Today he is staying inside the flat.
Robin and her mother spread their towels on the sand, and Faith rubs suntan oil on the child’s shoulders and back. They spread white zinc ointment on each other’s noses, and make white clown lips, and wrinkle up their faces and laugh, though it seems to Robin that there is always something small and sad, like a ship’s bell in fog, deep down in the well of her mother’s laughter. Robin looks down the golden slope toward the ocean and jiggles from one foot to the other with impatience; her mother is kneeling, the tube of zinc ointment in her hands, facing back toward the houses.
A change happens. First it touches Faith’s hands which tremble for an instant and then turn softer and gentler on Robin’s skin. Robin watches the change move across her mother the way a wave moves up the sand. It spreads a shining. And the child laughs with sheer happiness because a weight has been taken off her chest. “Oh Mummy!” she says, locking her arms around Faith’s neck, happy, happy.
The mother strokes the child’s hair and nuzzles the crook of her neck and looks at the houses. The child turns. Her father is crossing the road, waving, jogging toward them. Against her cheek the child feels the breath of her mother, how it has turned fast and sweet. It reminds the child of something, it smells like … like … ? like grass after mowing; like the moment when her father puts the mower in the shed and flops down in the shade and reaches up to take the beer from her mother’s hand. Her father, zigzagging between traffic, waves and calls out. He flashes his white teeth at them.
The sun is up, everything is different. But then …
But then a stray football passes through the air between them and without a thought her father leaps and catches. It is beautiful, Robin thinks, the way he moves. There are shrieks. Giggles. A knot of teenage girls, brown thighs flashing, jumps, laughs, entices, moves in a million directions, clutching for the football, waiting for his pass. He runs, he is engulfed, he makes his pass. And Robin can feel how cold it is on the towels where a shadow has fallen.
Faith looks away, tents a hand over her eyes and scans the empty Pacific. She holds herself very still. She smiles very brightly. “Go and swim, darling,” she says, with only the slightest tremor in her voice. “I’ll join you in a minute.”
Robin puts her head down and runs straight for the core of the football melee. “Daddy, Daddy!” she calls, and yes somewhere in all those limbs she finds his hand, she extracts him, she tacks up the beach with him.
“Come on then,” he laughs, and the three of them run down the beach and into the surf. The three of them. Robin is in the middle, her mother on one side, her father on the other.
“Bastard,” she murmurs, letting the phone rattle his windows in Northampton, Massachusetts. She hangs up and buries her face in her hands. “Bastard!” she calls out the window. Natalie goes to her, holds her. “Daddy!” Robin sobs. “Daddy, please.” She cannot stop sobbing.
In his haste, Adam fumbles the keys and drops them in snow. He can hear the phone ringing inside. Damn. He brushes at several inches of white powder on his doorstep. Damn. Where the bloody hell are the keys?
The phone stops ringing.
He gropes around in the dark with a gloved hand, hears the clink of metal, closes his clumsy fingers around the keys, lets himself in. The house is deafeningly horribly quiet. Against the great sludge of silence he pushes his shoulder and stumbles into his kitchen. He feels ill with anxiety. Lights, music, the king rises! Lights, lights, lights!
He turns on the television. “You cannot create faith,” a midnight preacher says earnestly. His certainties coat him like a slick of suntan oil. Cronulla, Adam thinks for no reason. The word falls out of nowhere, a black spider of sound, a little leggy knob at the end of a swaying thought. “Faith is a gift,” the TV evangelist says. “It is a letting go.”
“Oh shut up!” Adam snarls and snaps off the set. Pouring Scotch, his hands shake so much that an amber spill licks at his table like a wave on a Sydney beach. He holds the glass up to the light. “I made the TV say those words,” he tells it. “I put those words in the box. Bloody amazing what the mind will do. A bloody amazing machine.” He drinks the Scotch neat. “I’m spooked,” he tells the carpet, pouring himself another drink.
“What time is it there now?” Natalie asks.
“Middle of the night,” Robin says. “There’s no point trying again. He must be away.”
“Maybe you should call Carolyn. Doesn’t she always keep tabs on exactly where he is because of the child support?”
“I’d rather die,” Robin says. “She’d accuse Mum of staging her death to get attention.”
Natalie says nothing.
“I’ll try one more time,” Robin says. “For the heck of it.”
“Robin!” Adam lurches into the night table. “My god, Robbie!” Something shifts inside his body. Yes, his body says, this is it. This is what we have been dreading. The phone clatters to the floor, the knocked-over bottle of Scotch glugs all over it.
“Oh Daddy,” she says. She cannot speak.
Robbie? he asks, tries to ask, but no sound will come to his aid. In any case, to what point? Because he knows, he knows. “Robbie,” he whispers gruffly. He could be spitting his way through gravel. “I saw her. I saw her yesterday in New York. She looked so beautiful, Robbie. I did love her, you know.”
Yes, he realises now, he did. He does. He does. Something tears away from inside him. A miscarriage, he thinks in vague pain. A hysterectomy. He could be bleeding, he could be wetting himself.
“Oh Daddy,” Robin sobs. “Right to the end, she believed you’d visit before she – She kept on making allowances.”
There’s so much white noise, it roars in his ears.
“Robbie,” he asks. “What’s that smell? I smell –” he sniffs; a bubble of something, of anguish, of laughter, gurgles up – “I smell salt, I smell surf.”
“It’s the beach,” Robin says. “We’re in a flat at Cronulla.”
We. Robbie and … He feels the mule kick of anger and revulsion but bites his lip hard.
“I’ll get a flight tomorrow, Robbie,” he says.
He finishes the bottle of Scotch and falls asleep on his living-room carpet. He dreams.
On the hard sand, the wet sand, the line of foam licks around his ankles. His back is wonderfully arched, he’s on the World’s Most Sensuous Deckchair, the Great Australian Bight, the famous Bighter, he is cradled by the map of Australia. Silly blighter, Australia teases. Her Queensland finger tickles him, Victoria cushions his head, a wave catches him by the Perthy regions and he floats eastward into the Pacific. This is warm, this is womb fluid, Robin is just being born, not a thing has gone wrong yet, time itself is barely beginning.
Amazing visions come and go in the glass-green walls of the waves, the white crests are creamed with prophecy, a row of little fishes pauses and stares, and Faith, Faith with her sweet bride’s face, is coming at him with the speed of light. Effortlessly he turns, he reaches, a perfect catch. It’s a gift, it’s a gift, laughs Robin, capering on the golden sands of Cronulla.
Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep
I’m particular about the time I go. It’s a private thing, I don’t want people staring. Best of all are these long summer evenings when the light hangs on, mauve and coy, in a way that makes me think of Mary Pickford. You remember how she took forever to leave the screen? – a trace of perfume, a trace of sadness, a long slow fadeout. America’s Sweetheart, I’ve cried for her hundreds of times on the late late reruns. I’ve lived all her lives. It’s one of her films – I forget which one – that I think of when I climb through the chain-link gap behind the privet. (The wrought-iron gates have already been locked when I visit.) In my mind I’m always wearing trailing silk, cream-coloured, with little seed pearls along the hemline.
So I am dressed to go – I have added, in my mind, a bonnet with lace veil, a parasol
, gloves, the trappings of tragic occasion – when my brother Kevin arrives. I know it’s Kevin from the sound of his front bumper. He parks imprecisely. I hear him stumble past the first landing and call a noisy greeting at the turn in the stairs. “Kevin?” quavers Mrs O’Sullivan who lives on the ground floor, who’s been our tenant for centuries. But he stumbles on. He raps loudly on my door, but doesn’t wait for me to open it.
“Monica!” He smothers me in a hug.
“Oh Kevin, I was just going out.”
“Tha’s wunnerful, Mon. I’ll go wisher … I’ll go’sh …” He sucks in his cheeks and pinches his lips to show contempt for these words falling out like junk from an overstuffed closet. He rummages, pulls at syllables one by one, extracts them carefully, triumphantly: “I’ll … go … with … you.”
“Oh Kevin. I can’t believe you drove.”
“Hey!” he says, unjustly accused. “Hey! S’jus the mouth. Perfeckly orright ‘cept for lips. ‘N maybe tongue.” He balances delicately, first on one leg and then the other, to show that he has absolute control of the larger muscles. He twists his arms into a pretzel and winks at me through his fingers. He shadow-boxes, does a little dance shuffle. “C’mon, Mon. Aren’t you going to invite me in for dinner?”
“I’ve eaten already. Anyway,” I say, “the football trophies are all at Mrs Quinn’s. She took them home to polish them.”
“Lemme see.” He pushes anxiously past me, down the hall.
“She’ll bring them back on Friday.”
“S’okay,” he says, curling himself up in the old armchair. “S’okay. You mind if I stay for a night or two?”
“Oh Kevin,” I sigh. “Is it Margaret?”
“S’nothing. S’nothing. Doncha like having me? Wher’ you going?”
“Just for a walk. You haven’t been laid off again?”
“I told you, s’nothing. Where we going?”
“Nowhere. Just walking. You can watch TV.”
“I’m coming.”
“No, Kevin, I don’t want …”
“Monica,” he says heavily, protectively. “Allow me.” He offers his arm, makes an elaborate bow, trips.
So what can I do? I’ll have to give up this evening’s visit, forget the gap behind the privet. I don’t want to tell anyone yet. Sometimes, when I look at Kevin, I think: he’ll go the way dad did. There are rules for families like ours, Boston Irish, we can’t break them. God gets one son (that’s Patrick, Father Pat, he’ll bury us) and one goes to the devil. The daughters marry and produce Catholic broods, except for one – the eldest (that’s me), or the youngest, or maybe just the plainest. She’s needed home to look after Ma and Pa till they go, then to pick up the family pieces.
“Where we going, Mon?”
“Nowhere. Just walking.” Up Common to Trapelo Road, down the long hill, turn right, along past the wrought-iron gates (don’t look), on into the park.
“Wassermatter with your hands?”
Without thinking, I say: “I’m unbuttoning my gloves.”
“Wha … ?” He stops and stares down at me, frowning. “What gloves? Whad’ya talking about?” He puts his hands on my shoulders. Even whisky-softened, they are the hands of an old football star, of a construction worker. “Mon? You okay?”
Good, I think. He’s sobering up. I keep walking. I am okay, as long as I can handle it my own way.
“What d’ya mean … gloves?” he persists.
No gloves, no parasol, this isn’t the same walk. “Nothing,” I say. “Ask a silly question.”
Not that Mary Pickford would have chosen Belmont. More like Cambridge, more like Mt Auburn Cemetery with its view of the Boston skyline across the Charles: better headstones, more trees, a view of the Harvard and MIT racing eights on the river. More famous company. I won’t pretend that I don’t get wistful. But I think there’s a rule, I think you have to have proof of residence, I think it’s got something to do with city taxes. Anyway, it’s not the sort of thing you want to go asking questions about. You can’t just call up City Hall and ask if you’re eligible for Cambridge. Not with dignity.
“Monica,” my mother used to say, “don’t get ideas. A girl should know her place.” She was never wrong about anything, she would have been the first to admit it. When Kevin used to yell at her – he was her favourite, the one who got her maddest – when he used to storm out and slam the door, she would press her lips together and put her hand over her heart. Then she would say (not to me, exactly, more to the peas she was shelling or the pastry she was rolling or to the Blessed Virgin in her gilt frame over the refrigerator): “I may not know very much, but I know when I’m right.”
Even Kevin admitted it. “What I can’t stand, Mon,” he said to me once, before she died, in his wandering whisky voice, “is the way she’s so goddamn right about everything. Jesus! How do you stand it?”
“Well,” I sighed, “she was right about Dennis Bouchard, so what can I do?”
“Oh Mon. Poor Mon. Have a drink.” It was Crown Whiskey, his hip-flask standby. For a royal pain, he said. And I did – just a few sips – because I was thinking about the first and last time I brought Dennis Bouchard home. And afterwards Ma sniffing: “You’re getting ideas, my girl. If you think for one minute that a man who looks like that one is ever going to –”
“Ma,” I said, “he’s got a little boy. He’s a widower.” (It was a miracle, of course, a miracle. I knew it was too good to be true.) “He’s got a house on Beacon Hill,” I said. “Right near the Common.”
“Beacon Hill!” she laughed. She couldn’t see me on Beacon Hill.
And as always, she was right, so horribly right that I had to hide the Globe and the Herald for days. I couldn’t bear to have her purse her lips and raise her eyes to the Blessed Virgin or the Sacred Heart.
“Kevin,” I say, back in the present. “Who got Ma’s Sacred Heart?”
“Ginny got it. Keeps it on the pantry door.”
“This is a dreadful thing to say, but it used to make me think of raw liver.”
Kevin laughs, but then quickly crosses himself, and does some soft-shoe on the sidewalk. Suddenly I see him as an altar boy again, lace ruffs and freckles and missing tooth and grubby sneakers under the smock. Everybody’s golden boy. I’m sorry I mentioned raw liver. These days I’m not so quick to think thoughts like that. These days, sometimes, I wouldn’t mind the Sacred Heart on my dresser.
“Mon, why’re you crying?”
“I’m not crying.” I look back to adjust my silk train. The little seed pearls are snagging on the past, there are details clinging like burrs. The taste of Dennis Bouchard’s lips, for example. The way his hair came to a soft point at the nape. The reasons why so many women – as it turned out – agreed to marry him and look after his little boy. “I was thinking of Dennis Bouchard.”
“Jesus,” Kevin says. He swings himself around a tree, once, twice, like a top. “Jesus,” he says again. “When we mess up, Mon!”
But I have the parasol back now, and the button gloves, Mary Pickford’s gloves.
It’s your eyes, Dennis Bouchard said, the day we met. This was in the rectory, after a funeral, when I was secretary for Father Molloy. I twirl my parasol over my shoulder. I remember how I wanted to tell Father Molloy: You’ve never admitted the truth about mortal sin, you’ve never said how delicious, how it makes you feel that eternal damnation doesn’t matter … But I never said that to him, not even in confession.
Down through my spinning parasol, here it comes: the first time Dennis drove me out to Walden Pond. Late October, no crowds, and we sat in the car and he stroked my breasts and sucked the nipples like a baby.
I feel weak inside and have to lean against a tree, I arrange my train, I draw circles in the grass with the point of my parasol. We are standing in the park, Kevin is watching the kids play baseball with their dads.
> “Why don’t you bring J.J.?” I ask him.
Wrong question. I can see his heart jump like a fish. There might as well be a window in his chest, I can see it turn, I can see it jounce like raw liver.
“Jeez, Mon,” he says, turning away.
The Donnellys cry easily, they wear their hearts on their sleeves, you can buy them in cheap gilt frames.
“Oh Kevvy. Next weekend then. We’ll play baseball, we’ll drive out to the Arboretum.”
“It’s this weekend,” he says. “This is my weekend. She’s taken him to the Cape with that jerk, that filthy-rich …” He is hurling stones into a clump of forsythia. A word travels with each missile, is rung up against the chain link behind the bushes: “Smart … ass … prick …”
“I knew this had something to do with Margaret,” I begin, as the wordstones clatter and someone’s dad yells: “Hey, you! Don’t you know there are little kids … ?” and Kevin rams his hands into his pockets and begins walking in a race to nowhere.
“Got a cabin there, the jerk!” he says when I catch up, though he doesn’t slow down, he is late for something. “Mister Respectable!”
I’m stumbling. I’ve had to abandon my train. “Kevin, Kevin,” I gasp. Sudden exertion is where I notice the deterioration most. “Kevin, I have to … I think I’m going to …” It seems to come at me from the ankles up, like water rising. Suddenly nothing is solid below the neck and I am dissolving right here at the border of the park where it meets the street.
Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories Page 32
