Acts of God

by Mary Morris

  I stood there, motionless, watching my father select items from the shelf. He had no cart, but like a juggler was balancing them in his hands. It was odd to see my father picking cans off the shelf, reading labels. He took creamed corn. We never had creamed corn (or anything out of a can, for that matter) at home.

  I didn’t say hello. I backed up my cart and quickly slipped out of the store. When I got home, Lily yelled at me because I’d forgotten most of what I’d gone for. But I wouldn’t go back to that store again.

  35

  All families have secrets, don’t they? So why shouldn’t mine have ours? Why shouldn’t we keep things from one another? Even when you grow up within four walls with about as many people, you can’t really know anyone for sure. Even families are built on fragments, the bits and pieces we show the world.

  Still, it is a terrible thing to keep a secret inside. So far inside. Tucked deep like a tapeworm that works its way through you. Now I had to tell someone. And I knew who that would be. Once I knew I could hold on to it longer than before. Little Squirrel, guarding her nut.

  I’m not sure when it was that my father became a man of alibis, of duplicity, a man who lived a double life. It never occurred to me that he was spending half the week with us as he always had and the other half across the railroad tracks, just a mile or so from where we lived. But it was a world away, really, where he went, a place where he could put his shoes on the coffee table and laugh out loud. Where he could sing as he put up drywall.

  It has taken me a long time, but I can see it now. The disaster I feared had already happened. While I imagined him in the path of oncoming storms, racing tornados, dodging floods, the threat was in fact much closer and more real.

  Sometimes I have these dreams in which my father is looming over my bed, larger than he was in life. He has come with a story or a song, something he has to tell me. I always wind up telling him the same thing. “It’s all right, Dad. I already know.”

  * * *

  “What’re you going to do with your life, Trooper?” our father said to Jeb when he got home from Madison in June. Jeb was studying history and he unpacked his collection of books on the Crimean War, Central Asia, the Mongol empire.

  “I’m going to figure out how the world works,” Jeb replied without an ounce of irony, because that indeed was what he thought he would do—know how the world worked and then rule whatever corner of it that was allotted to him.

  “He’ll run for president, just like Abe Lincoln,” Lily replied and Jeb nodded.

  “I might. I just might.”

  That night Lily cooked Jeb’s favorite dinner—a dish of juicy chicken and au gratin potatoes, green beans with almonds—and Jeb told us all about college. Art had a million questions. He wanted to know all about colleges. I waited a day or two. I waited for Jeb to unpack, unwind, settle back into being one of us again, part of the family. And I waited for Monday, when Dad set off on the road. I watched as Dad packed his car and we all waved good-bye. I was studying touch typing that summer and was working at the swim club. Jeb had a job with a law firm in town and Art was going to camp, but none of it had begun.

  “Can we go somewhere today?” I asked Jeb.

  “Like where?”

  “McDonald’s?”

  We drove out along County Line and picked up a burger special and Jeb flirted a bit with this girl and that because he was now a very big man, strong, with nice skin, and our father’s gray eyes. I sat silently, watching the girls come up, pat my brother on the arm. He turned to me and said, “You know, it’s not bad, coming home.”

  I smiled and shrugged, but I felt shy, not like before when I always said what was on my mind and did what I wanted to do. Now it was as if there were a fence around me and somehow I was closed in. “You know, things have been a little strange since you left last spring.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Jeb took a bite from his burger. Some ketchup clung to his chin. “How so?”

  He didn’t seem to be listening to me or even wanting to be with me very much but I knew I had to go on. So I told him about prom and how Patrick went with Margaret and how I’d gotten drunk and this boy, well, nothing had happened, but this boy had tried to take advantage of me and I stood up on the boat and shouted at him, “How can you take advantage of a girl who’s drunk?”

  Jeb gave me a little punch in the arm and a “way to go,” like brothers do, so I thought I could go on, I should go on, because he was the one person I could tell and I knew that Jeb more than anyone else would never, ever say a word. “But then a few days later this strange thing happened when I was at the market, you know, Indian Trail, Mom had given me a list of things to get.…”

  Now he looked at me almost beady-eyed because he knew I was getting to the serious part, the real part, and something in his eyes told me that he wasn’t going to be surprised with what I had to say, that whatever it was he already knew. And maybe he’d known for a long time, but I said it anyway. “… and Dad was there. He was buying things, but it was only a Tuesday and he shouldn’t have been any closer than Quincy.”

  Jeb shook his head, then held up his hands as if warding off a blow. “I don’t want to know about it,” he said. “I don’t want to hear about this, Tess.”

  “But what is it? What’s going on with him?”

  He finished his burger, crumpled up the paper. “Oh, Tess, don’t make me be the one to tell you.” He made a clean toss into the trash.

  “But what about all his trips?”

  Jeb shook his head. “Tessie, he hasn’t been on the road for years.”

  I was silent for a moment. “Jeb, have you known for a long time?” My brother nodded his head ever so slightly. “Does Mom know?”

  “Tessie.” He looked me straight in the eye. “Everyone knows.”

  36

  If a life is said to have a shape, then certain events form the structure of that shape. Francis Cantwell Eagger has come down to us as a man of contradictions—a gentle poet of letters who loved the rugged out-of-doors, a sensitive man known for his violent temper. What were the elements that shaped him? What made him the man he was? In the life of Francis Cantwell Eagger three factors can be viewed as defining. The first was a boyhood episode involving lightning, the second his flight to the West, and the third his parents’ painful rejection when he turned to them for help.

  Until he was thirteen, Eagger lived a life of privilege. His family was extremely wealthy (his mother was a Sutton and they lived on Sutton Place) and no advantage was denied him. He toured Europe, studied music, had his own horse. However, he was a lonely, introverted child and his parents were often away, leaving him and his younger brother with servants to fend for themselves. When he turned thirteen, he spent the summer at the family compound in Maine. One night he got up to go to the bathroom and a violent storm erupted. As Eagger returned to his bed, he heard a loud crash and saw a brilliant flash. Covering his ears with his hands, he crumpled to the floor. When he dared look, he saw that above his bed the wall was seared where lightning had struck and the impression of the lightning was branded into the wooden wall, making a letter “Z.” (This episode is dealt with in his poem “Zorro,” one of the few surviving poems from the lost manuscript that helps define his hero quest.)

  Eagger was altered by this bolt of lightning. Life seemed unpredictable, random. Anything could happen at any moment. He lost interest in his studies and it was at this time in his life that he began to wander. He would walk all over Manhattan and once he walked to Westchester and back. His mother, who had never noticed him much when he was there, grew frantic when he would wander and this seemed to make him all the more determined to go further and further away from home. In the end he would flunk out of prep school after prep school and finally when he flunked out of Princeton, his parents sent him west. He was reluctant to go, but they gave him no choice. He either had to make good for himself or they would no longer pay his way. They set him up with a friend in the shipping business, but Eagger soon l
ost interest in it. Instead he attended classes at UCLA, where he met Jillian Palmer, the beautiful woman who would soon become his wife.

  Eagger had fallen in love with the West as well and intended to make it his home. He would have even if he had not fallen in love with Jillian, for he had found his spiritual home in the rough, rocky Coast as had artists before him such as Robinson Jeffers, Henry Miller, and Ansel Adams. Jillian was brilliant, beautiful, ten years his senior, and divorced. He loved her passionate outbursts, her fitful intelligence. And he predicted, and he was correct, that his parents would disinherit him for marrying her.

  The third and final formative event in Eagger’s life (outside of the mysterious death of his eldest son, who died off the cliffs of the beloved seaside house Eagger had built for his family) was his parents’ rejection of him. He tried for years to write them, to explain his love of Jillian, his marriage, his determination to be a writer on the West Coast. Finally when all else failed, and when little Thomas, their middle son, was stricken ill with tuberculosis, Eagger and Jillian drove across the country from San Francisco to beg his family for understanding and to help them in their financial woes.

  Eagger writes in his poem “Dark Window” of what happened that day. He and Jillian returned to New York to the house on Sutton Place and as they walked up the front steps, he saw the curtains drawn, the house darkened to him. He and Jillian stoically got into their car and drove back to San Francisco. Francis Cantwell Eagger would mourn the loss of his family in his poems for the rest of his life, but he would never attempt to contact any of them again.

  While Eagger was always an avid walker, he became obsessed with it upon returning from this journey. He walked for hours, sometimes days, with a pad and pencil. On his walks, he wrote down his impressions, jotted lines for poems, scribbled whatever popped into his head. Taking a walk with him was no pleasure because of these constant interruptions and in the end he walked alone. According to the letters of Francis Cantwell Eagger, a “desire path” is what hikers or walkers have worn thin through finding a better way, or a shortcut, to a desired place. From his poems we know that Eagger loved nature, that he was tormented in love, that he sought a better way. Once Eagger quipped in a letter to a friend that he preferred the dangers of nature to the threat of man and in his later years he grew more and more reclusive. In all of this, it is safe to say that he is the West Coast Robert Frost and indeed deserves his place in American literary history.

  Bruno sat across from me at the kitchen table, pondering my slightest change in facial expression. “Bruno, this is fascinating. It really is very interesting.” It seemed that Bruno had decided he could not write his doctoral dissertation without my help. So he brought to me page after page, note after note. Every word he wrote he ran by me.

  He smiled at me, the smile of a child who has done something to please his parents. “Tell me. What do you like about it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I like the way it tells a story and that somehow the story it tells helps you understand the man.” Bruno blinked, brushing his sandy hair out of his eyes. His hand trembled as it moved past his face. He seemed genuinely thrilled. I really didn’t know what I liked about it until I said that to him. No one had asked me to read his doctoral dissertation before, and in a way it seemed rather boring, but interesting at the same time. “I like the way these events shaped this man’s life. That’s interesting.”

  He nodded, hanging on my every word.

  I paused. “You must keep going,” I told him. “I think it is very good.”

  “Oh, it means so much to me. That you like it. You know, Tess, I feel such an affinity for this man. In some ways our lives have been similar. I grew up in the East and didn’t do very well in school—”

  “And were you ever almost struck by lightning?” With a laugh Bruno shook his head no. “But you did have a falling-out with your family?” I asked a bit more gently for I could see where this conversation was heading.

  Bruno nodded. “Yes, you know, my father was a minister and we didn’t always see things eye to eye. I was seeing this girl, she was older. Anyway, my mother hated her and my father went along. When I moved in with the girl, we stopped talking. I felt they never approved of anything I did. We didn’t talk for almost four years.”

  “How old are you now?”

  “I’m twenty-six.”

  “So you must have been young when you had your falling-out.”

  “We only patched it up last year, but now we’re good friends again.”

  “So are you writing this dissertation to find your father?”

  Bruno thought about this for a moment, then shook his head. “To find myself,” he said. “What about you, Tess? I don’t know anything about you or your family.”

  “My mother lives in Chicago. My father died nine or ten years ago.” Bruno gave me an odd look which I didn’t understand at the time, but I know he was surprised that I couldn’t recall the exact number of years. “He was an insurance salesman, on the road a fair amount. I have two brothers. We were an ordinary family. There was hardly anything unusual about us at all.”

  * * *

  Nick phoned every day. It wasn’t always easy with the time difference. Often he called collect from pay phones. He didn’t want the calls to be on any of his accounts or on his calling card. But dutifully each week he sent me fifty dollars, which was what he assumed the calls were costing me. I was starting to think how we could live together, dividing our time between Illinois and the Coast, the best of both worlds. I started to have dreams of the future again.

  Otherwise my life went as usual. Someone trashed the seashell house and Shana was beside herself. Vandals had gotten in during a few days when the house wasn’t occupied and smashed the cowrie-shell mirror, shattered the scallop coffee table.

  I had to deal with the owners, who threatened to sue us. I convinced them that it was an act of vandals and that the house was unoccupied at the time, but still there was much to do to straighten out the mess. During that time I became surrogate mother for a few weeks to two orphaned sea otter pups. And the National Registry of Historic Houses sent an inspector to look at the house.

  I’d actually forgotten that I’d mailed in my application, but a very tall, thin woman knocked on my door one day and said she had come to inspect the house for the registry. She didn’t say a word to me as she poked through rooms, stood across the street from the house, taking its picture. She wrote notes on a pad and after about an hour, she told me I’d receive a letter in a few months and that she thought it was a nice house, but she could not say if she would recommend it for the registry. I told her I wouldn’t get my hopes up.

  A few weeks later Ted returned with a story to tell—not a terribly pretty one. Sabe was into drugs and Ted had gotten out of there. Soon both of my children became aware of the fact that I was accepting collect calls from gas stations and phone booths in the Midwest and they each asked me what I had going on. I told them what they had often told me. That it was my business and if and when I was ready to share it with them, I would.

  Neither of them liked this answer. Jade asked me to go to lunch with her, where she pressed for details. She looked different than she had before going away. Her features were softer, her hair longer, no more purple spikes, though now she had a small gold nose ring. I confided in her as one might in a friend that I was seeing a man I’d known for almost my entire life, that his marriage was breaking up, and we hoped to find a way to be together.

  Jade’s jaw dropped when I told her this. “You aren’t serious? That is so cool.”

  “I am serious,” I said.

  She gave me a little sock in the arm. “That’s great, Mom.”

  They both got jobs. It was the law I laid down before I’d let either of them back in the house. Jade left her part-time position and went to work as a manager at a coffee-roasting factory. She came home smelling like the hills of Java. Ted got hooked up with an on-line company that sold space on the Web. He act
ually had a knack for this and began designing Web sites.

  Then in the middle of the summer Nick called and said he could come out for a few days. He said to book us a room somewhere I liked to go and we’d have our first romantic getaway. I hesitated and he asked me what was wrong. “I can’t do this,” I told him. “Not while you’re still living with her. Not while she doesn’t know. I just can’t do it behind her back.”

  “Tessie, I’m leaving her. Look, I was planning to tell her. I wanted her to know before I saw you, but she seems so fragile. Unstable, really. I don’t know what it is, but it’s as if she’s transparent. She’s not really there. She stares into space. Maybe she’s on drugs. I feel as if I am living with a ghost, but I have to think of Danielle. I want to come and see you, and once I know what I’m going to do and when, then I’ll tell her.”

  “It just doesn’t seem right.”

  “Tess, she’s going to know soon. Let me come and see you. I want to talk to you about it. Then we’ll decide.”

  * * *

  Along the coast the road dips and turns. Below Monterey the real cliffs begin. From the rocky points you can see terrifying vistas, the sea crashing against the shore. Nick had never seen this part of the coast and so I picked the Mermaid Inn down at Big Sur, though it was expensive. He said he didn’t care what it cost. He just wanted to be with me. He flew into San Jose, where I picked him up, and we drove straight to the coast. He was stunned as the road curved and we followed the rocky coast down.

  The Mermaid had a wooden mermaid over its entranceway. Our cabin had its own redwood hot tub with a special eucalyptus soap you could bathe in, a steambath, long paths lined with ice plants that led down to the ocean. First we took a long walk, climbing down the craggy pathways until we stood on a small, solitary beach. Seals and a pair of sea otters frolicked in the surf. Nick stood in the sand in his bare feet, just breathing in the air. “You’re lucky, Tess,” he told me, his arm firmly around my shoulder. “You got away.”