Flying a Red Kite

by Hugh Hood

  Late last autumn a shipmaster drove aground off Stoverville at the end of the season; he lost the closing date at the locks and passed the winter iced into the river with a ruined cargo. Each day the sailors walked to Stoverville over the three feet of ice, but the captain, a ruined man, brooded in solitary humiliation all winter in his cabin. He was never seen in Stoverville, although hysterical cables addressed to him arrived daily from Oslo.

  He was unlucky, mistrusted his pilot, didn’t know the river, hated it, and the river ruined him. He missed all the signs, the waning of the islands, the widening of the channel, the three trees — tamaracks with fifty feet of bare trunk and perky cor­onas on top — that stand on the promontory west of Stoverville. Making his move to starboard to­wards the New York shore minutes too late, he felt the current drive his bows so deep into the river bottom he knew he’d never haul her off. He stared at the three tamaracks all winter, counting them and counting them and there were never more than three. This summer, in Oslo, he killed himself.

  The tamaracks mark the end of the islands, the beginning of the river’s free run from Stoverville to the Atlantic, nothing in the way but the mammoth new locks, then Montreal, Quebec, wider and wider until you can’t see across, at last the sleety Gulf. But at Stoverville the river’s freedom is a newborn thing, the mass of water has just begun to run, eroding, finding the fastest way down. At Stoverville it’s hardly two miles across.

  Over there on the New York shore are the old resort towns, fading now, the gingerbread hotels coming down, their gilt furnishings sold off. Now and then a welterweight contender trains here and sometimes a powerboat regatta invites the curious. But the real tourist money goes to Europe or Montego Bay and the old millionaires, who found their way upstate in the seventies from Saratoga, are dead and gone. Between Watertown and Plattsburg, back a few miles from the river, there’s nothing. An Army camp, a NIKE site, trees and woods and dunes and the snow belt. And that’s it.

  On the Canadian side there’s Highway Number Two, the worst main highway in the world, with the small river towns dotted along it — Kingston, Gananoque, Stoverville, Prescott — dreaming their dreams dating from the eighteen-thirties of a prosperity which never came. Yet they sleep there along the shore waiting for things to pick up when the hundred and fifty years’ slack season shall be over, an occasional coal-boat putting in and water-buses running thrice-daily tours of the islands up to the bridge and back.

  Twenty miles north of the riverfront strip the towns begin to shrink in size — Tincap, Newboro, Athens; the farms are scrubbier and smaller and hillier. You still see television aerials but now the rocks begin to stick up through the thin topsoil and you are into the Laurentian Shield with a rocky uninterrupted thousand miles clear to James Bay of round old rock, polished by the last Ice Age. Saint Lawrence again but this time choking off life, not conferring it. And from this hinterland, from the little towns like Athens, people have been moving back down to the shore for sixty years, as soon as they broke their first ploughshares on the intractable rock humping up out of the hillsides. They come back to Stoverville and cherish their disappointments, the growth of their numbers limited by their situation between the river and the rock, the same smooth incredibly ancient rock which beds the river. Life and power flowing beside them and old impregnable rock, out of which nothing can be forced to grow, above them northerly, so they come back one by one into Stoverville from Athens and the other little towns, and here they fashion their lamentations.

  “They are painting the house,” says Mrs. Boston vengefully, “green and white, so unoriginal. In the thirty years we lived there they never offered to paint it for us. Your father painted every four years, always green and white. He spent thousands on paint, and always the best white lead — money I might have had, or you, that has been absorbed into the walls of that place, with the Hungarians living in the other side.”

  “Hungarians must live somewhere,” offers her daughter mildly.

  “But need they live in Stoverville?”

  “They make their choices unknowingly, the poor things,” says Maura even more mildly, “and I suppose once here they must abide by the original choice. I must say, I think it kind of Grover to let them have the other half of the house.”

  “Most Stoverville people won’t rent to them,” says Mrs. Boston, “but Grover does, in preference to me.”

  “You didn’t wish to stay in the smaller half. You had the opportunity.”

  “Taken a crumb from his table you mean? Accepted the little half, and maintained it as we did the other side for thirty years until they pushed us out? That I should lie awake alone in my bedroom in the smaller half and listen to Grover rattling around on the other side of the wall! I don’t know what he proposes to do with all that space, with just the two of them. Ellie, of course, doesn’t go out any more, the poor unfortunate. Can you imagine it? Cooped up all day with that man, green and white? The very least he could have done would be to choose new colours. Green and white were your poor father’s choice. Heavens, what it cost! It was that dirty grey, you know, but of course you couldn’t know. You weren’t five years old when we moved in. Your father had to pay for three coats of the finest white lead to cover the grey, the way they’d let it all run down, Ellie’s crazy mother!”

  “Was she crazy? I remember her.”

  “Undeniably, and her husband was worse. I tell you, Maura, there’s a warped streak in that family somewhere, and it comes out, it comes out. I’m glad they’re not my blood relations.”

  “But they were father’s.”

  “He was a medical doctor, my dear,” says Mrs. Boston stiffly, “and he understood these things.”

  “These things?” asks Maura delicately, lighting a cigarette. She does not wish to pass the entire weekend in these debates.

  “Tubercular bone,” says her mother, “congenital physical rot. And other things than physical for they’ve never been right, none of them. Your father at least went from Stoverville to the city, though in the end he came back. But these clumps of Phillipses — they move from the farm to Athens looking for the easy life, and from Athens to Stoverville believing they’ve found it because they don’t have to rise at four in the morning. My dear girl, they infest the countryside, they’re a positive plague.”

  “I’m one-eighth Phillips,” says Maura with a faint apprehension.

  “But you live in Montreal where medicine and science have penetrated.”

  “The weak drive out the strong, Mother,” says Maura, “like vines driving through rock. You’re better off away from either side of that house.”

  “But to be driven out! And then those Hungarians.” She smiles maliciously. “I understand that the ships’ sirens terrify the Hungarians, wake them up at night. They think of Russians, I expect.” The sirens give everyone dreams, thinks Maura to herself, everyone in Stoverville. Paaaaarrrrrrpppp. I am going to starboard. Mmeeeuuuhhhhhhhh. I am going to port. They never collide in the channel, even at Flowerlea; they do not astonish us with freakish mishaps, sinkings, or groundings except for a single dead Norwegian, but they are all around us in the night. Paaarrrrpppp. Mmeeeuuuhhhhh. They give us dreams in Stoverville, but in Montreal, though they circumnavigate the city, no one notices them. I forget the river in Montreal or in New York while here it rolls through me, head to thighs. I dreamt as a child in my bed at the dark top of the house, their house, probably Grover’s room now; he can’t sleep with Ellie, she’d never allow it, so virginal at sixty. Poor Grover Haskell, sleeping in my bed in my room listening first to the sirens and then to the cranky breathing of his good wife who has done everything for him, according to Mother, subjugated herself entirely to him, yielded him up her house, for of course it’s her house, not his — she’s legitimately Phillips. I’m only one-eighth, thank God, so she has the house that was my father’s by temporary arrangement because he was only a quarter Phillips and had the house at a no
minal rent while Ellie, disguised as Mrs. Grover Haskell, tried to get away to other parts of the world. What is a nominal rent? Daddy never complained of the rent and we knew that one day the Haskells would drift back, allowing Daddy the smaller side while they all four enjoyed a polite Stoverville retirement, except that they didn’t. Daddy is dead and Ellie is dying slowly and Grover is not. And my dear mother flourishes.

  The year we moved in, the tamarack trees were lonely and beginning to lean over the river, earthfall exposing part of their roots on the promontory’s side.

  “We’ll fix that,” Daddy said, and he poured in cement and fill, so the trees are still there. “Those tamaracks look lonely,” he said to me, “and they’re important. Did you know, Maura,” he said, talking as if I were an adult, “that sailors talk about our three trees from here to Duluth?” Then he told me where Duluth was and I remember it still. I think of the sailors at the Lakehead, talking about our three tamaracks, only of course they were never really ours at all but belonged first to her grandfather who was the town saddler and unsuccessful, and then the town magistrate and tubercular. Then they were her mad father’s, whom I knew, who moved into the little half of the house to rent us the larger and to resent us — we paid a nominal rent for the privilege of becoming an object of resentment to that frustrated painter.

  When I was five he would beckon to me from his side of the porch to show me his new picture, clutching at his brushes with arthritic paws and aiming unsteadily to pat me where he had no business to. “It’s a schooner, Maura, do you see?” he said, pulling at the frill on my sleeve. “It’s a schooner on the river.”

  “I like the steamers, Uncle Wallace,” I said, and he changed colour, “but I can’t help it, I like them.”

  “This is a schooner, don’t you see?”

  “But I like the steamers’ horns better.”

  Then Ellie came onto the porch, calming the morning with her still face. She picked up her father’s pencils which were rolling hastily away along the porch towards the shrubbery and, handing them to him, kissed him while he stormed at me.

  “The child’s difficult, Ellie! She abuses my pictures. Everyone always does, everyone but you.” She patted him and was silent, listening to his vacuities and smiling secretly at me from her still face around her lashes, drawing her father’s sting as he went on rebuking me, not directly — he said nothing to me directly, but he let me hear. “My house, my house. I let them have my house, which I love, and their child must criticize. Let her stay on her side of the porch. Edward Boston is a young fool and his wife is malicious. When I asked him what was the matter with me, he declined to say, the coward — he knows all right but he daren’t say. Only he sends his little girl around the corner of my house to make sure that my hands aren’t right, that they shake, that my schooners look like steamers because I can’t hold my pencil straight, a poor old man; they laugh at me. I’ll raise his rent!”

  Sitting on the arm of the deep chair in which her father crouches, mouthing his poison, she smiles sweetly along her lashes at me, frightened and trembling, five years old, misunderstanding it all because my father, young and poor as he is, worries about rent, cement and fill and the three trees.

  “Look at the new white paint,” I wail, starting to cry. “Daddy painted your old house for you.” But old Mr. Phillips can’t hear as he begins to slide into a soothed nearly senile sleep. Ellie tucks his blanket around him, watches him slide away, and takes me by the hand, walking me back around the corner of the porch to our front door.

  “I only said I like the steamers. I didn’t mean to make him mad.”

  “It’s all right, darling, he’s an old man. It’s nothing you’ve said, he’s an old man. He’s been disappointed and he’s sick.”

  “But he’ll be all right, won’t he?”

  She stands with me at the door to our half of the house. We look through the screen into the hall, and at the back of the house my mother bustles, moving kitchen furniture with a cheerful scraping noise.

  “He’ll be all right soon,” says Ellie full of comfort, placing her hand on her forehead and drawing me down after her onto the porch swing which rocks gently with a creak of chains as we look into each other’s eyes, hers the Phillips eyes, rapt, violet, staringly intense, and her face so sweet and still, mine the brown eyes my mother imported into the family, round and direct, eyes I hated as a child, so agate-like and unblinking, my mother’s and mine, not glancing and vivid like Ellie’s. All at once she hugs me and whispers secretly: “I wish you were mine.”

  I am appalled by the notion. “I belong to Daddy.”

  Ellie kisses me briskly and for a moment we stare together at the tamarack trees on the point. “We love our fathers,” she says absently, and turning gives me again her ineffable saint’s gaze, visionary, violet, preoccupied. “Find your mother, sweetheart,” she tells me, and I trot into the house vaguely disappointed.

  “If you were not such an intractable mule,” says Mrs. Boston, fixing her agate eyes in a persuasive stare, “you might do well in Stoverville. There are four distinct pieces of house property you might inherit if only you’d be nice to people.” She holds up her fingers, beginning to itemize them. “There’s our house, to begin with.”

  Maura emerges from her reverie, balking at this projected death-watch which jerks her suddenly over nearly thirty years to her pallid present prospects. What had been the frill on the arm of a child’s frock becomes a table-napkin across which she’s thrown a suddenly adult arm, plumper and hairier than a five year old’s.

  “I’ve stayed away too much.”

  “Then come home more often!”

  “This is home? Pardon me, mother, but the only thing that brings me to Stoverville is you. And this isn’t your home, any more than Montreal is mine. You weren’t born here.”

  “It has grown into my home. The thought makes me weep sometimes now that your father is three years dead.”

  “You don’t go back to your birthplace.” Maura hopes to make a point.

  “I do not. Nobody there remembers me or my family. We’re obliterated. If I have any home, which is dubious, it’s here in this crazy town beside these damned ships.”

  “What’s the matter with the ships?”

  “They’re getting bigger and bigger. I don’t know where it’ll stop. It was never like this before.”

  “It’s the new locks,” says Maura. “The big ships used to stop at Montreal.”

  “You’re past thirty, Maura,” says Mrs. Boston. “Do you imagine that Montreal will provide you with a home?”

  The faintest enlivening blush dabbles Maura’s cheek as she folds and re-folds a table-napkin in her hands. “I meet men of my own age at the studios,” she says reluctantly, “and you never can tell.”

  At this indecency her mother recoils, her life’s scheme all at once readjusted. “You do not think of marriage?”

  “I think of it all the time,” says Maura, crossing her legs irrit­ably, “all the blessed time and I wish somebody would ask me.”

  “A particular somebody?”

  “Since you ask, yes.” And then she grows defensive. “You were close to thirty when you married.”

  “But not past it.”

  “Thirty is no immutable barrier. Women past thirty have married before this, and will again.”

  “You mean that you will?”

  “Given the chance!”

  “Then think,” says Mrs. Boston, adapting her tactics, “of the uses of our home as, perhaps, a summer place. Right on the river, a most desirable location.”

  “I thought that you disapproved of the location.”

  “I should disapprove less,” says Mrs. Boston with regal dignity, “were the house legally mine.”

  “Ah!”

  “There is no need to be ironic, Maura. I am your mother, after all, and I have your best interests
at heart.”

  Maura thinks this over solemnly, seeming from her attitude to fancy a world in which fewer people have her interests more personally at heart. Identification with her interests, not cool appraisal of them, is the desideratum.

  “I mean to protect you from Grover and his schemes,” her mother pursues. “It is not a Haskell house but a Phillips house, and should come to you. He has no children.”

  “The poor man,” exclaims Maura involuntarily.

  “Poor man, bosh!” says her mother with energy. “He never wanted them and Ellie gave in to him everywhere. Poor woman, rather! You know what Grover Haskell is, a monster of selfishness.”

  “Has he the necessary wit and tenacity?”

  “All that he requires. You remember how, three years ago, he brutalized me, wouldn’t even let me go on clinging to the littler half, but insisted on what he calls ‘a proper rent, considering.’ That man had the audacity to ask me to move your father’s workbench from one side of the cellar to the other as soon as it was convenient, the tools still warm from your father’s palms. I offered him a cord of firewood that your father had stored in the cellar to dry — out of the purest neighbourly feelings — and he told me, as curtly as you please, that he meant to use the fireplaces ornamentally, to fit into their new decor.”

  “It is their house.”

  “It is her house, and will be yours, I tell you, if you behave properly. She must know by now what he is, even though she’s sick. She has sacrificed everything to him, given in to him, followed him through all his failures like a saint, I tell you, like a saint, and now she’s sick. She has never been well since her father died.”

  “When I was small,” says Maura, remembering it with deep pleasure, “I really loved Ellie, she was so good.”

  “She is a saint. But queer, Maura, queer. She has these visions, you know.” And Mrs. Boston begins a rambling account of the phenomenon called “second sight” by means of which events occurring at a distance in space or time may be observed directly by persons with certain particular spiritual equipment. “Your father’s great-aunt had it,” she concludes, “and I believe Ellie has it, or something like it. When I go to see her I have the feeling that there are other people in the room.”