The Girl of the Lake

by Bill Roorbach

  He answered with stately seriousness: “Since the fall of the Soviet Union we are without funds. Spain offers loans. In London I have been petitioning for grants. The Norwegians may intercede on our behalf with the World Bank—I address their parliament Tuesday next. But the outlook, cousin, is bleak. The army ant gobbles the lodge!” We walked in his subsequent dark silence up a long hill into a neighborhood of large homes. At the top of the climb Sileshi cleared his throat elaborately. “But you run a great museum,” he said. “You know what sorts of things can go wrong.”

  “I don’t have an army,” I said lightly.

  “You are blessed,” he said heavily.

  We walked in a deeply awkward silence, and I began to wonder why either of us might have considered this meeting a good idea. I longed to get back to my beloved Colleen. Passing alongside Singe Park, we paused in the rain to admire a crabbed old cherry tree. Sileshi patted one of the low-slung branches, gave it a shake, sniffed the bark, pinched the leaves between thumb and pinkie, exotic flora. His posture changed utterly, everything about him softened. He sighed in a manner familiar to me from the old days, enunciated gently, slowly: “Have you had reason to speak with Baby about our art lover?”

  He couldn’t even say her name. I said, “Shelagh lives in Texas,” and with a shrug I let him know the whole story—she was lost to us, lost to him, married rich, “born again,” Americanized, mother of three, the only one of our gang to have come to no relation with art.

  “No matter. I have heard that they are bad to Blacks in Texas,” Sileshi said with some of the old humor.

  We tilted our heads properly at one another and grinned, a full minute of rich but silent communication, old friendship returning, then we carried on, strolled to the Old Belfast Hotel, the nicest in town, where Sileshi had a standard room, taken under the name of one of his secretaries. He went up to “wash his ears,” which gave me the opportunity to call Colleen.

  Gail-Lynn answered, “Yar,” and said her mum was out. I tried a few friendly phrases, but the girl was having none of it, this sulky Australian teenager who, if the urgent promises of the previous night between her mother and me were kept, would be my stepdaughter within the month.

  And that’s what I was thinking when Sileshi appeared in the hotel bar in his gowns. We didn’t talk, only drank Scotch glass by glass at his pace, which was no longer amateur. I wanted to know him, recalled that I never really had, asked him directly, for starters, if he’d ever married.

  “Four times,” he said. “A fifth on the way. They get along well. Twenty-one children.”

  “Wuruju!” I cried. Dung beetle.

  He tilted his head with pride.

  I asked what he regarded as his principal accomplishment as a leader of his people (I knew not to say nation; nationhood was not his goal).

  “It’s what Shelagh taught us,” he said. “With the help of my ministers I’ve gathered the art of our people wherever we could find it, built an object-repatriation campaign to shame world collectors, sometimes successfully.” The old grin. “And finally, just a few years gone, we turned the old Belgian governor’s mansion into a museum of the life of our people, imperishable.”

  “Shelagh brought me to art, too,” I said, tilting my head. “And brought Colleen to it, as well—she’s involved in galleries.”

  “Let us talk about Colleen,” Sileshi said sadly. But after that he became abstracted. I kept a hand on his arm to keep him listening, talked for the sake of filling the abyss in front of us, told him all about what Colleen and I had planned in the midst of our passion, that Gail-Lynn would come with us to Kansas City. “Apparently,” I said with some forced cheer, “the girl is miserable in Ireland in any case, and loves Coca-Cola and Talking Heads. Aside from my presence the deal should be an easy sell. Colleen says we’ll promise her Brad Pitt and American football, and stand back, mate. The kid’ll be packing her room in a frenzy.”

  Sileshi didn’t laugh. “One should honor one’s parents,” he said lugubriously. He caught my eye at that, and we held a long, profound look, staring across the void of multiple marriages, murderous regimes, divorce, imminent elopement, daughters not one’s own.

  All of which, along with strong spirits, gave me courage to say the one true thing: “Sileshi, you killed your parents.”

  He continued to stare into my eyes, but the look hardened, congealed, the lie he must have been telling himself for so long about to come to his lips. I thought if he spoke he would shout. I took his thumb and pinkie, held them. “I saw this hand on that gun, I saw it in a wire-service photo.”

  We regarded each other, frozen. He could have said that there were many such hands in his world; he could have made me believe him. But he said, “I have mounted and framed that picture at some expense and hung it in the old palace.” His head bowed just perceptibly, his body sagged so. The truth was the truth. He touched my arm with that hand, pinched my sleeve, pulled me close, tilted his head, no grin, whispered, boast or lament I couldn’t tell: “My beloved parents were collusionists. They were killing our people. They were destroying our culture. I saved them from their folly. I saved us all. Our lands will be a kingdom once again. We will return home by refusing ever to leave.”

  “Wuruju,” I intoned.

  “You must help,” he said.

  “Help how?”

  He couldn’t hold my eye. At length, he said, “We have art treasures to sell.”

  “You would let them leave your country? Your kingdom, I mean? After all you’ve done to gather them?”

  “If I do not, there will be no kingdom.”

  “Wuruju,” I said yet again, sadly.

  “Dung beetle,” Sileshi said. Then, together, both of us starting to tears, we sang the phrase in his language as the maître d’ looked on, moved. Then, holding hands, we sang the whole song, lovely, surprised at the end when our fellow diners applauded.

  IN MISSOURI, COLLEEN FLOURISHED, starting an art imports business, three points of trade: Ireland, Australia, the United States. Gail-Lynn became a high-school soccer star, made the All-Kansas team, never happier, then on to university, more sports, a fraternity boyfriend, finally a degree in engineering, of all things, strong interest in bridges.

  I opened the Wuruju Wing at the KCMFA, the finest collection of African art in the world, a ten-year project, our acquisition stream routed through London and Montreal, I’m ashamed to say, Sileshi silent behind the deals we’d made, dozens of shady middlemen, Byzantine paperwork, dozens of other museums unwittingly party to illegal transfers, a long story, but no matter: my old friend had funded the continued success of his revolution.

  It seems just the other day that, along with the rest of the world, Colleen and I saw Sileshi on television. He’d united three colonial states as tribal lands without borders, erased the names of three countries, disbanded three parliaments, funded and consolidated three ragtag armies, armed and dressed them in the traditional way, disenfranchised everyone else, kicked out foreign business, left hundreds of thousands dead, horrible. And then, of course, he’d taken the title of king.

  There was a scandal when the method of acquisition of our treasures hit the news in the wake of the final revolution, as it was called. I spent a year in and out of congressional hearings and testifying at special board meetings at dozens of museums, too often found myself in front of news cameras attempting to explain how KCMFA had gotten involved in an African war. My ouster from the museum was national news, my censure by Congress humiliating, but I avoided prison, just an ankle monitor and a year at home, more time with Colleen, who found it all heroic and remains the solid center of my life.

  As king, Sileshi stood up to international pressure, stood up to his detractors at home, stood up to the neighboring states pressing at his borders, the funds I’d procured for him dwindling. I’ve got a video of the results via an acquaintance who was then an intern at CNN, not something I’ll ever watch again: Wearing traditional dress, King Sileshi Silesh Silboumi Silb
oumi turns to the camera, tilts his head, gives a winning grin, ceremonially bends to retrieve an ornate crossbow as tall as he, then bends again to retrieve an exquisitely woven quiver of long arrows. He takes a broad stance, notches a lethal-looking shaft, fires it out of the frame of the film, notches another, fires it, keeps firing arrows as the French-made tank rumbles into the frame, Sileshi posing there calmly, firing arrows right up to the moment the huge machine rolls over him on its way to restoring order.

  The Girl of the Lake

  CHICK FLEXHARDT HAD NEVER arrived at the lake in a cab, not once in his seventeen years. So he asked the cabbie to drop him at the top of the lane—at least he’d arrive walking. The woods were as dense as ever, the two-tracked lane as grassy, and the dark thoughts that had gripped him on the plane trip seemed to float up among the leaves of the trees and disappear.

  Glimpses of the lake through the dense foliage, too. And then coming over the familiar rise he couldn’t help but drop his enormous suitcase and run. As the old house came into view below he gave the family whistle, something between a loon and a lost coyote, grinned at the banner Grandma and he and his cousins and siblings had made a decade past—1959—all whacked up from felt scraps and home-boiled glue, a dozen colors—WELCOME TO THE LAKE—and nicely draped across the front of the house. Now how had Grandma managed that? He himself had cut and glued the last childish E, tall and narrow. He whistled again, ran faster.

  The screen door banged and here was Grandma herself, undiminished at eighty-two (born 1887!), bustling up the steps to hug him. Her face was speckled and pale and full of expression, and family history, his mother’s smile exactly, his brother’s nose, her own eyes bright and blue, liquid at sight of him. She smelled of cookies and lotion and wood smoke and patted at his back as he patted at hers, hugged him longer than he’d been hugged since he was five, pushed him away to look at him, drew him back in. He fell into her willingly and hugged her back willingly, fragrance of powder, something flowery. Poor Grandma, all alone now.

  She knew what he was thinking, as always. Cheerily, she said, “This place is a little quiet for just one of me!” She wouldn’t make any more direct reference to Grandpa’s death, Chick knew, and so Chick would say nothing, either. All that could be said about the old man’s death, sadness and grief and abiding love and anger, had been in the hug.

  In the cabin, everything was in place as it had been. Old-fashioned toys, some from Grandpa’s childhood, the building blocks Great-Grandfather had made, chewed by a storied dog named Frisky, dead eighty years now.

  “If you’ll open some windows, I’ll serve cookies and milk.”

  She’d been here a week with the shutters closed! Chick remembered the drill, could hear Grandpa as he carefully flicked the eyehook latches and pushed the shutters open, letting in light plane by plane till the years of dust sailed in it, swirled by the new breeze. The mildew tang left the living room, left the dining room, left the sunroom built out over the retaining wall to the very edge of the water. From the sunroom windows he watched the lake: whitecaps, which, as Grandpa had taught him, meant at least a fourteen-knot breeze. Straight out one mile away was Conflagration Island, then another mile to the far shore. Off along this shore to the east was the Gilman place on Abenaki Point, twenty-five rooms seldom occupied, and it didn’t look as if anyone were there now. Then the DuPont place, almost hidden in the bassing cove, huge pines unmolested. Next there was the Mulvaney’s more modest place with its half mile of shorefront looking somehow raw, Chick thought, then realized that most of its large old trees were missing. Further, there were signs of construction, plywood gleaming in yellow intervals along the shore where thick forest had always prevailed. Chick recalled all those dozen or more Mulvaney kids Grandpa had made such fun of—they’d been teenagers when Chick was small. They’d be grown-ups now, lots of babies in their arms, not a chance to find a person his own age or even close. Grandpa had predicted this: new cabins being built in choice spots on the land old man Mulvaney had bought so presciently when he’d become rich from ball bearings.

  To the west, a long bight of untouched shoreline called Grandpa’s Mile among the family. His money had come from the small-town insurance business Great-Grandpa had started and Grandpa had expanded into national prominence, then sold at peak value (such were the terms of the family story), only to fare poorly in subsequent ventures. But faring poorly was all relative—here still was the summer cottage Great-Grandpa had built, here still was the contiguous land Grandpa had later purchased outright from a logging outfit, unbroken for, in fact, 1.6 miles, all the way to the rocky point where the cluster of regular houses started, their rear windows facing the lake blandly, as if the water—so glorious—were just a wet back yard, nothing to put a dock in. Working people, Great-Grandpa had liked to repeat: short on imagination. The man himself was short on compassion. Born 1867! His grumpy face came vague to Chick’s mind, the awful things he could say, the disappointment always in his ancient eyes, the sadness back there that a kid could see but not name, only avoid, the claws to grip your shoulder. Well, Great-Grandpa had been dead a long time.

  Chick was very fond of working people and in fact meant to be a working person himself, despite the family prejudice. He was an excellent carpenter and mechanic, skills he’d learned from Grandpa, who’d bucked the old man and worked for a time in the trades.

  Outside, Chick hooked each shutter faithfully open, tapping the eyehooks into spiderwebbed eyes, tight to the bend as Grandpa always insisted, opened the huge basement doors to air the dripping granite blocks of the walls in there, just another step of the familiar “house-up” routine, in Grandpa’s phrase. In the basement Chick patted the canoes each in turn—red, white, and blue—the fleet, Grandpa always called them, three old wooden rigs built in another era by the last of the “wild” Abenaki Indians for Great-Grandpa, price of five dollars each, still in good shape these eighty years of maintenance later.

  Chick heard his grandmother upstairs creaking the kitchen floorboards: safe. From his shirt pocket he quickly whipped his tight little bag of pot, plucked out the joint he’d rolled in the bathroom of the Greyhound, lit it quickly, flash of matchlight in the dank dark, two puffs, three, a fourth. Those cookies would taste good. He tucked it all back in his pocket, waved at the small cloud of smoke he’d made, then commenced to tugging at the blue canoe, brought it out into the light, the wings of his ears beginning to burn—how funny to have ears. He grinned and pulled the canoe out onto the grass, wanted to remember something. The paddles. He recalled the paddles and where they were and Grandpa clearly and he welled with such stoned sadness and such a profound feeling of being alone that tears started to his eyes.

  He looked out across the lake. A whole summer! He’d been sacrificed for Grandma’s happiness while his New York cousins all got to spend the summer in France. The Seattle cousins were safely in Seattle, little creeps, playing tennis indoors and out. The somewhat older Texas cousins remained in Houston doing their oil-industry and state-government internships, square as blocks. Dad had made it sound as if Chick had volunteered for a Grandma internship. Meanwhile, brother Frank got to stay on in his college town. Meanwhile, both his sisters got to go to greenhorn camp in Wyoming for two whole months. Meanwhile, his parents had started their six-week Kenyan adventure. And maybe come to think of it he had volunteered in a moment of warmth. But Jumpin’ Jehosaphat. To quote an old man.

  The summers of cousins were over.

  Grandma’s cookies were antidote to all that. Chocolate chip – peanut butter, a recipe Chick and she and a couple of cousins had invented for themselves in this very kitchen many years past. The woman was a genius of food, even here with no resources. Chick thought of the long drive to town. Twelve miles and all you got was tiny little Beemis Corners, with its meat shop and wooden grocery, its old-timey, one-pump gas station, tiny post office, busy feed store, one white church. He said, “Can you drive the jeep okay?”

  “Mr. Parmenter has been dri
ving us.”

  Chick grinned. He loved Mr. Parmenter, that jack-of-all-trades, bent and wizened but strong and sudden as a tractor transmission, too, almost as old as Grandma, loved him so much, in fact, that he had since kindergarten faithfully answered “caretaker” when asked what he’d like to be when grown up. The picture of Grandma and gruff Mr. Parmenter driving to town in Mr. Parmenter’s old dump truck was too funny. Chick said, “Because I have learned to drive a shift.”

  Grandma fixed him in her patented firm gaze, formidable: “I’m told your permit isn’t valid outside Connecticut.”

  Chick grinned, caught. “But I can practice? Just up and down the driveway?”

  “You’ll have to get that old thing to start first.”

  Chick took another cookie, bit it grinning. He’d fix that car all right. He said, “And I want to paddle to the island.”

  Grandma said, “We’ll see about that!”

  “I’m old enough,” said Chick, the tones of a child invading his voice.

  Grandma stared off, suddenly wistful. She said, “You all used to blueberry out there, didn’t you.”

  Chick struggled to be adult, to think of Grandma and all she must be going through, just the words his mother had used admonishing him during good-byes. Quietly he said, “And the night before we went Grandpa would always tell the story.”

  “Well,” said Grandma, drawing the syllable out fondly, Grandpa suddenly in her head and in the room around them.

  Chick thought she’d like to tell the story. He primed the pump: “How there was once a house out there to rival the Gilman place . . .”

  Again: “Well.”

  “And how it burned down.”

  “So he called it Conflagration Island, yes.” She sounded irritable, suddenly. “But, of course, that’s not the name. It’s just Spruce Island. Such picnics you had, all of you.” Her irritation seemed to give way to sadness. Grandma had never accompanied them out there, claiming “canoe aversion” in a comical, seasick way that yet seemed to hide something.