The Immanence of God in the Tropics

by George Rosen

  “Do you keep all your stuff packed up?” he asked me. Foolishly, I started to explain. “I like that,” Mitchell said as he folded the ten and put it in his shoe. “I really like that.” He looked around, his astonishment of a moment before turned to an immense satisfaction. He clutched the whale ivory like a blackjack, the point into his hand. “Well, now I must be going,” he said, nodding his close-shaven head, not moving an inch. “My father asks after you often.”

  “Actually, I don’t think we’ve met yet.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry about that”—he shook his head even more vigorously, since I had just let drop an astounding truth—“it’s the least that I can do.” We stood for a moment, Mitchell, relaxed now, myself, nervous, afraid he was going to steal something, though of course nothing for him to steal smaller than a chair was yet out in the room. Finally, he said, “Well, now I really must be off,” and was gone.

  I am terrified of my daughter’s adolescence. Laura is only five now but already I have dreams of fistfights on our lawn like those I knew about when I was a teenager: boys struggling over who would get to take out, and worse, the most promising girls, the ones who, according to a little printed book of consequences sent out for our twentieth reunion, have all become aerobics instructors—divorced, fit and inviolate. I see Laura tormented, huddled in an upstairs bedroom, watching the chaos on prom night, the bloodied losers being taken away in rented stretch limousines, the waves crashing out beyond the grass.

  This lawn—the location of my terrified dreams—is the same one that Mitchell’s father once drove his car over. Angry or drunk, the old man was reasserting his claim to an ancient pathway that would lead him to the site—now, in fact, underwater—of his cousin’s, Bob’s father’s, house. A month after I had helped push it away from the inlet, the elder Streeter accused his son of stealing the car. Actually, Mitchell had merely driven it until he ran out of gas in western Massachusetts, where he got out and began walking back here—two hundred miles. The state troopers found him and sent him home on the bus, in the custody of a deputy. Meanwhile, they impounded the car and Mr. Streeter had to go out to the Berkshires to retrieve it. While his father was gone, Mitchell was released, went home, and took his father’s bicycle, with a jerry can of gas strapped to the rack, onto the road to get the car himself. Local police united the two in Worcester. Mr. Streeter, bitten by remorse, retained me to defend Mitchell on the stolen car charge that he himself had filed. I had the case continued and got them into family counseling.

  Representing Mitchell, even for just a week, unsettled me. I examined my own family relations. When I was small my father traveled on business a great deal and he once jumped out of a burning small plane, on the ground, rescuing the pilot, only to get on another plane twenty minutes later. I still see this ridiculous gesture in my dreams, the way my daughter repeatedly watches on the VCR the scene in Dumbo where the elephant child stands in panic in the burning building, surrounded by maliciously incompetent clowns. She rewinds the tape to see the miracle of the earflaps, the perennial rescue. I see only the foolish re-entry into the flames, the animal trapped in the fire again and again without knowledge or experience. Why do we continue to go back and forth, I wonder. Why don’t we exercise judgment when we can?

  Bob Streeter is not a good painter, but he is very successful. He does the kind of conservative seascapes that the local Art Association gives awards for: lobster pots, fishermen seated with tools in their hands, little dots of color. A cloudy day, a touch of foam. No faces. These things sell like hotcakes and because of them there are more people on this thin neck of land who actually make a living as artists than in most big cities. Bob has a large studio in the house and, since he is more tolerant of noise than I am, he can have the kids playing in a corner with their own brushes, daubing while he concentrates. I try to do the same, hooked up by modem to my office, when I don’t have to meet with clients, but it rarely works. The kids need questions answered, fights adjudicated, hands and mouths cleaned. My daughter gets her tiger ears stuck on her head. I pay attention to these things. I suspect Bob does not.

  It will all end—the juggling of work at home, the sharing with Bob—next year. Our children will probably go to one of the private schools, although, having grown up in the Midwest, where people learn to be friendly and attend public school, I was taught that private schools are for delinquents. Our local public system, however, is terrible. The roofs leak and the teachers have become beaten down, hostile and cynical. My wife, who is from this area, went to an excellent public school that has now been turned into housing for the elderly. I want my daughter to have the kind of experiences you get in a public school and meet the different sorts of people who live in town. Perhaps, like many of the middle-class teenagers, Laura eventually could work in one of the fish-packing plants for the summer. In the tones of her speech and her odd local adjectives, she has already, without effort, acquired Bob Streeter’s sense of community, his inner map. Laura is, after all, a native. She has the capacity to get along.

  One morning, late in August, she came to my desk in the study and asked permission to go for a boat ride with Mr. Streeter. Bob takes the children out often, in a red dinghy that he made himself, naturally, without nails or any other kind of metal. I checked the weather—light, puffy clouds, a low, pleasant wind—and, reminding Laura to wear her life jacket, granted her request.

  A few minutes later I watched the red rowboat making its way out across the shining water, the steady-dipping oars black against the light. The space between the back windows of our houses and the shellfish flats is a vast plain where the water, even at the highest tide, never gets more than a few feet deep. Its impracticality for navigation lends to its consideration as an aesthetic object. On still days, it can seem purely ornamental, a reflecting pool like those at the Taj Mahal and the Washington Monument, places where wading or gliding in a shallow boat becomes a subversive act, as much because it destroys an object of contemplation as because it violates local ordinance. Of course there are no laws against rippling the water here, but you can understand why the tide is never running in Homer’s watercolors, why the skiffs lie still and the clam diggers are stopped for a moment in their toil. With their bodies bent over and hats obscuring their faces, their skin and the white of their clothes are, like the empty anchored boats, always mirrored quietly in the tidal pool. As I’ve said, the figures in Bob’s paintings don’t have faces either, but there’s a difference. Bob is just painting light as he has been taught. He can’t see the faces. They are too far away or the sun is too strong. Faces do not occur to Bob. With Homer, the blanks where there should be features are a conscious choice, a sacrifice to an idea of beauty, perhaps, or a touch of the artist’s imperial malice. Bob, on the other hand, paints what he sees. He has no secrets.

  The red dinghy drew up on the edge of the flats as I watched, the sand gray and wet in the flow of tide. Bob, nothing more than a silhouette, the bottom of some kind of slicker flapping behind his legs, pulled the bow onto the rise while Laura—a swollen munchkin shape in her vest—stood at the side. The Streeter kids must have gone to their grandparents; Bob and Laura were alone. Bob reached into the boat and picked a dark object from the floor—a buoy or a bucket. I hoped he was not intending to dig. The flats up to Ipswich had been closed to shellfishing for months on account of the Red Tide. He pulled more shapes from the boat: a shovel, a long rake, probably—from the distance, it looked more like a spear—then a broom, something, a criminal’s tools, I couldn’t make them out.

  “Do you know Mitchell has Laura out on the boat?”

  Jenny Moskowitz-Mason, close to me, looked even more statuesque than usual. She had come straight in, without knocking, and leaned against the desk beside my chair, the skin of her legs cool and troubling to my arm as she peered out the window. She was wearing white tennis shorts and some kind of dinosaur tee shirt, her hair pulled back with a barrette. The button at her waist was loose.

  “Mitchell?�
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  “Bob was with me. In the studio. He just took the boat.” She was barefoot and there was a cut above her left ankle as if she had been running through briars.

  “Was he being hostile?”

  “Bob or Mitchell?” Jenny was wary, she sensed an intrusion.

  “I meant Mitchell.”

  “How can one tell? We just saw it. I thought you should know.”

  “He did ask my permission. Or he let Laura come in and ask.” I turned off my typewriter and senselessly started to stack statute books on the desk.

  “Mitchell isn’t really a hostile person,” she said.

  “No, he’s not.”

  Jenny was trying to calm me down. She turned her head to look directly at me, questioning. There were faint drops of sweat where the hair was drawn back above her ear. “You’d better go get her.”

  “I don’t have a boat.”

  “It’s not very deep.”

  “No, it’s not.” I started to move to the back porch and down to the water, stepped into a pair of rubber sandals, and then, thinking better of it, hopped out of them at the edge of the deck and rolled up the legs of my pants. “Why didn’t Bob go after them?”

  “I told you. We just saw it through the studio window. Bob thought it was your responsibility.” Irritated, Jenny was having trouble keeping up. She appeared to be limping. “We didn’t know if you’d given them permission.”

  “I had.”

  I left her on the deck and jumped down over the low wall of bricks to the water. She stood there, peering out with her hand above her eyes, the image of one of the old captains’ wives. Her obvious generosity of intention upset me. Wasn’t she angry that I’d interrupted her tryst by having my daughter kidnapped by a madman? I plowed my way through the soft sucking sand, the water at my knees.

  Of what exactly was I afraid? Red Tide? Assault? Of course, as Jenny had told me, Mitchell didn’t harm people, but he didn’t help them either. One had to give unceasingly to people like Mitchell. The fact was they tired me. Mitchell tired me, Bob, hidden somewhere, watching, tired me, Jenny tired me, even my daughter tired me. I was being responsible, wading steady through the inlet, messing up Homer’s still waters, sinking in resentment.

  I drew nearer to Mitchell and Laura, but what they were doing was no clearer to me. Laura was sitting on the rail of the red dinghy, trailing her toes in the water, while Mitchell, a pointless sou’wester on his head, dug with his shovel. It was definitely a shovel—the bag of murderer’s tools had dissolved to the usual equipment—but he wasn’t extracting anything from the sand, merely piling the petty dredgings next to him. If anything, he seemed to be returning dark shapes to the ground, sowing rocks, planting bulbs. I looked back to the houses and could see Jenny, still on the dock, gazing first at us and then, searching, back to Bob’s house. Where was he? Why hadn’t he come? I imagined him in his studio or in his bedroom, dressed, naked, contemptuous, embarrassed, watching me, shielded by the bright sun’s reflection.

  When Mitchell finally saw me coming, he froze, his arms spread, the rake clutched straight like a staff, a scarecrow’s silhouette. He waited that way while I pushed through the cold tide for three or four minutes. Laura stopped her play. I was spreading immobility, making her afraid.

  “You’re not going to eat anything, are you?” It was ridiculous, all I could think of to say as I arrived. Laura stared at me, dumbfounded.

  “They’re from Maine. They’re clean.” Mitchell started into rapid motion to defend himself. He reached into his pail and held up a puffed plastic plate oozing bivalves, the shrink-wrap ripped from the top. He was carefully burying a bucket of clams from the Stop and Shop.

  “That won’t do any good, Mitchell, the disease is in the water.”

  “No, you’ll see. They’ll grow and spread.” I was offending him. He reached back into the bucket. “I brought deodorant, too.”

  “What for?”

  “For the smell.”

  “Mr. Streeter is silly, Daddy.” Laura began to kick again, then hopped off the boat and walked to us. She lifted one of the supermarket clams and tried to squeeze from it a response.

  I turned to Mitchell. “I think you should go in.”

  “Well, perhaps I should, but I can’t.”

  “You can’t?”

  “I’m stuck. I’m stuck in the muck.” He began to laugh, at first just friendly, conciliatory giggles, then in wider and deeper breaths, drawing in all the air he could manage, a soft blow of panic underneath a pile of sound. The rising tide had darkened and soddened the sand and Mitchell had, in fact, sunk a few inches into the flat. But his laughter, now a kind of long moan, and the bellowing of his abdomen—underneath the flagrant yellow slicker he was wearing only a pair of gym shorts—bore no proportion to his slight shift of equilibrium.

  “Just lift your feet slowly.”

  “I can’t.” He began to rock his head and upper body, back and forth, his legs braced, pointlessly paralyzed from the waist down. The rake, still clutched in his hand, swung wildly in the air. The dread in Mitchell’s face was greater than any terror of quicksand. It was as if he were afraid he would never move again, but be imprisoned forever in the flats like one of those faceless, sexless models of Homer’s, rendered permanently anonymous.

  I pulled the rake from his grip and clutched Mitchell around the middle, tugging his feet from the suction. We bumped foreheads, pushing his cap off and down to where the creeping tide could catch it. With an increasing hatred, I imagined Jenny and Bob at their observation posts, taking it all in. Mitchell, in his terror, contributed nothing. He was pure burden, a graceless strength pulling me down. Laura grabbed my belt and I melted in gratitude as we accomplished the last few inches to free Mitchell’s toes.

  The wind blew suddenly cold. Mitchell walked in little circles on the bar, now everywhere an inch or two underneath the running tide. His legs vibrated in the tremors of whatever drug the doctors were forcing him to take.

  “Now,” he said, “I’ll leave.” His eyes followed his hat, floating up the inlet, as if it were a treacherous pet that had wandered.

  I wanted to leave him there to fend for himself, to pick my daughter up, take her to the dinghy, and row in over this false sea to our house. Of course, I couldn’t. He was crazy. He would panic again. He would drown in the shallows.

  Laura was afraid now, the water creeping up her ankles, the clouds in the sky somehow lower. I was going to have to play St. Christopher and carry her the five hundred feet across the inlet while Mitchell took the boat in.

  Far across the water, I could hear a chainsaw buzz. Bob stood at the edge of his own lawn. His white shorts, his ramrod back were all I could see, he and his Jennifer a neat pair.

  “I’m fine, really I am.” There was a predictable surprise now at the end of each of Mitchell’s sentences, the last second thinned and upbeat, catching the tremor of his limbs.

  I started to give orders. “Go in the boat, Mitchell. I’ll push you off. Don’t be afraid.”

  “But where are the oars?” He looked at his hands, wonders.

  “Right there. I’ll push you off in the right direction. The tide will carry you in.” He had nothing to do but follow the flow that would bend him toward the land.

  “Thank you. Thank you.” He made no move to the oars, but laid his hands limply on his lap as he sat on the thwart. He screwed his head back as I ran him off the bar. “My father says you should always say thank you when people do good things,” he confided to Laura, an instruction, a secret. I was left with my little girl holding tight to my leg, the tide pushing at us.

  Mitchell, running with the tide, racing to the shore, didn’t even have to row. “I won’t get stuck, will I? I don’t want to get stuck,” he yelled to us, the same terrible catch in his throat. Then he waved—a soft, perfunctory, good morning wave—and I waved back, a nod, a reassuring smile. This was all good cheer now, in order to avert catastrophe. The boat flowed in gracefully, tugged to a slight tur
n at the gentle channel in the middle of the inlet, then, puffed along like a child’s paper vessel, it brushed forward toward the sloping lawns. Mitchell, easing to land, had turned his waves from us to Bob and Jenny who, now that the die was cast, had both jumped into the water. They were broadcasting greeting, a warmth of welcome, splashes of celebration, drawing in the lunatic to the bosom of his family.

  As it drew near, Bob grabbed the dinghy’s line and hauled: the artist unwilling to let go of his creation. The three of them settled into peaceful procession. With one hand Bob towed his cousin—in state in the skiff—and with the other, he met Jenny’s outstretched fingers. Gently, five hundred yards from me, they walked on water.

  At sea on the flats, I was scared my daughter was learning that I didn’t like everybody, a small, forlorn secret she probably already knew. But there was more. I felt I was glowing harm. I could sense the heat in my arms, in my thighs, in the muscles of my jaw. Pillared in the sand, my daughter clinging to my leg, I was certain that even all the artistic water washing at our feet could never cool my heightened, dangerous temperature. I stood on the bar, ready to carry my daughter home, steadfast and full of rancor.

  Kenya, 1980

  A Good White Hunter

  Atherton was from somewhere else. Sometimes he could barely remember where. Barrow, he would say, or Bolton, names from a hat. The names all meant the same to the Kigeli. An Englishman, they would think, an mzungu.

  Occasionally he did get letters from home, a cousin who tried to keep in touch and sent him newspaper clippings. A doctor’s family had moved into the small Midlands town, with unemployed relatives and strange cooking odors, and the editors were worried about being overrun by Pakistani hordes. Atherton had never written back about his own marriages to African women, his black children. He’d never written back at all.

  Atherton had three wives. The first was a matter of love and need. The others, from his point of view, were hardly intentional, a confusing set of obligations he had fallen upon the way a lizard might walk into a child’s banana-leaf snare, for lack of adequate peripheral vision.