The Moon Pinnace

by Thomas Williams

  … so in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being that has known how to touch it. That being is not selected; it is recognised and obeyed.

  —George Santayana,

  The Life of Reason

  … American love of country has always been a curiously general affair, almost an abstract one.

  —Henry Steele Commager,

  The Nature of American Nationalism

  The Moon Pinnace

  Thomas Williams

  Dzanc Books

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 1986 by Thomas Williams

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Published 2015 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-938103-92-6

  Cover by Awarding Book Covers

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  1

  One June morning in 1948, in the town of Leah, New Hampshire, Doris Perkins watched John Hearne cross his backyard and her backyard, which met his, and lightly climb the woodshed roof to her bedroom window. She was waiting to hold the gray-gauzy curtains aside so he could slip through the small window head first, his hands on the wooden floor. Then, without a sound, neat as an acrobat, came the rest of him. Doris’s mother and father and her younger sister would be getting up soon, so they didn’t speak except in whispers.

  She was seventeen and he was twenty-one. She had known him all her life, but this coming to her room in secrecy, this new interest he had in her, was strange, a wish fulfilled, but fulfilled, as all wishes were, in an unsettling way. She had admired him as long as she could remember him, when the children in the after-supper twilight played their games across the lawns as the dark came on too soon. Prisoner’s base, kick the can, Red Rover, come over—now those games were played by younger children across other twilit yards. Once, when she was eight or nine, a little too small to be much of a player, he had chosen her for his side. He’d said, “I’ll take Dory—she can run like the wind.” No one had ever before called her Dory, or picked her anything but last. He had probably forgotten all about that time, but she never would. It was as if, during those evenings, or perhaps that very evening, something had become fixed in her way of seeing boys, and no other evidence seemed to matter, not even John Hearne’s occasional later childishness, or her own. He must have been thirteen then, but she could see no real difference in him since that summer long ago, eight years ago, nearly half her lifetime.

  He hadn’t been the leader of the children in their games, though he was a force, and would often be captain of a side. He would say what was fair and what was not fair. He had once fought a boy in the schoolyard and it seemed to her a battle of Titans, perilous even to watch from a distance. Such anger and hitting. She had been so terrified she hadn’t even thought to be on one side or another. Those eighth-graders were giants, godlike. There had been nose blood, or lip blood, the other boy’s face gray as metal with hatred.

  As he sat on her bed its cables and springs gave little twangs that made him grimace as a joke. His blond plain looks were what she thought a boy should look like, because conventional handsomeness didn’t matter. She sat on the bed too, but up near her pillow. He seemed proud that he had dared to come.

  “I said I’d come,” he whispered, smiling at her.

  “It’s dumb,” she whispered back. “Suppose someone saw you? Suppose my mother comes in here?”

  “In that case pretend you don’t know me.”

  It was funny, but it was not funny. She laughed silently and then stopped. She didn’t like things to be this complicated, and she didn’t think she deserved his new interest in her, because she wasn’t pretty, so there might be something bad or cheap about his new attitude. Maybe it didn’t matter much to him, but it mattered to her. She wanted him to be here yet she disapproved of her wanting him to be here.

  Yesterday they were sitting on the old teeter-totter in her backyard talking about nothing—nothing! She couldn’t remember a word of it. And then there was a silent moment and he came sliding down from his side and kissed her, saying something she couldn’t remember. Nothing they said was what they were talking about, or had anything to do with what they were really meaning or doing. It was like a dance—something you did with yourself that wasn’t really yourself. You almost watched yourself doing it.

  They’d gone into his house to get a Coke. His house was all clean, with expensive carpets and wallpaper and polished wood. Union Street was richer than Water Street, the lawns wider, the larger houses fresh and bright inside as if ready for guests. No one was home, and in the kitchen he kissed her some more and put his hands on her back, his hands interested in her shoulder blades and her ribs. She was surprised by it all and felt just as if she were melting. The strange thing was that she couldn’t disagree with anything he suggested. It was like a brand-new life that had just begun and she’d found herself in it, apprehensive or not, for better or for worse.

  He poured their Cokes over ice cubes into glasses just like the ones at Trask’s Pharmacy, special glasses bulbed at the top, with “Coca-Cola” etched into their sides. It seemed grand and yet frivolous to have glasses in your house just for Coca-Cola.

  “This is only the third time I’ve ever been in this house,” she said.

  “That’s because we weren’t really contemporaries,” he said. “But we are now, aren’t we?”

  He had always used words like “contemporaries” that others knew the meanings of but never used themselves. He hesitated, waiting for her assent, but she looked away; quite often she didn’t answer questions that needed no answers. She was aware of this habit as a kind of doubtful obstinacy that sometimes disappointed people.

  The large, bright kitchen didn’t smell of food. The colors of cabinets and shelves matched the colors of electric stove and refrigerator. All hinges and pulls matched. She wondered if there would ever be any leftovers in this kitchen, in the refrigerator or on a shelf somewhere covered with a cloth. He showed her the rest of the house with all its surfaces that people must have had to worry about marring or soiling. There were framed paintings on the walls, of still lifes and landscapes, one of Mount Washington that was so old even the blue of the sky was more brown than blue. There were empty silver trays on tables, and no photographs anywhere, and a sunroom with curtains drawn against the light but themselves lighted yellow by the sun. There were tall lamps with linen shades, and everywhere the splashboards were so narrow the o
ak floors must never have been meant to be mopped. If you had to clean such a house you’d never know where you’d been. In the bedrooms upstairs the beds were high, rounded at the corners, and didn’t sag in their middles. It was as if she’d come across the two backyards into another country. When she’d visited this house before, it was just for minutes, twice to the kitchen on errands, once to the front room when, as a child, she was invited in on Halloween and given wrapped chocolate candy instead of jelly beans and the like.

  They came to his room. He had been flippant in showing her the house, not toward her but toward the house. He had some attitude toward it of disrespect that she had decided to ignore in order to make up her own mind. “And here,” he’d said, showing her his parents’ bedroom, “is the Grand Uxorium.” But then, at the door to his own room, he grew nervous. She loved him but she really didn’t know him. If it was love, whatever this melting was, much of it must come from history and not from what he was now. John Hearne had actually given her her name—Dory. He had named her for everyone she knew except for her father and mother, who called her Doris. Even her uncles and aunts called her Dory. But when she was in high school he was away in the Army and then at college, and when he was home they’d just said,

  “Hi, Dory,” and “Hi, John“—neighbors across the way.

  He opened the door and swept his arm around to present her to the room, or the room to her. His bed was unmade. Used clothing hung over a chair. Childhood relics, like the model airplane hanging from threads and the paper wasps’ nest above a window, were in evidence. It was a corner room with windows on two sides (one window looked across the backyards, through leaves, to her window; she had known this for years). He must have been fond of the long bookcase in which the colorful children’s books blended along the rows into the more solid, somber bindings of his growing up. In her house there were not five books in all except for schoolbooks and the books she had borrowed from her friend Cynthia Fuller or from the town library.

  He sat on his bed and she sat on the arm of his leather easy chair.

  “You don’t say a lot,” he said.

  “I guess not.”

  “Most girls your age have all these idiotic expressions they think are clever.”

  She shrugged.

  He stood up and came toward her. She felt risk, that she didn’t really know him in these new circumstances. He was bigger and stronger than she was; his shoulders seemed a yard wide, his hips as strong and narrow as a tree. If it had been the other way around she could just say no, if she wanted to, and that would be that. But he was stronger and all she could do if she wanted him to stop would be to appeal to custom and law and the opinions of people like their parents. She didn’t want him to stop, at least not yet, but if she had wanted him to stop her authorities would be distant.

  His new interest in her had been so intense he’d trembled. She saw the tremor of his knee against his khaki pants. His warm blond head loomed before her, his open greenish eyes straight upon hers, so close everything blurred, including the feeling in her breasts and in the lower center of her, in which something seemed to drop down with a lurch as their mouths came together in that formal, folding way. She was curious about it all—about the feelings she was having and about what he really wanted with her. Maybe he just wanted to play with her.

  But all he did was move his hands over her back and look very serious. In a way this was really happening but it was not right, because she couldn’t figure out why this boy she had loved maybe since she was eight years old was suddenly doing what she had often imagined him doing. It was as if he were taking one of the most important of her fantasies away from her forever. It was all doubtful because in the fantasy she didn’t look the way she actually did, which was plain, plain, her eyes too close together, her mouth too big and her straight hair a brownish tan color that reflected nothing. But all the time she melted. She had never felt such fine sandpaper as his face.

  At the time it seemed that she must do everything he wanted; it was like falling. But after kissing her for a while he held her at arm’s length and looked at her carefully for a minute, or part of a minute, and then they went for a ride on his motorcycle to Northlee and back, five miles each way, her arms around his middle. She wasn’t afraid at all, but it was cold and she hardly saw anything but clouds and trees. He left her off in front of her house and made the joke, or dare, about coming to see her room the next morning before anyone was up. She had been so numb and invaded by so many new feelings it was as if she had lived a year on that one afternoon. And now he was here in her bedroom while through the small floor register at the foot of her bed the sounds and smells of breakfast came up from the kitchen—the squeezing sound of water not quite yet boiling, the odor of kerosene, the thud-clink of the refrigerator door and latch.

  “Doris,” her mother said in a normal voice, as if she were right there in the room, “you going to eat breakfast with us?”

  “No, Ma. You go ahead. I’ll get some later,” she answered, shivering unpleasantly at the lie hidden in her words. At least John Hearne was startled by the closeness of her mother’s voice.

  Her mother and father would take Debbie to school on their way to work. A danger was that Debbie might want to come into her room for something, although she probably wouldn’t. If she did, John Hearne would have to get in the closet, because she wouldn’t refuse Debbie if she wanted to come in. She felt a surge of annoyance with him and then wondered why any critical feelings she had toward him seemed to demean her. Why was that? It was dangerous. Suddenly he was complicating and changing the life that she had lived mostly in anticipation of the future, its scenes and characters largely imaginary. She hadn’t even studied practical things very much. She knew something about sex, about that compulsive attraction, but not enough about its mechanics and dangers. She had avoided the subject, leaving its parts and functions for some later time. There was the side view of the pelvic innards of a woman like curved sausage casings, tubes and clusters of little globules, but the murky picture in the book didn’t seem to apply to her. At her period there was a spongy feeling but she seemed all of a piece up in there. Even the idea of “up in there” was new—she wouldn’t have thought of it yesterday morning, but yesterday afternoon when he was kissing her something separate seemed to drop down like the stretching of a rubber band until it lost its ability to stretch any more.

  And there was another symptom; she was acting the way he wanted her to act. She was not being herself. Among her friends she was considered a witty and caustic person. She never automatically agreed to anything. But his touch was a force she did not resist. If he pulled, she came forward before he had to use any strength at all, and if he pushed she faded before his hand like air. She didn’t know how her body knew what step, turn, bend or fold bis arms effortlessly commanded.

  They were exaggeratedly immobile on her squeaky bed, waiting for the sounds in the house to go away. He evidently thought it was funny but when she frowned at him he stopped making faces at her. She sat Indian fashion in her pajamas, looking down the slope of the hammocky bed where he sat Indian fashion at the other end in his khakis and blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled partly up over his smooth forearms. He’d slipped out of his leather moccasins and left them on the floor, but when he saw her glance at them he reached down with elaborate care, picked them up and put them under a fold of blanket. He pointed downstairs, made his fingers into a person walking upstairs, pointed to himself and then his pointing finger made a loop toward the underside of the bed.

  “She could walk to school,” her father said in his high but authoritative voice. He referred to Debbie, who was right there at the kitchen table. He knew about walking because he was a mailman.

  “It’s no more than two streets out of my way,” her mother said. The subject came up most mornings, but what they did was, her father drove to the post office, got out of the car, her mother slid over under the wheel and drove Debbie to school, then drove back down
street to her job at the Public Service Company. Debbie walked home from school but never to school, and it had been the same way with Dory. But it seemed that every chance he got her father brought up the subject of walking.

  Knives clinked on the butter dish. Toast smells, light golden, near to char, wafted up into the air of the small room where she and John Hearne were immobilized in such tension right on the sheets and blankets of her bed. After a long time the sounds below diminished. The house opened out on voices, shut again, the car started and backed out the driveway with the light tearing sound of crushed cinders and they were alone in the house.

  2

  He was an only child, though that condition, being simply unalterable, rarely came to mind unless someone else brought it up. If it was a fault it wasn’t his. Who knew what had kept him from the company of brothers and sisters? From what he knew of his mother he tended to think it was malfunction—in her or his father or stepfather—rather than choice, but he couldn’t be certain.

  In Leah it had been awkward that his mother’s last name was not the same as his. No one else in Leah had the name Hearne; there were Hearnes in Northlee, according to the Northlee telephone book, but he’d never happened to meet one of them, and since his father came from the Midwest they probably wouldn’t be related to him. His father, his mother had told him over the years, was in the far West somewhere, if still alive. He’d been a handsome man, a charming man everyone had liked, but he was totally irresponsible, just totally irresponsible. To John this had, even from the beginning, seemed too simple a judgment. He suspected, and as far as he could remember always had suspected, that on this subject anything his mother might say was untrustworthy, because she was not free of blushes and girlish self-flattery when she spoke of it. It was as if men, all men, were first evaluated by her as dancing partners. He supposed that most people were in the habit of self-congratulation, some more subtle than others, but hers was always obvious and bright, ego a coin forever new. Was his father then charming and popular because she had married him, irresponsible because she had divorced him?