Irene feels as though she’s floating from room to room. One moment she’s in the kitchen, then the bathroom, then the living room, then in bed. How did she get to all of these places without walking on her own two feet? The rooms are different sizes and shapes and colors. They are past rooms where she has lived. They crumble and fall away once she leaves them.
It’s as though she has lived inside a different person every five years. And each of them looks worse and worse. How pointless it is to live so long in order to look so terrible. You don’t win anything by surviving. If only she could be remembered as sixteen forever, with an unknown life ahead of her, looking back at everyone looking at her, guessing, wondering, who is she, where did she come from, what will she be? Like Vermeer’s Het meisje met de parel. She would never be more than a question, a fascination, a girl.
There is one beer left in the refrigerator. She takes down a glass from the cherrywood cabinet and pours in half the can. She sips the beer and lets out a little burp. The mail, she thinks. She puts on a pair of sneakers. She puts on her fur. Why not? At the mailbox, she tries to forget the empty feeling in her stomach, her stomach contracting, the burn in her throat. She wishes she’d brought her beer.
The nausea passes. Cars whip by. People eager to get home to their husbands and wives and children and dogs and cats and television sets and soft couches and private bathrooms. She misses that feeling of going home. She hasn’t been anywhere other than home in years.
Irene touches the arms of her coat. Fox fur. And the pearls around her neck. How Robert years ago had led her through the lobby of the Plaza toward the elevators past the long row of brass-tinted pay phones. They made love in a suite overlooking Central Park during the Thanksgiving holiday when they went to Connecticut to visit her family, and then to New York so the boys could see the Macy’s Day Parade. They had snorted coke with Michael Douglas in a marble-tiled bathroom at the Oak Room. Men held their hand to her side longer than they should have. Women talked behind her back. And in the village of Wequaquet, she was still a marvel, an outsider, a woman to behold—because she was not from here, never dropped an r when she was speaking, looked radiant in mink or wool, wore her hair up, down, curly, and straight. She had two boys, a hardworking husband, and a name that went back before the town’s, a name that made her mother to them all—the schoolteachers and shop clerks and housewives alike.
She reaches inside the mailbox for the circulars, the bills, the invitations to this party or that gala. The mailbox is full of future responsibilities. It’s a trap, really. Why did she come out here in the first place?
But Robert in his powder blue suit, sitting on a stool in her father’s bar, watching the tiny television set above the bottles of good liquor, struggling with the matches that went out each time he brought them to the end of his cigarette under the twirling fans above. And she laughed at him, at his suit, at his inability to light his own cigarette, at his striped maroon tie, which he took off and rolled up like a long tongue and stuffed in his pocket. There was nothing yet but her laugh and the boyish look over his shoulder and her long fingers curled over her mouth and his embarrassed smile and her name and his name and the match that finally sparked the end of his cigarette and her silent applause and the surface of each other, the animal attraction of smells, of skin and hair and bone, and how, without knowing anything else about the other, without ever having to speak another word, they had become intimate partners.
She holds the mail in her hand and walks along the hedgerow between the sidewalk and the front yard, where the boys play football and Wiffle ball and badminton, and when the weather turns, they collect acorns and bring them to the back of the house and leave them for the squirrels in front of the large oak tree. In winter, the Christmas parade goes right by the house, and Santa will wave to the boys.
The hedges need to be trimmed. Loose branches shoot out at odd angles. She pulls a few that have died. Between the hedge and the side of the house the ground is always damp from little light, the cause of so much dirt on her kitchen floor from the boys forgetting to take off their shoes in the mudroom. The oil drum is rusted and should be replaced. Leaves and pine needles are scattered along the mangled crabgrass in the backyard. The split leaves she remembered pulling open and sticking to the bridge of her nose to amuse the boys when they were young.
She brings the mail in and places it neatly, in order of necessity, on the counter. She guesses she can make a shopping list. Or she can go out and see what’s on sale at Filene’s. Maybe she’ll get an idea. Maybe she’ll have a reason to return to her sketch pad in the carriage house later this afternoon, or tomorrow morning, after the boys leave for school.
EIGHT
You could say that the town of Wequaquet, Massachusetts, was built by the Kellys, though no one ever said such a thing. Still, Robert Kelly, son of William “Red” Kelly and Florence Zappa, holds a sort of quiet pride in seeing his family’s name emblazoned on the signs in front of the new Meadowbrook subdivision.
When he was a boy, Robert listened to his father deal the future to potential home buyers like a deck of cards full of kings and queens.
“The future,” Robert’s father had said, “is what everyone fears most.”
But forty years of political gamesmanship, endless paperwork, and petty conversations have begun to take their toll on Red. He is nearing seventy. He takes long naps during the day and has trouble hearing people over the phone. He’s exhausted. He has trouble urinating. The doctors say it doesn’t look good.
“Something in my gut,” he had told Robert over the phone, not more than a week after Robert had decided to move back to the Cape.
“What something?” Robert had asked.
“A blockage. I forget what they called it. A big word for what’s probably a little nothing.”
In those first few months home, Robert had set up in Red’s office in the renovated library on Sea Street. He spent the day decoding the old man’s medieval system of numbers, names, and dates, written down on scraps of paper and filed away in folders carelessly stacked wherever there had been space. A part of him believed his father had purposefully challenged Robert to a maddening quest, and that by organizing all this paperwork, restoring the files to order, Robert would come to know the town, the names and occupations of its people, if they had children or were just starting out or had planned to retire.
After work, wound up on coffee or liquor or coke, and the voices of so many people he had met that day or had taken calls from, he had no place left in his head for what Irene was saying about the boys or plans for that weekend. Irene made sure the house was clean and the TV guide was set beside the remote control in the living room, and there was a plate in the oven. His head hurt. He drank a glass of water and then another. After dinner he sat still and quiet on the front steps and smoked a cigarette and listened to the faraway howl of dogs at night, and once the dogs were brought in, he could hear the ocean in the distance, the roaring force of what was wild and unconquerable. He remembered diving into the waves and feeling them pull him away from shore, at first trying to fight against them with his cycling arms, but then letting the waves take him out until he was past the ropes and could barely see the beach. From the front door, Robert would call to Irene to tell her he was going out for a while, then drive the Wagoneer through the neighborhoods his father had built, the houses neat and uniform, simple ranchers for simple people, he thought. You had to build hundreds of these boxes to make the kind of money his father had, and by that time you were too old and bitter to enjoy it. The real money was on the shore, along Southbay Drive, and Robert drove along the one-lane street up toward the Wequaquet Country Club, the Wagoneer’s motor churning like a thick winding chain. He studied the shoreline for empty lots. He’d have his secretary draw up a proposal later that week. But nothing would come of it. Regardless of how many homes the Kellys had built, they were still seen as a lesser company, suited more for the workingman than the super-wealthy vacationer w
ho would spend a month a year in a three-million-dollar house on the water. Already feeling like an imposter, Robert searched up and down the coast for any parcel of land along the beach. No matter how many wheels he greased, he could never get a lot on the water. The Kellys were known for building a house quickly and under cost; sturdy houses without many flourishes—the Quahog, the Yarmouth, the Conestoga: three different models with the same square footage, but priced based on east-facing corner, central, or west-facing. Robert took the head of the zoning board to lunch at the Wequaquet Country Club, played golf with each of the seven town councilmen, picked up the tab at the Lobster Claw for the building inspector, who had curiously mentioned, while cleaning the guts out of a lobster tail with his fork, how lucrative it had been working for his father, Red, over the years. He had to become a trusted man, separate from his father in style and substance, but just as ruthless.
The Saturday following the visit from his in-laws, Robert quietly removes himself from bed without waking Irene and goes into each of his sons’ rooms, squeezing their big toes until their eyes open.
“Get dressed and downstairs in five minutes,” he says.
Robert smokes impatiently in the front seat of his 1979 Jeep Wagoneer. Even though he can now afford a Porsche—and, more important, can think about how he can afford a Porsche—Robert has sat in those sport cars with his knees in his stomach, the steady hum of the engine like the consistent buzz of a mosquito, a reminder that this class of car belongs to a certain class of people. Every morning he kicks the starter, and the engine groans and finally turns over, and a feeling of security catches him briefly in his depressed reverie, like someone patting him on the back and gripping his shoulder and telling him he’s doing pretty damn well.
The boys run out and hop in the backseat. Robert drives to the Dunkin’ Donuts on Route 132 and buys a large, black coffee and a bag of glazed munchkins. He hands the bag of munchkins back to Nathan.
“Share,” he says.
“Anything to drink?” Andrew says.
“No.”
Robert passes the high school. His legendary story as a defensive end for the Wequaquet Red Raiders grows each time he has the boys join him for a weekend drive. Now he’s telling them about a “big jig” who threw an uppercut at him and broke his jaw after Robert had “cleaned his clock” all game long. He points to a spot on his chin. The boys try to get a good look, and even though there’s no scar there, Robert trusts they believe him, the same as when he drives along the shore and says, “There, right out there, I was almost bit once by a shark. You know what your father did? He punched the shark in the head. Bap.” He gives a whack to the dash. “And it swam off like just another fish.”
Even if the story isn’t true, Robert wants his sons to know that being afraid is part of being alive. Andrew’s nearly eleven, and already Robert sees a weakness in him, an inability to keep up with the other boys on the ball fields or up the hills to go sledding or when swimming laps in the pool at the Y.
Robert will occasionally grab the boxing gloves from the mudroom and take Andrew and Nathan out in the backyard to teach them how to fight. The jab was the most important punch you could throw. The jab stunned your opponent and could make his eyes water if you hit him correctly; then, in that momentary blindness, you could throw a cross or an uppercut and knock him flat on his back. If he was bigger, if you knew you were outmatched from the get-go, you lowered your head so that when he took a swing, he sprained his wrist or broke his hand.
The first time they boxed, while living in Rochester, when Nathan was six and Andrew four, Robert brought the gloves in and held Nathan on his lap while he fitted the big spongy mitts over his little hands. He gave Andrew a bell he could hit with a serving spoon and then announced that it was round one. Robert got on his knees and put his gloves up to show Nathan how to protect his face. Nathan could barely hold the weight of the gloves above his elbows, and Robert touched him in the chin, just strong enough to let Nathan know he needed to react. Then Nathan swung his arm out and the momentum sent his gloved hand square into Robert’s face. By instinct or accident, Robert swung back and knocked out Nathan’s front tooth. His mouth was bloody, the serrated enamel making tiny cuts in his tongue. Andrew hit the bell over and over again until Irene came into the bedroom and picked Nathan up and took him to the hospital. He has a fake tooth there now, the size of a chicklet, stained behind the molding under the crack, which makes Nathan, only a few months away from being a teenager, look slightly unstable.
Neither of the boys have best friends, but they have some friends, because all of the children live close to each other, go to the same schools, and play on the same teams. In the same way, Robert wouldn’t call the fathers of these other boys friends, but they share pride and desperation and envy. They are connected by the strange arena of peewee sports. Robert is conscious of the fact that everyone, including the kids—if, say, one mentions Mommy and Daddy are getting a divorce—are potential leads. So he never gets too close or too distant; he hovers, offers to pick up the tab after games, when, along with the other fathers, Robert drives the boys to the Happy Panda for Chinese or Jack’s Pub for pizza, and the boys and men alike trash-talk the other team and report on different parts of the game. Always a hero is announced, someone who had the biggest hit in football or the game-winning shot in basketball or the longest home run in baseball. Taller and thicker than most of the other boys his own age, Nathan is usually the hero, often enough that after a while the boys grow jealous and hateful, and tell their fathers Nathan hogs the ball or doesn’t play fair, and the fathers suggest to Robert that his son play with the older boys. Last fall, Nathan had to play football with the freshman high school squad, and at practice and in games he got crushed. The boys were faster and stronger, and Nathan still hadn’t learned all the rules of the game and had to think about which way to block on offense and which gaps to fill on defense. He isn’t as productive when he has to think.
As he drives across the Wequaquet River Bridge, Robert is reminded of, and reminds his boys of, how he and his friends used to jump off the bridge when they were kids, and the time a bunch of guys from Falmouth, their rival, were on the beach and they started messing around with his sister. Closing in on her, pulling the straps down on her bathing suit, pinching her thighs, so that her only escape was the water. Robert and his friends whipped those boys like horses, and they ran as fast, too.
Robert pulls over at the end of the wooden bridge. He checks the side-view mirror for oncoming cars and then tells the boys it’s okay to get out now. They follow behind him, single file, down the dirt slope to the moss-covered rocks, where the river water comes up and laps at the toes of their shoes.
Andrew slips at the bottom and falls on his side. He rolls over and stands up. His glasses are fogged and he takes them off and rubs them with his dirty shirt. Now they’re dirty and he takes them off again and hands them to Robert.
“Can you get these clean for me, Dad?” he asks.
Robert wets his thumb and rubs the dirt off, huffs on each eyeglass, fogging up the lenses, then wipes them clear with the cuff of his shirt.
They sit under the bridge with their backs against a slab of sloped stone. It’s cold, still spring, and Andrew shivers with his knees pressed up against his chest. Nathan squats by the mouth of the river, looking like a hunchback, flicking broken bits of gravel into the water. Robert smokes and the smoke drifts over the river like a fog.
“What’re we doing down here?” Andrew asks.
“Taking some time,” Robert says. “When do I get the two of you to myself for longer than ten minutes?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nathan, come over here. Sit beside your brother.”
Nathan lumbers over, caveman-like, and leans back against the stone. In a few years he’ll be as tall as Robert, maybe taller. He’ll have to get used to dipping his head down in public places.
“I have something I want to say to the two of you.”
“What is it, Dad?” Andrew asks.
“It’s a delicate issue.”
“Delicate?”
“Like your mother’s glassware, except in a different way. Nathan, are you listening?”
“Yes.”
“Look at me. I’m talking about love. I want to tell you boys that I love you. I love you more than anything in this world and it’s important for me that you know I do. Do you know I do?”
Andrew straightens up. Nathan grips his knees with his large hands.
“Do you love your father?”
“Sure, Dad,” Nathan says.
“Andrew? Do you love your father?”
“I guess so,” Andrew says.
“Why do you have to guess?”
“I don’t know,” Andrew says and bows his head.
“Okay. That’s okay.”
The boys look at each other, communicating in silence the awkwardness of this moment, and Robert knows, as well, that if he and Brian were down here with Red, they might have already leapt into the river. Of course, their father had never told them he loved them, never like this, anyway, and Robert doesn’t know if this is the best way to tell them or if, given another shot in the future, it will scare them just the same to hear his voice, soft but firm, talking about love.
“Can we go now, Dad?” Andrew says. “It’s freezing down here.”
“In a minute.”
They sit in silence for a while. Robert smokes and looks at the river. Andrew rubs his hands up and down his arms. Nathan bites his fingernails.
“All right,” Robert says. “We can go now.”
They walk back up to the top and stand at the bridge railing and look at the river. Robert wonders if he was convincing enough, if his sons believe that he loves them as much as he says he does. Every rushed hug, every kiss on the corner of the lips, an awkward exchange, not a show of love, really, as much as proof that men shouldn’t engage in soft, physical contact for more than a few seconds. In one quick motion, Robert moves behind Andrew and picks him up and hangs him over the wooden rails so that his feet dangle in the air.
The Outer Cape Page 6
