by Ann Beattie
I remembered the day he was talking about. It was a Sunday in springtime and it had rained for three days, but the rain was really pouring down that Sunday. And Joseph put on his black rubber boots and his raincoat and said he was going to the beach. My mother grabbed him by the arm and said he was not. My father told Joseph to go ahead, then turned to my mother and said he admired his son’s spirit. Sebastian was visiting, and she started to argue but backed down when Sebastian asked them please not to fight. In many ways Sebastian was like one of us: he put his hands over his ears if someone said something harsh. Once when he hit his finger with a hammer, I saw him cry. Sebastian had left New York the same year my parents did; my father worked as a carpenter with two other men, and Sebastian kept the books.
My grandmother did not like Sebastian. My father liked him very much, and my mother tolerated him. Joseph and I had mixed emotions: he was always kind to us, but when he was with adults he seemed childish, so we didn’t respect him as we’d respect an adult, but when he played with us he seemed reserved—the way an adult would. When I was seven, when I saw him cry after he hit his thumb, my father took me aside and told me that sometimes Sebastian’s reactions were a little out of whack because in New York he had had a breakdown. He explained to me what a breakdown was. I was fascinated and wanted to tell Joseph, but somehow I knew that he was the storyteller. In fact, I started to tell him, but he interrupted with his own Sebastian story: in the Bible they shot him full of arrows, for being evil, but a beautiful lady pulled out all the arrows, without causing him any pain. “What happened to the holes?” I said. “All the arrows were shot into his face. She pulled them out so carefully that they just left little holes. Whiskers grew out of them.”
As Joseph was fabricating stories that spring, strange things were happening that we didn’t know about. We knew things were going on, but we were involved in collecting seashells from the main beach, playing hide and seek in the woods with Billy LaPierre, whose family had the camp next to ours, and the secret nighttime stories. We knew our mother was irritable and our father silent. We knew that Sebastian didn’t come around very often. We did not know that our mother had had an abortion, and that Sebastian had driven her to Montreal, where she had it performed illegally, and against my father’s wishes. I overheard her, one night, saying to him, “Where would we get the money for another baby? You won’t commit yourself to anything. You could have worked for a prosperous business, but you hooked up with Frankie and Phil Renshaw. I’m already surrounded by babies: Sebastian in tears every time I turn around, you bumming around, your mother coming every summer and expecting me to do everything but wipe her chin.”
I don’t think that my mother loved Sebastian—just that after the abortion, when he felt she and Sebastian had both turned against him, they began to spend more time with each other, discussing it. Then my father became jealous, and my mother laughed at him for thinking anything so stupid, and her taunting made my father bitter, and finally silent. Things were so bad that my grandmother came in June and left before the month was over, pretending that she felt guilty for having left her cousin.
Sebastian and Joseph and I drove her to Boston to get a plane. Everyone knew that it was strange my parents didn’t go. My father said that he had to work, and my mother offered to go along for the ride, looking very ashamed, but my grandmother said no—she wanted some time alone with her two favorite children. As I recall, she hardly talked to us, but she gave us both money. On the way back, Sebastian bought us large vanilla ice cream cones. We sat on the grass beside the ice cream stand, bees swarming around the trash can, Joseph more interested in watching them than in licking his cone. He got ice cream all down his shirt, and when we got home my mother complained about that instead of thanking Sebastian for what he had done. We ran outside as soon as we could and hid our five-dollar bills in an old tackle box and buried the box in the nook of a tree, because Joseph said we should.
At dinner my mother asked if Grandma had given us a treat before she left. It was all she said about her having left. Joseph tried to evade the question.
“Because your father has stopped speaking doesn’t mean that you should stop, Joseph,” she said. She laid down her fork and Sebastain laid his down too.
“I think she gave them both some money,” Sebastian said, looking at me because he knew I’d never have the courage to avoid a direct question.
“Yes,” I said.
My mother smiled. “She said she was going to give you money to buy a treat when she and I had breakfast this morning.”
Sebastian picked up his fork and began to eat his salad.
“Did you put it somewhere safe?” she said.
Joseph looked at me—a warning look.
“What’s the big secret?” my mother said.
“Look,” my father said, “it isn’t necessary to fill us in on little details. We don’t need to know everything. They should just do whatever they feel like doing.”
My mother frowned. “That’s unfair,” she said, “to challenge me in the guise of protecting the children.”
“I was aiming it at you. I love children. I wouldn’t put the children on the spot.”
“Stop it,” she said, “or I’m going to leave the table.”
“Take Sebastian with you. There’s nearly a full moon tonight—good night for a walk.”
“Why don’t you two make up?” Sebastian said.
“Why don’t I get a direct answer from my children before the conversation veers off again?” she said. She turned to me. Everybody knew I was the easiest mark.
“We pretended, we—played pirates, and we buried the ten dollars in a box in the hole of a tree.”
Joseph had not said we were pirates, and I thought I had been very clever.
My mother looked at me. “All right,” she said. “I don’t see why there had to be such a secret.”
That night, in bed, Joseph didn’t tell a story. Instead, we talked about how something had been wrong at dinner. Finally, proud of my invented story, I mentioned the buried money.
“She wasn’t even mad,” I said. “We can get the money tomorrow.”
“She wasn’t mad at you, but she was mad at me because I wouldn’t answer.”
“We can buy candy down at the store all month,” I said.
There was a long silence. Then Joseph said, “The money’s gone.”
I didn’t question it. He whispered, “The money’s gone,” and suddenly I knew that it was, that it was punishment for my having told the secret. Before we fell asleep he relented a little. “It might get put back somehow,” he said. But when we whispered the next night it wasn’t about the money, and we never dug for it or mentioned it again.
For years I forgot about it. I remembered it recently, riding the bus; I looked out the window and saw a squirrel run up a tree very much like the tree where we had buried the box. All at once I felt so sentimental I had to concentrate hard not to cry. I had remembered that there was something that was his and mine, that it was still there, and that I could go and get it. I got off the bus and walked to my room. It was a nice room with walls painted oyster-white, and the bare walls made me think of the rose-covered wallpaper all through the house in New Hampshire, and of what Sebastian had told me years before about the hospital he went to when he had his breakdown—how he would study the plain white walls and know that he had to get out of that place. The hairline cracks in them would appear in his dreams; imagined smudges would make him wake up, in a fit of anxiety. His obsession with the walls was only making him crazier.
In 1969 Joseph died in Vietnam. My mother received official notification, then a letter from a friend of his that was full of praise for his valor, his wonderful sense of humor, his skill with a rifle. It was an odd letter, one that the man probably would not have sent if he had thought it over. There was a paragraph near the end praising Joseph for having changed the man’s taste in music, for Joseph’s having explained what was really important musically. A
list of several meaningful songs followed. The letter concluded mournfully, and he signed it “God bless.” I read it over and over, all summer, and at the end, every time, I would hear Red Skelton’s voice saying the “God bless.” The man who had written the letter was obviously heartbroken, yet it just wasn’t the kind of letter to send. He was alive and Joseph was not. He seemed to give equal weight to a sense of humor and rifle skills. What sort of person could he be?
Instead of going to the main beach, I went to the dock and sat at the end of it with my feet in the water and the letter beside me, carefully closed in a book so it wouldn’t get wet.
He had a sense of humor, all right. He had such a fine sense of humor that he laughed when I told him to go to Canada.
Every day I sat on the dock, and when the sun went down I walked back to the house and had dinner.
For eight years my father has not lived in the house. He and my mother are not divorced, but the other day I saw an ad she had circled in the Village Voice about Haitian divorces. On and off, Curtis lives with her. Curtis is Phil Renshaw’s younger brother, who works for Phil now that my father is gone.
One day at the end of the summer when my brother was killed, my mother walked down to the dock. I was smoking grass, as usual—staring out at the water. When she came to the dock I was thinking about how often my friends and I thought ironically, and how irony had been absent from my childhood. The memory of the conversation about how much my father liked children began to come back to me. I was wondering if children miss a lot of ironies, or whether that had been a different world and everything in it really hadn’t been ironic.
My mother sat down. She didn’t say anything about what I was doing. Finally she said, “Your father is totally irrational. He holds it against me. He thinks that God did this to curse us, to even the score for that abortion I had years and years ago.” She took off her sandals and put her feet in the water. It was wet where she sat. She was sitting in a puddle on the dock. “Can you imagine your father being religious?” she said.
“No,” I said. “I can’t imagine him living in Mexico with a twenty-four-year-old girl either.” I did not say that I found it hard to believe that she lived with Curtis Renshaw. He was plain-faced, less willing to work at anything than even my father. And he was vain—he always washed with a special soap. There was a plastic soap dish in the tub with a bar of putty-colored soap in it that was Curtis’ soap.
“Your father loves you,” she said. “He should pay more attention to you. When Joseph died he lost all perspective—he’s forgotten what he’s got.”
I stared at our four feet, spooky and slender in the water.
“He should have sent the money for the plane ticket. He shouldn’t have said he was going to and then not done it.” She brushed the hair out of her eyes. “Is that part of why you’re blue?”
“No,” I said.
“I know,” she said.
Then, being as deliberately cruel as my father had been with his sarcasm and his silence, I said, “He didn’t send the money because she’s going to have a baby and he doesn’t want me around now.”
“Yes,” she sighed. “There’s that, too.”
It didn’t seem to have made her angry at me, though I knew she could hardly stand to be reminded of it.
“She’s twenty-four years old and a Catholic. I hope he keeps her pregnant and that they have hundreds of children for him to support, and no abortions.”
The dock needed some boards replaced; that was why there was the puddle next to me. She wouldn’t repair it, and Curtis wouldn’t repair it, and I wouldn’t. In June I had finally repapered the living room because the wallpaper was at once so faded and so garish. She had always asked my father to do it, and now, years later, I had done it with no prompting, wild for something to do with my hands. I suspect she didn’t care about the wallpaper anymore because she didn’t care any longer about the house. He had left it to her—his parents’ house (my grandmother had died five years before; no longer even any reason to fix it up for her summer visit)—as if to say: You care about material things, here it is. Then he traveled and finally ended up in Mexico City. What would have happened if she had had the other baby? Would anything that simple have kept them married?
“What’s that you’re reading?” she said.
I looked down at the book I held, with the letter closed inside it. The book was Cooking with Wine.
Sebastian comes to my apartment. “It’s nice,” he says. “What? Don’t you like it?” He sits on one of the two Salvation Army chairs. “It’s nice in here,” he says.
He comes here often, and is always ill at ease. He never knows what to say. After a dozen visits, today is the first time he’s passed comment on the apartment. He used to call and invite himself over. After he had called a few times I called him and began inviting him because I knew that was what he wanted. He drinks too much now. He knows I’m going to school and don’t have much money, so he brings his own bottle, and a bottle of white wine for me.
It’s winter now, snowing. I was surprised he came, because you can’t get a cab, and the streets are too bad to drive, so he had to take three buses to get here.
His shoes are on top of the newspaper in front of the door and he’s sitting in the chair with his socks drying on the arm. His feet are so familiar. In the summer, in spite of rough floorboards and rocky beaches, nobody ever wore shoes.
He wants to take me out to lunch, but I don’t want to go out into the snow. He looks a little relieved, and is happy when I bring him a plate of cheese and crackers to have with his Scotch.
“I got a letter from your father,” he says, reaching into the breast pocket of his worn corduroy jacket.
I read it. It’s a lot like the letter he sent to my mother, and the one he sent me. He has a nine-pound son, named Louis. Just like that.
“He wrote your mother, too.” He says it so I know he thinks such letter sending is insane.
I go into the kitchen and get the rest of the brick of cheese. It is a one-room apartment and from where he sits, Sebastian can see me.
“It’s nice of you to put up with me,” he says.
“It was nice of you to bring me a present.”
When he came, he brought with him six photographic postcards from the bookstore in the Square where he works. He knows that I like Walker Evans photographs; I won’t mail any of them.
We sit, eat cheese, and fall silent.
I remember a night when my parents went dancing. It must have been the same year she had the abortion. Sebastian came to baby sit. He came upstairs, barefoot, and we didn’t hear him. He found Joseph in my bed. “What are you two doing in bed together?” he said. He put the light on, and our eyes blinked—we couldn’t help looking funny. That was the first time I knew there was something strange about it. Joseph must have known, because somehow, long before, he had gotten me to understand that I wasn’t to talk about it. When Sebastian spoke, I knew that what he was asking about was something sexual. I thought about sex for the first time, though I didn’t know the word then, or even what sex was.
Today, Sebastian isn’t having much to drink. Usually by this time he’s high, and the visit goes more smoothly.
“I wish I had been your uncle,” he says. “I always liked children.”
“You were like an uncle.”
“Then I wish I had been a rich uncle. Then you really would have liked me.”
“When did we ever care about money?”
“You never had any. Your mother was always complaining because your father had quit his job in the city and they were stuck in the country with no way to do anything, or buy what she wanted.”
The house, in those days, had broken-down furniture, and we sat on pillows on the floors instead of in the old chairs with bulging springs, long before sitting on floor cushions was fashionable. My mother inherited money when Grandma died, and now there is new furniture, and a lot of the old pieces have been mended and refinished by Curtis.
“This is a very nice place,” Sebastian says. “It’s not easy to find a place this clean in the city.”
The year I was nine Joseph and I stopped sharing the huge upstairs room. It was nobody’s idea but my mother’s that I have my own room. I got the small room at the back of the house on the first floor. A bureau was moved in, and a bed, and she hung white curtains and put a straw mat on the floor that she had bought that summer at an auction. I missed Joseph—though long before, he had stopped telling me the stories. He still told stories, but they were full of bravado, stories that were about things that didn’t amaze me; he had hit a home run; he had carried Andrew’s little sister home when she broke her foot diving off the dock. In the stories, he was always the hero. I didn’t want my own room, but I suspected that my mother would have been angry if I had said so. Everybody else I knew had her own room, or shared one with her sister. After I moved into my room my mother would come in, once or twice a month, and sleep in the bed with me instead of with my father. I was a little embarrassed to have my mother in bed with me because I thought sleeping with your mother was childish, but something told me not to say anything about that, either.
I remember when my father left—the summer before Joseph left, to go to Vietnam. I remember that she was angry at first, and then so sad that Sebastian seemed always to be at the house.
“Your mother never really warmed up to me, in spite of the fact that there was nothing I wanted more. But you know that already,” Sebastian says.
I reach out and put my hand around his hand, on the glass. He was always there, so I could go off and sulk and not worry about my mother. He was there the next summer, too, working in the garden, the day we got the news that Joseph had been shot.
It seemed that the winter would never end, and that I would never be able to read all the books I was supposed to read for my courses, when suddenly, at the end of March, there was a day as warm as summer. Nick showed it to me first, having been awakened by the children who had gone outside early to play. The house in which I rented the apartment was across the street from a playground. He shook me gently by the shoulder and pointed out the window, at the bright day. I got up and leaned on my elbow, and looked at it: sunny, beautiful, the trees so still that there must not have been the slightest breeze.
