The Moon Pinnace

by Thomas Williams

  “We’ll do our best,” John said. He looked at Dory in the rose light She seemed demure and fragile, her eyes for now large with a cloudy inexactitude of focus. She had such an odd little face, the closeness of her eyes belying the common reserve about such an attribute; it gave her power. She was shy and wouldn’t look straight back at him.

  Sandra couldn’t bring him a drink because she wasn’t twenty-one, so she went away to find someone else to bring it.

  He looked at Dory, moving bis head to get into her line of sight, and said, “She thinks we’re cute. She wants to breed us.”

  “We’ve already bred,” she said, seeing that this startled and amused him. He was thinking of other things to say and she could see him making up and rejecting things, the play of wary thoughts.

  “Will you eat?” he finally asked, having rejected everything in that other tonality.

  “Yes,” she said. She looked at the menu. A salad, but not meat, not yet. Something bland and neutral. What difference did it make, though; food was not supposed to scream that it was the flesh of victims. But not red meat, not blood. Fish, shellfish. Why not a triumphant feast, as after a hunt? She had never been finicky. She ate the rabbits she had skinned and quartered, throwing away their heads and soft brown eyes. It was good meat. This perverse comparison of meat with the flesh of her sister would simply have to stop, and would stop.

  He said, “You may not believe this, but I now like lima beans. So I’m a man, according to your father. You remember he said that?”

  When Sandra came back, the bartender bringing John’s rye and soda and Dory’s ginger ale, Dory ordered sole au gratin. She knew who the cook was—Mrs. Brock, Sarah’s mother—so the food would be pretty good, if she could make herself eat it.

  “I’ll have that too,” he said. “By the way, do you have lima beans?”

  “We never have lima beans,” Sandra said, making a face.

  “Imagine that,” he said. “No lima beans.”

  “Squash, carrots, green beans,” Sandra said. “Baked or mashed potatoes. The house dressing’s got herbs in it, like little green specks. It tastes good, though.”

  While they ate—and she did eat something, as if boughten food were somehow purer—he told her about his father and the lima-bean machine, trying, she saw, to be funny and detached from it all, but he would come to places that surprised him and constricted his voice. He stopped, in consternation, and then said, “You go for a summer and certain things happen and they don’t have to make much sense. For instance, how can I feel terribly sorry for my mother when I can’t understand her constant dishonesty? She ran off with some jerk she practically created, for Christ’s sake. She’s been married to Amos for fifteen years. Granted, he’s a kind of jerk, too, but she’s been about as faithful as a bivalve. When I think of her operation I get sympathy pains, for some reason in both feet, but in another very peculiar way she doesn’t exist.”

  “She doesn’t exist? What?”

  “Well, if you’re talking to her and you realize that you don’t exist—at least not in the form you think of as real—then pretty soon you have the feeling that she doesn’t exist, either. But then I have to think that she is real, and she’s nearly forty-three and here she’s had a hysterectomy and she ought to be upset, and is upset, and all I feel is some slightly gory pains in my feet.”

  The Princess was forty-three, too, she thought. But of course princesses were out of time.

  “But my sister,” he said. “My half-sister, Thelma. She had this real talent. She sounded like she was talking through a sponge but she told the truth. She could draw…” He was thinking of Debbie, too, and the two victims got mixed up, as if the death of one were linked through Dory Perkins and John Hearne to the death of the other. Dory’s sorrow and guilt loomed over him and he remembered his moment with Thelma of near-religious certainty, power without sense, and all of this paralyzed his throat, a static, motionless seizure.

  She approved of his seriousness—whatever strong feelings kept catching him unawares. He said, “Let’s go to Cascomhaven after. Would you like to?”

  “I’ll go anywhere you want.”

  At Cascomhaven they sat on the dock to look at a sliver of moon. The weather had been so dry the lake was low and they could let their feet dangle, watching the small, moon-tipped waves slide noiselessly beneath them. He told her what lima beans were named in Latin, and went on from there, not telling her quite all, she could tell, about Bonnie Forester.

  “I have the feeling I’m just making up a story,” he said, “because I’m telling it to you. But everything I say happened did happen. I’m not making up events, you know. It just changes.”

  “That’s what everybody does,” she said. “Like your mother.”

  “Please don’t tell me I’m like my mother,” he said with a small laugh and a touch of irritation.

  She didn’t know how to answer that, so she didn’t say anything. She looked out at the broad lake, in which Debbie’s blood had been dissolved from the clothes and hands of her murderer. How the pale cloud had dispersed, cell by cell, into the cold lake.

  He said, “You can’t blame yourself for some madman, Dory. Some German. You knew there were murderers in the world. You’ve got to go on living.”

  She didn’t answer that.

  “Jesus Christ!” he said.

  “Debbie didn’t go on living!” she said in sudden anger. “Can you just lecture me? Where did you get all the authority?”

  He put his arm around her, like a yoke, and she struggled to get up.

  He held her, thinking his touch must heal, but she struggled against him like a bird whose frantic wings he tried not to damage.

  She couldn’t stand it. She fought his easy power as hard as she could, thinking of scratching or biting, the superficial irritants that were all weakness had.

  “Dory,” he said as if to a willful child.

  “Let go of me!” she said. She was crying and hated it. “You don’t own me! What do you want, anyway?”

  “I want you to be reasonably happy.”

  “You want what you want! What have I got to say about it?” She would just as soon die anytime. Pouf, there goes Moscow. He let her get to her feet, and stood beside her, looming like a bully. She was ashamed of her yelling and yet she believed in what she’d yelled.

  He said, “I don’t want you to be crazy.”

  “Tough!” she yelled. The word didn’t truly represent her but she couldn’t think of words that did, and in a red fit of frustration she pushed him off the dock. He grabbed her to get his balance but then saw that he couldn’t and tried to push her back upright so she wouldn’t fall in too, but it was too late. The water was not as cold as it had been in June but she began to shiver immediately and was really weak. She reached out for help and he picked her up easily and waded the rocky bottom to shore, then up the steps toward the cabin.

  To his strength she weighed little, not much more than the gravely hurt child on Okinawa, the girl child with her leg and God knew what else smashed, who signaled her consciousness with a whine of agony. He’d seen her smooth ivory little pouch, a sign of mortality and commonness, a twinge at his heart. He never knew what to do with the weak and the wounded but to carry them, and what good was that? He was not of the Healing Echelons. He knew what to do with men; you looked them in the eyes and things got sorted out. If they didn’t know what to do you told them what to do. If they were killers you either put them out of their misery or got the fuck out of there. But what did you do with women? And this one, a complication of desire and fear, humor and anger, who was an object, too. He was made by her to feel the risk of intolerable loss, but he believed that to own her was to be owned forever.

  She stood wrapped in a blanket while he knelt at the fire, a beach towel over his broad shoulders, a smaller towel around his waist, like Tarzan, his golden thighs and calves defined by fire into their hard, classical blocks and lines, all mobility and strength. She was cold clear th
rough, trembling to the marrow, ice to the fire of his energy, so chilled she didn’t dare move for fear of moving the air. She hadn’t been able to undo the safety pin at her waistband, or do anything, and he did it all, matter-of-factly, as though they had no secrets and had never had any secrets. He squeezed out their clothes in the kitchen sink, rigged clotheslines across the room and hung out everything they had worn. Their shoes, wallets and his wet traveler’s checks and cigarettes he arranged on the hearth.

  She warmed slowly, opening the blanket away from him, to the fire. She’d never been modest; it wasn’t that. “I’m sorry I pushed you,” she said. “That was dumb and I can’t even remember why I did it.”

  “You thought I needed a swim,” he said. “You didn’t care for my advice.”

  He sat back casually on the couch, the place of examining and taking, where she’d lost her singularity. “My mother wants you to cure me of all this sleeping business, isn’t that right?” she said.

  “Dory, I want to.”

  “Then everything will be all right.”

  “Easy,” he said. “Come on, now.”

  “So what do you want? Why did you come back?”

  “Because I wanted to,” he said. “I mean because I had to.”

  They made up carefully, only little slivers of resentment and shame left, as those little slivers and twigs and grains were always left, no matter how they tried to forgive. They lay down together, no tentative looks or hesitations. He was being careful about what he said to her but he acted as though he owned her body, which she supposed he did. She could tell that he had decided that she was too ill, or fragile, to do to her what he wanted to do, as if it would be too physical and momentous for now.

  “You’re a ghost,” he said. “You’re all sticks and fog. I want you to get your muscles back and then you can push me off the dock all you want.”

  She had no answer to that, but his bulk was heated and gentle, and after a while she let him know that she wanted him to do what he wanted to do.

  At midnight they put on their damp clothes and he took her home.

  The next day he went to Mrs. Pulsifer’s and registered for Selective Service, then got Paul Columbard, since Paul had Saturday off, to drive him around to look at secondhand cars. He bought a dented black ’36 Ford two-door sedan for two hundred dollars. It visibly used oil, but aside from a little smoke ran pretty well. It didn’t stop very well, with its cable brakes, but he was used to watching for obstacles.

  There had been no rain for weeks, and fires had run out of control in Northlee and to the west, so everyone was cleaning up brush around houses and cabins. A few days later he and Dory were at Cascomhaven doing this, Dory unable to keep herself from dragging away the brush he cut and gathered. The old man with his scythe was cleaning up the sparse hay along the road, his stone often calling agua caliente, agua caliente. John had to go back to the university in a week, if he was going.

  He watched Dory drag away a pile of dead branches, steeplejack and spiked blackberry stalks. Her arms were scratched and she was creased with sweat and dust, but if work was to be done she had to do it. So did he. It seemed to him that they should work like this all of their lives—that terminal, mortal shiver, though the years ahead seemed to stretch out forever, give or take the Apocalypse.

  At dusk they washed up in the lake, naked, soaping each other with shameless, proprietary hands. Lord! They handled each other’s rubbery cold exotic protoplasm, and swam through the cool libidinous primeval like horny squids—his terminology, which she would find doubtful—and he thought how she never haggled, she never bargained. She could resent, and probably should. He asked her if she wanted to get married, she said yes, and he thought how she would frighten him all of his life and make him careful, because he would have to pretend that he was better and stronger and more honest than he really was. But she was his woman and she would have his children, who would never be abandoned or betrayed. Never. Surely the decent and responsible could have their stories too.

  Made thoughtful by this exchange, they went up to the cabin. She’d said, “Yes,” because he really meant it, but her even-sounding “Yes” was not simple assent, it was something like surrender. She had loved and admired him ever since she was eight years old, but even if all that puppy love and infatuation and the way he owned her now seemed to obliterate sense, sense was still there. She knew what it meant to make such a decision. It meant the years, the years, for better or for worse. She knew what it was like to be a parent; she knew her mother’s life as if she had been a sister to her, of the labor and the losses. She knew more than he did about the long years of vigilance, the way through a vain world toward Homeland.

  Now he came to her, just to her, and he was for this moment perfect and beautiful, the creation, she knew—but this knowledge washed away unregretted—of all the dreams and fantasies that at this commencement must begin to slip away into the past.

  34

  It is one of their anniversaries, another warm day in September when the summer people have gone from the lake and they have it all to themselves. The small green canoe sails trembling on its sensitive, skittish keel. It now has a name stenciled in light blue letters on its bows: Phaseolus lunatus. Its sail is now white Dacron, its sheaves and cleats stainless steel and bronze, but the pretty hull, made in Maine so long ago, is still the same.

  “Do you remember,” he asks, “your dream about the Canadian soldiers?”

  No, she can’t remember, and he is always doing this to her. They are heading toward Pine Island on a port tack, to have a sort of picnic. Somewhere near here, she does vaguely remember, she told him about a dream, but sometimes it seems as if they must have led separate lives, because she remembers what he doesn’t and he remembers what she doesn’t.

  “Do you remember 1948?” he asks.

  “That year,” she says. From Pine Island they will be able to see where Cascom Manor once stood—now a series of A-frame condominiums John Hearne is partly responsible for. But she remembers that year all right, when the dregs of a distant war washed like a tsunami around her and her sister, and the world became precariously balanced upon a point of terror. She is the compulsive historian of the family, the active political one, whose composure can most easily be shaken by distant events. Her children, now grown up and away, have always lived in this world; they were born into it, and survive as if they are mutations who have adapted to the loom of Apocalypse. So far she too has survived, as has the man who steers the little boat on the mild blue lake. Mild for now, anyway. “Yes, I remember,” she says, thinking that he still feels proud of himself because, thirty-six years ago, he kept his word and married her.

  “It wasn’t such a bad year, was it?” he says. “Harry Truman won, didn’t he?”

  He, too, thinks about the world and his country and the history he has witnessed. He can’t define his country because it is the air he breathes, the water (becoming acidic, oh, woe) he swims in. In a way, he and Dory are his country. He even has a battle star for having fought for it—three days hearing the rattle of distant guns, a walk through shit, a time to carry a wounded child up a hill; there are better and worse records. But his country, his life—how can he define it, them? A black man or woman can now take a leak in Utah; that’s no small thing. Hold on to that.

  There were more wars, in which we lost, or almost lost, the feeling that we were the loved and the good. Only by comparison, a doubtful form of logic, can we feel righteous now. The world does seem, as Dory says, to be in a state of jihad, the sects at each other’s throats everywhere. The rational and the decent, where they are found or dare to speak, are the first to be shot. Theocracy, in all of its linguistic disguises, is ascendant, newspeak triumphant in the service of dogma. Urban Stumms, who no longer comes toward him in his dreams, heavy-shod and implacable, would share the joke of terror as peace; that is what the two-legged race has come to, Urban. What happiness there is must ignore the inevitable; but of course it can. Now: the b
lue lake, a light breeze, the austere September sun, Dory who is still alive.

  The little boat heels slightly, its wake leaving a smooth, turbulent hush among the waves, its energy understood but still miraculous. His companion in the bow examines and judges, a miracle of continuity and passion not so well understood.

  When he thinks of 1948 and of his father, now dead, it is always of that hushed moment when, with the calm intensity of an adult feeding a child, the man who did not believe in names brought toward his tongue one common, immaculate lima bean. In that vision innocent of dogma and intolerance he will always believe.

  Dory watches him, thinking how the gray-haired, still young-looking man at the tiller has not really had the life he wanted and expected. When Amos died in 1951 they came back from the university to take over—temporarily, they thought—Martha’s financial and business affairs. He has always considered his involvement in business merely temporary, secondary, but of course it is life itself that is temporary. He has been, like his partner, John Cotter, one of those detached, ironic scholars of the counting house who cultivate odd skills, such as the casting of a fly, and who have odd and irreverent opinions unrelated to their professions.

  The only one of their parents still living is Sarah, her mother, who is seventy-two and in good health. Better, perhaps, than her own. That chill.

  Martha, after Amos’s death, had an active career as a woman of leisure in which she traveled, fell in love with Adlai Stevenson, among others, bought a garage for her Indian chauffeur (they have a photograph of the Sylvester Garage, a white cement-block structure in Bangalore), and ended up after many travels and romances in Sun City, Arizona, where her heart stopped at seventy-four as she piloted her canopied golf cart down a residential street.

  Cynthia and Dibley have passed from her ken, though Robert Beggs still keeps his father’s store, now a “superette,” in Leah.