by Brian Payton
SIX
DOWN IN THE KITCHEN, HELEN FINDS THE KETTLE cold, her father’s chair tucked under the table—a lifelong early riser. She shrugs and sits down to make a list of questions to put to Ruth, questions that only occurred to her last night as she was falling asleep. Then she sets about making pancakes. Joe will smell the butter in the pan and find his way downstairs. She puts the coffee on to boil. But halfway through the batter, Helen feels suddenly, unaccountably alone. She turns off the burner and marches upstairs, calling out to him, fighting the rise of panic.
At the end of the hall, a gray ribbon of light separates door and frame. Helen pushes through and steps into his room.
“Dad!” she cries again, but his eyelids barely flicker. He is breathing, of this she is certain. How could this fail to wake him? She shoves his hips over and sits down beside him, struggles to pull him up by the shoulders. His head rolls forward, his back and arms are limp. She shakes him violently.
Dear God.
He takes a deep gulp of air and lets it out in a long exhale. He forces open his lids, but the whites of his eyes appear greasy, the color of fat.
“What?” It is more exhale than word.
“What’s happened?” she says. “What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you wake up?”
Another sigh, and he struggles to sit up on his own. His head slumps into her neck. She shakes him again, then he sits up with a start, pulls his left hand across his lips and whiskered cheeks. He manages to meet her eyes.
“I’m tired. Leave me be.”
“Get up.” She jumps off the bed, scoops up his knees, and pulls his legs round till his feet touch the floor. “Get up and walk with me.”
“Why’re you crying?”
“Because you’re giving me a heart attack.” She snatches his pants from the chair and tosses them onto his lap. “Get dressed. I’m calling a cab.”
“Where’re you going?”
She watches as he gathers himself in slow motion, trying to haul pants up and over his legs with his one good hand. She can stand it no longer. She grabs his shirt and begins dressing him.
“I’m taking you to the hospital.”
Again, he says he’s tired, nothing more. No need to call the cavalry. But the threat has him scrambling to recover his wits, forces him to sit up like he’s ready for work. He runs his fingers through thinning hair.
“Pray with me,” she says, “Hail Mary, full of grace.” She will get him to follow along, listen for signs of slurred or skipped words, forgotten phrases. But then the telephone rings.
“Calm yourself, girl. I just get tired sometimes. I’ll be right in a minute or two.”
She stands and wipes her eyes.
“Make yourself useful,” he says. “Answer the phone!”
Helen backs through the door, turns, and pads down the stairs. By the time she’s reached the bottom step, she regrets her decision to let him out of her sight. And still the telephone rings. She listens for the sound of her father collapsing to the floor up above, but there is only the insistent, determined ring.
She picks up the phone and is met with greetings from John’s mother, Margaret. Her quiet, careful voice. But it is immediately clear that Margaret has no news. Helen flashes on her mother-in-law having called Aden Street, discovering the line disconnected. Margaret asks how she is getting on, a preamble, Helen knows, to asking if she has heard from her son.
They’re in a terrible rush, Helen explains, no time to talk. Before hanging up, she briefly recounts the stroke, breaking her lease, and now trying to keep her father conscious.
HELEN RECOGNIZES the expression on the doctor’s unlined face as patience stretched thin. He is perhaps forty-five and yet only a whisper of gray is woven through his thick, precisely trimmed hair. And the pristine alligator shoes. Helen wonders if he is working hard enough at saving lives. To her numerous questions, he squints and blinks like he’s deciphering immigrant English. In her peripheral vision, she catches the roll of her father’s eyes. The two of them are commiserating.
“I fully admit that I cannot gaze into a crystal ball.”
“You didn’t see him this morning.”
“Let me summarize,” the doctor says. “I see no evidence of another stroke. It is possible, but doubtful. Did he have difficulty waking up this morning? Clearly.”
“Extreme difficulty.”
“And that can be caused by any number things. Extreme fatigue often follows a stroke. And it may reoccur from time to time.”
Joe stands, extends his left hand, and awkwardly shakes the doctor’s right. He thanks him for his time. With that, the men bring the conversation to a close.
“I’m starved,” Joe says. “Let’s eat.”
Helen pulls on her coat, grabs her purse.
“Uncertainty is part and parcel of stoke.” The doctor wants to end on good terms. “We should count ourselves fortunate. For his age, your father is in otherwise excellent health.”
THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, a tentative knock on the front door announces the arrival of Margaret Easley. Yesterday two hundred miles and the Canadian border stretched between them. Now Margaret sets her bags and umbrella aside, peels off her gloves. Helen reaches out and gathers her in.
Joe stands and offers apologies for not having prepared for her arrival. Margaret, in turn, apologizes for arriving unannounced, having hopped on the first bus south from Vancouver this morning. To forestall further awkwardness, Margaret declares that she’s booked into a hotel for the night. Standing as they are in his big, empty house, Joe won’t hear of such great wastes of money. Margaret waves her hand and smiles politely.
“You sounded like you could use an extra set of hands,” Margaret says. “I’m here to help any way I can. I don’t want to be a bother.”
Margaret and William Easley live in one of the well-to-do neighborhoods on Vancouver’s west side. Helen and John lived with them for ten months after their wedding while John looked for steady work. John’s father, an engineer, is now in Ottawa, “temporarily” seconded from his firm, and life, by Canada’s Ministry of War. Margaret, like so many women in the world these days, finds herself alone.
Helen doesn’t need to ask what is on Joe’s mind. He has always seen himself as stationed a rung or two down the social ladder from John’s “people.” Their being Protestants hadn’t helped. Plus, there was the issue of the cost of the wedding, which Joe demanded he pay for in its entirety. Unsure of what to do with himself, he gets up and announces he’s putting on a pot of coffee. He apologizes for not having tea, knowing it is the drink the Easleys prefer. A refreshment foreign to his palate. It has become for him an indictment against Canadians in general, a people he finds “neither here, nor there . . . neither us, nor them.”
Margaret has always treated Helen like a daughter and friend. Shown keen interest in Helen’s plans and opinions, although it’s often clear she doesn’t understand or agree. She attempts to compensate for the absence of a mother or sisters in Helen’s life by passing along family recipes and home remedies, the kinds of accumulated experience and wisdom utterly lost on her two sons. She gives gifts of a personal nature, gifts ordinarily reserved for daughters, including her own mother’s wedding ring. And as the years began to pass without the appearance of grandchildren, she restrained herself from making inquiries.
Much more than her husband, or even John, Margaret carries in her face the living memory of her youngest son. The full lips, eyes deep-set and steely blue—missing only the look of comic nonchalance that was Warren’s alone.
Good things seemed to come so easily for Warren. He never married, preferring to play the field. Before the war, Warren’s position—as a pulp trader for a timber company—fell into his lap. He was getting rich selling blank rolls of newsprint while John was getting poor trying to fill them. And he was a shameless flirt, which, to his credit, he refrained from practicing on Helen. He had none of John’s quiet self-assurance. In Helen’s estimation, being beautiful saved War
ren from life’s ordinary accumulation of disappointments. But then Warren’s luck ran out suddenly, over the English Channel, in the service of us all.
Joe returns, pulling on his jacket, announcing that they are fresh out of coffee and chicory, or much else in the way of hospitality. Helen knows this is only half true but lets him go anyway. He escapes out the back door.
Helen details her father’s episode and prognosis. It feels good to give the story shape, relay it to someone who understands what the patient means to her. Someone with a stake in the outcome. Margaret listens intently, asking for a few points of clarification, nodding in sympathy with Helen’s worries and frustrations. Which inevitably leads them to John.
“I could guess what happened between you two,” Margaret says, “from what little he had to say. But I’d prefer to hear it from you.”
Helen remains unused to the presence of another woman in her family, unaccustomed to sharing a space that has long been hers alone. And yet, in all the world, her mother-in-law occupies the closest vantage point to the inner workings of her marriage. Margaret neither sought nor expected this view. At first, Helen found herself resisting this insight, but she has come to recognize just how much she needs it now.
“I told him I won’t be alone anymore,” Helen says. “I made him choose between his work and me. He made his decision.”
Helen recounts their last days together, the hurt and confusion, how she had told him not to bother coming back if he left. How he walked out with no further argument, no word about where exactly he was going, or when he planned to return. She confesses her misery, of knowing that these were the last words she said to him, and the fear that her adolescent dramatics have set in motion something that can’t be stopped.
“He came up and stayed a few days,” Margaret explains. “He said you don’t understand him. I told him no one does. He has his idea of duty and wonders why no one else can see it. I said we all can see well enough, but our family has already given its share. All we want is to have him safe at home.”
“I’m sure he’s back in Alaska.”
“Yes, but where?” Margaret is in the habit of touching her hair when nervous. The grief and worry of the past few years has hastened the fade to gray. “He hasn’t written me either. All we can do is wait.”
“Wait . . .” Helen can hear her own desperation. “If he’s been caught again, they could have thrown him in prison until the end of the war, or longer. In which case, he’ll need me. If they haven’t caught him, then he must be in another kind of trouble. He’s not a soldier. If he’s been captured or is lost somewhere, no one will even know he’s missing . . . I can’t sit and wait like you.”
Helen buries her face in her hands, regretting her choice of words. Staring back is a woman still reeling over the loss of her youngest son, dismayed over the acceleration of time, fearful of more endings yet to come.
“I won’t take that personally, because I suspect it wasn’t intended that way.”
“I’m sorry . . .” Helen says. “But if I don’t look for him, no one will. Waiting is the one thing I will not do.”
“Staying here, where it’s safe, is the one thing he would want you to do. Just what is it, exactly, you think you can accomplish?”
“Find him. Bring him home. Or, if I’m wrong, find out what happened to him.”
Margaret stares at the rug and nods. She gets up and walks over to the door. She returns with a small briefcase and sets it on the coffee table between them.
“He left a few things behind. I tried to squeeze it all in here. Maybe you can make some sense of it.”
On top is John’s old mackinaw jacket. He must have judged it too thin for where he was heading. Helen is taken aback by her visceral response to holding it again, a sensation that is quickly overcome by the smell of his mother’s brand of laundry soap. Below this, she finds handwritten and typed pages, newspaper clippings, and a book each on oceanography, natural history, and the travels of Vitus Bering. She quickly recognizes abandoned notes on Pacific bird migration from John’s original assignment for the National Geographic Magazine. Mostly, there is research about all things Aleutian. Photographs of natives and their traditional wooden hats. White Orthodox churches. Men pushing fishing boats into the surf.
“Of course his leaving has nothing to do with you,” Margaret declares. “He changed when Warren was lost. I think we’ve all changed since then.”
Helen sets the papers aside.
“In ’39, John told Warren not to go,” Margaret continues. “Said there were important contributions to be made from home. Then we lose Warren and all of a sudden it was John’s duty to report the war. . . . I remember the last war. My brother fell in the Battle of the Somme. I asked Warren not to go to England. I asked John not to go to Alaska. I told their father not to go to Ottawa. No one listens to me.”
Margaret slumps back in Joe’s favorite chair. Helen leans forward and begins paging through. She can almost hear the sound of her husband’s voice.
Handwritten notes: Aleuts speak Russian and English, as well as their own native tongue. Traditional culture ravaged by Russian fur traders. Russian Orthodox church now central in their lives. Circled text from a magazine article: Today’s Aleuts live in modern houses. They fish and raise fox for fur. Aleutian fur can be found warming the shoulders and necks of the natives of Manhattan. Half an hour of study takes her through the stack and adds little to the sum total of her own research and what John had told her about the islands, save this: Aleut, which means “community,” was the name the Russians gave them. They call themselves Unangan, or “original people.”
“You’re like John in that,” Margaret says, finally. “The concentration.” She picks up a newspaper clipping about extreme Aleutian weather, titled “The Birthplace of Winds.” After a brief and troubled glance, Margaret drops the clipping back on the pile.
So few people, so far away. This is not the defense of London, or even the shores of Puget Sound. Something Tom Sorensen had said comes back to her again. Last year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers punched a road into Alaska through the wilds of British Columbia and the Yukon. Seventeen hundred miles in under seven months. Would they really be wasting manpower and materiel if they didn’t fear an invasion?
“Is Joe getting the care he needs?” Margaret reaches for her purse. “We don’t have many connections down here, but I do have the name of a cardiologist. I could have a friend of ours give him a call. He’s supposed to be the best.”
Helen looks up. She stops herself from jumping at the opportunity. Joe will be walking through the door any minute. She can already see her father’s jaw tightening at the suggestion of getting some kind of break or special privilege that comes from Helen having married into “gentry.” This will require diplomacy, deception, the utmost delicacy.
“I know my being here makes your father uncomfortable,” Margaret says. “I won’t be staying long. But the doctor. He never needs to know. And you needn’t worry about the cost.”
AMONG JOHN’S NOTES and files, Helen found no clue but was left with a revelation. She has been overlooking perhaps the greatest source of information about the war in the Aleutian Islands.
The following morning, Helen calls the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The clerk on the other end of the line is less than forthcoming with details about the territory’s native population, particularly those from the Aleutians. When Helen says she is trying to locate a relative—the first of what she knows will be many lies—she senses a slight improvement in tone, but still learns nothing of value.
Next she scans the phonebook and discovers the existence of Seattle’s lone Russian Orthodox church, named for St. Nicholas the Wonderworker. She likes the sound of that. The secretary tells her that the priest is away until the weekend, but explains that he visits an Aleut family in the hospital. She doesn’t know their name, or which hospital, but believes they are still in town. After eight phone calls, and the help of three hospital volunteers, He
len finally tracks them down.
* * *
A MIDDLE-AGED NURSE leads through dim corridors with purpose and precision. She has allotted a couple of minutes to this task and no time will be squandered. She glances over her shoulder now and again to confirm that Helen is still in tow. Helen feels herself nearly overcome by the thought that she might be closer to finding news of John than she’s ever been before. She allows the hope to fill her chest and pass through her limbs. After two elevator rides and a disorienting trek through winding halls, they stop before an open door.
“And here they are,” she proclaims. “I’ll be at the desk down the hall, if anyone needs me.”
Inside, Helen discovers a boy of seven or eight, and a man approaching forty. Both have dark hair and eyes. If she had passed them on the street, she may not have guessed they were native. The man appears weak and ashen, but the boy has a healthy complexion. They sit at a table beside a window where a small three-bar Russian cross is perched on the sill. A cribbage board and playing cards are spread between them. They seem chastened, as if unsure how to proceed in the presence of authority.
Perhaps four hundred people live on the eight inhabited Aleutian Islands. On his magazine assignment John visited two of those islands, Unalaska and Atka. The odds are long, but could these people have seen or even heard about him, or have a clue about where he might be?
“I’m Helen Easley.” She smiles and steps forward, extends her hand.
“Hello there.” The man shakes her hand but does not rise. The pause grows large and awkward.
“I hope I’m not disturbing you. I have a few questions and I was hoping you could help me.”
“Nurse said you’d be by. What do you want to know?” The man speaks with a soft, halting accent Helen hasn’t heard before.
