by Mary Morris
After that he never went near the water. For the rest of his life he stayed high up on the sand in shoes with kneesocks, a baseball cap, and sunglasses, his eyes scanning the sea for predators. In his later years they wintered in Florida. When I went to visit and would go for a swim, he’d sit on the seawall with binoculars, scanning the water for sharks.
The truth was he never wanted to go anywhere. He loved the house he built. He loved the cherry tree in the yard. He would have lived his whole life there if he could have. But my mother wanted to move. She raised her children in the suburbs, which she abhorred. She worked for the PTA and been a leader of my Girl Scout troop. She marched in the Flag Day parades. Now she wanted the gritty streets of Chicago and its shops, not the tree-lined roads and lake below the bluffs that my father adored. She wanted to pound the pavement in her high heels.
Reluctantly he sold the house. The day we moved out, when I’d just returned from France, I woke to the sound of my father mowing the lawn. They moved into the city, into a skyscraper he and his brother had designed. A few weeks later my mother gave my dog away to a checkout girl at the A & P. He barked too much in the apartment, my mother said. Then she sold our piano, and my father never played again. He used to walk around the apartment with nothing to do, saying that selling that piano was the “dumbest thing” he ever did.
In his later years he seemed happiest in his lounge chair, in front of the television, alone. When he turned one hundred and they moved to Milwaukee to be closer to my brother, my father, using an old Prohibition term, described this solitary part of his life as “a dry run.”
I leave the Villa Louis and head over to the gift shop where “Bridge Over Troubled Water” plays poignantly. I’m looking at souvenirs, postcards, snapshots of the Dousmans. I’m grazing on a short history of the villa when I notice the time. It is past ten and Jerry was very clear about leaving at ten. I’ve never been known for my promptness. I’m sure there are complex reasons for this. My father ran a tight ship himself and he was fanatical about being on time. Hours before we had to be anywhere he’d start: “Are you getting ready? Are you going to be on time?”
I seem to have rebelled in this regard. It was one of the silent wars I waged, the only way I knew how to combat my father’s rages, which were not so silent. I would linger in jeans and T-shirt until just before we had to walk out the door. I had this timed perfectly in fact, enough to drive my father wild. “You aren’t going to get ready, are you?” he’d say. Then I’d appear, on the dot, all dressed, makeup, stockings, heels, just as they were heading for the door.
Given the fact that Jerry was once “Air Force” and given his somewhat protomilitary style, I decide to hightail it. I scurry out of the gift shop, sorry to leave this peaceful place behind. Heading past the villa, I catch a glimpse of Linda and her cohorts, now in turn-of-the-century reenactment garb, greeting the wives of the governors of Iowa and Illinois. But I must rush on. Ahead of me the railroad tracks that run between the river and the Villa Louis cut a slice through St. Feriole Island.
A freight train chugs my way. It stretches as far as I can see, car after car. If this train reaches the intersection before I do, I’m going to be literally on the wrong side of the tracks for a while. If the train has to stop on the island, it could be a much longer wait.
But the freight is approaching at about the speed our houseboat travels and I’m pretty sure I can beat it. I dash down the street, past the duck pond and the Villa Louis gardens. I rush toward the tracks as the train comes near. It can’t be going more than five miles per hour and is perhaps fifty yards away. I can see the engineer’s dark eyes. I give him a wave and he replies with a long, warning blast.
It is a sound of youth, a memory rising. When I think of childhood, I think of horse chestnuts, girls walking together to school, the trains. Camel hair coats and saddle shoes. The sound of my father leaving for work and coming home. The Chicago Northwestern he took twice a day. F. Scott Fitzgerald would agree. At the end of The Great Gatsby he wrote, “That’s my Middle West. Not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth.”
I hear the whistles. The 8:08; the 5:15. My father punctual as the railroad that carried him. On nice days he walked to the station, his arrivals and departures perfectly timed. More often my mother drove to pick him up or drop him off. When I had a bicycle accident and had to go to the emergency room, she made me get in the car with her so that he could see I was all right, even though I was bandaged like a mummy from head to toe. I can see his train pulling in. I see him, clicking his tongue, shaking his head when he sees me.
Still I think I can make it. I run like a rabbit, my backpack and paints and journal bouncing behind me, and the engineer honks again. Breathless I race to the other side and it still takes the train another minute or two to get to the crossing. As he passes, the engineer waves at me, pretending to scold. Then he honks once more.
* * *
The train chugs across the island, coming to a halt as I dash through the small park. The wind off the river is cool and fresh. The air smells of cut grass and leaves. On the dock beside our boat an old man is fishing. A worm hangs from his hook and I hear Jerry say, “Hey, where’d you get that worm?”
The man laughs, staring at his rod. He has no teeth.
“In your own backyard?”
As I approach I can see that the man is perhaps retarded or just very old and dotty. But he and Jerry are yukking it up. Now Jerry turns to me. “So, Mary, we now have a toilet and a fridge.” He pauses for effect. “I hope you can tell one from the other.”
I give him a smile. “I think I can.” Apparently he isn’t annoyed at my lateness. Indeed he seems quite relaxed.
It is clear that while I was at the Villa Louis, Tom and Jerry were working on the boat. The head is now operating and the water pump is hooked up. This does not mean that water actually flows, but it does mean that if we switch on the pump, we’ll get a trickle of cold water, though Jerry controls the switch at the helm and seems reluctant to use it. A shower appears to be a distant dream, but they tell me that they also have hooked up the gas. We can now boil water. I am oddly ecstatic.
I make my first cup of coffee on board. As the water boils, I drop in a Folgers Coffee Single (“tea bag”) which Jerry brought from home, and watch the water turn a light shade of beige. I’ve always believed that it isn’t coffee if you can see the bottom of your cup. I can definitely see mine. I add two more tea bags until it turns murky as the river we’re on, then I go on deck to sip it.
As I’m standing in the sunshine, enjoying my first Folgers aboard ship, Tom points to a half-built structure on the bluff a hundred yards south of where we’re docked. “See that place?” he says. “They were going to open a restaurant or something, but a guy hung himself in it last winter and now no one wants to use it.”
Somehow this shatters the peace of my morning. We all pause, unsure of how to respond. Then Jerry says, “So, was he well-hung?”
There is the usual guffaw. “Reminds me of that house where the man kept his mother in the freezer,” I say, deciding I can play the death-and-doom game as well as anyone.
“Oh, god,” Tom says, “that’s in my backyard. The day I moved in they were moving her out. I wanted to get the guy a sticker that says ‘My Mom’s Cooler Than Your Mom.’”
I start to laugh, then gag on my coffee.
“Aw,” Tom says, “Mary’s all choked up.”
“Okay,” Jerry says, staring at the river, “rock ’n’ roll.”
“I’m gonna warm up that cold-blooded thing.” Tom heads back to his engines.
“Roger,” Jerry says, giving the key a turn.
“Clear.”
“Contact. Jer, keep your rpms up for a moment if you could.” Jerry seems to be resisting and Tom calls out to him again, “Keep them up. I need you to give me more.”
At last the engines sputter to a start and we’re off. Tom comes onto the bow an
d stands right in front of my view. Jerry says, “Tom, get out of the way. I can’t see the buoys.”
“What do you mean?” He gives his girth a pat. “You can’t see the boys?”
I pull a chair to the side so I can see too and it scrapes against the floor. “Violation!” Jerry shouts. (“Violation” means you have done something very bad.) I’m a little stunned by his outburst. I can see this as a “technical error,” which is boatspeak for a boo-boo, but hardly a violation. Still Jerry snaps at me. “Pick that chair up and move it next time. We spent a lot of time painting that deck.”
“Aye aye,” I say, giving a false salute, though I am annoyed at being shouted at for a minor infraction. In fact I do not like to be shouted at at all. There is no place to go on this boat, really, if one is in a bad mood or wants to be alone. I sit at the bow. I can feel Jerry’s eyes, staring at my back. I spread out my journal and paints on the wooden worktable I have claimed as my own. It is an unstable, three-legged job with a peeling linoleum surface and Jerry says he’ll use it as firewood first chance he gets.
I’m just getting set up when a huge shadow looms, blocking out the sun. I gaze up and see Tom. “Excuse me,” he says, “but I need some of my things.” Tom stows all his personal items in the hold on the bow and he has to move my table to retrieve his razor, an extra jacket for Samantha Jean, any of his things.
Before I can say a word, Tom hoists my table, which is covered with scissors, glue, water bottle, journal, paints, and moves it out of his way. Amazingly nothing spills. He opens the hatch and disappears into the hold. Moments later he’s heaving shorts, razor, and various personal effects onto the deck. “I won’t be long,” he says.
We are living in close quarters, to say the least. Jerry and I are basically sleeping in the same room. Tom isn’t, but only by default. He’s camping out on the flybridge under the stars. I have no idea how or where we’ll all sleep in a storm. There is no space for clutter, for things not put away. All our clothes, our drug kits, anything personal must be stowed.
Tom keeps his bedding and air mattress in the dinghy and secures them with bungee cords, but the rest of his things are in the hold. Jerry stows his stuff in the cubby above the couch where he sleeps and in the cabin hold, along with the cases of beer and diet Dew and diet Coke that aren’t on chill, our screens which haven’t been installed, and whatever else is down there. It seems to be a kind of bottomless pit.
But Jerry doesn’t seem to have much. A few Hawaiian shirts, caps, a couple pairs of shorts, jeans. I’ve brought the most stuff. I guess I was thinking closet, drawers. Just shy of “cruise.” Wishful thinking, obviously, on my part. In the cubby above my bed I stow my underwear, T-shirts, and shorts. I also keep my emergency items there, such as my flashlight and batteries, my earplugs so I can read if the engines are roaring, and the jelly jar I brought in which to pee, not knowing what the sanitary conditions would be.
While Tom’s organizing his things, I go into the cabin to put mine away. I make my bed, which consists mainly of folding my sleeping bag, then start to tear my duffel apart. In the duffel I keep my jeans, my flannels, a slicker and all-weather gear, several nice shirts, and a pair of khakis, which I’m sure I won’t have occasion to wear. There are no hooks, nothing to hang anything on, except the showerhead. I begin what will become a daily ritual of folding and refolding my things.
I take my shirts and sweaters and sweatshirt and sweatpants, and lay them out on the bed. I begin to fold. I roll up my T-shirts and flannel pants, my slicker. Shoes I tuck in rows under the bed. What would my father say about all of this? He’d shake his head, give me that sardonic smile. He’d look at a crumpled blouse, jeans with a tear in the thigh. “You aren’t going to wear that, are you?” he’d say. Meaning, I guess I’m not.
My father was an impeccable dresser and he cared a great deal (inordinately I might add) about how people looked. If their nails were buffed, their shoes shined. I would not call him a dandy or even dapper. He was just a very well-dressed man. He had exquisite taste in fine herringbone or tweed jackets, cashmere coats and scarves, cashmere sweaters and fedoras. He had his silk ties made specially in Hong Kong and they all had matching handkerchiefs, which he folded carefully into his breast pocket.
The one thing about my father’s style that amused me were his toupees. When I was five or six years old, my parents were invited to a Suppressed Desire Ball. Guests were to invent costumes that depicted their secret wish, their heart’s desire. My mother went into a kind of trance. She bought blue satin and gossamer cloth. She cut out pictures of the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal. On a mannequin in our basement my mother fashioned for herself a costume of the world.
My mother could do anything with her hands, but she used her talent mainly to design strange Halloween costumes for her children. In my life I have been a giant squid, a house of cards, and a money tree. She spent six weeks on her costume for the ball, but it was my father who won first prize. My bald father borrowed a wig from his barber and went as a man with hair. The judge said his was the simplest and most imaginative.
Afterward my father began wearing his wigs all the time. As he grew older, his toupees aged with him. They grew grayer, whiter, thinner. In his closet he kept several wig stands and, as a joke, someone painted my father’s face on one of them. At night with a grimace he’d unglue the toupee from his head and put it on his likeness.
As a girl I teased him. If he was engrossed in something, I’d put on one of his toupees and wear it around the house until he noticed and told me to put that “damn thing” away.
Now I cannot bear the thought of my father’s toupees or where they might be. I can’t stand thinking about his clothes at a church auction, a rummage sale. Donated. Being picked over. Tossed aside. Strangers in my father’s suits.
I loved the smell of my father. His talc and his cologne. Old Spice, I think. When I walk by a man on the street who smells this way, I want to follow him. I loved watching him dress, doing his tie. When I first met my husband, this fascinated me. I could sit beside the mirror forever and watch all the loops that are required in a man’s tie.
My husband still wears the yellow and cranberry and green sweaters my father handed down to him one by one, but what about the rest of his things? The toupees? The wig holder painted with my father’s face? “Do you want to know?” my brother asks when we speak on the phone.
“No,” I say back, “don’t tell me. Don’t tell me a thing.”
The wig stand, he will tell me later, he put in the trash.
GHOST RIVER
12
“NOTHING REMAINS to me now but my life,” Joliet wrote after a shipwreck swallowed the maps and journals that recorded his discovery of the Mississippi. As we approach river marker 630.6 Jerry calls me out to the bow and points to a narrow, unnavigable rivulet, clotted with fallen trees, merging with the Mississippi. I gaze at the trees, lying with their roots in the air. Pushovers, Jerry calls them. Trees that grow in shallow water, shaky soil. Trees you could just walk up to and give a shove.
Gazing at the navigational maps where Jerry’s got his finger planted, I see that we have reached the choked mouth of the Wisconsin River. A disappointing trickle, barely noticeable, hardly the place I envisioned. But it was here, just three miles below St. Feriole Island, that Joliet and a Jesuit priest, Father Marquette, first entered the river that the Indians up north called The Big Water.
Tribal leaders warned them that this river was filled with “monsters that devoured men and canoes together.” Along its banks warriors who would “break their heads with no cause” roamed. They would face a searing heat that would turn them black and kill them. Marquette thanked them for their advice but “told them I would not follow it because the salvation of souls was at stake, for which I would be delighted to give my life.”
In May of 1673 Father Jacques Marquette and the French Canadian explorer and geographer Louis Joliet, armed with compass and astrolabe, left Illinois country in birch bark
canoes and traveled along the northern rim of Lake Michigan until they came to the limits of the French penetration into the continent. On the tenth of June they paddled up a sluggish stream, which was the Fox, until they reached the portage, where their guides, refusing to go on, left them. They carried their canoes until they found the broad and beautiful Wisconsin River and on the seventeenth of June Marquette and Joliet entered the Mississippi “with a Joy that I cannot Express,” Marquette wrote in his journal.
Marquette and Joliet began making careful notes about the current and depth of the river, on the fish and game along its course. They saw wildcats and what they described as “swans without wings” and “monstrous fish” (probably giant blue catfish), but it was the “wild cattle” that excited them. Herds of bison darkened the prairies and the plains and Marquette and Joliet were the first Europeans to see them.
Now just after noon on our second lazy day we arrive at the place where Marquette and Joliet first saw the Mississippi. As we pass the mouth of the Wisconsin, we come to an open stretch, bordered with savannah-like wetlands that could be found in Africa or the Amazon. If I didn’t know where I was, I’d think I was in another country. A flock of snowy egrets rises. A lone white pelican soars over our heads. Blue heron, fish dangling from their mouths, glide over the surface of the smooth water. It is a wild, seemingly undiscovered place and I feel what the early explorers must have felt.
As Jerry guides our ship, I stand beside him. Other than our vessel and these birds, the river is breathtakingly empty. There’s not a house or man-made structure on either side. We are at this juncture on a beautiful day and there isn’t a pleasure craft or a barge in sight. Not a tow or a fishing boat. I am seeing the river as Marquette and Joliet saw it. Perhaps as no one has in hundreds of years or more. Deserted, abandoned, frighteningly so. As we pass the confluence, we are traveling down this ghost river alone.
