, and you seem to use your painting to get away from me. I know that’s silly, I know I’m imagining things. I must be having a belated mid-life crisis.”
I blew my nose and sat up straight. I felt that if I let myself I could sit there and cry for a week. I could think of nothing to say except the truth, and I had a moment of panic. Then I said, “I think it’s partly that Denis is coming here. It’s on my mind a lot. Let me get used to motherhood before I think about marriage.”
“Like the Virgin Mary had to do.”
> I smiled over at him. “You must admit it’s going to be a huge change for all of us.”
He handed me another tissue: he was the kind of man who offered cats in a crisis, who always had clean tissues in his pocket. “And you don’t like change,” he said. “How well I know.”
Now he was going to tease me: we had argued for weeks the previous fall about moving Jimmy Luigi’s farther up Chapel Street to a historic building that was being restored. We’d lose half our clientele, I told him: kids, shoppers from the Mall, people changing buses or coming from events on the Green. His position was that we’d get more Yalies, more faculty, plus the museum crowd and the yuppies. I said that the yuppies and the Yalies would move down because the pizza was so great, but our regular customers would never move up. James said that might sound like a great sociological insight, but it was just a coverup for the fact that I was a hopeless curmudgeon, set in my ways worse than his Aunt Gert had ever been.
“Of course you were right about the move,” he said. “I walk by the restaurants in the new building all the time, and I never see anybody in there.” He put the car in gear and we proceeded down the road toward Hugh’s place. “Why are you always right? And you’re right about this, too. We can wait. We’re fine the way we are. One upheaval at a time. Do you think the kid will report everything back to that Frenchie swine? Tell him I need to lose thirty pounds and I have a pigtail and smell of oregano and I’m always nagging you to marry me?”
I laughed and took his hand, and we held hands as he drove. I thought, fiercely: I won’t see Orin any more, I don’t need to see Orin, the next time he calls I’ll tell him it can’t go on. I knew perfectly well that this wasn’t true, but for the moment it was better to believe it was.
Vigil for a Stranger Page 11
