Plum & Jaggers (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Susan Richards Shreve

  The man, Mr. Blake—he called himself Mr.—was very tall and thin, with a blond mustache and fuzzy soft blond hair like a girl’s. As representative of the American consulate, he had come to take them to Florence.

  “Your grandfather is coming,” he said cheerfully, as if they had simply been on an overnight with strangers.

  “I won’t go with you,” Charlotte said.

  “We have to go,” Sam said. “We have to meet Grandfather.”

  The Danesi children gathered solemnly at the door to the cottage and watched as their mother walked with the McWilliamses along the path to the car.

  Sam walked first and alone, walking into the sun so the car appeared as a splash of glittering aluminum foil and Sam had to narrow his eyes to reduce the sun’s assault. Behind him, Sam could feel their presence, Charlotte walking alone and Susanna carrying Julia, holding Oliver’s hand. At the car he stood aside while Charlotte climbed into the backseat, taking Julia in her arms, and Oliver scrambled after them.

  Just as Sam was getting in, Susanna snapped the stem of a purple wildflower and put the flower in the pocket of his shorts.

  “Goodbye, goodbye.” She kissed his hand.

  Sitting in the backseat of Mr. Blake’s long American car, Sam noticed that Gió had gone on ahead to the end of the dirt road to see them leave. He stood in a bright circle of sun, in a field of yellow wildflowers, nearly as high as he was, his arms folded across his chest. As the car drove past, he covered his eyes with both hands so Sam couldn’t see his face.

  Their grandfather had come to Italy alone. Their grandmother didn’t fly.

  William Lucas was sixty that year, a tall, white-haired, dignified man. He was an artist of sorts, drawing birds and parts of the body, usually diseased parts for medical journals. A quiet, formal man, not given to expressions of emotion, surely not grief.

  At the airport in Florence, Charlotte announced that she wasn’t going to leave Italy.

  “I don’t fly,” she said to her grandfather.

  “I don’t fly either,” Oliver said.

  “But we flew from Greece,” Sam had said to her.

  “I wasn’t on the plane from Greece,” Charlotte said.

  They were all on the plane, of course. Israel to Athens by ship and bus and car, and then from Athens by plane to Milan to see The Last Supper before they traveled south.

  But Sam didn’t argue.

  Their grandfather had sat, his legs crossed neatly, the International Herald Tribune with the news about the terrorist bombing of the train folded on his lap. He checked his watch.

  “They should call our flight in fifteen minutes,” he said, as if he had missed hearing Charlotte’s announcement.

  The McWilliamses didn’t know their grandfather well. The year Sam was three, Charlotte almost two, their parents had gotten teaching jobs in Athens, where they’d stayed two years; Oliver was born there.

  And then they’d gone to teach in Jerusalem and then to work on the kibbutz. They had returned to Grand Rapids for a month in the middle of these years, and Sam had felt warmly about that visit—especially the evenings on his grandparents’ front porch, the aunts and uncles and cousins chattering the silver night away, capturing lightning bugs in glass jars sticky with Popsicle juice.

  But just before they left for Tel Aviv, there was a rare argument between his soft-tempered grandmother, who started the fight, and his mother.

  “I don’t know why you have to go to Jerusalem, Lucy,” she’d said to his mother. “You aren’t Jewish.”

  “It has nothing to do with being Jewish,” Lucy said. “Many people go who aren’t Jewish.”

  “I read in the paper about a bus which blew up, killing several people,” his grandmother had said wearily. “You haven’t given any thought to violence, I suppose.”

  “There’s no safety anyplace,” his father had said.

  But James McWilliams—a tall, wiry, athletic man, black-haired, boyish, full of pleasure in his life—didn’t act that way. He lived as if safety were everywhere he chose to walk.

  “I don’t know,” his grandmother said. “I don’t know at all.”

  “But they’re going, darling,” his grandfather said to his grandmother. “So we must wish them well.”

  On the plane to Tel Aviv, Sam had told his father he was afraid.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid about, Sam,” his father had said. “This is an adventure, and then there’ll be a new one and a new one. We’re going to have a fine time.”

  The flight from Florence to Brussels left at 11:30 a.m., connecting in Brussels with a flight to New York.

  Charlotte shook her head.

  “I want to stay in this place,” she said, as if it were a perfectly reasonable request, crazy that anyone should think otherwise.

  “Me too,” Oliver said.

  Their grandfather, a man Sam would come to know as extraordinarily kind, took Charlotte’s hand in his.

  “We’re not going to leave your parents in Italy,” he said. “I’ve made arrangements for them to travel on the same plane.”

  Charlotte looked up at him.

  “You’re sure?” she asked.

  “I’m sure,” her grandfather said.

  “Then I’ll fly on this plane,” Charlotte said decisively.

  “Me too,” Oliver said earnestly.

  On the plane back to America, just as the tip of Nova Scotia came into view, Charlotte looked up from her book.

  “Sam?”

  He’d been sitting with his eyes closed.

  “Do you think we’re going to die?” she asked.

  He looked over at Oliver zipping his Matchbox cars across his belly.

  “No,” Sam said, giving the possibility a full measure of his consideration, weighing the odds, wishing to tell Charlotte the truth. “We’re not going to die for a very long time.”

  As the plane descended along the coast of Massachusetts, across Connecticut, over the cluttered skyline of New York City, Sam McWilliams looked down the line of seats beyond the one where he was sitting: at Charlotte, reading her book; over the head of Julia, sleeping fitfully against her chest; at Oliver, clutching his shorts, unwilling to go to the lavatory for fear he’d fall through the airplane toilet into the sky.

  “We’ll stick together through thick and thin,” his father used to say to them. “From now on forever,” he’d add with his usual high-spirited drama as they went on trains and airplanes and buses and cars from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to Cairo to Ankara to Istanbul to Athens to Milan.

  And finally to Rome.

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHARLOTTE PUT her book down and listened. Downstairs, someone was knocking. She turned off the light beside her bed and looked out the window of their house on Morrison Street, but she couldn’t see anything except a police car parked across the street without its lights.

  The rented house where they had lived since they had arrived in Washington on Julia’s fourth birthday was the only clapboard among a row of brick houses, white clapboard with plum-red shutters and a small front porch, an ordinary colonial built in the twenties, with four bedrooms and a study where their grandfather drew body parts, recently illustrations of diseased kidneys for a medical dictionary. There was a garage, a basement, an unfinished attic with pull-down stairs: 4616 Morrison Street, Northwest, Washington, D.C. The Lucas house, where the McWilliams children lived—remarkable in the neighborhood, as if it were a historical monument where children lived whose mother and father had been blown to smithereens in another country. Too much for ordinary children to comprehend.

  “Four orphans live there,” they’d whisper to one another as they passed the house, walking swiftly in case the condition were catching. “Their parents were bombed to death on a train,” they’d say with a kind of dark pleasure. “That’s the Lucas house, where the McWil
liams children live,” they’d say; a place of consequence.

  The reason William Lucas gave for their move from the house on Sloan Street in Grand Rapids, where they had lived since James and Lucy were killed, was his work for the Smithsonian Institution. But he chose Washington for sentimental reasons, because it was the city where Lucy had been planning to move for medical school when James was accepted into the Peace Corps and she had followed him to Bombay. William liked to think that by moving to Washington, a place neither he nor Nicole, his wife—he called her Noli—knew, but would have known had Lucy gone to Georgetown Medical School, they could begin again, weave a different future for Lucy’s children, take hold of that moment when her life hung in the balance—a small turn, an incidental choice, nothing permanent without the possibility for revision, nothing final, her future fixed like the butterfly, its glorious wingspread pinned to a stiff white board.

  In fact, William Lucas’s real work was no longer drawing birds or body parts or perfect skeletons but raising his daughter’s children, a life, as he chose to live it, out of another time, small-town America at the turn of the last century, when the country was isolationist and provincial. He had no television, for he was unable to bear its invasive unreality. He read no newspapers or periodicals, only books written before the First World War: Dickens, Henry James, Trollope, Edith Wharton. And he listened to classical music on an old console radio that he’d bought with his first paycheck after he and Noli were married.

  He wasn’t fond of the swampy city of Washington, its anonymity of formal architecture and love affair with the daily news. He longed for the water landscape of northern Michigan.

  But in 1977, when the Lucases told their friends about William’s work with the Smithsonian, put their house up for sale and their furniture in storage, and gave away the collected memories of forty years of marriage, they had, as they saw it, no choice.

  The real reason they had left Grand Rapids was Sam.

  “Who’s that?” Julia asked from the slender mat on which she slept, keeping it under Charlotte’s bed, sleeping there so she could see the slats and mattress above her, although Charlotte would have been perfectly happy for Julia to be in the bed with her, in the twin four-poster pine bed, her mother’s bed when she was young. It pleased Charlotte to sleep where her mother had slept. Lucy Lucas’s bed. Charlotte loved to say her mother’s name, Lucy Lucas, over and over again, before she went to sleep.

  She couldn’t exactly remember her mother.

  “Of course you do,” Sam had said. “You were five. People can remember a lot from when they’re five.”

  Charlotte shook her head. “I really don’t remember her,” she said reasonably, sensitive to her brother’s temper. “I remember the smell of her shoulder like paper whites when I leaned up against her, and her long hair brushing my face, but I don’t remember her.”

  “You have to,” Sam said. “You just have to.”

  Charlotte tried, filling her room with pictures, keeping a few of her mother’s clothes, covered in soft tissue like holy garments, in the bottom of her closet, reading the letters and stories and school papers her grandmother kept in boxes in a closet in the hall. In case of fire, Noli said, they could be rescued quickly.

  She was quiet, almost preternaturally calm—drawing people to wade above their ankles in the still water of her company. Especially Sam.

  The psychiatrist to whom William Lucas had taken Sam when they returned from Italy in June 1974, taken him immediately, knowing there would be terrible problems festering, recommended daily sessions.

  “He has no defense system,” the psychiatrist said. “Like any child of trauma, he needs to develop the normal ability to differentiate between crisis and ordinary daily life.”

  “I’m not sure about that,” William Lucas had said. “Sam’s all defense system. Sometimes he goes days without speaking.”

  “That’s the beginning of trouble,” the psychiatrist said. “He could get much worse. He might harm himself,” he added in a tone of self-congratulatory warning.

  “It’s not true what he says,” Noli Lucas told her husband, sitting in the kitchen after supper as they did: Oliver doing the crossword on the floor so the cat could sit on the newspaper beside him, Charlotte reading, Julia sleeping in her grandmother’s lap, Sam doing his homework, so he claimed, but he never did homework, busy with his own observations—he had notebooks full of them—or lists he wrote carefully in black pen on unlined paper.

  “We’ll cancel the psychiatrist,” Noli said. “He’s making Sam worse.”

  Noli Lucas didn’t leave the house. For a while after her daughter died, she didn’t even leave her bedroom. She sat in the chair by the window overlooking the garden.

  “I have a little agoraphobia,” she explained to her grandchildren. “ ‘Agora’ is a Greek word that means marketplace. You know Greece.”

  Yes, they agreed. They knew Greece. They’d been there as young children, so Greece must be in their blood.

  “ ‘Phobia’ means fear,” Noli said.

  “So you’re afraid of the marketplace,” Sam said.

  “I think I am,” Noli said. “I may be wrong.”

  Yet her world wasn’t defined by the geometry of a rosy chintz bedroom or an ordinary colonial house, but by the wide expanse of a whimsical mind, childlike in its capacity to imagine full stories extending like soap operas from daily conversations. She kept in touch with people by telephone, by mail, engaging even strangers in their personal stories. Never her story. She was too mercurial for that. Just at the moment a person was on the brink of a secret from Noli, she would mysteriously slip aside, hiding out in someone else’s life.

  She had been a great beauty, a “stopper,” William Lucas said of her. When they met at the University of Michigan, she took his breath away. That beauty was the woman he still saw when he looked at her, although she had grown fat, with breasts that hung to her belly, a round, doughy face, with a pile of thick gray hair she often wore loose like a girl’s.

  Her grandchildren loved her. Beyond love, she belonged to them. A living mother who never left the house to do good works or visit friends or travel by plane to foreign places. She was in the kitchen when they left in the morning, a whisper of little steps around the room, and still there when they came home in the evening, the house warm with the smell of baking. If they should happen to arrive with friends from school, she would put out oatmeal cookies, disappearing into her bedroom, a secret grandmother invisible except to them.

  When Charlotte went into the upstairs hall to see who was knocking, Oliver was already lying facedown on the stairs, his feet in the second-floor hall, his belly on the steps so he could see the front door where his grandfather was speaking to a policeman.

  “What has happened?” Charlotte asked.

  “Trouble,” Oliver whispered.

  “Who’s in trouble?” Charlotte asked.

  Noli stood with Oliver in the hall in the flannel nightgown she always wore, winter and summer, with eyelets and faded red hearts, her hair down, her hands folded under her chin, smelling of sweet perfume, gardenia, her very favorite. She loved scents.

  “Sh-sh,” she said to Oliver. “I can’t hear what’s happening.”

  William Lucas came to the bottom of the stairs.

  “I wonder if you could get Sam for me, darling,” he called. “Darling” was not a name he used. Nicola or Noli or Moosh, but not darling. In his broad, formal Midwestern accent, his low, melancholy voice, his dedication to the sound of a word, holding it, like a musical note, the name “darling” had the weight of social order, spoken for the benefit of the policeman. No trouble in this house, Officer, it said.

  “I can’t get Sam,” Noli Lucas called back. “You must have forgotten. He’s spending the night with the Alexanders.”

  “Can we reach him?” William walked halfway up the steps. “There
’s been some difficulty.”

  “No, I’m awfully sorry,” she said in the vacant, faraway voice she saved for trouble. “The Alexanders have taken him someplace in West Virginia where there isn’t a telephone.”

  Behind Charlotte, the door to the last bedroom opened, the one which overlooked the back garden, the alley, the garage where the McWilliams children had their private office.

  Sam stood in the darkness just beyond the door.

  He was tall for fourteen, angular, with high cheekbones, a handsome older face, full lips, dark hair—fair skin—high color from his Scottish father. He had a way about him, a kind of swagger, that didn’t show so much in his movement as in the manner he assumed. A surprising confidence—“arrogance” was the word his teachers used at school. But the quality had more to do with a view of the world as a place where life is always fragile, where danger can be final.

  When he first came back from Italy, he had developed enuresis.

  “It could mean deep sleep from which he has trouble waking or depression,” the psychiatrist said, “or it might anticipate nascent sexual problems.”

  He refused to go to the boys’ room at the public elementary school in Grand Rapids. Occasionally he would come home from school with a large circle of pee on his corduroys, and some mornings he’d wake up swimming in urine.

  “I don’t understand why his peers don’t make fun of him,” the psychiatrist said.

  “They’re afraid of him,” William Lucas said.

  But it wasn’t exactly fear they felt. It had more to do with a feeling of awe—a sense that Sam McWilliams, on whom age seemed to descend in decades rather than years, could see straight to the center of a person’s heart and soul. He had no reason to accommodate other people, very little need for friends. His small family was sufficient.

  Oliver got up from the stairs, tiptoed across the floor, and stood next to Sam.