A Marriage Made at Woodstock

by Cathie Pelletier

  • • •

  It would take him half an hour, but he would walk to Panama Red’s. He was meeting Herbert and Maggie there for dinner at seven. They had decided, at Maggie’s insistence, to live together this time around, at least for a while, just to see what lessons had been learned. He would miss Herbert’s company in the long autumn evenings that lay ahead. But then, that was a part of learning to live alone. And Maggie, he hardly knew Maggie at all. Maybe now he would be given the chance.

  The sun had already sunk and now the chill of autumn, the first tremor, had moved in upon Portland. Leaves floated down like brown boats, some knocking against tree trunks, others sailing in the pure blue sea of open air. Men and women were out in their yards finishing up chores. He could hear the excited buzz of their conversations, drifting from lawn to lawn. He thought about his own neighbors back on Ellsboro Street. When he had found a new place and moved away, he would miss the Mullers in a strange kind of way. He wondered if he would ever take part in the notion of neighbors again, or if he was destined to become some kind of hermit. Maybe he would end up in a monkish cell, Caedmon’s monastery, overlooking the English sea. Or he would become a lighthouse keeper on a tiny island, giving out paternal beams of light, steering ships safely away from the jagged teeth of the rocks. After enough years came and went, the stories of legend would grow up around him. They would keep him alive by telling of ghostly sightings. He would eventually belong to the community. Every Halloween folks would swear that a beacon in the old lighthouse had been turned on at the stroke of midnight. “Freddy, the old lighthouse keeper, is searching for lost ships.” There were worse ways to be remembered.

  He had curled the newspaper open to the want ads, and as he walked, he read. Not a great deal of opportunity for a well-educated man, not in a state that had recently declared bankruptcy, as Maine had. But he didn’t really have to work, at least not for a time. He wasn’t a poor man, after all, not really. He had the money from the house, and his share of several thousand more dollars from the joint savings account. And he would inherit fifty percent of his mother’s estate. Maybe he would bounce around Europe for a while, spend a summer in Vienna as he’d always planned, walk through the musty reminders of Franz Kafka’s old room. You could do things like that when you had money. You could do lots of things. He decided that he would buy Herb and Maggie their dinner. Later, he would drop by the China Boat and toss a free round of drinks down the bar. Maybe he would even invite Hannah, the bartending geisha, out to dinner sometime. They could drink a Dirty Mother or two and talk about the sadness that had engulfed their early lives. This was the stuff great literature was built on, after all. This was the stuff that had brought down both kings and paupers, this talk about families, this longing for love, this battle against mortality. Countries had risen and fallen for less.

  He stopped at the small park overlooking the bay and sat on one of the benches. He knew one thing for sure in regards to his money. He wanted to buy Polly’s kids something nice, send it down to Connecticut by UPS. Maybe a collector’s doll of some kind for the niece. But he had no idea at all what to buy the nephews, those young men. A baseball bat? A microscope? In a week or two, he would phone them up and talk to them one at a time. He stopped at the little park overlooking Casco Bay to slip the aging pictures from his wallet. The two boys resembled their father, Percy Hillstrip, at least from what Frederick could remember of his brother-in-law. But the little girl looked so much like Polly that he felt sorrow just gazing at the photo, sorrow followed by guilt. Frederick was suddenly aware of a sense of duty to Polly, a sense of retribution brought on by the dream he had dreamed the night of the animal-rights march, that night when she had risen up, flesh and blood, to speak to him. Who else did these children have to tell them things about their mother, to recall the stories of her youth? He would make up what he hadn’t bothered to notice about his sister during all those years of growing up together. Here was a way in which he could put his writing talents to some fine work. Polly had been in demand all over Portland by only the best bachelors. She had been so swamped with offers to take her to the senior prom that she had hidden in the attic all day, just to avoid the phone calls. The flowers being delivered nonstop to her door had nearly asphyxiated her. She had been a genius at the piano, mesmerizing relatives and friends with her nimble fingers. She had been beautiful beyond words, her skin like a fine white silk. Pity, the only pictures left behind had shown her as dumpy and plain. But then, she had never been photogenic. And yet, in the midst of all this beauty, this talent, she had chosen wifedom and motherhood, chosen to bear three children rather than play the piano across Europe, or sip Dom Perignon with the jet set. Her children’s lives had been precious to her. She had held each of them, at birth, in her hands as gently as if holding snowflakes. And he would tell them that, soon. Maybe at Christmas he would catch a bus down to meet them. He would be Uncle Fred. And they had an Uncle Herbert, an Aunt Maggie. He would build back the pinwheel. Families shouldn’t drift apart.

  Several herring gulls, thinking he held food in his hands, swooped in at his feet, their loud noises hiyak hiyah jarring him away from thoughts of Polly’s children. He put the pictures back into his wallet. They would make such wonderful streamers. He wiped his eyes for they had teared as he remembered Polly. He would take upon himself the lion’s share of reparation, which included his father’s share. Frederick wished Mr. Bator would say something now. As soon as he was settled, he would hire a private detective to find Mr. Bator. And he would throw a suitcase into the trunk of his car and drive all the way down to Washington, to the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial. Ten boys from his senior class, the class of sixty-six. He might even do his own rubbing of Richard Hamel’s name. The truth was that he still hated the bastard, even if he had died a hero’s death. But once a mumblety-peg cheat, always a mumblety-peg cheat. There was nothing wrong in rounding up everyone you had once known, was there? There was nothing wrong with a little safety in numbers.

  He heard the Toyota before he saw it, recognized the sputter of the muffler. It pulled into the crushed parking area next to the picnic tables and sat there idling. In the oncoming twilight, with the pole light just beginning to flicker, the car was a reddish-orange. Then the engine died and Frederick heard the door creak open and then shut. Footprints stepped on the crushed rock, coming closer.

  “I was going to have that muffler fixed,” Frederick said, without glancing up. “But you left before I could.”

  “It’s like music to me now,” Chandra say. “I’d miss it.” She sat beside him on the bench. He could smell wood smoke on her sweater and wondered if she had a fireplace in her new home. He knew the real address this time, 7 Wallace Terrace. But he had not bothered to drive by, not once, not even in those long stretches of evening when he sat on the screened-in porch and listened to the heart of Ellsboro Street beating all about him. Their respective lawyers, on the other hand, had been keeping in close touch with each other over the sale of the house.

  “How’d you know where to find me?” he asked.

  “Well, it began with my driving by the house and seeing the FOR SALE sign gone,” Chandra said. “Then I went on to Cain’s Grocery and was told you’d quit your job and gone off walking. I figured you’d take the scenic route.”

  “Why were you driving past the house?” Frederick asked. “It’s in a cul-de-sac, remember?”

  “Nostalgia,” said Chandra. “I loved that house. Moving out wasn’t easy.”

  “Staying wasn’t a picnic,” Frederick said. He looked at her then for the first time. There seemed to be more gray hairs about her temples, or was he merely hoping that she had come out of the storm a bit weathered herself?

  “So it sold?” she asked.

  “Hasn’t your lawyer told you?”

  “She’s gone away for the weekend with your lawyer,” Chandra said. “I think they’ve fallen in love. He’s taking her to Cape Cod.” They s
at quietly, thinking about this great irony. When Chandra laughed her lilting laugh, he was able to laugh with her.

  “For every action there’s a reaction,” said Frederick. “I suppose that goes for divorces, too. You’ll need to sign papers so that we can divide up the booty.”

  “Who bought it?” she asked.

  “A nice young couple just starting out,” he said. He wondered how long that fairy tale would last, and hoped that it did.

  Gulls had discovered the new arrival and now they gathered near her feet, thinking she had something for them. As Frederick watched, he realized that he’d been a bit like them at one time. But Chandra didn’t have any crumbs to give the gulls, either. Poor buggers. He knew how they felt.

  “How’s Mr. EPA?” he asked. “The man with a natural forest of hair.” The tip of her nose had turned reddish with the evening chill. She had buried her hands deep into her sweater, clutching it to herself.

  “It fizzled out,” Chandra said.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Frederick.

  They sat quietly, the sound of traffic in the background, the screeching gulls at their feet, the bay unfurling before them in the gathering dusk. He wondered what it would be like to touch her, this stranger sitting next to him, this newly established entity: a divorced woman. He had never even dated a divorced woman before, although he had certainly dallied with one. Was Chandra now more experienced and understanding? Was she wiser than ever before? He’d even pulled divorce up, on his American Heritage Dictionary III, Software Edition—310,000 words at his computer fingertips—and discovered that it came from the Latin divortium, to turn different ways.

  “Back in our courting days,” Chandra said now, “I always knew that you hadn’t written those poems you sent me. Even at Woodstock, that very first night. I knew.”

  Frederick spotted the Peak’s Island ferry crossing Casco Bay, a tiny well-lit country moving toward shore, the Enterprise, even. He could make out the silhouettes of people aboard, tiny blips. She was in the wrong line of work, his ex-wife was, if she was that well versed in the poets of the twentieth century, not to mention those easily forgotten poets laureate.

  “I see,” he said. “And you went ahead and married me anyway. So much for your ability to judge character.” She giggled, the kind of thing that one might refer to as a cackle, after forty or fifty years of marriage. But to Frederick’s ears just then, it still sounded sweet and innocent.

  “I thought it was charming,” she said. “It meant you cared and you wanted the words to be as good as possible.”

  Frederick kept his eyes on the ferry. It was just coming to shore. But he had nodded his appreciation for her assessment, or so she would think. What else could he do? Should he tell her the truth, that many times during those long nights in the Victorian house when he had lain in their marriage bed or on the hellish settee, when he had contemplated the numbers on the clock and waited for time to carry him toward another day, on those nights of crucifixion, nights of impalement, nights of self-flagellation, he had found comfort in the only constant in his life, that at least his estranged wife thought him an excellent poet? Well, it was good this knowledge had come to him at the last, and not the beginning. He wondered why it had come to him at all. What was she doing there? Granted, she had reason to be curious about the FOR SALE sign disappearing. She did have bills to pay in her new life as a divorced woman, a woman who has turned a different way. Or had she come to unmask his plagiarizing as a way to expose his last shred of dignity? Well, he had turned a different way himself in these many declining weeks, these days rushing past as though he were on a fast-moving train and staring helplessly from the passenger window.

  Frederick stood and brushed the seat of his jeans as a safety measure. He had dropped down onto seagull shit more than once in his current life as a bench person.

  “I’ve got a dinner invitation from Herbert and Maggie,” he said. “I’d better be running.”

  “Herbert and Maggie?” Chandra asked. “I’ll be damned.”

  Well, let her be damned. Not all the male Stones had been skipped out to sea, flat, useless rocks, never to be retrieved by the sirens who had tossed them there. Some were worth the saving. Although, why Herbert Stone was among the salvageable was still a mystery to Frederick.

  “It was nice seeing you again, Chandra,” he said. “If our lawyers ever surface, I suspect they’ll have some money for us.” He turned away to follow his well-worn trail along the bay.

  “Freddy?” There seemed to be wind in her voice, lifting the word, a youthful vitality that the years could never diminish. What had he thought of her, that first night after they’d made love, when she stood before the window of his old Boston apartment and watched the rain beating against the pane? He had wondered then if he could ever hold on to something so free, so ephemeral, so like the rain as this illusive, fanciful creature.

  “Yes?” He stopped and turned again to face her.

  “Tell Maggie and Herbert hello.”

  Frederick felt a crisis emerging and was horrified to be tested so soon, so close to his having arisen like a phoenix from the ashes of his marriage. But a crisis was winging close by. He felt his lips tremble with the question they longed to ask: Would you like to join us for dinner? Oh, please, join us for dinner. Join us forever. He could almost see the pinwheel starting up again, the streamers turning slowly, then faster and faster until they were a colorful blur.

  “I’ll tell them,” he said.

  “And, Freddy?” He waited. “I need to tell you that I’m sorry from the bottom of my heart. I’m sorry that the fairy tale didn’t last. I hope we can learn to be friends.”

  “I wrote two of those poems myself,” he said.

  “I know,” Chandra said. “‘Ode to Woodstock’ was one of them.” The gulls rose up at the noise of her words, their wings full of wind, floating above his head now like old metaphors. She was right. “Ode to Woodstock” had been one of them: Here on this bounteous field, we reap the first harvest of our youth. Or had it been the last harvest? They were reaping something, was all he could remember now. He saw her hair rise in strands with the wind, her baggy sweater hiding those breasts he had touched so many times in his career as her husband, the skirt hiding her graceful thighs. Would he ever touch her again? Maybe if he agreed to become her friend? After all, they had started as friends, that night at Woodstock, when she had looked up at him with eyes that held a thousand protests in their pupils. Chandra, she had told him. It’s Sanskrit for moonlike.

  “What was the other poem I wrote?” he asked.

  “You wrote it about me the first night we made love,” she said. “The one that begins ‘Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.’” He heard her laughter rising above the strident cry of the shore birds. So he could still make her laugh, could he? That was a poetic art in itself.

  “You nailed it,” Frederick said. “That was me, all right.”

  He turned back down the beach. He felt his feet moving beneath him, eating into the sand, taking him away from her. Poor E. E. Cummings. Poor uncapitalized bastard. Well, it was no skin off his nose now, was it, if Frederick Stone got credit for the poem? Frederick wondered where the poet’s ghost was hovering these days. Maybe he had ended up in Sesame Street Hell where all the letters of the alphabet were huge capitals, poking at him with hot tridents. He heard the Toyota start up, the muffler giving itself away again. And then she was gone. He stopped to watch her taillights disappear into the blue of evening. Seagulls came in quickly and lit upon the gravel where the Toyota had been, scratched among the grit, as if certain there had been a gift in her having been there.

  The lights on Peak’s Island were just blinking on. He paused at the edge of the strand and stared across at that swell of land emerging from the ocean, as though some huge sleeping creature had allowed a few people to live on one of its humps. Maybe he would wr
ite a children’s book. He would call it The Mystery of Dragon Island, about a prehistoric beast who fell asleep for a million years, only to waken and find that people are now living on one of its exposed humps. They have built houses, a school, a church. They are very serious about their little knoll of land. Now the dragon cannot move beneath the sea because moving would wash the island people away. So he floats, his limbs growing weak and stiff, his scales crystallizing. But no one on the island suspects the truth. No one knows of his Great Sacrifice. Or is it a sacrifice? Frederick decided that the dragon did the selfless act because he had been lonely before his long nap. Now he can feel the scuffle of feet across his back, the soft caress of picnics, the tickle of baseball games. Every now and then, he is stung by the pinprick of someone’s dying, the puncture of the spade, the scraping coffin. But he is not alone. He is never alone.

  It wasn’t a question of whether or not he could live life without her. Frederick knew now that he could. The question, instead, was how he would do it. He picked up an abandoned seashell that lay at his feet. It was not just on Ellsboro Street that homes were being left behind. He put the shell to his ear and there it was, the sound of his blood rushing to and fro, the sound of his heart curled up safely in his ear. His life was beating away by seconds. He tossed the shell far into the night sky and saw it rotate in midair, a universe spinning, Triton’s horn airborne. Maybe he should move to an island. There was something clean about the people who inhabited islands, people who kept themselves at a distance. From shore, no one could peer into their windows with cameras. Their entire lives appeared to be lights flickering on the horizon. Their unabridged language, the foghorns one hears in the mists of dawn. To people who are landlocked, even the screams of islanders sound like the sweet songs of dolphins. They sound like fairy songs to those people who have pressed their ears to the sea. Come away, O Human child, to the waters and the wild.

  On Peak’s Island, one solitary light caught his attention, and he wondered whose light it was. He thought of Jay Gatsby, staring at the green light on Daisy’s dock. Maybe the light on Peak’s Island belonged to a woman he could love, and who would love him back. They would spend the rest of their lives happily together. Or maybe he wouldn’t feel the need for love if he lived on an island. Perhaps a daily ferryboat ride, a Sea Change per diem, would help fill up the empty spaces. He could rent a room at some boarding house, one that would offer the safe perimeters of his old college room. Because he had felt safer in those days, with four walls, with Webster’s dictionary on his desk, a radio, a clock, and a teakettle that worked. He would find a boardinghouse run by a big, robust woman with a swaying bosom, who whipped up home-cooked meals and dished out folksy advice. He would live at a place called Emma’s Boarding House, and Emma would keep a watchful eye on the type of women he dated. The muscles of her large, maternal arms would tremble as she weeded her summer garden. She would scold him about his shirts not being freshly ironed, the ponytail inching down his back. He would cut all her firewood, an ideal tenant in Emma’s opinion. In the early evenings, he would take his dinner at a local restaurant, commenting now and then on how fast the proprietor’s children were growing. He would spend late nights in the parlor of Emma’s Boarding House, sipping Pernod before a raging fire, listening to the old fishermen tell stories of vessels wrecked at sea, of gold coins swirling in underwater currents, of silver goblets being sucked up by whales. He would politely oblige the unscrewing of a wooden leg in order to gape at where the real leg had once lived. During the day, he would sit before his computer up at the single window in his room, the window overlooking the ocean, the window looking back to landlocked shore. All he’d ever really wanted was a job he could do from the privacy of his own home. He used to think that writing poems would be one way, but there was no money in poesy. The only other way he had, or so it seemed, had been through his accounting degree and his beloved computer. Was that so wrong? He wished now that he’d asked Chandra that very question.