And that’s what happened. He wept like a baby. And while he was weeping, sitting on the couch, crying into his hands, he said he had not told her about Jennifer and Lynette because he was afraid of losing her, that he loved her so much he couldn’t bear the thought of losing her. Fear. Fear was the great crippler. And they weren’t lies, they were evasions. It was an evasion because he had wanted to be new and bright and clean and fresh for Bethie like she was for him. In every way. Body and soul.
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Fear and evasion had haunted him because he was afraid he would lose the love of his life if he told her the absolute truth. He asked her forgiveness for not trusting her love, for not believing she would love him unconditionally. And as for being married, he added, tears streaming down his face, it wasn’t such a terrible thing. Was it?
Weren’t they going to marry? And having a daughter didn’t make him a criminal. “Elizabeth, please don’t leave me,” he wept.
Even Jennifer (she was female, wasn’t she?) stared at him open-mouthed, abashed at these gushing tears. And Bethie? Bethie looked like a fish flung upon the land, eyes blinking, gills pounding. But she fought her chromosomal instincts and she did not rush to him to make it All Better. Bethie said, “How could you lie? You above all people? You were always so insistent on accountability. Responsibility.”
“He’s lied about everything, Bethie, beginning to end,” I burst in as Wade wept on. “I bet there’s more he’s lied about. Everything he’s ever said is a lie. You’d better get out of this while you can. Pack up and come home with me. Don’t stay another minute with this liar, this fraud.”
“I don’t need you to tell me about my fiancé,” Bethie snapped.
Wade continued to cry, brushing tears from his cheeks. Containing his emotions at last, he reached up, reached out for Bethie’s hand.
“Don’t stay here, Bethie,” I warned her. “Come with me. I mean it. I beg of you. This man has lied about the most fundamental relationship there is. Do not condone this betrayal.”
Wade raised his eyes and in his sad voice he said, “Either you love me, or you don’t.”
It was the same uncomplicated ultimatum Bethie had given all of us in this very room: believe me or don’t. No room for texture, shading, no possibilities less rigid. Simple. Inflexible. Appealing.
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to keep you in my life. Forgive me. I did it so you wouldn’t leave me.”
“Bethie—don’t let him turn a lie into an act of love!”
“I’m sorry for my past ineffective behaviors, Elizabeth, and I ask you to forgive me.”
“Don’t stay with this man! He’s turning a gross lie into a plea for love.”
“Either you love me or you don’t,” he repeated didactically, as if this were an exam question. “If you love me you will find it in your heart to forgive me.”
She went to him. She knelt on the floor in front of the couch, between his open legs, put her arms around him and they clung together. And over Bethie’s head, Wade, with only a momentary flick of a glance to me, beckoned to his daughter. Damned if she didn’t go to him too. Still clutching Pooh.
So I left them, the little family unit—the abandoned teenage daughter, the fraudulent father, the woman who’d been crippled and didn’t even know it—their arms all around each other in the embrace of love and forgiveness and the spirit of humility and abiding affection. Once outside the door I gave a great spit, but it didn’t help.
Westbound, the night ferry pursues the sunset, not with any zest or fervor, just patiently plying toward the tarnished horizon. In the distance the islands rise up like dinosaurs and over them, darkness drips down, absorbed in the Sound. The sky, an inky wash, sinks into night till only a bronzed scar divides sea from sky. Daylight lingers though summer flees. In August it is dark before nine, and the drama of those high unending summer days and short contracted nights begins to close. Late August melancholia sets in. Fog in the mornings. Trees balding, going gold when all the rest of the world is at its green apogee. Autumn is
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the Northwest’s moment, our longest and most reliable season, skies besotted with clouds, and on the islands, trees shimmy quickly out of their leaves and go naked.
Unable to bear the camaraderie, noise and cheer of other ferry passengers, I left my truck and made my way up to the topmost deck and then outside where lights were few and the only sounds were the ferry’s enormous engines and the cries of greedy gulls who eyed me expectantly. I had nothing for them. Nothing for anyone.
I took my place like some sort of westward-looking figurehead, wooden and unmoved.
If you live long enough, your experience melds, mortars so that all rainy afternoons accrue into one rainy afternoon. Eventually there is but one snowy night, one summer morning, one spring day when you lay on your back and through the just-greening trees you saw overhead all the clouds of your life. These singular memories radiate, crackle with such energy, such vivacity that you feel they can live apart from you, that they could touch someone else’s memory and graft there. For me, of all the westward journeys I have taken, of all the ferries I have ridden home to Isadora, there is only that one ferry ride I make again and again. The ride to Isadora when I did not know it would be home. That first ferry ride with Henry. I remake that significant journey with each inconsequential one. Inevitably.
Invariably. I make it even now, having lost my daughter irrevocably.
It was our first ferry ride, but it was not our first westward journey.
That was the boat train from the Hook of Holland to Harwich, England, the journey beginning on a huge, ungainly ship, filled, that late summer sailing, to capacity for the overnight journey. We didn’t know each other, just two strangers, individuals in a big tribe of penniless travelers who had booked the cheapest possible passage, which is to say, we didn’t rent bunks, but crashed on the deck. The ship’s deck was vast and sheltered, littered, dusty and crowded.
There were a few plastic chaises for those travelers experienced enough to grab one immediately. I was not experienced, so I was one of the congregation camped on the floor. Slowly and in a protected corner, a group of us,
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perhaps fifteen or twenty young strangers, pilgrims thrust into overnight intimacy, gathered. Those who had snagged chaises drew them over. We were a sort of gypsy camp. Young, dirty, united by our high spirits, low funds, carrying backpacks, harmonicas, perhaps a single battered suitcase, we shared what we had in the way of food, cigarettes, gum, wine, water, anecdote and experience, communicating in English for the most part, halting English if you were not a native speaker, and carefully enunciating if you were. A motley and international bunch, we were from all over the world, the Malay Peninsula to Israel, New Zealand to Norway, kids intent on travel, adventure, all to be accomplished as cheaply as possible. The tall, lanky kid with a shock of curly hair and exuberant smile, the one in the purple tank top, the faded jeans, the leather sandals, that was Henry West.
Along with food and cigarettes, people exchanged names and places, the places they were from and the places they were going.
My contribution was almost nil. I had started sneezing right after the engine started up, not your ladylike, occasional achoo, but nonstop wheezing-sneezing, exploding through the nose, using up all my own Kleenex and everything offered to me, reduced finally to trips back and forth to the ship’s bathroom to use their coarse toilet paper which tore the skin off my nose. Sitting on the floor of the deck, the ship’s deep incessant rumble went through my whole body, rattling especially the bones in my head and shaking my sinuses. The dust raised and mazed caught in my nose and eyes. I could hardly listen for all my sneezing and I spoke only to say thank you to people who offered Bless you in perhaps
four different languages.
At the center of this shipboard camaraderie was Henry West. His laughter drew people to him, and his zest and intelligence, his generosity and warmth kept them at ease. He carried a backpack, a water bottle and a shoulder bag from which he drew some German chocolate bars. He broke them up and offered them all around, and in this gesture he cemented us, mere passengers, into a group of friends. He had been everywhere and he knew everything about traveling on a shoestring. From Constantinople to 282
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Copenhagen, Henry could tell you where to crash, what to see, how and when best to travel, what was not to be missed and what was overrated. Moreover, how to do this on virtually no money at all.
This was how Henry had traveled the world for two years on a pittance, westward, from Washington State. He was still going west.
From London, eventually he would fly home to Seattle.
As the short northern night wore on, one by one people dropped, literally, fell over where they sat, fell asleep or tried to. No one could sleep for my incessant sneezing, which punctuated the engine’s roar.
I had long since ceased to collect Bless you in any language whatever, and finally Henry got off the chaise he had snagged and gave it to me, insisted that I take it. The dust and rumble didn’t bother him, he said. Besides, he said, it was a humanitarian act; he nodded to the rest of them who were bleary-eyed and sleepless. As soon as I got off the floor, the irritations to my nose eased and the sneezing abated miraculously. I curled up gratefully on the chaise while Henry, using his backpack as a pillow, lay down beside me and we talked the rest of the night.
Docking in Harwich, we shouldered our bags and after a quick cup of hot tea, we got on the train to London, our other new friends in the same compartment, Henry and I side by side. Around us everyone slept, but I wasn’t at all tired. We laughed and talked with an ease, even a sort of affection that seemed of longstanding, watched the sunlight shuttling through the window, illuminating his tanned face.
He could pick up his Seattle ticket at American Express in London anytime, he told me, but he didn’t know when he was going home.
When he’d left Washington two years before, he’d done a leisurely jaunt through the South Pacific, Tahiti, Fiji, all those strange and marvelous islands, through the strange and marvelous islands of Southeast Asia, Sumatra, New Caledonia, making his way (and making friends) through the Mediterranean and the Aegean and all those strange and marvelous islands, Lesbos, Samos, Patmos. And in all these two years he had discovered there was only one island he cared about. Isadora Island in the Puget Sound.
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A strange and marvelous island in its own way. As we rattled toward London, he told me the story of Massacre, of the violent deaths visited on those peaceful people and how the name had stayed, their sole monument, and how there were places on the island, like Sophia’s Beach, that seemed to resonate with a magic, not altogether benign perhaps, but certainly magic. He told me about his great-Aunt Sophia’s school, the vision that had formed it, about its sad demise. Though he had been raised in Seattle, Henry said Useless Point was home to him, and his great-Aunt Sophia, who had died some years before, the beacon of his childhood.
Once arrived in London, I was ready to find a youth hostel, but Henry said it would be hard to find each other again in the city.
Hostels have no phones. We’ll lose each other if we part now, he said. He grinned. He had a marvelous smile and warmth, an innocence odd in someone so cosmopolitan. He was going to a friend’s, a grad student from the University of Washington doing research here in history. The guy had volunteered his floor to Henry whenever he showed up in London. It was a pretty big floor. I could come too. I’m not too good on the floor, I reminded him, but Henry said this one wasn’t moving. He hoisted his pack and offered me his hand.
Henry’s friend rented an attic room in an Earl’s Court house that had been carved into many flats. We found the place with difficulty complicated by our excruciating fatigue (and the fact that we nearly died every time we crossed a street, stepping into oncoming traffic).
We got the right bus finally, found the right stop and trudged to the address, only to find that Steve Goldblum wasn’t home and the house completely locked up. When Steve finally returned from the British Museum that afternoon, he was surprised to find Henry and me on the front porch steps, propped on either side of the door like two china dogs.
We all climbed the stairs to Steve’s attic room. The bathroom was one floor down and if I wanted a bath with hot water, Steve said, I’d better get there fast. When I came back up, Henry was already asleep on Steve’s floor. He’d made two makeshift beds 284
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from blankets, side by side. Till the day he died I slept beside him, wherever we were, from that night forward.
Over the following days and nights, I learned this much of Henry West: true, he was eager to return to Isadora Island, but he dreaded going back to Seattle, dreaded seeing his father whom he described as the owner of a lumberyard and a man more feared than loved.
Three older half-brothers and a sister had all bolted Washington to escape him. They had married and taken up lives elsewhere, one brother in New York, two in the Bay Area, his sister gone to Minne-apolis. He didn’t resent their having fled, and anyway, it was too late to protest. Besides, Henry was more easy-going than the rest of them, and he had never quarreled bitterly with his father as the others had. As the youngest, he had stayed out of the old man’s way.
Summers he lived with Aunt Sophia at Useless Point, avoiding Seattle altogether. Nonetheless, Henry had done what his father expected of him: graduating from high school, going to the University of Washington long enough to evade a major in business and avoid the draft. Henry was freed by the draft lottery when his number came up, 324. He was restless and wanted to see something besides Washington. That was when his father offered the bargain: Henry could travel round the world, take as long as he liked and his father would fund it. But on his return Henry would come into the family business. More than that. Henry would dedicate himself to the lumberyard, learn it, eventually take it over, inherit and keep it in the family. For Henry, rudderless and relaxed, the prospect of world travel was dazzling, and as for the lumberyard, well, you had to have some kind of work, didn’t you? Why not that?
All that time in London, Henry and Steve and I were a sort of Northwest triumvirate, Henry from Isadora Island, Steve from Walla Walla and me from Colby, Idaho. I had them howling with laughter over tales of the faith-healing of goats, and they were equally full of stories. Henry’s were about Useless Point, never his family in Seattle, and I came to know Ernton, Nona and the others long before I met them. Henry was a fearless traveler; he had an unerring sense of direction and he never got
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lost. Or perhaps he just never felt lost. We went exploring. Intuitive and astute, and very clever, Henry figured out a way to get really cheap theater tickets for us, and we went to every forgettable musical in the West End. While Steve worked at the British Museum, we hung out with the rest of the young and unwashed at Trafalgar Square where the London police seemed not to care if you were stoned and happy, as long as you weren’t stoned and obnoxious.
On rainy days we wandered the National Gallery or the great tombs of culture in the British Museum.
We became lovers, knowing perhaps from that first night on the ship that we would. This gave the prospect relish without haste, and we became lovers slowly, our minds and hearts coupling as well as our bodies. Though I considered myself experienced, not till Henry did I discover I had never been in love. There was with him a sense of twinning, of feeling—to my surprise—that I needed to be made whole, that to be whole I had to have Henry, not in me or on me or with me all the time, just tendriled somehow. With Henry I felt whole, never having known that I wasn’t. Or maybe I was always whole, and Henry just made me aware
of it, widened my notions, brightened my vision. I saw the world through both his eyes and my own, and it was a far more colorful place than I had ever guessed.
We had parallel reflexes. Sometimes I have seen this sense of common-response in couples long married, their alliance forged of habit.
But we had this synchronicity early on, this unexpected rapture.
Could that have survived? There’s no such thing after all as expectable rapture. Rapture deluges and is not reliable.
We made love while Steve Goldblum studied the public career of Lord Liverpool in the British Museum. Steve was sad when he came home. He said we filled the place with our love and it didn’t seem fair that we should be so complete and fulfilled while he was so alone. It wasn’t fair. None of it was. That’s what Steve said to me years later when he brought his wife and sons to Henry’s House.
Steve and I fell into each other’s arms, weeping, both of us, for our loss in Henry, for those days when the mice scampered through his attic room, the hot water meter swallowing
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coins, the three of us enjoying meals I cooked on a single hot plate.
Cheap wine. Warm beer. Toasts to love, to London, to Lord Liverpool, to life and Isadora Island because by that time I knew I would go back with Henry. I had not seen a tenth of what I’d come to Europe to see, but I had found what I needed to find.
We stayed a long time in Britain, tooting around Wales and the west coast of England, Scotland, sleeping in cheap B-and-B’s (no hostels; they separated the sexes and we were lovers and could not be separated). Henry and I slowly approached our future, but he warned me, once back in Washington he faced more than a debt, a disaster. He’d kept careful track of all the money he’d spent (and he had preferred the challenge of traveling on a shoe-string, rather than the upholstered comfort he could have had; his father had not capped his offer at a certain figure, had told Henry to travel any way he liked), but an offer to repay all the money wouldn’t satisfy the old man. Henry knew that. His father would expect the bargain, once agreed upon, to be kept. The closer we came to leaving England, the more anxiety dogged him. He could feel increasingly the weight of his father’s leaden hand. It wasn’t altogether fear Henry felt. It was loathing. He said his father did not recognize love or friendship, only power, adored power, practiced power, was very adept with power. He knew how to bend people to his will. He would surely bend Henry, shackle him to his bargain and the lumberyard. At first I pictured this lumberyard like a fort, a sort of Lincoln Log fort with a watchtower command post overlooking piles of rough-hewn timber on one side and smooth, planed boards on the other. Slowly, over the course of our travels, my Davy Crockett picture changed as I began to realize the extent of his family’s holdings. Finally Henry showed me his passport. Westervelt. I understood then. He said these two years he’d been Henry West. When I do go back, Henry said, I know an attorney, Mr. Ellerman, who’ll help me change my name legally to Henry West.
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