There was a small round table whose four feet ended in claws and from whose open drawer spilled photographs and bridge tallies and old Christmas cards.
The Oriental rug underfoot gave Ben the feeling that all these wonders were precariously balanced on an island of flowers. He knew it would be polite to admire something.
“Nice sofa,” he said at last.
“Love seat,” Helen corrected him. “It’s an antique.”
“Aunt Helen gets all her furniture from dead people,” said Davy.
“I know it’s crowded in here,” said Helen, “but I hate to sell things that have been in the family. Do you want a ginger ale?”
“Me too,” said Davy.
“Bring two bottles of Vernor’s and two glasses from the kitchen, Davy,” said Helen.
As Davy darted away, Helen took Ben’s arm and led him to the mantel. A long swag of artificial holly hung down at either side of it like a rumpled snake.
“I want you to see what nice painting Clare does. She painted this pitcher when she was twelve.”
On its unglazed belly, an angel rode across a navy sky on a green bird. Every feather was meticulously drawn: a bird in armor, a jeweled nightingale.
“Beautiful,” he said.
“And that bowl next to the pitcher,” said Helen. “She gave me that bowl for Mother’s Day when she was eight.”
The wooden bowl, covered with crudely painted hearts and flowers, Ben found less attractive than the pitcher.
“Pretty good for eight,” he said.
“She painted angels on all my kitchen cupboards. And when we had the kitchen repainted last year, Mr. Schneider painted right over them. It broke my heart. Clare said, ‘Don’t worry, Mother, I’ll paint you some new ones.’ Nell says, ‘Watch out, she’ll paint on your coffin.’ Come here—let me show you something.”
She urged him toward the grand piano, over which hung half a dozen diplomas and certificates and one blue ribbon.
“Clare won first prize in the Scholastic Regional Art Contest, Southeastern Michigan Division, when she was fourteen.”
“That’s wonderful, just wonderful,” said Ben. He was growing sleepy; the room was too hot.
“And she won this blue ribbon for a shadow box she entered in the Ann Arbor Garden Club Flower Show.”
“Well, what do you know?”
“And here’s a picture of Clare in the freshman class play. She wrote the play.”
Helen pointed to the photograph of a makeshift horse wearing ballet slippers.
“Did you say Clare is in the picture?” asked Ben, puzzled.
“She’s the horse. The front half.”
Davy ran into the room carrying two ginger ales with Grandma right behind him, dragging her suitcase, her straw hat shoved cockeyed on her head.
“I’m going now,” she said. “It’s been lovely.”
“Oh, Grandma, you don’t want to go now,” said Nell, gliding up behind her. “We’ve just put lunch on the table.”
“And Clare’s friend Ben has come especially to meet you,” said Helen. “Oh, you can’t go now.”
Grandma peered at Ben through her thick glasses, as if she had been asked to believe in something she could not see. Or was she listening to the muffled thumping in the hall? Did nobody else hear it except this old woman and himself, Ben wondered, and at that moment he caught sight of Clare in the mirror over the mantel. She was paddling headfirst down the stairs, pulling herself forward with her arms, dragging her legs after her as if she wanted to leave them behind; a shell she had outgrown and could not shake off.
Ben wished he had not seen her. She would not want him to see her. Not that way. He followed Helen into the dining room.
“This is Hal, Clare’s father,” said Helen. “He always sits down to lunch at noon, whether anyone else is here or not.”
Hal, in shirt-sleeves at the head of the table, had not only sat down, he had already started to eat, spearing beets out of a bowl as steadily as a conveyer belt, forking them, eating them—snip, snap! He speared, spooned, snapped, chewed without mercy; he did not miss a beat.
“Glad to meet you,” said Ben, though he did not feel they had met, only appraised each other, as one insect might wonder if the other is edible. He looked away and saw Clare again, this time in the mirror over the telephone table in the front hall. Nell was lifting her into the wheelchair. Was this Clare, he asked himself, this rag doll whose dress hung dark and plain, like a nun’s habit? The two of them emerged from the mirror into the dining room: two time travelers entering the fourth dimension.
“Hello,” said Clare.
Davy took Ben’s hand.
“Here’s your place,” he said, “next to me.”
Ben sat down at the table between Davy, who stared at him, and Grandma, who was humming under her breath. And Clare? She hardly seemed to notice he was in the room.
“Clare tells me you’re a student at the University,” said Helen.
“She did?” Ben’s stomach sank. He had never told Clare that.
“What are you majoring in?” asked Nell.
“Geology,” said Ben. The first subject that popped into his head.
“And what do you plan to do with it?” asked Hal.
Everybody was staring at Ben now, forks in midair.
“It’s kind of private,” he said. “I just can’t talk about it.”
He must be on academic probation, thought Helen, trying to imagine what could be so private about a career in geology.
“If you want an easy course, take Precious Gems!” exclaimed Nell, and Clare’s stony face broke into a smile.
“Mother, tell Ben about Precious Gems.”
“I can’t,” said Helen. “I don’t even like to think about it.”
“Tell it, tell it!” pleaded Davy.
“Well—” Helen wiped her mouth with her napkin and laid the napkin on the table. “Hal and I were at a faculty dinner party—we had only been married a month, and everyone was so curious about me because Hal is twenty years older than I am—we met on a blind date—and somebody started talking about pipe courses on campus, and I said, ‘The biggest pipe course on campus is Precious Gems.’ There was a long silence. And then the hostess said, ‘The gentleman on your left is our good friend Professor Shrew, who teaches that course.’ I nearly died.”
“Shrew,” repeated Hal, as if invoking him. “We took freshman English together.”
“At Michigan,” added Helen. “All our family went to Michigan. Hal, Nell, me—”
“Our other sister, her husband, my ex-husband,” chimed in Nell.
“Hal,” said Grandma, “did anyone ever tell you that you have beautiful ears?”
“You did,” said Hal. He smiled at her.
“You tell him every day,” said Davy.
“Davy, she forgets,” whispered Nell.
Grandma peered at Davy. Her glasses made her eyes huge and all-knowing.
“How old are you now?” she asked.
“Five.”
“Oh, that’s right. I forgot.”
Ben finished his salad—a Bartlett pear filled with cream cheese—and reached for the plate of hamburgers. Nell snatched it away from him.
“Give Ben a real hamburger. That’s Hal’s Protose.”
“They look just like—” began Ben, but she cut him off.
“They’re made from soybeans. Hal is a vegetarian.”
“I never heard of soybean hamburgers.”
“I order them from Battle Creek,” said Hal, as if that explained everything. Helen had just come from the kitchen, and from the dish in her hand she forked a real hamburger onto Ben’s plate.
“We’ve got cases and cases of Protose,” said Davy.
“You’ve heard of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, of course,” remarked Hal.
Ben shook his head no.
“I want to take Clare to the San,” Hal said, as if Ben had nodded yes instead. “I want to see if Dr. Kellogg can help her.”
Clare, head bowed, was eating slowly and steadily.
“Listen,” exclaimed Helen. “The marching band is practicing.”
Silence.
“I can’t hear anything,” said Ben.
“Me neither,” said Nell.
“Can’t you feel the vibrations?” asked Helen, turning to Ben.
Again they stopped talking and listened.
“It wouldn’t be the marching band now,” said Nell.
“Perhaps it’s snow,” said Helen.
“Pardon me?” asked Ben.
“Helen can hear the snow coming when it’s still miles away,” said Nell. When he did not respond, she changed the subject. “Wasn’t that Ohio State game a thriller?”
“I didn’t see it,” said Ben.
“Goodness, I don’t know how you could bear to miss it,” said Helen. “We go to all the games.” She almost said, “We used to go to all the games till Clare came home,” but stopped herself in time. “Our seats are right on the fifty-yard line. Where are your seats?”
“My seats?”
“Where you sit,” said Nell.
“I don’t have any tickets.”
“You never got your tickets?” exclaimed Helen. “Every student is entitled to a season ticket. You should have gotten yours in the mail the first week of classes.”
“I’ll call the dean of men about it on Monday,” said Hal.
“That’s all right,” said Ben quickly. “The season’s over.”
“The season’s over,” said Hal, “and who knows if there’ll be a football team next year? Did you see the headlines this morning? The Germans sank another submarine.”
“If we go to war, there won’t be enough men around to make up a team,” said Nell.
“Do you think we will go to war?” asked Clare.
She had hardly spoken during the entire meal, and now her voice was as startling as a stranger’s.
“We’re arming ships,” said Hal. “We’re sending men. We can hardly be called neutral.”
“I expect you’ll be drafted one of these days,” said Nell, beaming at Ben.
“Wait till you’re drafted,” said Hal. “No point in going any sooner. You can serve your country better with a good education.”
In the front hall, the telephone was ringing urgently.
“Now who would call during lunch?” asked Helen and rose to answer it. Again silence fell over the meal. Helen knew they were all listening to her, trying to piece the conversation together from her brief responses. “Here? … Tonight? … But not for supper, I hope.”
She banged the receiver down without saying good-bye.
“What nerve!”
“Who was it?” asked Nell.
“Marie Clackett. Mr. Knochen will be arriving here at eight.”
“I thought he wasn’t coming till the seventh. That’s Sunday.”
“He says he has important business on Sunday.”
Helen began to clear the plates.
“I think that any man who goes around saying he can call back the dead will go straight to hell. And to charge a dollar for it, too!”
“Every dollar goes to the Red Cross,” Nell reminded her.
“Did Jesus charge people a dollar when he raised Lazarus?” demanded Helen.
13
Islanders
THE TELEPHONE IN DRAKE’S Sandwich Shop stood in a booth at the back, behind the restrooms. Ben managed to park Hal’s vast Buick in front of the shop. But should he leave Clare in the car or carry her in? Or should he go through the long hassle of getting her on crutches? During the drive after lunch she had begun to liven up, and he saw traces of the spirited girl he’d met in the hospital.
It’s the heat in that house, he thought. It’s enough to put anyone to sleep.
The subject of Mr. Knochen had revived her. He was an itinerant spiritualist, she explained, who arranged séances in private houses. He did not claim to be a medium, only a believer who cleared the air of doubt so the dead could make themselves heard. The dead could speak through anybody they chose—and not only a person, either. They could speak through any object, and they could send you presents from far places. Why, a man in Philadelphia had received, over several years, a two-thousand-year-old coin from India, one English farthing, ten artificial gems, a child’s sleigh bell, a small seashell, and two fresh poppies out of season. He had also been robbed by spirits of a package of Turkish cigarettes. And a dead priest had sent his congregation in New York a ceramic ashtray marked Chicago Hilton. It sprang from the air and plummeted to the altar while the choir was singing “Nearer My God to Thee.” The dead could even gather vibrations and spiritual vapors in the room and put on the appearance of flesh.
“Isn’t there somebody you’d like to talk with in the other world?” asked Clare.
The quickness of his own reply surprised him, as if someone had spoken for him. “My dad.”
Ben was glad to find Drake’s nearly deserted as he shut himself into the telephone booth and dialed home. Glad not to be burdened, at this moment, with Clare. The telephone rang twice. Willie answered it.
“It’s me,” said Ben. “Listen, I have a big favor to ask you.”
“Not a cent,” said Willie.
“It’s not about money. It’s about Marsha.”
“What about Marsha?” asked Willie, in quite a different voice.
“Can you take her to the dance tonight?”
“Why aren’t you taking her?”
“I—things have gotten a little complicated here,” said Ben. “Sort of involved.”
“In what way involved?” persisted Willie.
“Don’t ask,” said Ben.
“Did you tell anyone that you were the—”
“No. Clare doesn’t know I’m the one who messed up her life. It doesn’t seem very important right now. Listen, the dance is at the Barton Hills Boat Club.”
“Gas is twelve cents a gallon,” murmured Willie.
“I’ll pay for the gas.”
Still Willie hesitated. “Lots of debutantes, I suppose.”
Money entered silently, like an eavesdropping operator.
“Oh, lots of them. You’ll have to buy Marsha a corsage. Her dress is black. Buy gardenias. She likes to wear gardenias on her wrist.”
“A corsage on her wrist?”
“You have to ask for it. I’ll pay,” said Ben. He didn’t say that Marsha often bought her own corsage, in case she didn’t like the one Ben bought her.
“What shall I say when she asks why you can’t take her?”
“Anything but the truth. You’ll think of something.”
Climbing into the car beside Clare, Ben felt sad and exhilarated: a traveler leaving home forever bound for the New World.
“Where shall we go now?” she asked.
“How about Island Park?” Again, the quickness of his own reply surprised him, as if someone had spoken for him. “Oh, Clare, I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right. I’ve always loved Island Park.”
“Clare—why did you tell your folks I went to the University?”
“So they’d like you. Why did you tell them you’re majoring in geology?”
“God knows,” said Ben.
Indeed, said God.
In any quiet town you can find a street, a field, a stand of trees, which breaks into the dreams of its citizens years after the dreamers have left home for good. For generations of dreamers in Ann Arbor the Island has beckoned, flickered, faded, and risen again. Yet Island Park is surely not different from other parks in other cities lucky enough to be divided by one of those lazy brown rivers that join shanties and brickyards to golf courses and boathouses. In summer the water is too shallow for a rowboat, but canoes from the livery on Barton Pond thread their way past black willow and wild cherry and crab apple, among islands large enough to offer standing room only to one adult human and five muskrats, or four otters and half a dozen mallards. There are picnic tables on the right bank, wh
ere the new road runs, and tall grass along the left bank, where the old road sleeps, and a bridge between them, big enough for one car to pass over. Once, whole families of Negroes who lived by the tracks that followed the river could be seen on that bridge, fishing for carp or crayfish.
A footbridge joins the right bank to the only island that could support a population larger than one adult human and five muskrats or four otters and half a dozen mallards. On the Island—for so it is called, as if no other island were worthy of the name—stands a modest Greek temple with a roof like the lid of a fancy tureen and a colonnade running all around. Is it a circular temple proper to the worship of Hermes in winged cap and winged sandals, sacred to crossroads, the messenger of the dead? Is it sacred to the genius of this place?
No. The temple is sacred to two toilets, hidden at opposite ends behind appropriately marked doors. From far off, the graffiti on the doors do not show and the rough plaster walls might pass for Carrara marble. On a spring morning, when the black willow is leafing and the wild cherry beginning to bloom, if you are taking the Wolverine to Detroit or Battle Creek, you might look out of the train window and think you are passing the temple of love on the sacred island of Cythera, as Watteau painted it. And long after you’ve forgotten where you are going and why you are going there, the temple will appear to you in dreams, and you will wonder if your soul lived here before it put on its burden of flesh.
On this cloudy day the temple hung over the river like a ghostly sepulcher. Snow added its cubits to the stature of the roof, the trees, the picnic tables spread as if with that hidden fabric called “the silence cloth” by housewives who keep it under the finer damask one, to absorb the clatter of dishes and silver. Snow softened the bare limbs of the bushes.
Under its roof of ice, the river sent up bubbles: the telegraphed laments of the fish.
A single twig was now a thing of great beauty: a wand, a power, a glory. A sign.
Ben turned down Catherine Street and passed the open arcade where tomorrow morning at eight the manager of the Farmer’s Market would walk up and down ringing a bell, to signify that the stalls were now open for business. During the winter only a few farmers huddled over small stoves behind their counters. Tomorrow the smell of kerosene would hang over the kale, dug out of snow fresh that morning, and over the cartons of eggs which had to be kept in the back of the trucks to prevent them from freezing.
Things Invisible to See Page 9
