The Maytrees

by Annie Dillard

  Often from her shack Lou saw Jane slog through sand to visit either her or Cornelius. She thought nothing of it until one summer, those two, Jane and Cornelius, more than twenty years apart in age, married. Only Lou and Edna Raposo, county clerk, witnessed the civil to-do. At Lou’s kitchen table afterward, Cornelius popped corks. Lou saw his profile; his beard hid a bow tie. He kept a bow tie in his shack? He spent that night in town at Cairos’. The next day on the Upper West Side, Jane Cairo’s mother Elaine, on the telephone, threw a rod.

  Hollyhocks spattered Reevadare’s West End house. Perhaps so many spattering painters for that reason chose it as motif. Jane Cairo arrived at the gate as Lou did. Jane’s hair overwhelmed two barrettes and a rubber band. Since her mouth was wider than her teeth, whenever she smiled or laughed, dark triangles pointed up her lips’ corners. Knowing, Lou looked hard and saw Jane was already showing.

  —You look wonderful, Jane told Reevadare. Reevadare’s humpback, which she named Surtsey, was now almost higher than her head.

  —Honey, I got enough troubles without looking good. Reevadare never used to call people honey. She was playing old age like a bass.

  —“The tragedy of old age,” Jane said, “is not that one is old but that one is young.” Reevadare led them to a red table in the garden. Unseen, a catbird sang baroque. The wind was clocking east. It cracked the cold sea line.

  Jane and Cornelius would keep living apart. What if they have a baby? Especially if they have a baby, Lou thought. Cornelius claimed to abhor both the form baby and the concept baby. Town had a Laundromat. Wait and see.

  Reevadare’s hair’s part sunburned red. She was going hatless these days like everyone else. To Lou as a girl, old people’s following fashion was just as sickening to watch as old people’s not following fashion. Reevadare’s ears looked like Buddha’s. Her tea smelled like grass clippings. Over egg-salad sandwiches, she asked Jane if they planned to have children. Jane said Cornelius always wanted to name a baby girl Tandy, after a character in Winesburg, Ohio. A what? A girl. In a book?

  —A drunk man names a seven-year-old girl Tandy, which he says means something like, the quality of…Jane looked off high to her left, revealing her jawline. —Tandy means…“The quality of being strong to be loved. It is something men need from women and that they do not get.”

  Why would anyone saddle a baby with a made-up name that means “the quality of being strong to be loved”? Jane said she liked the name fine. Tandy Blue?

  Lou asked herself, yet again, What happens to people out here on the lower Cape, a mid-ocean sandspit, what happens even to intelligent and educated people, that they take to plying skies like cows in Chagall? From solid citizens they sublimed to limbless metaphysicians. Their minds grew lucent as gels. Or they slipped from supersaturation to superstition without passing through crystal. Lou decided that the lower Cape’s ratio of gases and fluids to solids must be out of whack. Otherwise, she agreed with many out here who like her (and Maytree, Deary, and Jane) found it prudent not to waste life’s few years cultivating and displaying good taste. To whom? She could be reading.

  —I wonder what women need from men that they do not get. In Reevadare’s garden, Jane looked dreamy.

  —Courage would be nice, Reevadare said. All my husbands were afraid, every last man jack. She laughed and waved her spotted hands. She looked to Lou like she had gotten over them, every last man jack.

  DURING ONE SNOWY SATURDAY morning cartoon commercial Deary asked Maytree, Did you know that back in Provincetown I could see children’s auras? Petie’s was blue! He did know that. She repeated herself at ever-closer intervals. When did he notice he tuned her out like wind, like halyards’ knocking masts? He had vowed himself to their life together, not to every word she spoke.

  Maytree stepped into his study and rubbed his face. He heard the television playing the Poet and Peasant Overture in full orchestra. Things must be working out for Bugs Bunny.

  How had he now loved Deary for—almost—twenty years? Or did he. He used to listen on edge, for years and in vain, to uncover where, in any anecdote’s avalanche, dropped the flake she thought might interest him.

  Early with Lou, then with Deary, and again now, he returned to this: Why can love, love apparently absolute, recur? And recur? Why does love feel it is—know for certain it is—eternal and absolute, every time? He opened a notebook and found a passage he had copied from Kafka’s letters to Felice. “I have no crazier and greater wish than that we should be bound together inseparably by the wrists.”

  Of course Kafka wrote letters to Felice only when they were apart. Love letters do not so much document daily love’s long hours as precede them. Now after these many years in Maine, Maytree wondered if Kafka ever felt that being bound to Felice by the wrists was a wish crazier than he knew.

  He began on a blank page. Three explanations for love’s recurrence presented. Perhaps everyone gathers or grows an enormous sack of love he hands whole from one beloved to another. In this instance, the beloved is love’s hat rack. Or, second, perhaps love is delusional. The heart never learns and keeps leaping the length of its life, rising to lures made of rubber hiding hooks. Or, third, perhaps he never really loved Lou, let alone his other girlfriends, and, having learned love by loving, had found in Deary his true mate at last.

  All three—even the usually irresistibly tempting true-mate-at-last hypothesis, for which both Maytree and Deary were by now many years too experienced—apostasized. They apostasized by saying love between man and woman, or anyone and anyone, beyond those eighteen months that science allows for infatuation, was imaginary or theater, or inertia, or convenience. A view looking to Maytree ever more plausible, but he knew he had truly loved Lou for years and still did. Since all apostasized, he was missing options, unless the premise—that there is such a thing as love, and it recurs—was false, so that apostasy was really a lapse into truth, like Galileo’s. But then which belief was largest, which afforded hope, by which could we live? Was romance hierophany, or some fowler’s snare that yanked a culture by the toe? Lucretius declared that love was only a shudder mammals used to procreate. Lucretius drank a love philter, fell in love, and died of suicide from a broken heart—doubtless, Maytree thought, to the delight of everyone.

  Deary’s legs felt weak, she told him later; she could hardly get up the stairs. She was out of breath. She had back trouble. She was old. Her neck hurt. Would he rub her back? Was her back still beautiful? Could he build them an addition—a bigger dining room in which to hang three chandeliers?

  The lasting love he studied, not mere emotion, might be willful focus of attention. It might be a custody of reactions. He circled this view for years. Love as directed will did not sound like love’s first feeling of cliff-jumping. Call that period eighteen months or seven years—call it anything but infatuation! It must be acknowledged and accounted for. Recently science had nailed down its chemistry: adrenaline. After eighteen months, the body balks at more adrenaline. Then what? He had loved Lou for years and years. On and off, mostly very much on. Those loving years, and their persistence, must also be credited. People used to die so young! Maybe lasting love is a rare evolutionary lagniappe. Anthropologists say almost every human culture on earth gives lip service, and lip service only, to monogamy. He was scrupulously loving in mind and body toward Deary in order to make reparations to the moral universe. He was grateful for the chance.

  Lasting love makes no scientific sense after the kids can hunt and gather. Yet statistics note that if one of a long-married couple dies, the other often dies soon after. Maybe love in that case is a term so wide it includes both infatuation and mutual, habitual dependency. Screw that. Why? Because he knew better. That it was outside science’s lens did not mean it did not exist. As Maytree aged, lasting love was starting to seem more central to a man’s life even than work. Even than building a career and even writing poetry! Anthropology had proved against its expectations that the ideal of lasting love and also its undeniab
le (if minority) presence was well-nigh universal, in culture after culture from the Stone Age on.

  Say that evolution came up with the eighteen months’ infatuation. That might be long enough to get Baby on his feet and arranged for, if only by Grandpa or siblings. Then the man can go off and impregnate someone else. Why then do old people fall in love? Why stay loving? The feeling of love is so crucial to our species it is excessive, like labor pain. Lasting love is an act of will. It is a gentleman’s game.

  To Lou’s raised light Maytree had once set his face. “Time was,” said a Wessex rustic, “long and merry ago now!” He loved her, whatever that was, merry ago or not. He skipped over his undeniable knowledge that he had also loved Deary deeply for a while at first, a while he had been prolonging. He was obliged to love Deary. Now with and for Deary, he had wrapped his hands around oars, iced them fast, and kept rowing.

  LOU HOPED SCANDALOUSLY TO live her own life. A subnormal calling, since civilization means cities and cities mean social norms. She wanted only to hear herself think. She admired Diogenes who shaved half his head so he would stay home to think. How else might she hear any original note, any stray subject-and-verb in the head, however faint, should one come?

  She pushed the tiller hard over, came about, and set a slashing course upwind. The one-room ever-sparer dune shack was her chief dwelling from which only hurricane or frost exiled her. Over decades, she had reclaimed what she had forfeited of her own mind, if any. She took pains to keep outside the world’s acceleration. An Athens marketplace amazed Diogenes with “How many things there are in the world of which Diogenes hath no need!” Lou had long since cut out fashion and all radio but the Red Sox. In the past few years she had let go her ties to people she did not like, to ironing, to dining out in town, and to buying things not necessary and that themselves needed care. She ignored whatever did not interest her. With those blows she opened her days like a piñata. A hundred freedoms fell on her. She hitched free years to her lifespan like a kite tail. Everyone envied her the time she had, not noticing that they had equal time.

  The bay and ocean and daytime sky did not change. Lou lived in color fields. By habit, she ignored the Cape’s man-made changes. In town it was tough to break the habit of checking skies every hour or so. These new people kept imaginary beasties away using streetlights and spotlights. Not one of them asked about burglary rates. They thought they knew. They unknowingly brought their big-city obsession with crime and appearance and status as rats bring etc.

  When winter forced her back to town she braced to enter the same low-ceilinged cave most Americans lived in unknowingly. Always in May the Milky Way returned to belly overhead, as if equinoctial storms made of the galaxy a spinnaker that opened to north winds. Any fuss reached her anyway, even though she ducked just as, swimming, she took a breaking wave by diving under it.

  Three days a week she helped at the Manor Nursing Home, where people proved their keenness by reciting received analyses of current events. All the Manor residents watched television day and night, informed to the eyeballs like everyone else and rushed for time, toward what end no one asked. Their cupidity and self-love were no worse than anyone else’s, but their many experiences’ having taught them so little irked Lou. One hated tourists, another southerners; another despised immigrants. Even dying, they still held themselves in highest regard. Lou would have to watch herself. For this way of thinking began to look like human nature—as if each person of two or three billion would spend his last vital drop to sustain his self-importance.

  In September and October, Lou stayed in the dunes to surf-cast. After sunset, the sky drew out its dying. The sea climbing her legs was suddenly warm, a wonder. Until a wave knocked her down, she was herself sea and skies in equipoise. A hitting bass jump-started her. She caught the shrieking reel as the fish ran the line; she set the hook.

  The next day Jane Cairo visited Lou’s shack on the way to Cornelius’s. And she brought swaddled Tandy! who was the size and shape of a one-quart thermos. Tandy’s yellow face (previously purple) was peaceful. When Lou held the light baby, she said, You forget. Jane said everybody without exception studied the baby’s face at length and eventually said, You forget. Cornelius called her You Forget. Later that night Lou felt a friendly greeting from Maytree in Maine. She felt his surprise jig several times a year. Did it rebound from that old backboard the moon? Hallo, she said back like Toad, amused.

  Maybe someday a thought or two would come. In the meantime she cleared the landing strip.

  NEWLY ASHORE IN CAMDEN, Maine, Pete wore his sweater belted into his pants. A Greek cap, canvas land shoes. He liked this time of evening, yellow pier lights, indoor rooms glowing blue as the sky’s last edge, and Cassiopeia asprawl. When his vessel Marie’s motor cracked in the Gulf of Maine, he hauled out the two-stroke, the old eggbeater, and they limped to the nearest boatyard. In Camden, if this tiny outboard could make Camden within their lifetimes, they would seek a cheap boatyard, wait for a new engine, and fix or replace the pump. How would he and his estranged father act? Pete at thirty-two was ready to meet him man-to-man and father-to-father.

  Once on the wharf as Pete dropped his duffel from dock to deck, his father’s face appeared behind the water—narrow skull, laugh creases, alert eyes under brows like shakes—and Pete felt the barometer needle swing over like a helm. SET FAIR. He had hopped aboard. The needle stayed over ever since.

  He remembered playing catch, rowing. His father let him open and shut his folding ruler. They dug clams. Sometimes his parents danced to Louis Armstrong on the radio and sent him aghast out the door. When his father looked up from the flats, or looked beyond the downstairs French doors to the bay, he tended to say,

  Where is there an end of them, the fishermen sailing

  Into the wind’s tail, where the fog cowers?

  These memories were thin tokens. Long ago Pete had forgiven Deary’s betrayal. She was the one adult in town who had a good time.

  And what would his own firstborn, little Manny, remember of him? Everything! His son was extra conscious.

  Pete climbed the steep Main Street sidewalk. He found the couple’s side street named at its top. He knew the house number. He could always join the rest of the crew at the boatyard.

  He saw her dark slacks on a porch, a green couch, knees up, white ladylike bun showing over a pillow; she was reading the New York Times. He saw lamps, a sideboard, a heater, and a Persian rug. He opened the screen door and walked in. What if his face rang no bell? She gave a cry, and he helped her rise. She held him fast. She was short. She tilted her face up and said, Petie! Your room’s ready.

  My room?

  —What is it? That voice came from inside. His father entered the porch, thin as a pipefish, tall, orange-and-white eyebrows, loose limbs, full head of white hair, nice-guy face. He wore his belt high. Their eyes met over Deary’s head.

  Here was the look he used to dread. The sticking point for Pete had been his father’s twenty-year silence. Often Pete’s partner Sooner reported that his own father had seen Maytree at their college reunion. So he even came to Massachusetts every five years, and still never even called.

  Pete saw his old father’s smile kindle and tremble. So many easy lines crossed his skin that his eyes looked like pokeholes in screens. Pete held out his hand. Maytree surrounded him as if for keeps, and, in the process, Deary. At his collar Pete smelled the man’s neck like warm copper. His hair smelled like him alone. I must hold back, Pete thought; he knew his enthusiasm could scare people. Then he saw his wet-faced father, not holding back. Oh—he used to read him books, that’s what he did. Pete felt his father’s tensile arms, felt his knobbed shoulders’ heat and tone. He remembered the round faraway voice in which his father read him stories aloud day and night long after Pete himself could read. Blue carpenter’s chalk smudged the pages.

  Why had he waited? Why had he not—as his mother urged him to—invited him, both of them, to his and Marie’s wedding?

 
—Hell’s bells, his mother had said back at home. You poisoned yourself after all. —It’s not that, he said. He did not say that meeting his father would embarrass them both. He knew his mother would ridicule his using embarrassment as an excuse not to do what was right. Yet surely she understood embarrassment?

  Now in Camden father stepped back, possibly lest Deary suffocate. —Whiskey? he said. Vodka? Gin? Here was the same long face blushing, the same shambling friendliness. His wild brows arced down and his wide mouth arced up, giving him a hopeful look. Pete had seen this expression squinting in deckel-edge snapshots. Now the rays pleating his father’s temples were deep. He was sixty-four, Pete knew—much younger than Deary, younger than Cornelius, three years older than Lou Maytree. He had the zip of a tern.

  —Gin, thanks. His father carried his head a bit forward. What should he call him? His short orange-and-white beard angled like a train’s cowcatcher. Deary, hanging like a toddler, still had Pete hooked with both arms.

  What sort of love was twenty years’ silence? It made no sense. A father’s shame, fearing his son’s censure? Pete had no idea. He knew how a parent falls wild for a child. Nothing could breach his intimacy with their own amazing baby, gleeful, passionate Manny. No one who adored you like that could ever hate you. Pete’s once wanting to stone his father with beach cobbles had dropped from his mind, and so had the memory of all his internal work just to bear the thought of him.

  Later that night he climbed Camden’s Main Street again with his kit. The sidewalk under trees was like a cave. In twenty years he had never once imagined—in the little time imagining takes—that his father loved him all along. His father had waited for him to figure out it was his, Pete’s, move. But Pete’s movement was all internal. He never let his father know.