Life Between Wars

by Robert Patton

  Life Between Wars

  Robert H. Patton

  For Vicki, of course and for Robert and James

  “. . . through all wine and want, through all lies and unfamiliar truth, dark or light — the men of his kind were governed by their gods, and each man knew the law and yet could not give tongue to it, but it was the law. . . .”

  – Stephen Crane

  Contents

  Part One

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Part Two

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Part Three

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Epilogue

  Part One

  One

  Penscot Island was moving. You couldn’t feel it, but it was moving — right to left on a nautical chart. Tidal currents were the cause, eroding the island’s eastern bluffs while laying along its western shore wave on wave of new sand, forming first a shoal, a spit, a point of dunes and wire grass, maturing finally to a buildable housing lot. In outline Penscot resembled an amoeba streaming through pondwater; or, some said, a drunk on a barroom floor, his head slung low, one leg dragging behind. An offshore lighthouse once attached to, now severed from, the island corpus by gnawing waters heightened the illusion, glinting near his ankle like a misplaced pint.

  Penscot was motionless in intervals between the tide’s ebb and flood, and at all other times slid slower than a snail and faster than a continent westward. Tourists sometimes read poetry into this migration, a sense of yearning indicated, a longed-for link with the mainland twenty-six miles away, a trip that at present speed would take twenty thousand years. People who lived here year round kept a cooler view, warmed mostly to their situation’s menace, the fact of ground moving under them like a tablecloth under china. Still, they knew that whatever happened would happen not to them; their homes would someday spill into the sea, this was sure, but not today and not tomorrow. Twenty thousand years was eternity enough.

  The estates along Penscot’s Oceanside Road were especially endangered. They’d annually have lost eighteen inches of lawn if the bluffs below weren’t buttressed with railroad ties or cinder blocks, and even the costliest constructions were laid low by the few properties that accepted naked the ocean’s massage. Each year erosion cut deeper into the bare frontages and in time outflanked the protected ones. Formidable seawalls defending absent bluffs were a common result. Monuments now, the Atlantic surf tormented them without end.

  The easternmost property on Oceanside Road featured seawalls of martial grandeur. In 1942 the War Department built a concrete parapet topped with pillboxes and observation posts in anticipation of Nazi attack, though how the owners, John and Carolyn Winston, worked stairs to the beach, freshwater showers, and a barbecue pit into the design was a question never answered. Wealthy and at one time influential, the Winstons still lived on Oceanside Point, and early one morning far into old age, Mr. Winston slipped from his canopied bed, donned a robe against the September dampness, and hobbled barefoot downstairs.

  The stone floor of the solarium was cold under his feet, wet with rain beneath a shattered skylight pane. Mr. Winston took a porcelain vase down from its glass shelf. Powder blue in daylight, the vase appeared gray in the morning dimness and was the size of a burial urn. He dumped its flowers on the floor and carried it up two flights of stairs to an attic stepladder that led to his house’s widow’s walk, a narrow railed balcony atop the roof peak. Such activity was remarkable. He usually got about with great difficulty, leaning on his wife, his nurse, his aluminum walker, sometimes riding a motorized chairlift so slow in ascending he’d lately threatened to gore the house with an elevator he’d seen advertised in Architectural Digest.

  Mr. Winston hadn’t climbed to the widow’s walk in more than thirty years, though at one time it had been a frequent ritual. How pleasant to pour a brandy-and-soda and carry it here to sip and savor the passing afternoon. Up so high he could breathe pure sky, touch clouds. He could imagine the ocean at his feet a royal blue carpet leading, as to a throne, to England, could survey his wife’s estate (her money, her estate, though he liked to pretend) with the pride of practically owning it. The four-horse stable and post-and-rail paddock. The apple grove that on warm days smelled of fruit fallen from the tidy boughs. The garden, its beds configured like church pews bought for a price, fat dusty vegetables yielding to flowers nearer the grape arbor altar. And the arborvitae trees (big bushes really, but big; outside the solarium they stood steady as palace guards) that framed a view of a fairway lawn and a gazebo overlooking the sea, a view that offered even this misspent man a thrill of exaltation — thirty years ago anyway, before he’d suffered the first of several small cerebral events the doctors aptly termed shocks. Today Mr. Winston’s memory was like the smudged fingerprints a careless thief might leave behind, barely traceable, the capacity for pride, for exaltation, the priceless jewel stolen.

  He climbed the ladder to the overhead trapdoor and pushed. The door lifted high, and cool wet air washed over him. Hauling himself to his feet, he made out the dark twin cones of the arborvitae trees below. Sighting the right hand one over his thumb, he bent over the railing and with the delicacy of releasing a trout to its stream rolled the vase down the roof. It clattered past a dormer, clicked as it leaped the gutter, vanished. He bit the railing where he’d released the vase, with an animal yank of his head tearing off a soft sliver of wood to mark the spot. Pensively he chewed. The eastern sky had colored to brown, the ocean misted and not yet visible, its presence betrayed by the sound of its breathing. He spat out the pulpy wood. His teeth ached as he returned downstairs. He savored the pain.

  When he reached the solarium he was being followed shadow to shadow by a girl in white. No ghost, she was alive and of her time. Her black hair was cut spikey with a racing stripe bleached across one temple; the white she wore was a man’s T-shirt torn at the shoulder on purpose. A guest in this house, she’d been here four days, time plenty for even vague old Mr. Winston to realize she had an attitude. She was fourteen and considered herself an artist in search of a medium. And she liked her name, which was Araby.

  Araby watched Mr. Winston go outside to inspect the tall evergreen bushes at each side of the back door, watched him return for the shotgun stowed in the umbrella stand and go outside again. Poking with the gun barrel he dislodged a porcelain vase from the righthand bush’s branches. He scooped into the vase flowers puddling the solarium floor and replaced it on its shelf. Then he shuffled past her like a Halloween zombie and went up to his room. She followed. At his desk he wrote something in a leatherbound portfolio. She couldn’t resist, snuck in and read his message. As she tiptoed out he hissed from his bed, “Who goes there?”

  She said nothing.
r />   “Speak!”

  “It’s me,” she answered.

  “For Christ’s sake, Marguerite! My wife is home!” But his anger melted as she fled, for he was pleased that his shy little chambermaid would risk all for a shag with the boss. Such, he sighed, was his power over women.

  Araby curled in her bedroom windowseat. She’d been lying awake conjuring tragic airs when noise on the roof had summoned her to other investigations. The depression she’d sought in the rain out her window now set in for real. She was stuck in a nuthouse with no way out. She needed what her great-uncle had printed in his portfolio in childlike block letters:

  Another miracle.

  Two

  Viewed from the water at early dawn, the lights of town — called Penscot, after the island — flickered like torches on a beach. The town’s older streets were of cobblestones once the ballast of whaling ships. Galleries, antique shops, bookstores, and cafés all held to strict codes of restoration and upkeep, staying picturesque no matter the cost. There was a maritime museum few natives had been to. There were diners open at 5 A.M. and four-star restaurants booked through summer and closed in winter. There were huddled houses and guesthouses, and two whiteplank churches identical to the nonattending save that one chimed at daybreak “Amazing Grace” while at sundown the other chimed “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” A colonial windmill at the outskirts of town was activated each Thanksgiving to grind a sack of corn, in tribute to harder times. Schoolchildren and old folks, ex-soldiers and ex-hippies, watched the windmill slowly turn and sang “We Gather Together” straightfaced. The whole town participated, singing and drinking, and afterward everyone drifted home feeling part of a bigger plan.

  This morning’s rain gave the town an authentic aspect that the gaudy cheer of the recent Labor Day weekend had much disturbed; like taking the blueing off a shotgun or the collar off a bird dog, appearance yielded to utility and gained a different beauty. Locals soon would quit their summer jobs for winter work of house repair, fishing, finishwork carpentry. The roads would empty of mopeds and mountain bikes and belong again to pickup trucks and cross-country skiers, to hikers and snow-happy Labradors. Off-season was a time of ferment and dormancy, of frozen ponds and lengthening icicles and TV’s like hearths in the night. Many people drank then. They drank because Penscot in winter could turn a person desolate; preventive measures included finding a lover and getting wired for cable. Come summer, however, with its crush of crowds and joy, natives awakened to what they’d missed and often fell into bad behavior. Tourist money was a powerful blessing, like monsoons after a drought. Floods resulted. And after the floods, renewal and growth for almost everyone.

  From a peak of fifty thousand in summer, Penscot’s population shrank to fewer than four thousand the rest of the year — a native core established in colonial times and confined ever since to this speck of waterbound land, so the proportion of local dead to local living, of gravestones to mailboxes, was high. Superstition thrived. Tales of spirits wandering the moors, of lighted windows in abandoned farmhouses and known-dead derelicts thumbing rides on the cross-island road, were common. In town, the nineteenth-century greathouses on Main Street were home to numerous unquiet souls, among them a pair of spinster suicides and a schoolgirl supposedly headless. One house, an inn now, advertised a bricked-over alcove behind which, the legend went, a wife and her houseboy had been entombed alive by a ship captain home a year early. Several guests claimed to have heard the sounds of sex within, as if the lovers didn’t know the dawn had come and gone.

  The Penscot town waterfront was split by the ferry dock into two sections, commercial piers and marinas on one side, condominiums, shops, and the yacht club on the other. At the club, sailboats swayed in their slips in a gleam of teak and brightwork, a singsong of jangling rigging. The place hummed with affluent bustle in summer. There were fuel tanks to fill, sailing classes to teach, spars to refit, and varnish to strip. A veneer of salty professionalism covered an ingratiating inconsequence. The yacht club seafarers were like the oysters you could slurp in the lounge. They looked fresh and generally did no harm, and no doubt were flown in from Long Island.

  At the boatyards beyond the ferry dock another kind of kitsch prevailed, a beer commercial come alive in the men hoisting cod and yellowtail from the steaming holds of commercial vessels listing heavily under twisted nets and gnat-like swarms of seagulls. The men had coarse hair and beards, wore kneeboots and bright rubber overalls. You could find such types on the coast of Maine, in the Berkshire Mountains, along the Gulf shore, and in the Northwest, veterans and drifters who’d snagged in these places like leaves in a storm drain and settled down to lives hopefully middling. You could find such types lots of places. You could find them here.

  Jerry Cochran lived in a converted garage three blocks up from the piers. Jerry was a man who’d seen a few things. One of the bad things was his first marriage. One of the good things was his second marriage, to Eve. She was dead now.

  When Jerry was a teenager a district judge had given him the choice of jail or army enlistment. He’d met Eve while stationed at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and before long he was spending weekends at her place watching TV and going to movies, everything fine till came her ultimatum to marry or walk. In honor of his decision to walk, he and some buddies drank heavily and thought not of women nor the war across the sea. They capped the night by stalking and butchering a stray Collie. Jerry dressed the carcass himself — same as deer back home, though the dog’s long hair got everywhere — and someone bought ketchup at the Seven-Eleven and someone else bought beer. They broke up a fence for firewood, stoked the flames with gasoline and had a picnic on the grassy median of a country highway. For their fun they landed in the local lockup where several soldiers became ill on what bites of the vile loin they’d consumed. The graffiti inside the cell were the usual testaments of insult and longing except one, etched on the ceiling above the commode, that named in simple inscription, Eve. What could Jerry do? Magic was on her side, so he married her. It turned out a pretty good thing. She made him talk and share his thoughts, aggravating him considerably. She made him be better than he was, and in later times he often wondered how he’d lived without her.

  Jerry went to Vietnam soon after the wedding, later extending his combat tour six months for reasons he never explained. When he came home in January 1973 he found himself father to an infant named Brendan, conceived during Jerry’s brief R & R with Eve in Honolulu. The boy was fourteen now, healthy and not stupid. When he was ten his mother drowned off a Penscot beach — not one hundred percent bad, since because her body never was found father and son could pretend that she wasn’t really dead, that some afternoon they’d find her home as vital and opinionated as ever. They each pretended this sometimes, would call truces to their small estrangements as if awaiting her counsel to set the matter straight. It wasn’t reality but it was harmless, therefore not a bad thing at all.

  One night Jerry stood on his bed and carved Eve into the sheetrock ceiling over his pillow. There was pain in this and there was expedience. He later had a woman who glimpsed the name over his shoulder and asked afterward who it was. Setting his jaw, he said, mean enough to frighten her, “Not you.” The woman, a girl really, shrank from him. Smoking in bed he watched her dress. In his room across the hall Brendan heard her hurry out. He felt about it as his father did, which is to say neither good or bad.

  A great concern of Jerry Cochran’s was his younger brother Robby, who, at this early hour, stood alone in a small boat idling on the ocean about a mile beyond the town breakwater. Raindrops fell sluggish as snowflakes from invisible clouds overhead. Colors red, green, and white made misty haloes around the running lights as his boat yawed side to side in the waves. Robby tended toward trouble, you see.

  Water slapped the hull, drizzle joined the sea in a lush hiss. Wood-slatted lobster traps were stacked in the cockpit. Another sat on a scuffed platform bol
ted to the starboard gunwale. A sculpin head dangled inside shedding rainwater and syrupy rot. Robby turned off his running lights to better immerse himself in the sensation of wet feet. He hated wet feet. In his rage earlier, he’d forgot his boots and now his deck shoes were sopped. He’d already thrown his socks overboard, heavy and wet as old diapers. His toes felt squishy inside his shoes, digested in some sort of enzyme. It was his wife’s fault. He imagined breaking Lois’s jaw next time he saw her — no warning, one punch to lay her flat, talk later — but he sensed it would be admitting defeat. Plus his brother Jerry would kill him.

  Robby kicked his shoes off and stood barefoot on the deck. It was made of plywood covered with fiberglass and felt cool and hard. In a rush he threw his shoes over the side, heard them hit the water one at a time. He giggled at the rain tickling his feet. The sound of his giggling filled his ears, and he cocked his head quizzically as if receiving sudden instructions from heaven.

  Robby was thirty-six, hard, wiry, of medium height. He wore his hair in a short ponytail beneath a striped engineer’s cap. He smoked Lucky Strikes because his brother smoked Camels and because they had no filter and filled him like a meal. And he feared his wife — because she seemed able to hurt him more than he could her. He’d married Lois because she fucked dirty and because she had a laugh that made him laugh. She’d married him because she was bored and because she was pregnant. The baby was lost and with her relief came her first affair. That was four years ago. Robby had since convinced himself she was a wanton whore, which in bed repelled and thrilled him. When they fucked he’d pin her arms to the mattress and suck on her chin or tongue, sometimes breathing in her ear that she was made for cock and would die begging for it. He didn’t know why he did these things — they left him embarrassed afterward. Still, she climaxed like clockwork and this seemed a pardon of sorts. Last night he’d called her a castrating bitch. She in turn rehashed her opinions concerning his brains. Storming from the house, he’d realized his marriage was troubled and had not a constructive thought since. He’d scored some crystal methedrine and now his nostrils were scorched and runny. A lobsterman by trade, he’d headed into the bay at first light. A good move. He’d passed the time working, snorting, smoking joints and cigarettes. Contentment had crept over him.