Inland Passage

by Jane Rule

  “Who’s her friend?” Joey asked.

  Maybe Joey would be a lawyer…for the prosecution. “His name’s José,” Harry confessed quietly.

  “Hose Hey?” Sally repeated.

  “It’s Spanish,” Anna explained.

  “Do real grandmothers speak English?” Sally asked. She’d wanted to know the same thing about adopted grandmothers before they met George and Mary.

  “Of course, my mother speaks English,” Harry said.

  “What about him?” Joey asked.

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  “Where are she…and him going to sleep?” Sally wanted to know.

  “‘He,’” Anna corrected, “as long as granddaughters are supposed to speak English.”

  “I speak English,” Sally answered angrily. “Where are they going to sleep?”

  “We haven’t even decided to invite them yet,” Harry said.

  “Your own mother?” Anna asked in surprise.

  “It’s Hose Hey,” Joey decided. “He’s the problem.”

  “One of them,” Harry agreed.

  “Do they sleep together?” Sally asked.

  “How should I know?” Harry shouted.

  “It’s time we talked about something else,” Anna said.

  “What a thing for a six-year-old kid to ask!” Harry said, as he and Anna were getting ready for bed that night. “What a thing for her to have to ask about her grandmother.”

  “She didn’t mean anything by it,” Anna said. “She probably just wanted to know if she and Joey were going to have to give up their room.”

  “It’s time they stopped sharing a room. It’s time she got over being frightened of the dark.”

  “Harry, most of the kids in this world not only sleep in the same room but in the same bed with their parents and all the animals.”

  “We’re not peasants.”

  “Are you going to show me the letter?”

  He dug it out of the pocket of the trousers he’d just slung over the chair, handed it to her and watched her read it, sitting on the bed, her long, dark hair falling forward over her breasts. She still had on her trousers and one shoe. She was as proud and careless about her body as a child, and it was that Harry wanted for Sally instead of the glamorous artificiality of his own mother, who had been collecting husbands and ‘friends’ as long as Harry could remember.

  “Rid of husband number four,” Anna mused as she read. “So nice to be traveling again with someone completely congenial.”

  “Read either ‘rich’ or ‘docile,’ probably both.”

  “She has plenty of money of her own,” Anna said.

  “From our point of view.”

  “Well, where are they going to sleep?”

  “How about the Bayshore Inn?” Harry suggested.

  “Harry…”

  “I’ll pay for it,” he hurriedly added. “Anna, you’ve never met my mother. She wouldn’t be comfortable here. She’s used to being waited on…”

  “We could give them this room; it’s just as comfortable as the Bayshore.”

  Harry looked around at the room, which they’d made by bashing down the wall between two small rooms so that their queen-sized bed did not crowd either Anna’s sewing table or Harry’s desk. It was a sanctuary not only for sexual privacy but for projects, for plans, for hilarious late night arguments.

  “It would take a month to clear it out,” he objected.

  “It’s as good a time to spring clean it as any.”

  “But where would we sleep?”

  “You could have the single bed in the guest room, and I could put up the camp cot in Sally’s room.” Sally’s room had no furniture in it, waiting for a time when she consented to occupy it.

  “We have to sleep in separate rooms so that my mother can consort with this gigolo, this…Hose Hey?”

  “It’s only for a couple of nights,” Anna said reasonably.

  “It’s immoral!”

  “Don’t be a prude. As far as the kids are concerned, you couldn’t persuade them anything of interest goes on in our bed, never mind your mother’s.”

  “You haven’t met my mother.”

  “I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Why the devil, after all these years, is she coming?”

  “Mortal curiosity,” Anna suggested, “or maybe just because the cruise ends here.”

  Harry, having resigned himself to Anna’s decision, helped her reorganize their room for his mother’s comfort, and, while he was at it, he also tried to make the guest room as comfortable for himself as he could. He arranged a new book on Frank Lloyd Wright, some political interviews, a book on organic gardening on the shelf by the bed, and then he tucked in Fanny Hill. He fixed the reading lamp, which hadn’t before ever stayed on for more than five minutes without turning itself off like an institutional chaperone. Anna brought in a tin of cookies and a glass jar of dried fruit. He added a bottle of brandy and two glasses. They might get a late night drink together, and, after all, they’d managed to sleep in a single bed more than once before. He wouldn’t suggest it beforehand…

  “They’re sleeping in your room then,” Joey said, interrupting Harry’s comforting reverie.

  “That’s right.”

  “You better tell Sally not to mention that when we have dinner with George and Mary tomorrow night.”

  “Joey,” Harry said, sitting down on the bed and folding his hands low between his knees, “Your grandmother, your real grandmother, is not your ordinary YWCA grandmother, I’ll grant you that. She’s always been a very independent sort of person, and she’s a very attractive woman; so it’s not surprising that she’s had a number of men…friends. But it’s not George and Mary’s job or my job or your job to criticize the way she lives. She’s your grandmother, and you’re to respect her.”

  “Gotcha. So tell Sally,” Joey said and wandered off down the hall, leaving Harry with his folded hands nearly touching the floor.

  Perhaps because he simply couldn’t think of the right way of putting it, Harry said nothing to Sally. He, therefore, had to suffer the I-told-you-so despair in his son’s eyes on the following evening as Sally graphically rendered the preparations being made for her grandmother and José. Mary and George were a model audience, neither shockable nor encouraging, so that Sally finally dropped the subject for schoolyard scandals less close to home.

  After dinner, however, George said, “That’s a peculiar first name. How does Mr. Hey spell ‘Hose?’” Only Anna thought it was simply funny.

  “Harry,” Mary said, as she and he were doing the dishes, George, Anna and the children happily settled in the living room for a game of monopoly, “I don’t want to sound like a mother to you, particularly since you’ve got a mother of your own, but I don’t think it’s right for a married couple to give up their bed to anybody, and I’m sure your mother would agree with me.”

  Harry wanted to say, petulantly, that it was all Anna’s idea, that he’d wanted to put them up at the Bayshore, but there was no point, particularly with Mary, in pretending the problem was a disagreement between himself and Anna, who was being, under the circumstances, a better and kinder wife than he had any right to expect.

  “The truth is,” Harry said instead, “I don’t think she’ll even notice she has our room. She’s not a…domestic sort, or she wasn’t when I last saw her about fifteen years ago.”

  “It’s a lot to ask of Anna.”

  “She asked it of me,” Harry could finally say.

  “That Anna,” Mary said, shaking her head.

  They went back into the living room together, and for a moment Harry could enjoy the scene before him, his wife and children in the warm protection of grandparental welcome, but it was shaded with nostalgia as if it had taken place years ago against the imminent arrival of his mother and José.

  Usually the one to complain about the casual attitude Anna and the children had about clothes, Harry was the most reluctant to dress for the occasion, remin
ded of his governess and boarding school dominated childhood when dressing up for his mother was a rare and extremely embarrassing occurrence, that glamorous stranger always greeting him with surprise and disappointment, a plain little boy whose ears stuck out, whose eyes watered, bunched into his clothes like a bag of dirty laundry on legs. What was the opposite of an Oedipus complex, he wondered, as he adjusted his most conservative tie. He had never wanted to be his mother’s suitor, the only role she could assign to a male.

  His own children looked beautiful to him as they stared up at the big cruise ship, docile with wonder, Joey’s bow tie neat under his chin, both Sally’s socks riding high and trim. He realized he didn’t care at all what his mother thought of them. Anna took his arm and with her other hand hooked Joey gently by the collar. Harry reached for Sally, who took his free hand and swung and skipped along beside him.

  “Harry, dear Harry.” There she was at the top of the gangplank, surprisingly unchanged, the same trim and expensive figure he had always looked up to, but, when he reached her, he was looking down, and in that close second her face suddenly blurred like an old photograph. When he stepped back to introduce her to his wife and children, Harry saw that his mother was, in fact, fifteen years older.

  “Do call me Rose,” she was saying to Anna. “Everyone calls me Rose. I never let Harry call me Mother.”

  José, a tall, rather frail man in his sixties, stepped forward to be presented.

  “You speak English,” Sally said with approval, and Joey bumped into her, as if by accident.

  “What an adorable little car!” Rose said as they arrived with a worrisome amount of luggage at the Austin. “Will we all fit?”

  “I can sit on Hose Hey’s lap,” Sally said, and, once she’d settled herself comfortably on his surprised knees, she asked sociably, “Do people on a big boat like that ever throw up?”

  “Adorable,” Rose said again. Joey’s ears were so red they had begun to pulse.

  The house was adorable, too, and so, when they finally got there, was the master bedroom. Was it the way José hesitated in the hall? Was it the way Rose flung her coat across the whole bed? Nothing was said, but it was perfectly clear to both Harry and Anna that Rose had no intention of sharing the room with anyone.

  “And José,” Anna said, “let’s show you to your room.”

  This time Joey tripped Sally before she could say anything, and she followed him down the hall, punching at his back, as Anna offered José the room Harry had so comfortably prepared for himself. He remembered Fanny Hill and thought of it resignedly as some compensation for the old fellow. It wasn’t as easy to feel generous about the brandy. It didn’t occur to Harry until some time later that he, himself, had nowhere to sleep.

  Rose held court in her room for what was left of the afternoon. Out of her suitcase came exotic weapons for Joey, ethnic dolls for Sally, jewels for Anna, and so many alligator wallets, belts, bookends, and desk sets for Harry that he began to mourn the creature skinned. At the end of this unseasonal Christmas, Rose’s face was as empty as her suitcase.

  “Come along,” Anna said, “give your grandmother a chance to rest before dinner.”

  His mother probably didn’t visibly flinch at the title. Harry was working to be insensitive and kind, and he was surprised to feel sorry for her, age beginning to defeat all her careful disguises.

  “She’s pretty,” Joey said, his new dagger strapped onto his new belt, leaning on a spear.

  “I like the way she smells,” Sally said.

  “The spear doesn’t come into the kitchen,” Anna said. “She is pretty.”

  “But can Hose Hey read to us tonight?” Sally asked. “I want to look at his teeth.”

  “We’ll ask him,” Anna said, “but just don’t talk about his teeth, all right?”

  “What are they made of?”

  “Plastic,” Joey said knowledgeably, “That’s why they make that funny noise.”

  “Why don’t they sleep together?”

  “Maybe because of his teeth,” Joey said. “Where are you going to sleep, Dad?”

  “I haven’t really had time to figure that out,” Harry admitted, “but I think I’d better borrow your sleeping bag, if you don’t mind.”

  So it was late that night Harry found himself blowing up an air mattress he’d discovered in the basement and laying out Joey’s sleeping bag on top of it on the floor next to Anna’s cot.

  “Reminds me of week-ends on the boat,” he said. “That was a great boat.”

  “Well, we’d outgrown it really,” Anna said, yawning. “I’m glad we bought this house.”

  “Do you suppose he really is going to sleep in there?”

  “I think Joey’s right about his teeth,” Anna said. “Anyway, she strikes me as the sort of woman who always sleeps alone.” She put her arms around Harry. “It’s a miracle you’re here.”

  Harry looked down at his wife, but the image in his mind was of his mother, seeing her really for the first time as a man does see a woman, and as a woman she wasn’t real. Her surface would come off on your hands, and underneath those expensive clothes would be nothing but a series of carefully constructed wire shapes. He shivered slightly, then realized that the woman in his arms was his very real wife who was shaking with laughter.

  “What’s so funny?” he whispered, suddenly fearful of being overheard.

  “Everything,” she whispered back.

  “It’s ridiculous!” he said, and he was laughing, too.

  But Harry aged forty years in that night, and he was aware of every ancient bone as he hobbled down the stairs to breakfast. His mother had suggested she needed only a bit of tea and toast after nine in the morning, served in her room, and there had been no sign of life behind José’s door; so Harry’s crippled entry into breakfast was observed only by Anna and the children.

  “You better have my bed tonight, Dad,” Joey suggested.

  Harry straightened up and shook his head. “We’ve played enough musical beds around here. I’ll make it for one more night.”

  “Do you know why they don’t sleep together?” Sally asked.

  “I thought we’d already worked that one to death, Sally,” Anna said, the sharpness in her voice suggesting that the cot hadn’t been an ideal resting place either.

  “Well, but I asked Hose Hey. He said they weren’t married. He said only married people sleep together.”

  “Now why hadn’t that occurred to me?” Harry asked, looking at Anna.

  “Well, now you know,” Sally said.

  “Can I take my spear to school?” Joey asked.

  “It’s a dangerous weapon, son. Ask your friends home to see it tomorrow after your grandmother’s gone.”

  “And after she’s gone,” Sally said, “and you guys get to go back to your room, I think I’d better move into mine.”

  “It’s all right by me,” Joey said, who had wanted his own room for a long time but now was not certain how to react to Sally’s declaration of independence.

  After the children had grabbed their lunch pails and their coats, admonished to be quiet leaving the house, Harry and Anna were left to their coffee.

  “Do you think she really will go into her own room?” Harry asked.

  “I think she’s decided the old arrangement is indecent.”

  “Well,” they said to each other, “now you know,” and the long day and the long night ahead would not be difficult in that new knowledge.

  A MIGRANT CHRISTMAS

  HARRY WASN’T THE ONE in the family who had a principle against doing what everyone else did. It was his wife, Anna, who liked to be out of sync with everyone else, whether for buying a house or starting a family; so Harry never seemed to have either the problems or the pleasures his friends did, both his children and his mortgage years younger. Mike’s son was dealing dope before Joey had tried a cigarette behind the garage, and Al’s daughter was in danger of pregnancy before Sally learned to read.

  “Well, it gets wor
se before it gets better,” Al philosophized. “The best thing about kids is that they grow up and leave home.”

  “Joyce and I have an even better solution. We’re growing up and leaving home first. We’re going to Mexico for January,” Mike announced.

  It wasn’t just that Joey and Sally were too young to leave alone. Harry frankly couldn’t imagine a holiday without them. Even the year Anna had talked them into going to Europe, Joey was less than a year old and went everywhere on Harry’s back. Harry still couldn’t eat an ice cream cone without expecting a second tongue to help. He and Anna were far too old to take a holiday on their own and still be able to stop at every advertised snake pit and haunted house along the way. Harry would feel like a fool going into one of those child-sized motel swimming pools by himself, and he didn’t suppose you ever took just your wife out for a hamburger even if, like Anna, she happened to love them.

  No, he didn’t envy Mike and Joyce their freedom from the children for a month, but he did envy them their winter holiday. Wouldn’t it be really good for Anna and the kids to have at least a couple of weeks out of the rain sometimes tipping to snow, in the winter sun? They wouldn’t have to drive all the way to Mexico. Anna was good with languages, so good it had been sometimes hard for Harry not to feel unmanned by her confident handling of their lives all the time they were on the continent. Her stomach was as admirable as her tongue. She hadn’t taken one Lomatil in the months they were in Europe. There were weeks when Harry ate nothing else. Montezuma’s revenge, and therefore Mexico, had no part in Harry’s daydream.

  “People in wheelchairs take winter holidays,” Anna said over after-dinner coffee at the kitchen table while the children made a quarrelsome game of the dishes.

  “Mike and Joyce don’t even have a golf cart,” Harry protested.

  “Oh, it’s because Mike and Joyce…”

  “It is not. It is nothing of the kind. I want to do just what they’re not doing. I want to take the kids along, go when we can all enjoy it together.”