Inland Passage

by Jane Rule

  “Next round,” Fidelity said.

  Troy handled her glass more confidently than she had at breakfast, and, after her first sip, she said with relief, “Dry.”

  “This is your captain,” the intimate male voice asserted again. “A pod of killer whales is approaching to starboard.”

  Fidelity and Troy looked out the window and waited. No more than a hundred yards away, a killer whale broke the water, then another, then another, their black backs arching, their bellies unbelievably white.

  “They don’t look real,” Fidelity exclaimed.

  Then one surfaced right alongside the ferry, and both women caught their breath.

  “This trip is beginning to feel less like somebody else’s day dream,” Fidelity said. “Just look at that!”

  For some moments after the whales had passed, the women continued to watch the water, newly interested in its possibilities for surprise. As if as a special reward for their attention, an enormous bird dropped out of the sky straight into the sea, then lifted off the water with a strain of great wings, a flash of fish in its talons.

  “What on earth was that?” Fidelity cried.

  “A bald eagle catching a salmon,” Troy replied.

  The ship had slowed to navigate a quite narrow passage between the mainland and a small island, its northern crescent shore fingered with docks, reached by flights of steps going back up into the trees where the glint of windows and an occasional line of roof could be seen.

  “Do people live there all year long?” Fidelity asked.

  “Not many. They’re summer places mostly.”

  “How do people get there?”

  “Private boats or small planes.”

  “Ain’t the rich wealthy?” Fidelity sighed.

  Troy frowned.

  “Did I make a personal remark by mistake?”

  “Geoff and I had a place when the boys were growing up. We didn’t have money, but he earned a good deal…law. He hadn’t got around to thinking about…retiring. I’m just awfully grateful the boys had finished their education. It scares me to think what it might have been like if it had happened earlier. You just don’t think…we didn’t anyway. Oh, now that I’ve sold the house, I’m perfectly comfortable. When you’re just one person…”

  “Well, on this trip with the food all paid for, I’m going to eat like an army,” Fidelity said. “Let’s have lunch.”

  Though the ship wasn’t crowded, there were more people in the cafeteria than there had been for breakfast.

  “Let’s not sit near the Jonathan Seagulls,” Fidelity said, leading the way through the tables to a quiet corner where they could do more watching than being watched. Troy had chosen a seafood salad that Fidelity considered a first course to which she added a plate of lamb chops, rice and green beans.

  “I really don’t believe you could eat like that all the time,” Troy said.

  “Would if I could.”

  Fidelity tried not to let greed entirely overtake her, yet she needed to eat quickly not to leave Troy with nothing to do.

  “See those two over there?” Fidelity said, nodding to a nondescript pair of middle-aged women. “One’s a lady cop. The other’s her prisoner.”

  “How did you figure that out?”

  “Saw the handcuffs. That’s why they’re sitting side by side.”

  “They’re both right handed,” Troy observed critically.

  “On their ankles.”

  “What’s she done?”

  “Blown up a mortgage company,” Fidelity said.

  “She ought to get a medal.”

  “A fellow anarchist, are you?”

  “Only armchair,” Troy admitted modestly.

  “Mrs. McFadden, you’re a fun lady. I’m glad we got assigned to the same shoe box.”

  “Do call me Troy.”

  “Only if you’ll call me Fido.”

  “Will you promise not to bark?”

  “No,” Fidelity said and growled convincingly at a lamb chop but quietly enough not to attract attention.

  “Fido, would it both antisocial and selfish of me to take a rest after lunch?”

  “Of course not,” Fidelity said. “I’ll just come up and snag a book.”

  “Then later you could have a rest.”

  “I’m not good at them,” Fidelity said. “I twitch and have horrible dreams if I sleep during the day. But, look, I do have to know a few intimate things about you, like do you play bridge or Scrabble or poker because I don’t, but I could probably scout out some people who do…”

  “I loathe games,” Troy said. “In any case, please don’t feel responsible for me. I do feel much better, thanks to you.”

  A tall, aging fat man nodded to Troy as they left the cafeteria and said, “Lovely day.”

  “Don’t panic,” Fidelity said out of the side of her mouth. “I bite too, that is, unless you’re in the market for a shipboard romance.”

  “How about you?” Troy asked wryly.

  “I’m not his type.”

  “Well, he certainly isn’t mine!”

  Fidelity went into the cabin first, struggled to get her case out from under the bunk and found her book, Alice Walker’s collection of essays.

  “Is she good?” Troy asked, looking at the cover.

  “I think she’s terrific, but I have odd tastes.”

  “Odd?”

  “I’m a closet feminist.”

  “But isn’t that perfectly respectable by now?” Troy asked.

  “Nothing about me is perfectly respectable.”

  “You’re perfectly dear,” Troy said and gave Fidelity a quick, hard hug before she went into the cabin.

  Fidelity paused for a moment outside the closed door to enjoy that affectionate praise before she headed off to find a window seat in the lounge where she could alternately read and watch the passing scene. An occasional deserted Indian village was now the only sign of habitation on the shores of this northern wilderness.

  The book lay instead neglected in her lap, and the scenery became a transparency through which Fidelity looked at her inner landscape, a place of ruins.

  A man whose wife had died of the same cancer that had killed Gail said to Fidelity, “I don’t even want to take someone out to dinner without requiring her to have a thorough physical examination first.”

  The brutality of that remark shocked Fidelity because it located in her her own denied bitterness, that someone as lovely and funny and strong as Gail could be not only physically altered out of recognition but so horribly transformed humanly until she seemed to have nothing left but anger, guilt, and fear, burdens she tried to shift, as she couldn’t her pain, onto Fidelity’s shoulders, until Fidelity found herself praying for Gail’s death instead of her life. Surely she had loved before she grew to dread the sight of Gail, the daily confrontations with her appalled and appalling fear. It was a face looking into hell Fidelity knew did not exist, and yet her love had failed before it. Even now it was her love she mourned rather than Gail, for without it she could not go back to the goodness between them, believe in it and go on.

  She felt herself withdraw from her daughters as if her love for them might also corrupt and then fail them. In the way of adolescents they both noticed and didn’t, excused her grief and then became impatient with it. They were anyway perched at the edge of their own lives, ready to be free of her.

  “Go,” she encouraged them, and they did.

  “I guess I only think I miss them,” Troy said. Otherwise this convention of parent abandonment would be intolerable, a cruel and unusual punishment for all those years of intimate attention and care.

  And here she was, temporarily paired with another woman as fragile and shamed by self-pity as she was. At least they wouldn’t be bleeding all over the other passengers. If they indulged in pitying each other, well, what was the harm in it?’

  Fidelity shifted uncomfortably. The possibility of harm was all around her.

  “Why did you marry me then?”
she had demanded of her hostile husband.

  “I felt sorry for you,” he said.

  “That’s a lie!”

  “It’s the honest truth.”

  So pity, even from someone else, is the seed of contempt.

  Review resolutions for this trip: be cheerful, eat, indulge in Mighty Mouse fantasies, and enjoy the scenery.

  An island came into focus, a large bird perched in a tree, another eagle no doubt, and she would not think of the fish except in its surprised moment of flight.

  “This is your captain speaking…”

  Fidelity plugged her ears and also shut her eyes, for even if she missed something more amazing than whales, she wanted to see or not see for herself.

  “Here you are,” Troy said. “What on earth are you doing?”

  “Do you think he’s going to do that all through the trip?” Fidelity demanded.

  “Probably not after dark.”

  “Pray for an early sunset.”

  It came, as they stood watching it on deck, brilliantly red with promise, leaving the sky christened with stars.

  “Tell me about these boys of yours,” Fidelity said as they sat over a pre-dinner drink in the crowded bar. “We’ve spent a whole day together without even taking out our pictures. That’s almost unnatural.”

  “In this den of iniquity,” Troy said, glancing around, “I’m afraid people will think we’re exchanging dirty postcards.”

  “Why oh why did I leave mine at home?”

  Fidelity was surprised that Troy’s sons were not better looking than they were, and she suspected Troy was surprised at how much better looking her daughters were than she had any right to expect. It’s curious how really rare a handsome couple is. Beauty is either too vain for competition or indifferent to itself. Troy would have chosen a husband for his character. Fidelity had fallen for narcissistic good looks, for which her daughters were her only and lovely reward.

  “Ralph’s like his father,” Troy said, taking back the picture of her older son, “conservative with some attractive independence of mind. So many of our friends had trouble with first children and blame it on their own inexperience. Geoff used to say, ‘I guess the more we knew, the worse we did.’”

  “What’s the matter with Colin?” Fidelity asked.

  “I’ve never thought there was anything the matter with him,” Troy said, “except perhaps the world. Geoff didn’t like his friends or his work (Colin’s an actor). It was the only hard thing between Geoff and me, but it was very hard.”

  The face Fidelity studied was less substantial and livelier than Ralph’s, though it was easy enough to tell that they were brothers.

  “We ought to pair at least two of them off, don’t you think?” Fidelity suggested flippantly. “Let’s see. Is it better to put the conservative, responsible ones together, and let the scallywags go off and have fun, or should each kite have a tail?”

  “Colin won’t marry,” Troy said. “He’s homosexual.”

  Fidelity looked up from the pictures to read Troy’s face. Her dark blue eyes held a question rather than a challenge.

  “How lucky for him that you’re his mother,” Fidelity said. “Did you realize that I am, too?”

  “I wondered when you spoke about your friend Gail,” Troy said.

  “Sometimes I envy people his age,” Fidelity said. “There’s so much less guilt, so much more acceptance.”

  “In some quarters,” Troy said. “Geoff let it kill him.”

  “How awful!”

  “That isn’t true,” Troy said. “It’s the first time I’ve ever said it out loud, and it simply isn’t true. But I’ve been so afraid Colin thought so, so angry, yes, angry. I always thought Geoff would finally come round. He was basically a fair-minded man. Then he had a heart attack and died. If he’d had any warning, if he’d had time…”

  Fidelity shook her head. She did not want to say how easily that might have been worse. Why did people persist in the fantasy that facing death brought out the best in people when so often it did just the opposite?

  “How does Colin feel about his father?”

  “He always speaks of him very lovingly, remembering all the things he did with the boys when they were growing up. He never mentions those last, awful months when Geoff was remembering the same things but only so that he didn’t have to blame himself.”

  “Maybe Colin’s learning to let them go,” Fidelity suggested.

  “So why can’t I?” Troy asked.

  There was Fidelity’s own question in Troy’s mouth. It’s because they’re dead, she thought. How do you go about forgiving the dead for dying? Then, because she had no answer, she simply took Troy’s hand.

  “Is that why your mother doesn’t speak to you?” Troy asked.

  “That and a thousand other things,” Fidelity said. “It used to get to me, but, as my girls have grown up, I think we’re all better off for not trying to please someone who won’t be pleased. Probably it hasn’t anything to do with me, just luck, that I like my kids, and they like me pretty well most of the time.”

  “Did they know about you and Gail?”

  “Did and didn’t. We’ve never actually talked about it. I would have, but Gail was dead set against it. I didn’t realize just how much that had to do with her own hang-ups. Once she was gone, there didn’t seem to be much point, for them.”

  “But for you?”

  “Would you like another drink?” Fidelity asked as she signaled the waiter and, at Troy’s nod, ordered two. “For myself, I’d like to tell the whole damned world, but I’m still enough of my mother’s child to hear her say, ‘Another one of your awful self-indulgences’ and to think maybe she has a point.”

  “It doesn’t seem to me self-indulgent to be yourself,” Troy said.

  Fidelity laughed suddenly. “Why that’s exactly what it is! Why does everything to do with the self have such a bad press: self-pity, self-consciousness, self-indulgence, self-satisfaction, practices of selfish people, people being themselves?”

  “The way we are,” Troy said.

  “Yes, and I haven’t felt as good about myself in months.”

  “Nor I,” Troy said, smiling.

  “Are we going to watch the movie tonight, or are we going to go on telling each other the story of our lives?”

  “We have only three days,” Troy said. “And this one is nearly over.”

  “I suppose we’d better eat before the cafeteria closes.”

  They lingered long over coffee after dinner until they were alone in the room, and they were still there when the movie goers came back for a late night snack. Troy yawned and looked at her watch.

  “Have we put off the evil hour as long as we can?” Fidelity asked.

  “You’re going to try to talk me out of the lower bunk.”

  “I may be little, but I’m very agile,” Fidelity claimed.

  The top bunk had been made up, leaving only a narrow corridor in which to stand or kneel, as they had to to get at their cases. Troy took her nightgown and robe and went into the bathroom. Fidelity changed into her flannel tent and climbed from the chair to the upper bunk, too close to the ceiling for sitting. She lay on her side, her head propped up on her elbow.

  It occurred to her that this cabin was the perfect setting for the horrible first night of a honeymoon and she was about to tell Troy so as she came out of the bathroom but she looked both so modest and so lovely than an easy joke seemed instead tactless.

  “I didn’t have the courage for a shower,” Troy confessed. “Really, you know, we’re too old for this.”

  “I think that’s beginning to be part of the fun.”

  When they had both settled and turned out their lights, Fidelity said, “Good night, Troy.”

  “Good night, dear Fido.”

  Fidelity did not expect to sleep at once, her head full of images and revelations, but the gentle motion of the ship lulled her, and she felt herself letting go and dropping away. When she woke, it was mo
rning, and she could hear the shower running.

  “You did it!” Fidelity shouted as Troy emerged fully dressed in a plum and navy pant suit, her night things over her arm.

  “I don’t wholeheartedly recommend it as an experience, but I do feel better for it.”

  Fidelity followed Troy’s example. It seemed to her the moment she turned on the water, the ship’s movement became more pronounced, and she had to hang onto a bar which might have been meant for a towel rack to keep her balance, leaving only one hand for the soaping. By the time she was through, the floor was awash, and she had to sit on the coverless toilet to pull on her grey and patchily soggy trousers and fresh wool shirt.

  “We’re into open water,” Troy said, looking out their window.

  “Two hours, you said?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think I’m going to be better off on deck,” Fidelity admitted, her normally pleasurable hunger pangs suddenly unresponsive to the suggestion of sausages and eggs. “Don’t let me keep you from breakfast.”

  “What makes you think I’m such an old sea dog myself?”

  Once they were out in the sun and air of a lovely morning, the motion of the open sea was exciting. They braced themselves against the railing and plunged with the ship, crossing from the northern tip of Vancouver Island to the mainland.

  A crewman informed them that the ship would be putting in at Bella Bella to drop off supplies and pick up passengers.

  “Will there be time to go ashore?” Fidelity asked.

  “You can see everything there is to see from here,” the crewman answered.

  “No stores?”

  “Just the Indian store…for the Indians,” he said, as he turned to climb to the upper deck.

  “A real, lived-in Indian village!” Fidelity said. “Do you want to go ashore?”

  “It doesn’t sound to me as if we’d be very welcome,” Troy said.

  “Why not?”

  “You’re not aware that we’re not very popular with the Indians?”

  Fidelity sighed. She resented, as she always did, having to take on the sins and clichés of her race, nation, sex, and yet she was less willing to defy welcome at an Indian village than she was at the ship’s bar.

  They were able to see the whole of the place from the deck, irregular rows of raw wood houses climbing up a hill stripped of trees. There were more dogs than people on the dock. Several family groups, cheaply but more formally dressed than most of the other passengers, boarded.