American Morons

by Glen Hirshberg

  Like most of the dolls, it had been assembled entirely from shells and seaweed and sand. From its peaked roof, tassels of purple flowers hung like feathers, and around the eves, gull feathers hung like the decorative flourishes on some outrageous society woman’s hat. On the rug—clearly, it served as a yard—tiny nuns prowled like cats. Some lay on their backs with their arms folded across their crucifixes, soaking up the light. One was climbing the leg of one of the wicker chairs. And a group—at least five—stood at the base of the window, staring out to sea.

  And that is what reminded Selkirk of his purpose, and brought him at least part way back to himself. He glanced around the rest of the room, noting half-a-dozen round wooden tables evenly spaced around the perimeter. On each, yellow beeswax candles blazed in their candlesticks, lending the air a misleading tint of yellow and promising more heat than actually existed. Mostly, the tables held doll-making things: tiny silver crosses, multi-colored rocks, thousands of shells. The table directly to Selkirk’s right had a single place-setting laid out neatly upon it: clean white plate, fork, spoon, one chipped teacup decorated with paintings of leaping silver fish.

  Selkirk realized he was staring at a crude sort of living sundial. Each day, Mrs. Marchant began with her tea and breakfast, proceeded around the platform to assemble and place her nuns, spent far too long sitting in one or the other of the wicker chairs and staring at the place where it had all happened. In spite of himself, he felt a surprisingly strong twinge of pity.

  “That hat can’t have helped you much,” Mrs. Marchant said, straightening from a bureau near her dining table where she apparently kept her tea things. The cup she brought matched the one on her breakfast table, flying fish, chips and all, and chattered lightly on its saucer as she handed it to him.

  More grateful for its warmth than he realized, Selkirk rushed the cup to his mouth and winced as the hot liquid scalded his tongue. The woman stood a little too close to him. Loose strands of her hair almost tickled the back of his hand like the fringe on a shawl. Her blue eyes flicked over his face. Then she started laughing.

  “What?” Selkirk took an uncertain half-step back.

  “The fish,” she said. When he stared, she laughed again and gestured at the cup. “When you drank, it looked like they were going to leap right into your teeth.”

  Selkirk glanced at the side of the cup, then back to the woman’s laughing face. Judging by the layout and contents of this room, he couldn’t imagine her venturing anywhere near town, but she clearly got outside to collect supplies. As a result, her skin had retained its dusky continental coloration. A beautiful creature, and no mistake.

  “I am sorry,” she said, meeting his eyes. “It’s been a long time since anyone drank from my china but me. An unfamiliar sight. Come.” She started around the left side of the platform. Selkirk watched, then took the opposite route, past the seaweed table, and met the woman at the wicker chairs on the seaward side of the platform. Without waiting for him, she bent, lifted a tiny nun whose bandeau hid most of her face off the rug, and settled in the right-hand chair. The doll wound up tucked against her hip like a pet rabbit.

  For whom, Selkirk wondered, was the left-hand chair meant, in ordinary days? The obvious answer chilled and also saddened him, and he saw no point in wasting further time.

  “Mrs. Marchant—”

  “Manners, Mr. Selkirk,” the woman said, and for the second time smiled at him. “The Sisters do not approve of being lectured to.”

  It took him a moment to understand she was teasing him. And not like Amalia had, or not exactly like. He sat.

  “Mrs. Marchant, I have bad news. Actually, it isn’t really bad news, but it may feel that way at first. I know—that is, I really think I have a sense—of what this place must mean to you. I did live in Winsett once, and I do know your story. But it’s not good for you, staying here. And there are more important considerations than you or your grief here, anyway, aren’t there? There are the sailors still out there braving the seas, and…”

  Mrs. Marchant cocked her head, and her eyes trailed over his face so slowly that he almost thought he could feel them, faintly, like the moisture in the air but warmer.

  “Would you remove your hat, Mr. Selkirk?”

  Was she teasing now? She wasn’t smiling. Increasingly flustered, Selkirk settled the teacup on the floor at his feet and pulled his sopping hat from his head. Instantly, his poodle’s ruff of curls spilled onto his forehead and over his ears.

  Mrs. Marchant sat very still. “I’d forgotten,” she finally said. “Isn’t that funny?”

  “Ma’am?”

  Sighing, she leaned back. “Men’s hair by daylight.” Then she winked at him, and whispered, “The Sisters are scandalized.”

  “Mrs. Marchant. The time has come. The Lighthouse Service—perhaps you’ve heard of it—needs to—”

  “We had a dog, then,” Mrs. Marchant said, and her eyes swung toward the windows.

  Selkirk closed his eyes, feeling the warmth of the tea unfurling in his guts. When he opened his eyes again, he found Mrs. Marchant still staring toward the horizon.

  “We named the dog Luis. For my father, who died at sea while my mother and I were on our way here from Lisbon. Charlie gave him to me.”

  After that, Selkirk hardly moved. It wasn’t the story, which Amalia had told him, and which he hadn’t forgotten. It was the way this woman said her husband’s name.

  “He didn’t have to work, you know. Charlie. His family built half the boats that ever left this place. He said he just wanted to make certain his friends got home. Also, I think he liked living in the lighthouse. Especially alone with me. And my girls. The nuns, I mean.”

  “Smart fellow,” Selkirk murmured, realized to his amazement that he’d said it aloud, and blushed.

  But the keeper simply nodded. “Yes. He was. Also reckless, in a way. No, that’s wrong. He liked…playing at recklessness. In storms, he used to lash himself to the railing out there.” She gestured toward the thin band of metal that encircled the platform outside the windows. “Then he would lean into the rain. He said it was like sailing without having to hunt. And without leaving me.”

  “Was he religious like you?”

  Mrs. Marchant looked completely baffled.

  “The…” Selkirk muttered, and gestured at the rug, the dolls, the little shell-house. Sand-convent. Whatever it was.

  “Oh,” she said. “That is a habit, only.” Again, she grinned, but unlike Amalia, she waited until she was certain he’d gotten the joke. Then she went on. “While my father was here, my mother and I earned extra money at home making dolls for the Sacred Heart of Mary. They gave them to poor children. Poorer than we were.”

  The glow from Mrs. Marchant’s eyes intensified on his cheek, as though he’d leaned nearer to a candle flame. Somehow the feeling annoyed him, made him nervous.

  “But he did leave you,” he said, more harshly than he intended. “Your husband.”

  Mrs. Marchant’s lips flattened slowly. “He meant to take me. The Kendall brothers—Kit was his best and oldest friend, and he’d known Kevin since the day Kevin was born—wanted us both to come sail with them, on the only beautiful January weekend I have ever experienced here. 1837. The air was so warm, Mr. Selkirk, and the whales gone for the winter. I didn’t realize until then that Charlie had never once, in his whole life, been to sea. I’d never known until that weekend that he wanted to go. Of course I said yes. Then Luis twisted his foreleg in the rocks out there, and I stayed to be with him. And I made Charlie go anyway. He was blond like you. Did you know that?”

  Shifting in his seat, Selkirk stared over the water. The sky hung heavy and low, its color an unbroken blackish gray, so that he no longer had any idea what time it was. After noon, surely. If he failed to conclude his business here soon, he’d never make it out of Winsett before nightfall, horse or no. At his feet, the nuns watched the water.

  “Mrs. Marchant.”

  “He wasn’t as tall as
you are, of course. Happier, though.”

  Selkirk swung his head toward the woman. She took no notice.

  “Of course, why wouldn’t he be? He had so much luck in his short life. More than anyone deserves or has any right to expect. The Sacred Heart of Mary Sisters always taught that it was bad luck to consort with the lucky. What do you make of that?”

  It took Selkirk several seconds to sort the question, and as he sat, Mrs. Marchant stood abruptly and put her open palm on the window. For a crazy second, just because of the stillness of her posture and the oddly misdirected tilt of her head—toward land, away from the sea—Selkirk wondered if she were blind, like her dolls.

  “I guess I’ve never been around enough luck to have an opinion,” Selkirk finally said.

  She’d been looking down the coast, but now she turned to him, beaming once more. “The Sisters find you an honest man, sir. They invite you to more tea.”

  Returning to the bureau with his cup, she refilled it, then sat back down beside him. She’d left the nun she’d had in her lap on the bureau, balancing in the center of a white plate like a tiny ice skater.

  “The morning after they set sail,” she said, “Luis woke me up.” In the window, her eyes reflected against the gray. “He’d gotten better all through the day, and he’d been out all night. He loved to be. I often didn’t see him until I came outside to hang the wash or do the chores. But that day, he scratched and whined against the door. I thought he’d fallen or hurt himself again and hurried to let him in. But when I did, he raced straight past me up the stairs. I followed after and found him whimpering against the light there. I was so worried that I didn’t even look at the window for the longest time. And when I did…”

  All the while, Mrs. Marchant had kept her hands pressed together in the folds of her dress, but now she opened them. Selkirk half-expected a nun to flap free on starfish wings. “So much whiteness, Mr. Selkirk. And yet it was dark. You wouldn’t think that would be possible, would you?”

  “I’ve lived by the sea all my life,” Selkirk said.

  “Well, then. That’s what it was like. A wall of white that shed no light. I couldn’t even see the water. I had the lamp lit, of course, but all that did was emphasize the difference between in here and out there.”

  Selkirk stood. If he were Charlie Marchant, he thought, he would never have left the Convent, as he’d begun to think of this whole place. Not to go to sea. Not even to town. He found himself remembering the letters he’d sent Amalia during his dock-working years. Pathetic, clumsy things. She’d never responded to those, either. Maybe she’d been trying, in her way, to be kind.

  “I’ve often wondered if Luis somehow sensed the ship coming,” Mrs. Marchant said. “We’d trained him to bark in the fog, in case a passing captain could hear but not see us. But I think that on this day Luis was just barking at the whiteness.

  “The sound was unmistakable when it came. I heard wood splintering. Sails collapsing. A mast smashing into the water. But there wasn’t any screaming. And I thought…”

  “You thought maybe the crew had escaped to the lifeboats,” Selkirk said, when it was clear Mrs. Marchant was not going to finish her sentence.

  For the first time in several minutes, Mrs. Marchant turned her gaze on him. “You would make the most marvelous giraffe,” she said.

  Selkirk stiffened. Was he going to have to carry this poor, gently raving woman out of here? “Mrs. Marchant, it’s already late. We need to be starting for town soon.”

  If she understood what he meant, she gave no sign. “I knew what ship it was.” She sank back into her wicker chair, all trace of her smile gone, and crossed her legs. “What other vessel would be out there in the middle of winter? I started screaming, pounding the glass. It didn’t take me long to realize they wouldn’t have gone to the rowboats. In all likelihood, they’d had no idea where they were. The Kendall boys were experienced seamen, excellent sailors. But that fog had dropped straight out of the heart of the sky, or it had risen from the dead sea bottom, and it was solid as stone.

  “And then—as if it were the fogbank itself, and not Charlie’s boat, that had run aground on the sandbar out there—all that whiteness just shattered. The whole wall cracked apart into whistling, flying fragments. Just like that, the blizzard blew in. How does that happen, Mr. Selkirk? How does the sea change its mind like that?”

  Selkirk didn’t answer. But for the first time, he thought he understood why the sailors in the Blubber Pike referred to those teasing, far-off flickers of sun the way they did.

  “I rushed downstairs, thinking I’d get the rowboat and haul myself out there and save them. But the waves…they were snarling and snapping all over themselves, and I knew I’d have to wait. My tears were freezing on my face. I was wearing only a dressing-gown, and the wind whipped right through me. The door to the lighthouse was banging because I hadn’t shut it properly, and I was so full of fury and panic I was ready to start screaming again. I looked out to sea, and all but fell to my knees in gratitude.

  “It was there, Mr. Selkirk. I could see the ship. Some of it, anyway. Enough, perhaps. I could just make it out. The prow, part of the foredeck, a stump of mast. I turned around and raced back inside for my clothes.

  “Then I ran all the way to town. We never kept a horse here, Charlie didn’t like them. The strangest thing was this feeling I kept having, that I’d gotten lost. It was impossible; that path out there was well traveled in those days, and even now, you had no trouble, did you? But I couldn’t feel my skin. Or…it was as though I had come out of my skin. There was snow and sand flying all around, wind in the dunes. So cold. My Charlie out there. I remember thinking, This is what the Bruxsa feels like. This is why she torments travelers. This is why she feeds. You know, at some point, I thought maybe I’d become her.”

  Selkirk stirred from the daze that had settled over him. “Brucka?”

  “Bruxsa. It is like…a banshee? Do you know the word? A ghost, but not of anyone. A horrid thing all its own.”

  Was it his imagination, or had the dark outside deepened toward evening? If he didn’t get this finished, neither one of them would make it out of here tonight. “Mrs. Marchant, perhaps we could continue this on the way back to town.”

  Finally, as though he’d slapped her, Mrs. Marchant blinked. “What?”

  “Mrs. Marchant, surely you understand the reason for my coming. We’ll send for your things. You don’t have to leave today, but wouldn’t that be easiest? I’ll walk with you. I’ll make certain—”

  “When I finally reached Winsett,” Mrs. Marchant said, “I went straight for the first lit window. Selkirk’s. The candlemaker. Your uncle.”

  Selkirk cringed, remembering those hard, overheated hands smashing against the side of his skull. “He was so kind,” she said, and his mouth quivered and fell open as she went on.

  “He rushed me inside. It was warm in his shop. At the time, it literally felt as though he’d saved my life. Returned me to my body. I sat by his fire, and he raced all over town through the blizzard and came back with whalers, sailing men. Charlie’s father, and the Kendalls’ older brother. There were at least fifteen of them. Most set out immediately on horseback for the point. Your uncle wrapped me in two additional sweaters and an overcoat, and he walked all the way back out here with me, telling me it would be all right. By the time we reached the lighthouse, he said, the sailors would already have figured a way to get the boys off that sandbar and home.”

  To Selkirk, it seemed this woman had reached into his memories and daubed them with colors he knew couldn’t have been there. His uncle had been kind to no one. His uncle had hardly spoken except to complete business. The very idea of him using his shop fire to warm somebody, risking himself to rouse the town to some wealthy playboy’s rescue….

  But of course, by the time Selkirk had come here, the town was well on its way to failing, and his aunt had died in some awful, silent way no one spoke about. Maybe his uncle had been different,
before. Or maybe his uncle had been an old lecher, on top of being a drunk.

  “By the time we got back here, it was nearly dusk,” Mrs. Marchant said. “The older Kendall and four of the sailors had already tried four different times to get the rowboat away from shore and into the waves. They were all tucked inside my house, now, trying to stave off pneumonia.

  “‘Tomorrow,’ one of the sailors told me. ‘Tomorrow, please God, if they can just hold on. We’ll find a way to them.’

  “And right then, Mr. Selkirk. Right as the light went out of that awful day for good, the snow cleared. For one moment. And there they were.”

  She was almost whispering, now. “It was like a gift. Like a glimpse of him in Heaven. I raced back outside, called out, leapt up and down, we all did. But of course they couldn’t hear, and weren’t paying attention. They were scrambling all over the deck. I knew right away which was Charlie. He was in the bow, all bundled up in a hat that wasn’t his and what looked like three or four coats. I could also see the Kendall boys’ hair as they worked amidships. So red, like twin suns burning off the overcast.

  “‘Bailing,’ Charlie’s father told me. ‘The ship must be taking on water. They’re trying to keep her where she is.’”

  Mrs. Marchant’s voice got even quieter. “I asked how long they could keep doing that. But what I really wondered was how long they’d already been at it. Those poor, beautiful boys.

  “Our glimpse lasted two minutes. Maybe even less. I could see new clouds rising behind them. But at the last, just before the snow and the dark obliterated our sight of them, they stopped as one, and turned around. I’m sorry, Mr. Selkirk.”

  She didn’t wipe her face, and there weren’t any tears Selkirk could see. She simply sat in her chair, breathing softly.

  “I remember the older Kendall, the brother, standing beside me,” she finally said, in something close to her normal voice. “He was whispering. ‘Aw, come on boys. Get your gear on.’ The Kendalls, you see…they’d removed their coats. And I finally realized what it meant, that I could see their hair. They hadn’t bothered with their hats, even though they’d kept at the bailing. Remember, I’ve been around sailors all my life, Mr. Selkirk. All the men in my family were sailors, long before they came to this country. My father had been whaling here when he sent for us. So I knew what I was seeing.”