Ship Fever

by Andrea Barrett

  We had a problem, we knew: the problem of our father, who could not feed himself, and the dogs, who could not feed either themselves or our father and also could not walk themselves. We had lives of our own, elsewhere, and soon we would have to go. In those other lives, in our real lives, we sank down at night into beds with men who were precious to us, who had strong thighs, strong arms. But during this visit we slept with no men. We slept with each other, on the bed that was not a bed, and when we rose we fixed our father breakfast and then went to the market and bought more food and then came home and fixed him lunch and fed the dogs as well. We walked the dogs in the marsh south of the lake. The largest dog, the white one, every day pushed his way through the weeds to the rim of black mud and sank down to his shoulders. When we came home, we wiped him off with a cloth. Always, before we were done, he tore himself from us and bounded into our father’s room and leapt up on the bed and curled himself next to his master.

  You were jealous of the dogs?

  Our father said, “They are all I have. They are the only ones who treat me affectionately.” He was talking about the dogs, not us. We were cleaning and cooking and shopping and wondering what to do; we couldn’t agree about anything. We argued about what we should do for him and how we should do it. One of us would want to peel fruit for him at the same moment the other decided he needed meat, a roast. Sun or shade, hammock or bed, hot tea or cold juice—always chaos, always conflict. We quarreled one night, when he said he’d like ice cream: which of us should be the one to fetch it and which the one to stay behind with him, for a private moment when we might be redeemed. We wore him out, and for all that, neither could feel like his favorite.

  Our father sat on one of those wrought-iron chairs that had served as decoration in the summer-room of our old house, but which here had become the sole, inadequate kitchen furniture. A moth flew against the window over the sink and then fell into the standing water and drowned. Our father had always been a small man, but we had never noticed it before. After he ate he felt tired and went back to bed. The white dog lay like a person beside him.

  His head on the pillow?

  On two pillows, turned to face our father. We went to the store. We bought spinach fettucine and fish and grated hard cheese and butter and muffins and coffee and cream, and when we came home we washed the kitchen floor, which was suddenly, mysteriously, covered with small ants. Against the baseboards were drifts of dog hair. A doctor called and then another; appointments were made. In our houses, we told each other, the counters shone in the sun. At night we undressed in darkness and avoided looking at each other’s bodies. You know how differently we are built—one tall and rounded, one short and spare—but in the light of our father’s disintegration we seemed identical in our health and smoothness. Our father told us a story about your mother, our grandmother, and how she and Agnes and your other aunts were raised by their mother after their father died and left them the vineyard and no men to cultivate it. In the Ukraine, he said, at about the same time, his father, our grandfather Leo, was struggling to establish vineyards for Stalin. He said our family had been drawn together by forces that felt like fate. Later he mentioned that he had borrowed heavily against his life insurance and had not been able to pay the money back.

  Do you wish you’d stayed?

  Yes. No. Yes. How could we stay? We had our own lives. But it’s true that despite that we thought of staying, talked of staying. On our knees on the kitchen floor, scrubbing the accumulated dirt and dog saliva and ant tracks and juice from a surface that for months had seen only the briefest sweeping, we looked at each other and said, “Anyone could walk into this house and tell there are no women here.” And this was a strange thought, for both of us—that much of what had gone wrong had to do with the absence, not only of women, but of women willing to do those things that have always been women’s work. Our father’s wife was a busy woman, successful in her own way and seldom home. We were busy ourselves, and gone. And so there was no cleanliness, no order, no smells of good food cooked with care and eaten with pleasure, no signs of the raising of children, no curtains ironed, no flowers tended and cut for the tables. No one to relish a clean yellow counter shining in the sun. Our father could not do one thing to make life pleasant or comfortable for himself.

  Didn’t you do what you could?

  We abandoned him.

  Didn’t he welcome your help?

  We abandoned him.

  Wasn’t he glad to have you there?

  He died one August weekend, when we were absent and his wife was present. She was furious with us for coming to visit and then furious that we couldn’t stay. She’d moved back to the house for his last weeks, and when we returned for the funeral she opened the door as if to let us in and then started to say something and flushed and slammed the door on us. She couldn’t keep us from the church, but she wouldn’t let us into the house and so we stayed outside. We drove around the lake, up into the vineyards on the hill near where our old place had been, and when it grew dark we simply stopped the car where we were. There was no one around and the sky was very clear. We took two blankets out of the trunk and spread them on the ground and lay there, talking and holding hands. We slept, we think, toward morning, because we were not awake when the dew fell, and we woke covered with cool water. The sun crept over the hills across the lake, lighting the mist that filled the valley. We thought we sensed you there, but we weren’t sure.

  After the funeral, we tried once more to come into the house. We meant to take the dogs, about whom our father had been very worried, and the portrait of you, and a few other small mementos. But again his wife would not let us in. She had already found homes for the dogs, she said. She had already let go of the lease on the house, already arranged for the sale of the few pieces of furniture that were left and the removal of the things she wanted to her new apartment in Syracuse. She had a new life, she said, and she wanted to start it, and that new life didn’t include us. So we left.

  But last week, one of us said over the phone to the other, “We should go back, it’s been a year.” So we made arrangements and met each other here, and although there were strangers living in our old house, as there have been for many years, and although of course the house where our father spent his last days had been cleaned and rented to someone else, and although the dogs were gone and everything we’d ever known, we thought we had done the right thing.

  We rented this boat at the dock near the post office, and as soon as we’d sailed into deep water, both of us realized you were near. One of us took the tiller and the other handled the sheets.

  You were always good sailors.

  This is a lake on which it is impossible to get lost. But so much else is gone, all the remnants and relics of our family. The house, of course: but also your mother’s rugs and sofas and chairs, and your lamps and bureaus and paintings and knickknacks, and Aunt Agnes’s cups, and our old books—everything, really. And when our father’s widow disappeared from our lives and disposed of the dogs, it was as if our family had never existed. It was as if we’d imagined our history. All that is left is the shared set of memories we have of our last days with our father in that house that wasn’t his house.

  He asked after you, during our last day with him. He thought we were back in our old house, and he wanted to look at your picture in the living room. We sneaked downstairs and took the picture from the hall and dusted it and brought it upstairs to him. We told him we’d brought it to him so he wouldn’t have to move. We did not have the heart to tell him that there was no living room, filled with books and our family’s things, with your picture hanging from its cord.

  Was he glad to see me?

  Of course he was. Have you seen him since then?

  No.

  [4. The White Dog]

  Were we really speaking with Suky? Was Suky really speaking with us? Bianca says yes, absolutely. I say yes, sort of, maybe.

  Nothing happened after our sail on the lake—we di
dn’t see our father’s ghost or feel his presence or even reach any sort of peace or understanding. We were comforted, of course; Suky’s voice fell on us like balm. But I believed that what we’d done was wrong, and even as Bianca couldn’t help showing her triumph at having lured me into speaking with Suky, I couldn’t help resenting it.

  That night we shared a room with two beds in a new motel where no one knew us. We slept uneasily and guiltily, aware that we had left things undone and that there were people in the village whom we should have visited. The next morning I dropped Bianca at the airport and then I drove home.

  Now I can’t talk to Bianca about what went on then, or earlier, because Bianca is gone. The stories we’ve made of our past have come to nothing. A month after we met in Hammondsport for the anniversary of our father’s death, she fell in love with a landscape painter our father’s age and moved with him to a house on a cliff in Costa Rica, where she has no phone.

  I live back here in Hammondsport now. Around the time that Bianca took off I quit my job and decided to move; Boston, where I’d lived for more than a decade, suddenly seemed like a place where I’d set no roots. When my colleagues pressed for reasons for my decision, I told them I’d inherited something from my father that required my attention. Quite quickly I learned that any mention of his death would stop the conversation. No one will pass the screen thrown up by that word, I’ve learned. Behind it I could and did—still do—conceal my confusion.

  Only Bianca felt entitled to pry. When I told her my plans, she told me I was making a big mistake; this, after all the complaining she’d done about my job. The last time we spoke, I was in my lab in Boston and she was at the Houston airport. She said, “You’re crazy. There’s nothing in that place for you.”

  “It’s what I want to do,” I said. “Why is it any stranger than moving to Costa Rica with someone you hardly know?”

  “Because it is,” she said. “Those people—you’ll always be who you used to be, for them. Is that what you want?”

  This, like the predictions she’d made in Boston, would turn out not to be true. But even then, not knowing that, I said, “Would that be so bad? Is that worse than being with people who don’t know anything about us?”

  “Oscar knows me,” Bianca said. “He knows what I want him to know.” Meaning, I think, that he understood her in terms of the stories we’d manufactured together.

  For a minute we were silent, listening to the low roar of airport noise and the hum and whisper of the instruments in my lab. “Come with me,” Bianca said finally. “I’m all for your getting out of that lab, but it’s stupid to go back home. Oscar wouldn’t mind if you came to stay with us.”

  “Maybe next year,” I said. “Maybe I’ll come for a visit, once I figure out what I’m doing.”

  “Maybe I won’t be here by then,” Bianca said.

  We promised to write and hung up, disappointed with each other. Honestly I think we have felt this way since our last conversation with Suky. Hallucination, perhaps; but if it was we shared it. Since then, though, we have found it almost impossible to share anything.

  I moved back here after that phone call and rented an apartment that I only kept for a little while. Then I did two things even more distasteful to Bianca: I got a job teaching chemistry to sophomores and juniors at the school Bianca and I had attended, and I moved into a house in the village, with Harry Mazzullo and the white dog.

  Harry is, was, my father’s lawyer. The white dog is not the one Bianca and I saw by the creek in Boston but one of the dogs my father cherished. The other dog is dead; when I tracked down the family who’d taken him from the pound, they told me he’d barked uncontrollably until they’d had to put him down. But one day, shortly after I moved back, I found the white dog by accident as I was walking through the village. He was sprawled on a broad porch, looking completely at home, and when I knocked on the door of that house Harry opened it and greeted me as if he knew me.

  “Rose?” he said. “Rose Marburg?”

  When I nodded he said we’d been introduced at my father’s funeral. I didn’t remember this; I remembered almost nothing of that day. Bianca and I had been in the back of the church, as if we were guests and not daughters, while our father’s widow had accepted condolences up front. At the cemetery we had stood at a distance, talking to no one, and then we had left. When could Harry have met me?

  But he swore he had. And when I said, “How did you get that dog?” he said he’d had it for more than a year. “Your father’s wife,” he said. “After the funeral she was so…confused. She was making a lot of decisions very fast, and I was worried about the dogs—your father was very attached to them.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “They’d gone to the pound. I’m sure she didn’t mean to do that, but she was under a lot of pressure. By the time I got there the brown one was gone, but no one wanted this one and so I took him home myself.”

  All this time, it turned out, the dog had been safely with Harry. Harry took me out to dinner that night, and a week later he took me sailing. Cool water, a gentle breeze, a bottle of wine. This is where the shameful part comes in. Already I had sketched our history for him, and I’d told him the story of the wild night Bianca and I once shared in Boston. But while we were out on the lake, while I was relaxed, a little drunk, almost hypnotized by the water, I told him about the vision Bianca and I had had, which in different ways had caused both of us to move.

  Harry sat quite still and listened, only his hands moving on the tiller and the sheets. I told the story just as I remembered it, a dialogue in which I played both parts. My mother’s questions I rendered high and thin and soft; our responses lower, slower, doubled. Two sisters speaking simultaneously with one voice.

  Harry didn’t shrug or make a face or look at me as if I were crazy. How calm he was, how cool. Perhaps his years as a lawyer have exposed him to stranger things. He said, “That’s interesting. I knew your mother a little, when I was a boy. She was quite a woman. So were your great-aunts, for that matter. That was one of your great-aunts, wasn’t it? The woman who moved in with you?”

  “It was,” I said. “She took care of us.” We were not, apparently, going to pass judgment on either the scene with Suky or the way I’d rendered it.

  “I remember,” Harry said. “And when she was sick, I remember that you and Bianca took care of her.”

  A few months later, he asked me to move into his house and I accepted. I live with Harry because of the way he absorbed my story; because he was good to my father near the end; because he tells me tales about my father’s last days that I would otherwise have no way of knowing. Tit for tat, my secrets for his. It’s not much of an excuse to say that perhaps I sensed this was what I’d gain.

  Five weeks passed between the time Bianca and I last saw our father and the time we returned for his funeral. During those weeks I was back in Boston and Bianca was in Dixon, New Mexico, where she was working on a garlic farm. During those weeks, Harry said, some strange things happened.

  Bianca and I had envisioned our father the way we’d last seen him—how could we imagine anything else? Guilty, horrified, we’d imagined him alone. On a Friday night, we had left that house together: both afraid, it seems to me now, that the one left behind would never find the strength to leave again. Or maybe both afraid that the one left behind might somehow gain the upper hand. And then there was also, beyond these fears, the problem of our father’s wife.

  Leaving, we had told ourselves that she was due home within the hour. By then we’d realized that our father wanted her, not us; our fussing and cleaning and cooking only tired him, and none of it led to what he wanted. He welcomed the filth, we had come to see, and the signs of his abandonment. He believed these signs would sway his wife and bind her to his side for his remaining days. Each night of our visit she’d called, and the change in his voice when he talked to her had been unbearable to us. By the time we left, we almost understood that all our efforts had only pos
tponed the moment when he might have his wish. The clean house we left behind meant his wife could feel free to leave again come Monday.

  But we’d buried that thought beneath our need to feel that we’d done some good; in our departure, finally, we acted with one mind. Only back in our own worlds could we see the ambiguous nature of what we’d given him. Alone, we said to each other, when we learned she’d disappeared again. How could we leave him alone? But while it’s true that his wife left after that weekend visit and didn’t return for good until three weeks later, the fact is that even then he wasn’t alone. There was a nurse with him for several hours each day: I spoke with her frequently on the phone and always felt relieved after hearing her voice. She was strong and practical and had a nice laugh. She bathed our father, and washed his sheets and changed his bed and cooked some meals.