Harbor Lights

by Theodore Weesner

  But maybe she would tell him, she thought, heading onto the floor. The things you took for granted—didn’t they need to get said? For she had never really told Virgil of her appreciation for what he had done for her, the good times and success he had brought her way. She wouldn’t be telling it to the young women at McInnes Business College, but she wouldn’t be where she was today if it hadn’t been for Virgil Pound. And no matter what Warren thought, it was Virgil’s friendship more than anything that she had found gratifying. Certainly she adored him, but first of all he was the best friend she had ever had. The day she walked into his office had changed her life; something came alive in her and neither of them had ever been the same. They had clicked like Fred and Ginger, as Virgil liked to say—and what was an aspiring young dancer to do, click with her dream partner and walk away?

  Marian appeared unimpressed with the joke, and Beatrice said, “I guess you heard it.” Lori was also on the floor, as were five or six customers, strolling and browsing. Beatrice waved a greeting to Lori.

  “Mom, I think I need to talk to you,” Marian was saying.

  “Of course, about what?”

  “A couple things, this and that. Virgil, too—I’d like to talk to both of you if I can.”

  “Something serious?”

  “I don’t know—I guess so. Will Virgil be around? You’re giving that talk, aren’t you?”

  “The seminar at McInnes—I’m leaving in a few minutes. Why don’t you come with us for lunch?” Leaving the store with neither of them present was against Beatrice’s policy, but something in Marian’s voice had her ignoring her own rule. “What’s the subject? You’ll have me worrying all morning.”

  “It better wait—but don’t worry about it.”

  “You feeling down?”

  “I don’t know—maybe—I don’t think so. Okay, I’m feeling like an elevator.”

  Beatrice whispered, “Honey—not that I haven’t said it a few times before, but it is an investment, showing spunk and personality. You want to get ahead in life, in business—I keep learning this over and over. It takes effort, but it’s money in the bank. In the end, it’s happiness.”

  “Mom, you know what—they should have you as a guest speaker at McInnes Business School!”

  A customer with a forced smile and raised hand was signaling from the table of pepper grinders, and Beatrice went to serve her, still wondering what was going on with her daughter. Ron? Her job? And wanting Virgil present?

  Beatrice rang up a twenty-six-dollar sale, just as cash register one was also singing its little tune—she liked serving customers, cherished the melody of the money machines—and her thought was to explain to Marian, again, how people gravitated to someone who laughed, who had personality, who wasn’t maybe too droll. (Unlike the way they responded to dark clouds like her father, which Beatrice but rarely pointed out.) It was the reason some succeeded and gained personal pride—they were well-liked and people enjoyed doing them favors, sending business their way. It was satisfying to make someone smile, and the friendships that developed were real no matter what the cynics might have to say. What was wrong with getting an extra little something out of life?

  Marian

  Helping a white-haired lady select a pepper mill, and however distracted she felt, Marian couldn’t resist joking. The lady was beautifully dressed all in gray, rich tweeds and satins, had stockinged canes for ankles, and of a pepper mill the size of a tenpin, Marian confided: “It doesn’t come with a spray, but you could always hit him over the head with it.” A titter came from the lady, then stifled giggling. “That’s a lovely idea,” she said. “That’s just what I’ve been looking for.”

  In a moment, as the lady carried away a wrapped parcel in a Maine Authentic bag, Marian was without customers and needed—as trained by her mother—to elect a productive way to occupy herself. Lori and John, another part-time clerk who had come on, were likewise without customers at this early hour, and were dusting and straightening display shelves beyond cash register two. Down time wasn’t anything Marian minded. Mornings in off-season remained a favorite time, occasions of letting her mind travel as it wished, and as she took to rearranging placemats on shelves, it was more to weigh the questions in her mind, to get them to settle into neat stacks of their own.

  Isolate the problem and don’t kid yourself about it. It wasn’t something she had learned at the University of Maine but from her mother, reinforced by who knew how many mini-lectures.

  Her deceit in living with Ron, guessing he’d work out as a father: was there any doubt that he was one of her core problems? And yes, it would be wise, if embarrassing, to confide the worry to her mother and Virgil. Ron had been not just slow to evolve, but seemed to have stopped altogether, she thought, maybe two years earlier, when they had been married but a handful of months. The honeymoon had ended all at once for her—on his brutal smashing to the floor of a glass bowl filled with stale pasta, complaining about waste. Blinking, stepping aside in the kitchen, she had seen that she was living with an arrested adolescent. The incident evaporated, but thereafter, every time she looked at him, she saw him differently—as if he were not as old as she had thought him to be. She tried to shed the perception, then Ron would be Ron—always seething just under the surface—and she could not help seeing that life with him was what was hopeless.

  What to do in such a situation? Yeah, get pregnant, she told herself as she shifted back to the cash register to wait on a customer. Brilliant, given that the last thing Ron would be able to tolerate would be a child. Had she ever in her life done anything more dumb?

  It was odd, too, she thought, returning to the placemats, to think how bold and mature Ron had looked to her in high school, how she had been mad for him from her two-year distance of ninth to eleventh and tenth to twelfth grades. Even when they were at Orono together and he squeezed out two years in automotive engineering before returning to Kittery to join an antique car restoration business (really to be a mechanic in charge of three hourly-rate teenage grease monkeys), she had kept believing he would break through like some famous engineer at Ford or Mercedes-Benz. It wasn’t to be. He continued to live like a college sophomore—the way he lived today, sleeping in on any excuse, doing nothing at all that would get him anywhere. Seething—even when he smiled or spoke in an ordinary voice. She could see his suppressed anger. The only time he was not seething was when he was with his dopey friends and they were joking about cutting the cheese, burping, tailgating elderly drivers on the road.

  Her father. There was her other core problem, for as much as his health was an unanswered question, it was already heavy, for her, with guilt. Again, he was her father, and she knew he was sick, and also knew that if she did not assume some responsibility for him, no one would, least of all her mother. They might reside in the same house, but he no more lighted up her radar than would a man living two streets away. There’s a marriage, Marian thought. There’s an example of why you should endure, say, for the sake of the child.

  In a while, Marian thought—when her mother had left to give her talk—she would slip into the office and telephone her father at home. He could be there, if he was sick, and, whatever might be done for him, maybe she’d at least be able to sort it out and then get her mother and Virgil involved. They wouldn’t like it, but no matter, her father had been treated like excess baggage, had lived the most miserable life imaginable, and the least they could do was give him some of their time. Would he be pleased that she was having a baby? Would he see a chance, in a grandchild, of his life and lineage being not entirely negative? If the child were a boy—would it make him happy if they used his name, say, as a middle name? Dear God, if she felt besieged with her problems, how might her father feel with his?

  Their one abiding experience together as father and daughter—the summer she went on his boat with him as first mate—was one she had been recalling as often recently as once a day. And as she proceeded to another shelf of place mats, leaving the next
customers to Lori to check out, she opened herself to the memory yet again, recalled the smell of salt water and air, the faint chill always riding the breeze, and satisfaction in him being right with her as his daughter. The Lady Bee. She was twelve and thirteen that summer—her birthday fell on July 1st—and if anyone thought it was a picnic out on the water, they didn’t know her father.

  Work. Learn. Remember. He made her master everything from operating boat and motor to using the fire extinguisher, throwing the O-ring to a man overboard, sending an SOS, operating ship-to-shore, responding to an SOS, abandoning ship—went into the water himself, to have her throw the ring and use a grappling hook, and had her abandon ship in a drill of her own, pulling off her rubber boots and apron and, entering the cold water in her life jacket, receive the O-ring as he tossed it twenty feet to where she was bobbing and her teeth were chattering. The exercise created a blowup at home. “She’s twelve years old!” her mother had cried, while her father had growled—had bite in his growl in those days—that the idea of marine safety was to save a person’s life before it was lost, or they wouldn’t stand a chance.

  She had also to master the use of wrenches and tools in removing seawater from the carburetor and restarting the boat’s engine … everything a first mate had to know and be responsible for, her father kept telling her, and, like bobbing in the water, however uncomfortable the lessons, in the aftermath they filled her with self-confidence. It was one of those fatherly things women rarely have a feel for on their own, she thought. Her mother could rail about a twelve-year-old being put into the water, but,, in truth, she overcame fears that would have left her intimidated and paralyzed. Now she’d welcome a crisis, just to show her stuff—and to make her father proud.

  Nor had it been all drills, rehearsals, baiting pots. He indulged her child’s need for a snooze each time out (they usually left the house at four a.m.), fixed a shelf-bunk for her on the starboard side of the Lady Bee’s pilothouse, out of the wind, and when she took a nap managed to wheel about so toasty sun would keep her warm within the enclosure and make her snoozing easy. And he called her “sleepytime girl” when she stirred to her feet, gave her sips of coffee from his big thermos (leading to another spat at home), loved her unequivocally in those waking-up moments, though calling her “sleepytime girl” was as close as he ever came to getting it into words

  Life had betrayed her father. Given half a chance he might have been twice the man he came to be. Fate was cruel. Who would believe he had lived all his life in a house with a wife who had given herself, body and soul, to another man? It wasn’t how it happened on television. On television a man might rage in the face of such obstacles. Around the harbor, and but for his damaged spirit, her father went about his business. He was a defeated man. It was both painful and true.

  Customers began to multiply, and Marian returned to serving them while her thoughts roamed. Who would she be today, she wondered, had she gone into fishing with her father? Who would her father be—he who had not had a son to take into his business? Would he be a happy and vigorous man? Something independent and wild about lobstering appealed to Marian, especially there in the careful store with its scented cosmetics and candles—called to her more strongly than marketing, than being dressed and delicate, serving people with smiles rather than jokes, those parts of the business she had never quite liked. If there was a boy in her, she thought, maybe it was telling her to be reckless and strong, to head into life directly and openly. As a mother on her way to childbirth, she felt certain of one thing: if she had a boy or a girl, the call of the sea this summery day had an adventurous feel for her, while work in the aromatic store felt layers removed from what was rich and vital.

  Stealing office time, leaving Lori and John to cover floor and cash registers, Marian telephoned her parents’ home, and replaced the receiver when the answering machine clicked on. Then she telephoned her father’s doctor, told the receptionist she was Warren Hudon’s daughter, and asked if they knew what was going on with her father, if he had been referred to a clinic?

  “The Kittery Clinic, I believe,” a woman named Pricilla told her.

  “The cancer clinic?” Marian’s worst fear felt confirmed.

  “It sounds like he hasn’t told you very much.”

  “He’s very secretive.”

  “Well, gee, listen, I’ll give you their number, but I don’t think they’ll tell you anything over the phone.”

  And so it was. Identifying herself yet again as Warren Hudon’s daughter, she asked for an update on her father’s condition, and the receptionist said, “I’m sorry, we can’t give out information like that over the phone.”

  “I am his daughter,” Marian said.

  “Well, his chart says ‘no family,’ ” the woman said, as if reading from a screen.

  Marian sighed. “No family? Is it blank or does it say that?”

  “ ‘No family’ is checked.”

  “Does it mean he said that?”

  “That I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Could I speak to the oncologist?”

  “Dr. Dawson’s with a patient right now.”

  “Does it mean my father has cancer?”

  “Miss, you need to ask your father to have your name added to his file so you can have access to information about his condition. I’d be glad—Dr. Dawson’s assistant would be glad—to share information with you, but it does say ‘no family’ on the screen.”

  “But he has cancer—isn’t that the only reason he’d be there?”

  “Miss, listen, I understand your frustration, but you’ll need to speak to your father, or to Dr. Dawson. I have other calls here. Patients do come in for consultations—it doesn’t mean they’re diagnosed with cancer.”

  “You can’t just tell me?”

  “Miss, please. You’ll have to speak to Dr. Dawson.”

  Running through Marian’s mind as she returned to the checkout counter was a thought of Virgil having influence enough to make a call and have people vie with information. Then she thought no, saw that using Virgil to learn something about her father wasn’t the way she wanted to go.

  Warren

  In Narrow Cove, returning in the direction of open water, he tied to his float and let the Lady Bee swing to anchor. Then he did something uncharacteristic—he sat on the gunwale to rest and contemplate the path his life had taken. Securing the boat had exhausted his breath yet again, though for the moment his confusion was lifting away. Placid water in the cove was soothing at high tide, given the warmth of the air. Try to be as calm as the weather, he thought,for what was more worth savoring at this late stage than an Indian summer reprieve? His doctor’s appointment wasn’t until one-fifteen, and he had nothing to do in the meantime but take in breaths of air, as if to store for later use, and to keep the runaway freight-train coughing from taking him on breathless rides. Taking him, he sensed, into swirls where one day soon he would experience darkness from which there would be no return.

  Warren hated to admit it, but he knew his anxiety was tied still to the disgusting folly he had committed, the self-loathing he had imposed on himself, in letting Virgil Pound arrange a job for him twelve years ago with the state. Eight years in the Water Pollution Division. He had sold out—there was no getting around it. Maybe he broke away in time, but he had yet to regain his bearings. Wearing the uniform, that cap of a cuckold. A job arranged by Senator Pound. An employee protected by Senator Pound—so the senator might have his way with the employee’s sexy little wife. Would selling out ever settle itself in his mind?

  Virgil may have come to him and he may have acted tough and independent, but they both knew who was pulling the strings. Everyone knew, just as they knew his wife worked for the influential politician and traveled as his assistant, his companion, and mistress. His whore. Why not take the job? Warren told himself at the time. Lobster catches were down; he was scraping by and being made a fool of—why not gain some financial security in the terrible mix of things? What was t
he alternative—to leave Beatrice and take up solitary life in a saltwater shed, become another mad dog Mainer made simple by the muck and brine left exposed at low tide?

  All along there had been the richness of the dark sea calling to him with its mystery and depth. The sea had filled his life, and at times he had hated it, but then it had never presented more meaning to him than when he was away from it, or on glorious days like today. Cough-free for the moment—the train in his throat seeming to glide over a prairie—he gazed beyond the watery darkness to where the tide had left ribbons on sea walls, and on the spit of land where his truck was parked a hundred yards distant and a fathom higher. Creatures of all kinds luxuriated within the deep, and the sea’s tidal movement had been growing no less than spiritual to him in its immensity. The body of water was like an organism too vast to comprehend.

  He watched it rise, like the side of a cat—a watery kingdom from which life had come gasping and crawling millions of years ago. He liked the idea of tides being earth breathing, and returning there himself to disappear. But he also wanted to remain with Beatrice, to lie in proximity to her, thinking they might yet reconcile, along the path to eternity. Or to be lying next to her when the sea came in to claim them both. Never having possessed her in life—in body early on, but never in spirit—he felt all the more bewildered at the thought of being apart from her in death each time it came to mind. Being cheated was the story of his life, and here, turning into the home stretch, he was finding himself haunted with issues of mortality he had barely considered since childhood. He did not quite believe in hell, or in purgatory, rather he saw oblivion, aloneness and loneliness, as the alternative to a heaven offering some form of consciousness. How could the universe ever stop unfolding—and who could know what waited in the infinite beyond? Who could know that those who had been cheated in life might not gain some justice in the hereafter?