The Cloud of Unknowing

by Mimi Lipson

  “Can I have French toast?”

  “French toast it is.”

  “How come she gets to have French toast and I can’t have a Monte Cristo?”

  “For chrissake. Have a Monte Cristo, then.”

  Jonathan only picked at his sandwich when it arrived. While poring over the menu, he had overlooked the fact that it came with jelly, which he didn’t like. Lou gave Jonathan his coleslaw and ate the rest of the Monte Cristo himself.

  A few miles south of Interstate 4 they stopped at a filling station. While their gas was being pumped, Lou got out to see if he could find a better map.

  “Dad,” said Jonathan, who had followed him inside, “don’t get mad, okay?”

  “What is it?”

  “You have to promise not to get mad first.”

  “All right, I promise. I promise I won’t get mad.”

  “I’m hungry. Can you buy me these?” He held up a packet of neon-orange crackers.

  Lou took the crackers from Jonathan and looked at the package. Milk solids, palm oil, monosodium glutamate. Junk. He sighed and handed them back. “You’re really hungry?”

  “Yes, really, I am. I’m really hungry.”

  Lou spotted a cardboard box next to the cash register filled with little paper sacks. He picked one up; the bottom half of the sack was transparent with grease.

  “Boiled peanuts,” the attendant said as the cash drawer sprang open. “Wife makes ’em.”

  “Boiled peanuts! Now that’s something you won’t find in Cambridge. Let’s get a bag of boiled peanuts instead of these.” He took the crackers out of Jonathan’s hand and put them back. “Where’s your sister?”

  Kitty was standing in front of the soda machine with the door open, tugging at a bottle.

  “Daddy, can I have an orange soda?” she asked.

  Lou pretended not to hear her. She followed them back to the car with her fists jammed in the pockets of her windbreaker, dragging her sneakers along the pavement, and got in next to Lou. There was a dispute about whose turn it was to sit in front. Jonathan and Kitty had agreed to switch off at each stop, but they’d neglected to agree on what constituted a stop, and since it had only been twenty minutes since they left the Seminole Diner, Kitty didn’t think the gas station should count. She put up a half-hearted fight before climbing over the seat.

  As they pulled out of the station, Jonathan popped a boiled peanut in his mouth and spat it out the window. “Blekh. This tastes like a boiled toe.”

  “God damn it, Jonathan. You want to come with me next summer, and you won’t eat a bag of peanuts? What do you think we eat over there? French toast and orange soda? If you want to spend two months in the Soviet Union, you’d better be prepared to live on cabbage soup and black bread.”

  Jonathan stared ahead angrily, clutching the greasy bag in both hands.

  “It’s all right,” Lou said after a bit. “Pass them over here.” He tossed a handful of peanuts into his mouth. It actually was a little like chewing on boiled toes. He swallowed the mouthful and put the bag down on the console.

  He heard a sniffle from the back seat.

  “Kitty, you can switch with Jonathan after the next stop,” he said.

  “I don’t care.”

  “Are you mad at Daddy about the orange soda?”

  “You said we were going to call Mommy.”

  “I said we could call her in a few days, Kitty. We can’t be calling Mommy every time you get mad.”

  She threw herself down on the seat and began crying in earnest—howling sobs that Lou couldn’t ignore. He pulled onto the shoulder, got out of the car, walked around, and opened the back door. She was curled up with her face buried in the seat back. “Why don’t we go for a walk, Kitty?” He held out his hand for her. “Let’s stretch our legs.” Kitty climbed out, and they walked along the road for a bit. The sun had finally broken through, and bits of crushed shell glinted in the light-colored gravel. On both sides of the road were orange groves behind high page wire fencing.

  “Daddy, I don’t want to live in Florida,” Kitty said when she’d calmed down. “Mommy won’t like that house, and I want to stay in Cambridge with Mommy.”

  “Oh, Kitty. That was a joke.”

  “We were tricking the lady?” She looked up at Lou. Her face, blotchy from crying, still registered uncertainty.

  “We were tricking the lady. We’re going to Disney World, and maybe we’re going to see the ocean, and then we’ll get on a plane and go back to Cambridge.”

  “We aren’t keeping the car?”

  “Of course not! That was a joke, too. We’ll ride our bikes when we get home, just like always.”

  He took her hand and they started walking back.

  “Bold paynits,” she said after a moment.

  “What, honey?”

  “Bold paynits. That’s what the man called them.”

  “Oh,” Lou said, “Boiled peanuts! What we’ve got here is a failure to commun’cate,” he said, doing his best George Kennedy impression.

  “What we got here is a failure to commun’cate!” she answered. Then after a bit, “Daddy?”

  “Yes, sweetheart?”

  “Can I have an orange soda?”

  “Yech. Why do you want an orange soda? It rots your teeth and makes you stupid. We’re in the land of sunshine and oranges, Kitty. Why have a cheap imitation when you could have the real thing? There’s no greater pleasure in life than biting into a piece of fruit that was just picked off a tree.”

  As he was saying this, he noticed a place near a fencepost where the bottom of the page wire fence had been bent back. He knelt down, looked around him, and tugged at it a little.

  “And if it’s not your tree,” he said, standing back up, “so much the better!”

  Lou pulled up alongside the spot where the fence was loose. Behind the cover of the Imperial, Jonathan slipped under with no problem. The back pocket of Kitty’s pants snagged on a piece of page wire, but Lou freed it without tearing the corduroy too much, and she slithered the rest of the way through.

  “Scoot!” he said when they were both inside. “Get away from the road so they can’t see you. No, Kitty, leave the ones on the ground. We don’t want those; we want fruit right off the tree.”

  They ran a few rows into the orchard. Jonathan could reach the oranges on the lower branches easily, but Kitty sprang up like a kangaroo again and again, grabbing at the air.

  “The ripe ones are higher up,” Lou shouted. “Jonathan, give your sister a boost so she can climb up there.” Jonathan kneeled down and made a stirrup with his hands. Just as Kitty put her foot in it, Lou heard a tractor start up somewhere nearby. He whistled and waved them back.

  As his children ran toward him, stolen oranges gathered up in their T-shirts, he wished with all his heart that he had not promised to take them to Disney World.

  Lou had the first premonition of a headache the next morning as the Imperial passed under the Walt Disney World archway and entered the buffer zone surrounding the Magic Kingdom. A three-lane road funneled them into a vast outdoor parking lot. They boarded an open-sided shuttle that dropped them at the ticket office, where the line zigzagged through what seemed like a quarter mile of roped stanchions. When they got to the front, Lou paid their admission and traded his Villa Serena coupon for a booklet of color-coded ride tickets and a map of the park.

  “It looks like Purity Supreme money,” Kitty said.

  “What, honey?”

  “She means food stamps,” Jonathan explained.

  “Can I hold them?” Kitty pleaded.

  “Don’t let her, Dad. She’ll lose them. Give them to me.”

  Lou decreed that Kitty would hold the ticket book, keeping it in a zippered pocket, and Jonathan would hold the map, and after lunch they would switch.

  It turned out they were still nowhere near the Magic Kingdom, which lay beyond a vast manmade lagoon and was accessible only by ferry. Lou had to admire this feat of land-gobbling showman
ship; still, his stomach clenched with dread as he followed his children up the ramp. On board, he sat on a bench and watched the dock disappear, along with any hope of a quick get-away. Jonathan sat next to him studying the map. “That’s Blackbeard’s Island,” he said, pointing into the glare. Kitty joined the crowd leaning over the rail. A shout went up when land appeared.

  The first thing they saw when they disembarked was a cheery replica of a Victorian railroad station, high up on a landscaped embankment. Lou was momentarily dismayed, thinking that yet another leg of the journey awaited them, but Kitty and Jonathan pulled him into the stream of parents and children that flowed through a tunnel under the railroad trestle and into a bank of turnstiles, where Jonathan took the entry passes from Lou and handed them to the ticket-taker.

  They found themselves in a simulacrum of small-town America circa 1890, complete with a three-quarter-scale town hall built in an imitation of the Second Empire style. Covered arcades lined rows of old-timey storefronts. Everything was freshly painted in candy colors, and atop each mansard roof an American flag rippled in the mild breeze. They stood for a moment staring up the wide boulevard, immaculately paved and lined with saplings, at the bright blue Gothic spires of Cinderella’s Castle.

  “Come on!” Kitty said, leading the way.

  Lou’s headache was upon him fully now, and he was suddenly exhausted. The all-encompassing artificiality of his surroundings made everything seem foreshortened, so that he couldn’t judge how far away the castle was. He followed Jonathan’s blue windbreaker and Kitty’s red one up the teeming sidewalk until they came to a gazebo, where he sat down and called out for them to wait. While he rested, Kitty and Jonathan hunched over the map. They seemed to have instantly gotten the lay of the land.

  “Can we go on Cinderella’s Golden Carrousel, Daddy?” Kitty asked.

  “But the Frontierland Shootin’ Gallery is on the way,” Jonathan said. “Can’t we go there first?”

  Lou took the map. “I’ll tell you what. I’m going to have a little lie-down over here.” He pointed to a grove of cartoon trees behind a building in Tomorrowland that looked like a flying saucer. “You kids have fun, and come get me when you’re ready for lunch.” He handed the map to Jonathan. “Kitty, you still have those tickets, right?” She unzipped her pocket and took the booklet out and waved it.

  Lou walked back the way they’d come. He found an alley, hidden from view by an information booth, which led to an open area. He saw the flying saucer building in the distance, and cut due southeast until he found the grove—in reality just a scattering of spindly young pines—where he stretched out on the grass and shut his eyes.

  “Sir? Sir, are you awake?”

  Two security guards stood over Lou. They were wearing short-sleeved uniforms with white Panama hats, and red ties patterned with tiny Mickey Mouse heads. Both of them were young and fit. The one who addressed Lou had a moustache. He looked a bit like Lee Van Cleef.

  “Sir, is your name Mr. Schultz?”

  “Yes, that’s me. Lou Schultz,” he said, sitting up. “How did you know my name?”

  “We have your children, sir. They’re waiting at the security office.”

  The guards escorted Lou back to Main Street, to a storefront between a candy shop and a photography studio. “Town Sheriff” was painted in ornate gold letters on the front window. Jonathan and Kitty were inside, sitting close together on a wooden bench.

  The guard with the moustache kneeled down in front of them. “Is this man your father?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Jonathan said impatiently. “Dad, tell him we don’t need a babysitter.”

  “What are you doing here?” Lou asked. “I thought you were going to Frontiertown.”

  “Frontierland,” Jonathan said.

  “Sir, we found your children in the park unattended.”

  “Ah! There’s been a misunderstanding,” Lou said. “They were not unattended. You see, they came here with me. But I thank you for your concern.”

  “I realize that, sir, but they were unattended when we found them.”

  “Yes, but we had plans to meet for lunch.” He looked at his watch and saw that it wasn’t even noon yet. “I suppose we might as well eat now.”

  “Mr. Schultz, your children were found taking coins out of the Cinderella Fountain.”

  Lou saw that their pants were soaked up to their knees. He furrowed his brow. “Is this true, children, what the officer is saying?” he asked, making his voice deep with concern.

  “Kitty lost the tickets,” Jonathan said. “She got to go on the Dumbo ride, and then we were supposed to go on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but she lost all the tickets. The whole book. We were going to buy another ticket book.”

  “My pocket came unzipped,” Kitty protested.

  To Lou’s relief, Kitty and Jonathan’s outrage at getting picked up by security seemed to have preempted any complaints they might have had about spending under two hours at Disney World.

  “Well kids,” he said as the ferry nosed out into the lagoon, “what did you think of the Magic Kingdom?”

  “So-called Magic Kingdom,” Jonathan said.

  “They acted like we were babies,” Kitty said.

  “Did they get all the coins off you?”

  “Yeah, and fifty cents of it was mine,” Jonathan said. “I found it in the back seat.”

  “Tell you what. Let’s go to the beach and have a picnic lunch.”

  Resort hotels in various stages of completion lined the highway along the ocean. Lou stopped at a market a few miles north of Palm Coast and bought a loaf of bread and a jar of pickles and two cans of sardines. He asked the clerk where they could go swimming.

  “Most of the beaches around here are private, but if you want to leave your car here, y’all can walk up the road a bit to the town boat launch,” he said.

  “Say, is there a payphone around here?”

  “Out front, left of the door.”

  Lou got two dollars in change from the clerk and stuffed a dollar in a jar on the counter that had a picture of a kid in a leg brace taped to it.

  “Much obliged,” he said. “C’mon, kids,” he called to Kitty and Jonathan, who were browsing a rack of comic books. “Who wants to talk to Mommy?”

  “I do,” yelled Kitty, but Jonathan was impatient to get to the water.

  “The boat launch should be just up that way.” Lou pointed north. “Go ahead and find us a spot.”

  Kitty talked to Helena while Lou emptied his flight bag and packed it with motel towels and their swimsuits and a few oranges. Kitty handed him the phone when he came back. “I’m gonna go find Jonathan, okay?”

  Lou waved her off. “Careful crossing the street,” he said. “Helena?”

  “Hi, Lou.”

  “The kids are having a great time.”

  “They didn’t mind getting thrown out of Disney World?”

  “You know, they really didn’t seem to.”

  “I’m glad you called, Lou—”

  “I’m glad I called, too.”

  “I’m glad you called, because I was over at the house today—I thought maybe they’d sent my 1099 there—and I noticed that the radiator in the front hall was seeping. Did you bleed the radiators last fall?”

  “Helena, I was thinking. Maybe we could all go to Europe this summer. I don’t think the Soviet trip would be much fun for the kids, but I’ve got it down pretty well at this point. I can put someone else in charge for three or four weeks. We’ll go to Poland, and Czechoslovakia, maybe even drive down to Bulgaria and take the kids to some monasteries. I think they’re old enough to appreciate it. They really are good travelers, Helena. Very resourceful. Did Kitty tell you about the fountain?”

  “Oh, Lou.”

  “Oh?”

  “I can’t take a month off. I’d lose all my shifts.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s a lovely idea, though. It really is. I think the kids would love it if you took them. We’ll have to
get them passports.”

  “Okay, Helena. It was just an idea. We’ll see you in a couple of days.”

  “Tell Jonathan hi.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  Lou crossed the highway and looked out at the water, grey and opaque under a thin cloud cover. The seawall was under construction, and sections of concrete slab were stacked on the sand. He saw the boat launch a hundred yards up the beach, and two figures, knee-deep in the surf with their pant legs rolled up. It took him a minute to realize that he was looking at Jonathan and Kitty. They seemed so small.

  The Endless Mountains

  In 1976, the Bicentennial year, Jonathan turned twelve and started calling his father Lou. The two of them shared a room on the top floor of Lou’s large brown-shingled Victorian in Cambridge, all the other bedrooms being occupied by paying tenants. Jonathan’s younger sister, Kitty, lived in a nearby apartment with their mother. It was informal arrangement, though. Most summers Jonathan moved into the lower bunk in Kitty’s room while Lou, who taught Slavic languages at Brandeis, was away leading camping tours of the Soviet Union. During the rest of the year he and Kitty made their way home together or separately after school as the mood suited them, sometimes wandering around until they got hungry and then fixing themselves a snack in whichever kitchen was closest.

  One day at breakfast, Lou put down his newspaper and said he thought he’d walk to work.

  “How far is it, Lou?” Jonathan asked.

  “Ten miles, give or take.”

  “Can you really walk all the way?”

  His father had never been athletic. His stomach hung over his belt. He smoked cigarettes and fed himself and Jonathan out of cans, which he bought in bulk from a wholesale grocer in Somerville.

  “I’ll just have to leave a little earlier,” Lou said. “After all, Shulkin walked five thousand kilometers to escape the gulag.” Shulkin was a colleague from Brandeis, a cheerful Russian man who wore overcoats and itchy-looking hats.

  Lou got a ride home from school that day. He pulled himself up the stairs, groaning, soaked in the tub for a long time, then went right to bed, leaving Jonathan to open a can of ravioli for supper. He persisted, though, walking to Brandeis again when he’d recovered from his first attempt, and after a few months he was jogging to work. His enthusiasms were always extreme. He checked nutrition books out of the library and began to make his own sprouts and yogurt, and a preparation he called “rejuvelac,” which sat out on the pantry shelf in a water carafe. It had an eye-watering stench. He said it was the elixir of life and was disappointed when his kids refused to try it.