Telling Time

by Austin Wright

  I could see Dolores’s baby getting heavy in her arms, which she didn’t seem to notice. Asking questions about my work. How I got started, published, my first book. How I came up with Thumpy Puppy and when did I invent Milkweed Kitty-puss? Work habits, when I do my illustrations, how much time on text, how much pictures. She wants to be a book illustrator of course, which is why she approached me. That’s fine, don’t mind at all and I gave her advice she probably doesn’t need though she thinks she does. I dealt with her questions and never got to my own, which was why she doesn’t marry Larry, since she has a family now, my niece-in-law without the law? I wanted to ask but I felt a delicacy and didn’t.

  We saw a bittern in the reeds. The old osprey nest in a dead tree across the marsh, nobody occupying it. Angela offered her binoculars to Betty who couldn’t hold them still enough to see. White and gray seagulls clean as fresh laundry, as well as the dirty-looking younger birds. Some of the mature gulls were different, with black wings or black heads, and no one knew what they were except the herring gull, which Tommy knew. There was a marshy smell, a whiff of sulfur; more dead things around. Dead fish in a stagnant pond, Tommy poked it with his stick, Angela said quit that, Tommy said why should I? Then a dead flicker right in our path, the flash of useless gold, the white back feathers, the strong neck broken and twisted around. Upset Betty, who wanted to know what killed it, which I didn’t know, and Angela said Ugh, and Tommy turned it over with his stick. Flickers are always getting killed, he said. Then into the woods, the sandy path between lichen rocks, the struggling little evergreen and little oak trees, while we looked at the olive birds darting about like mosquitoes and heard a white throated sparrow. I called attention to the sound of the quail, bob bob, bob white, and the children held still and Tommy whistled an imitation.

  The crows cawed echoing from the tall pine beyond the golf course, and a somber mood came over us from the darkening sky. Cirrostratus, I explained the high clouds full of ice spreading a veil across the sun, the brightness fading, the twilight will be long and lusterless, and rain tomorrow.

  Timidly, as if she were asking about love, Angela asked if I believed in the reincarnation of souls. I laughed, which was tactless of me. I guessed some boyfriend had been trying to impress her. I told her it’s an old idea with metaphorical significance. Plato used it. I said how you need metaphors to express what realistic and literal language can’t express, and that’s how it is with reincarnation. But what’s it a metaphor for? she asked, making the mistake of assuming a metaphor says something which you can say some other way. I went along anyway to suggest that in so far as reincarnation was a metaphor it was probably for the bone-feeling of universality in human experience, empathy and oneness with others and our pasts and the human heritage and transcendence of our selves, and a lot of bullshit. I avoided saying that I’d be mighty cautious about getting involved with anyone who believes literally in reincarnation—if that’s what was on her mind.

  Dolores’s baby began to cry so we started back. We found a gold and black furry caterpillar for Nancy, who played with it the rest of the way while it gradually shrank until there was nothing left. Then she cried, criticizing me for not warning her though actually I did warn her. So we were a bit grumpy by the end, but that’s natural because we were healthily tired, and on the whole it was a good time and a good thing to have done.

  ANGELA KEY: Diary

  The best thing today was Aunt Beatrice took us for a nature walk. Down behind the house to the beach and back through the marsh and woods before town. I think I’m in love with Beatrice. She is so slim and tall and graceful. Like a dancer; every move slides. Pretty like the Virgin Mary, I’m not kidding. She can protect me from anything. Nothing upsets her. There was my stupid brother doing his morbid act, finding dead things and trying to shock us, and Beatrice just smiled as if that’s what nature is, which it is but Tommy is too dumb to know. There’s something wrong with him on this trip, I don’t know what, something on his mind, he won’t say. I don’t think it’s grandfather’s death. Aunt Beatrice, though. How beautifully she talked to me, addressing herself to me, her whole attention, when I asked the Pete Arena question. She almost saved him without knowing. I could have melted.

  Better not tell Axel. He’ll think I’m perverted. He’s wrong, it’s not like that at all.

  PATRICIA KEY: Composed at dinner

  To Pete Arena. Here I sit containing my fury as we eat while Mrs. Goslowly helps Mother. How dare you come to the Island without asking me? Didn’t you realize I might be meeting people on that plane? When I saw you coming up the tunnel, your black face, jeans, plaid shirt, talking to Tommy and Angela, I was shocked. With my nephew David right behind you not knowing and my old Aunt Edna in front of you and here you come full of big boy scooting past my poor old aunt in her wheelchair like a snail in the path of your ignorance. And the nerve to grab me in front of my relatives who don’t know you exist.

  You forgot that. Nobody in my family knows you exist. They think William’s still my husband, sharing my room, same bed. (Queen size, forget it.) What am I supposed to say about you?

  Your ignorance of decorum, that’s why I scowled and pretended not to know you. Against my deep grain you forced me to make my kids lie. I had to whisper them not to know you. Lie to Aunt Edna with my kids watching. That humiliates me. I teach them to be honest and this is what you do.

  What did you expect? Did you think I would introduce you? Even your call was awkward. There were people in the room. I pretended it was from New York.

  Here are the rules. Keep away from the house. If we meet by accident, show no recognition. The funeral is Friday. You can go to it if you stay that long but sit in back, don’t say who you are. If you spy on my family don’t let anyone see you. If you have to be somebody, be a former student, come to pay your respects.

  Your coming so prematurely, I could easily regard it as a breach of faith. I thought it was understood, I’ll introduce the question to my family in my way. Nobody here knows you exist, let alone you’re black. If you think you should present yourself and let them see for themselves, you’d better not. You laugh when I say my siblings are no racists and you’re probably right, but that’s no reason to bludgeon them. We need to be tactful, considerate, you included. When my mother learns the truth, she’ll react. After her reaction she’ll adjust. If I don’t warn her in advance, she’ll feel betrayed. It would be like introducing you to her in the bathroom when she’s undressed.

  Before she can get used to your distinctive color, she’ll need to get used to the breakup with William and the fact that someone in your position exists. That’s three shocks I’ll be giving her. Even William doesn’t know you’re black. He knows everything about you but that. It will put his ACLU liberalism to an interesting test. He’ll look down on me for picking you. He won’t show it because of the hypocrisy, but I’ll know and he’ll know that I know and it will be part of the package of our parting. But he doesn’t know anything yet. Do you understand?

  MELANIE CAIRO: To Dr. Parch or Dr. Saunders

  Hard to distinguish between his grief if he has any and his sickness. Quiet, lethargic, morose as usual. Or do I mean Dr. Saunders, Parch or Saunders in the living room with such a crowd I don’t dare write yet, especially if it’s Saunders not Parch I’m writing to. The distractive question of the other man, this man of last year’s beach house, and me nervous and fearful not of what he would do but of what I would feel. Since last summer I’ve grown to hate the memory, shabby and dirty in retrospect not seen at the time. Ashamed not for infidelity (no longer a useful term, the man soothingly told me) but for cheap excitement and obese emotion. I’ve not been able to expel the image of his secret sticking out like a red carrot through all that civic dignity and control. I couldn’t recall what captivated me. Nothing captivated me. It was an opportunity to experiment on myself, but the instrument was crude.

  I was surprised to be so jumpy about meeting him again. But when he arrived yest
erday and I saw again the shielded gray look covering so much unsaid interpreting and recalled his hidden carrot of truth, why then Dr. Parch or do I mean Saunders my nervousness vanished and I felt secure.

  I was determined that what happened once last summer back of the beach would not repeat this year, certainly not in the middle of grief, nor be mentioned or thought, erased from history as if it never was. I was determined that he conspire with me on this. But tonight as we sit here all these people in the living room and dining room, the young ones playing games, I’ve been aware of his eyes not looking at me knowingly and no longer with contempt if it ever was contempt, and there was the moment by the front door but only for a second as if to create an event. It was about the strain of taking care of my depressed husband, and I felt sympathy projected at me not like a carrot but a flame. So that all evening while I think notes for Dr. Parch I find myself thinking notes for Dr. Saunders about how it could be done again if that were to happen which I vow won’t in the house or the Inn, but would a room at the Motel beyond the harbor be too dangerous, or might a safe wilderness be found along the beach like last summer or an empty beach house not in use at this time of year, and how much time might go unnoticed, what could be done with the husband, how could the wife be distracted? I try to dismiss the sentimental questions (how could you think of it at a time like this) because the fact is, I am thinking of it with him sitting across from me reading a magazine, and remembering we are the in-laws, the invited outsiders. Except that this was exactly what I intended never to think again.

  But it’s Henry I must think of, keep my mind on Henry, playing with the children, morosely. A child’s game. I hear him animated, bargaining, calling to the cat that walks across the board, cooing, meowing, giggling, pretending not to be morose. This afternoon I heard someone crying in the house. It went on and on, oh oh oh, with intakes between the sobs. I thought probably a child, but loud enough to be adult so it probably was adult for only an adult would cry that loud, woman or man, how the voice rises and changes pitch under stress, and who here is capable of making a noise like that, crying away like the end of civilization.

  The problem is, when I think of Henry I think of him, like one causes the other. And then I keep thinking he’ll tell me, he’ll find a way and when he does I’ll know what to say. But I had resolved not to. As for Henry, what should I do, Dr. Parch or Dr. Saunders?

  HENRY WESTERLY: To God

  Let me ask you a question. Can God commit suicide? Can God be depressed?

  Good, I thought not. God goes along all year doing what he does. The relief I feel today. Pray watch me not to make everybody ask what’s come over me.

  You saw last night when I read the suicide note by my father. Everybody was shocked, like a crime discovered at the heart of the universe. Philip and William, who wanted to classify it Secret with William going so far as not to tell Patty his wife.

  But if Patty’s his wife she’s also my sister and that irritated me so I told her myself. You’d have done the same. This afternoon with the sheets on the sunporch before the airport. Well, she was shocked too. How conventional everybody is. Asking when he wrote it, as if that mattered, not realizing that the suicidal worm is a worm no matter when it pokes up through the ground. It’s a deep way of seeing, and though it may require a mishap to bring it to the surface like rain, it’s a worm in the ground nevertheless. She wanted to excuse it by a specific misfortune like presidential failure, but that won’t do, this is character we’re talking about.

  Her problem was, she took it personally. Like by killing himself Father killed her. Because killing himself amounted to killing the world in which he lived, which includes her. It’s also a repudiation of you as author and creator of life, and therefore of her soul and the immortality of her soul, that too. Then she realized that he didn’t actually do it, which I say makes no difference but for her made it business as usual, and it was Poor Daddy all over again.

  Nobody shared the relief I felt when I read his note. It settled a confusion of identity that’s been plaguing me. Since you would never be suicidally depressed, it means he’s just another mortal like the rest of us. Like say me. This isn’t as naive as it sounds. I never mistook him for you. It’s a question not of what I know but of the unseen connection. The underground conspiracy I used to suppose between you and him. I knew he was mortal, but I heard him in your voice.

  Until last night when I saw it clear, the familiar vanity, the punishing ego full of tears and puff adder, curling to strike himself a venomous blow in his own serpentine neck.

  I won’t read his papers tonight. They read them like carrion birds. I’ll sit it out for a while. I heard someone crying this afternoon with the house full of people, impossible to tell where from or who. Again tonight upstairs which stopped when I came out of the bathroom. I’d like to think someone is grieving for you, but it’s only mourning Father, I suppose.

  PHILIP WESTERLY: Tribute

  My father as past, language, civilization. As Chicago, organized by him in the car and on foot and in everyday speech. As New England. As Ithaca where I live, which was mine until appropriated by him in his visits.

  My father as the organized wilderness, arranging the red fox that escapes off the road under the headlight of the car and the skunk odor over country roads in summer evenings. The differentiation of bird songs, the divisions into phoebe and peewee, hermit and wood thrush, song and white throated sparrow.

  My father as the modern world. The obsolete railroad locomotive, the internal combustion engine, the airplane wing, the jet engine. Attachments and luxury gadgets—windows that roll up by a push button. Glow of the dashboard lights in the dark.

  My father as non-belligerent skepticism and genial doubt. Appropriate awe for the mysteries of life. Avoidance of simplified solutions. Common sense, horse sense, self-reliance. World in the image of the self-created self.

  Omit this. My first wife Louisa, a rebel child of the sixties who was against parents, who fluttered and gave him hugs when we met and called him cute, who when I went into practice found me too conventional to be interesting, compared us. She said I was a mere pale copy of him. My second wife Beatrice assures me that’s unfair.

  How could I make myself without a model? What else is there but confusion?

  HENRY WESTERLY: Narrative

  So, Mr Angel Vertebrate, Sam Truro says, you thought you’d stop by for a little negotiation. There they sit, each in a different chair, handcuffed to the chain, which is padlocked to the radiator post. Across the room is Truro, carbine in his lap, revolver on the table. Angel Vertebrate is naked, Truro’s wife Georgette is disheveled, her hair scraggle wet across her face. She’s ill, she refuses to look at her husband. There’s age long frustration and defeat on her face, a look you see in the streets, the buses, the grocery stores on the faces of middle aged and elderly depressives, beaten by years which in her have been compressed into a few days. The little boy Roger rests his head on his wrist. He has been through all the comic books several times. He complains because the calves of his legs tingle, he can’t hold them still, he kicks them out, he shakes his body, he makes birdlike and mouselike noises until his father says, Shut up.

  So now are you satisfied, Mr. Angel Vertebrate?

  Sweating in the leather chair; wiggling and easing his body around in an effort to loosen it up, Vertebrate says, I don’t know what you want wimme, Sam. You tell me what you want wimme and I’ll see what can be done. I never meant you no harm, Sam.

  Georgette can tell you what kind of harm you meant.

  Fuck you, Georgette murmurs.

  You wanted to be a member of the Truro family, welcome to the Truro family. How do you like being a member of the Truro family, Mr. Vertebrate?

  You got me wrong, Vertebrate says. I never wanted to interfere the Truro family.

  What you think is Georgette if you don’t want to interfere? Truro says.

  I never meant nothing with Georgette. She’s your wife, honest
a God.

  So now it’s all out in the open, you, me, and her, and your cock sticking out where everybody can keep an eye on it. I notice it ain’t as interested as it used to be. Is that right, or did you always have difficulty with it?

  You just tell me what you want, Mr. Truro, and I’ll see that you get it.

  Almost a day and a half has passed since Sam Truro took Angel Vertebrate into his family of captives. He has taught his friend the routines, unlocks his handcuff when he has to go to the bathroom, with the gun on him and the door open. Makes him wash morning and night, use the extra toothbrush. Angel says he wants a bath, Truro says he can have one soon. The routine by which Georgette is released into the kitchen to cook meals has become habitual, but now that Angel has joined the group they no longer eat together as a family. While Georgette and Roger sit at the table Angel stays in his chair and gets his meal on a tray in his naked lap. (Evidence for this from neighbor boy Mick Haskins climbing up in the big oak next door.) After they are finished Truro eats by himself at the table, always with his eyes on the handcuffed group and his guns by his side. When they are done, whereas hitherto Georgette was released to do the dishes, now Vertebrate does them. He stands at the sink with his bare buttocks and an apron in front between his cock and the dishes, washing rinsing and drying while Truro keeps the carbine across his knee casually aimed.

  Does Truro worry about the increased danger of bringing a strong bold man like Vertebrate into his kennel? Does it make him uneasy when he leans back for sleep in the night, wondering what new ingenuity this man from outside might challenge him with? Perhaps sleeping under such stress during the past week has trained him so that he can sleep even with his new prisoner in the house—well shackled, in any case: the mother and son each on a cot, and Angel handcuffed out of their reach further down the chain with only the leather chair to sleep in, or if he prefers, says Truro, the rug at the foot of the chair. Making doubly secure at night by shackling his feet together.