These Granite Islands

by Sarah Stonich

  “Closed.”

  Isobel took the flower but could not repress a smile as she sniffed at the paper. “Doesn’t smell like much, does it?”

  Within six months they were married.

  During their courtship Victor was uncharacteristically reticent when Isobel asked about his life.

  “But I’m going to be your wife, Victor. You have to tell me something.”

  “Well, it is awfully like a Dickens tale.”

  He was smiling as he said it, but his smile stitched sideways and he focused on a point far over her shoulder.

  His father, a railway worker, had died in a switching accident when Victor was only eight. His mother, frail to begin with, grew more weak and distracted. She could neither take proper care of Victor nor make ends meet on her small pension. One day she walked Victor to St. Matthew’s Boys Home and begged the nuns to look after him until she regained her stamina.

  He waited two years for some word. When the priest came to sit on his bed to tell him his mother had died in the TB hospital in Superior, he could not remember her face.

  He had twin brothers ten years older. One had gone west. The other, he told Isobel — only after they’d been engaged for a month — had been convicted on counterfeiting and swindling charges, and was serving out a prison sentence in Wisconsin.

  The story had made the Duluth papers, and the nuns who taught at the Catholic school annexed to St. Matthew’s discouraged Victor from taking vocational classes that might expose him to inks and printing presses, particularly papermaking and engraving.

  “They needn’t have worried. My real dream was to be a ship’s captain.”

  The window over his bed in the boy’s wing had a fine view of Duluth’s harbor, and the activities of the port inspired his imagination. His sleep was light with expanses of seas the colours of all eyes. He dreamed of the racket of foreign harbors and of climates where he imagined things as exotic as olives or bananas grew, places where darkskinned people danced barefoot and spoke in melodies. He set himself on the bows of ships skirting shoals of islands forged of sand and sun and all hues of green.

  If his studies were weak, he was given slack for his good nature. He was kind to the younger boys in his ward. The children of St. Matthew’s were expected, among other things, to mend their own clothing. Victor took pity on frustrated boys who fumbled with wormlike fingers over their tasks; usually they ended up tearing or otherwise making worse a simple chore. He took the needle and coarse thread from their hands, knowing it would be easier for him to darn the sock or stitch the hem himself than watch them struggle — in the same way he could not watch a boy in a fistfight without knowing it would be easier to take the blows himself.

  Victor showed a talent for settling arguments between the boys who were as rough as motherless boys would be. With the older ones, he turned his nimbleness with a needle into a kind of currency, trading the patching of jeans and sewing of buttons against more unsavory chores of spreading manure in the vegetable garden, washing the tile floor of the bathroom, or disinfecting the long bank of stained urinals.

  In his elevated social status in the confines of the orphanage, he found he never needed to steal. If he wanted to sneak to the belfry for a smoke, he could always find some boy with a stash of tobacco who either owed him a good turn or simply liked his company. If he needed a nickel, he would offer to run errands for one of the nuns who trusted him to return with the right goods and proper change, if only late. His navigational skills — even in a town with the landmark of a great lake — were poor. He was forever confusing his whereabouts. Not so much lost as wandering.

  The policemen who brought him back time and time again became more patient with the boy as they grew to know him; a few even began to look forward to the break in their beat when they might come across him turning circles at some intersection, trying to make sense of the numbered street signs. Walking back to St. Matthew’s, Victor always had some embellished story to tell the policemen about his journeys, things he had seen or conversations overheard that he twisted into humorous tales. By the time they dropped him at the gate, the policemen would shake the priest’s hand and grin as Victor sauntered off toward the dormitory. They would say things like, “Fine boy, Father. Smart, real smart,” then shake their heads. “Odd, though. Compass all cattywampus.”

  He couldn’t tell his right hand from his left. His failure in all but simple mathematics was not for lack of effort, and he often sneaked away to the belfry more often to study on the sly than to smoke, embarrassed at his shortcoming and afraid to let the other boys see him laboring over his sums like a girl.

  He would never be a ship’s captain, not even second officer. Even merchant marines needed enough sense to navigate by the stars. He could become a dockworker, a labourer, a criminal like his brother, or he could find a trade. He buried the dog-eared math books at the bottom of his wooden locker and asked one of the nuns if she’d teach him to run the pedal sewing machine in the laundry.

  Victor took a bow. “And that is the fascinating story of how I became a tailor instead of a sailor.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Thomas got up to slowly pace the room. “He never said much to us about the orphanage, only a few funny stories about the boys and the nuns. Did he ever find out about his mother? Those two years?”

  Isobel rubbed her numb arm. “Not much, only that she worked for a time as a maid, in a hotel, I think.”

  “But didn’t they write to each other?”

  “Oh, I’m sure she couldn’t read or write. She’d never been to school.”

  Thomas stopped and turned, his shoes squealing on the linoleum. “So, my grandmother was an illiterate chambermaid.”

  He looked at the floor and exhaled through his nose. “Christ. How did I get to be almost seventy years old and not know that?”

  Isobel shrugged. “Swept under the rug. You know, he always wondered if his own shortcomings might have been passed on. He worried you’d all inherit his… oh, there’s a name for it now, what is it?”

  “Dyslexia.”

  “Yes, that’s it. Lord, he struggled. When he was having a hard time with numbers he’d just leave the account books and receipts on my side of the bed.”

  “And you’d do his work?”

  “Of course. I’d do the books at night and leave them under his coat. Later on I’d just do them at the shop.”

  “Did he ever thank you?”

  She looked at Thomas. “Certainly not. He was too ashamed.”

  Her smile was stiff. “You know, he made me promise something. He made me promise — and he didn’t mention Henry — that you would go to college. That was only a few weeks before he died. I remember afterward thinking how strange, as if he knew.”

  Thomas saw his mother’s chin waver, and dug in his pocket for a handkerchief. “Did you really think he knew he was going to die?”

  “Oh, I don’t know anymore.”

  He was about to speak when a food service worker came in without knocking. A youth with a greasy ponytail set Isobel’s dinner tray down with a metal clank on the table and turned without a word.

  Thomas glared at the youth’s back and asked, “What, no candles?”

  “Oh, be nice, Thomas. They work hard.”

  Isobel lifted the aluminum cover to a mound of beige food. She glanced at her menu slip. “Low-sodium chicken stew, and this, I think, is either turnip or potato.”

  She pushed the tray away and fell back into her pillow. “I’m too tired to eat, anyway.”

  The tear that was threatening ran slowly down her temple and into her hair.

  “Let me see that.”

  Isobel grimaced. “Don’t, it smells.”

  Thomas plucked his suit coat from the chair and picked up the tray. “I’ll get rid of this. Listen, Hugo’s is right around the corner. How about some pasta? Ravioli? What’dya say to a pizza?”

  Isobel shifted and swallowed. “Pizza?”

  Out in the hall Thomas slid the
food tray into the rolling metal rack. He leaned back against the wall and pressed his thumbs into his temples, the throb of hospital sounds beating to his pulse. He shook himself into his suit coat and moved toward the elevator.

  ~ ~ ~

  Not long after they met, Victor took Isobel to a cockfight in Hayward. Before the first round was half over, he turned to the empty space where she’d been. He found her in the parking lot, leaning against the dusty bumper of his car, hand over her mouth as if she might retch.

  “Hey, where’d you go? I had two dollars on that fight.”

  Isobel closed her eyes. “Is this your idea of a date?”

  He sidled up to her and stroked her arm, suddenly contrite. “Sorry. Next time I’ll take you bowling.”

  He nodded toward the back door of the bar. “It was kind of smelly in there.”

  “Victor.”

  “You see.”

  He dropped his cigarette and ground it into the dirt. “I’ve never done this before.”

  “Really? You seemed like an old hand in there, cheering on those horrible birds.”

  “Not the fight. Courting.”

  She slit an eye on him. “So now you’re courting me?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, yes.”

  He laughed. “You think I’d bring just any girl down here?”

  When she turned to open the car door he laid his hand over hers. “So what do you say?”

  “To what?”

  “What do you say we get married and have a dozen blue-eyed babies?”

  Isobel laughed, but when she met his glance she saw he was serious. “Is that a proposal?”

  “No.”

  He dropped to one knee in the gravel and took her hand. “This is. Isobel Marie, will you be my wife and mother our blue-eyed babies?”

  She tried to pull him up. “I’ll think about it.”

  In her bed that night she wondered about the strange boy. Man, really. He was nearer to thirty than twenty. He was rough, streetwise, and not at all what she imagined her first suitor would be. When she moved to Duluth she had taken rooms in the east end of town, near the Normal School. She’d thought how lucky she was to be near the campus. She would meet nice college boys, studious young men, serious and sensitive.

  As she drifted off to sleep she smiled, thinking of Victor on his knee in the dingy parking lot, his voice raised to be heard over the din of a cockfight.

  He did take her bowling, and afterward she pressed him for more details of his life.

  “Ah, you don’t want to hear more about me.”

  She folded her arms and leaned back. “I have all night.”

  “Fine, then. You sure?”

  She didn’t move. “When I was seventeen I was apprenticed to a tailor named Joseph Beeks. You’ll not have seen the shop, it’s down by Docklands.”

  “What was he like?”

  Isobel leaned forward.

  “Ah, what’s the word? I read it once.”

  Victor thumped his temple. “Garrulous. That’s it, fits him to a tee.”

  Beeks, he told Isobel, disliked the monotony of his work but loved a rowdy story. He allowed himself one furtive dram of whiskey for every hour he sewed, and at the hour the old tailor would hold up a hand for silence, then cock his head sideways to determine by sound the location of Mrs. Beeks. If her off-key humming and cooking noises from the kitchen assured she was at a safe distance, the bottle would come out of the bottom drawer and the whiskey was poured. Beeks would gulp, wipe out the glass, and stash the bottle. A ritual.

  Once Victor asked, “Why bother with the glass?”

  Beeks slapped the table. “Why bother! Only tramps and drunkards drink from the neck, boy. Speaking of necks, I’m reminded of a story ’bout a Hottentot priestess and her pygmy lover… ”

  Mrs. Beeks was a kind, faded woman who appeared to be built of a series of hinged, uncooked bread loaves. Her hair was a powdery white, she smelled of boiled milk, and she had a tendency to hug Victor in a suffocating clench whenever he was near enough to grab. She apologized once a week to Victor over Sunday dinner, loaded with regret that she had not known of his plight years earlier, for surely she and Mr. Beeks would have adopted him away from “that place.”

  Not wanting to disappoint her, he let Mrs. Beeks choose to believe whatever grim miseries she imagined he’d endured at St. Matthew’s. She was a good cook, and the room she gave him at the back of the shop was clean, his linens were fresh, and the bookshelf was crammed with dozens of adventure books left behind by their grown son.

  Evenings Victor walked through the warehouse district, the great landmark of dual lighthouses at the pier leading him to shore. There he would soak his stinging, needleworn fingers in Lake Superior and read from young Beeks’s stories. Trading one water-numbed hand for another to turn pages, he sat at the edge of the lake and read slowly through Africa and India on the backs of water buffalo, camels, and elephants. He dug for diamonds in Peru and climbed Machu Picchu, went to the pole with Admiral Peary.

  His fingertips grew rigid with calluses, but after five years he could tell by touch if a quarter-inch stitch was straight and tight without looking. After the apprenticeship was complete, he stayed on as Beeks’s assistant. It did not occur to him to go to a bigger city or find a better-paying position. He could not have said whether his inertia stemmed from contentment or laziness. When Mrs. Beeks died, he mourned her as he might have mourned a fondly remembered grandmother. Mr. Beeks mourned more actively, no longer hiding his whiskey or limiting himself to his once-an-hour “medicinal” shots. The bottle was now within easy reach, the old man pouring shot after shot until his dirty stories degenerated to obscene mumblings and he could neither sew nor walk straight. Victor could hardly leave then.

  He corrected Beeks’s mistakes, appeased disgruntled customers, and cooked large, starchy meals in hopes that potatoes and rice would soak up the effects of the alcohol. He watched as the old man drank himself to liver disease.

  Out of spite for his son who never visited, fondness for Victor, or some addled sense of gratitude, Beeks redrew his will and left the tailor shop and its contents to his young assistant. After the funeral the only change Victor made in the shop was to clear out the spent bottles and shift over to the old man’s chair. He did not bother to change the name of the shop, certain he would be gone within the year.

  A tailor shop in the heart of the waterfront was no place to meet girls. Victor often went to the cinema, but his favorite films, the westerns and horror flicks, were seldom attended by single females.

  He wandered occasionally to dance halls or bars near the wharf, where he would idly flirt with the barmaids and listen to stories of returning sailors. He fell in with a pretty but irritable waitress named Nell. She even moved into the rooms above the shop for a time. But she left him after a year, frustrated at his reluctance to marry, leaving behind an acrid note and the broken shards of his favorite coffee cup.

  Isobel felt a flash of unease. “So you didn’t marry her, yet you… is that honorable?”

  “She wasn’t the one.”

  “But I am?”

  Victor pinched the tip of Isobel’s nose. “You’ll do.”

  The girls from the Pasal Millinery held a bridal shower for her. Isobel’s landlady had agreed to let them use the front parlor of the boardinghouse, and there they spent an afternoon giggling and playing shower games, making up wedding-night rhymes pairing her name and Victor’s.

  “Victor Howard?”

  Carol frowned. “Nice name, but crummy for rhyming. All I can think of is coward.”

  Ruth pulled a scrap from her purse and shot up from her chair. “How about this?

  Izzy’s garden was full of delights,

  A flower so sweet and so bright,

  Demure, and just ready for plucking.

  Victor laid her right down

  On that hard stony ground

  To give her a jolly old fu… ”

  “Ruthie!”

  Ca
rol cackled, spilling her soda, “You cheat! You wrote that before. This is supposed to be spur of the moment!”

  Ellen tapped at the stem of her glasses and frowned, repeating several times aloud, “Mrs. Howard was deflowered?”

  Isobel rolled her eyes.

  Kathleen, who had been sitting quietly in her chair, suddenly waved her arms. “Okay, I’ve got one!”

  She stood and laid a hand across her bosom, clearing her throat for effect.

  “Fair of hair, sweet of heart, Isobel,

  Was a maiden, an innocent gal.

  When Victor arrived,

  She was filled with surprise,

  At the length and the breadth of his swell.”

  Ruth screamed and then shook her finger wildly. “That’s a limerick. It’s not fair, she’s Irish.”

  Isobel laughed. “Oh, I think that one takes the prize.”

  She reached into the pile of wrapped party favors.

  “Wait. You have to make up one too.”

  “Oh, no. No-no-no.”

  They made her sit in a corner with a piece of paper until she came up with one. “Okay, this is what I’ve got. No apologies.

  A tailor who hadn’t a care.

  Had the lass Isobel in his lair.

  Victor had picked her,

  Young Howard had wowed her

  with a smile and a dimple, so there.”

  There was a collective moan and a titter. “Izzy, that’s the dumbest poem ever.”

  She shrugged. “It’s all I’ve got.”

  Isobel opened gifts, mostly linens, all hand-stitched. “Oh, they’re so beautiful.”

  Her exclamations were sincere even after the third set of hemstitched pillowcases and the second batch of identical tea towels. Cream-colored dinner napkins piled up at her side.