by Minot, Susan
Why aren’t you in school? A hill came rolling at her.
I’m not in school. Anyway it’s July.
There were dark green footprints on the hill. She must have gone on after that. She stood at the kitchen door and the grass turned silver from the sky. She must have gone on.
I’m acting now. I’m in a play.
That’s right, I knew that. Out of the hill came wheels spinning which began to shoot out bits of steel in little darts. She cried out.
God are you O.K.? Nina stood up. Can I get you something?
Her mother’s eyes were pressed shut. They opened. A bullet, she said.
Harris Arden came up around the side of the house. He was not used to so much emotion. It wore him out. This had all caught him off guard. He’d come upon a new road and had taken a few steps down that road and now he saw it wasn’t the road he was going to take after all. He was going back to the road he knew and would continue walking where he’d been walking for a long time. He’d been walking on that road for a long time for a reason. It suited him, didn’t it? Well there wasn’t any use in asking whether it suited him or not, it was where his duty took him and where his life had put him and where he would go.
He smelled his sleeve, that was her. She was like a flash of light, surprising him. It had been too sudden. But hadn’t it been sudden with Maria also? Why, it could go on being sudden with girls if you let it, one had to put a stop to it somewhere along the line. Having a baby would put a stop to it. Maria was the one he would stop with. And Maria loved him, that was certain. He could not be certain about this new woman. After the brightness faded who knew what would happen, he hardly knew her.
He stepped onto the long porch with dew soaked shoes. Some dim lamps were lit inside. He was surprised to see people still up. Through the window he would have seen Carl’s friend Monty bent toward Vernon Tobin’s girlfriend Kingie. They were holding cups of tea and looking solemn. He didn’t want to disturb them and didn’t want to see anyone anyway so he stepped back off the porch and walked back the way he’d come past the garbage cans where the cake boxes were stacked in the blue light.
On the driveway standing near a car was the man in the white dinner jacket whose name he couldn’t remember and the tall girl Gail. When she saw Harris she came running toward him with an air of panic and it reminded him of overseas and for a moment thought something had happened to Maria. Gail pulled him into the car and the man in the dinner jacket got behind the wheel and before he knew it he was being driven away, needed someplace else.
The Bishops Harbor public landing was a flimsy dock the size of a foyer and Clint Stone was there waiting in the Happenstance to bring Harris to the mainland and to Buddy. Maybe they’d beat the ferry. Clint Stone’s wife sat on the stool beside him, a kerchief under her chin, a thermos in her lap, looking toward the bay. Harris stepped into the boat still in his dark suit, in his pocket he felt his bunched-up tie. His footfall rang hollow on the floor. The man in the white dinner jacket untied the painter and Gail held the boat steady with one foot and for a moment Harris thought she was going to jump on but instead she gave the boat an angry shove and stepped back folding her arms over her chest looking suddenly sixty years old instead of twenty.
Harris Arden turned up his collar as they motored out. He remembered other louder dawns full of chaos and smoke and things burning and what it felt like stepping out of the closeness of a tent. He did not want to think of things which did no good. He turned his mind from that. Then Ann Grant’s face flashed up looking at him sidewise smiling the way she had, standing at the railing in the dark, and he thought of the curve of her back and her head turned and her neck and her eyes opening slightly as she lay on her back and as spray misted his face he had to turn his mind from that, too. He must not think about that anymore. He frowned and steered his thoughts toward Maria and the smooth face he knew well. She was sleeping now, and he thought of how she’d wept a little when he’d checked on her earlier and how he’d told her everything would be fine and how grateful her face had been. Then he remembered the weeping of the other one and how he could not reassure her. Well there was only so much a person could do.
I would want it stopped, Nina said.
Well you’re not her, Teddy said.
What about what she said?
What?
I’d rather retire.
When did she say that?
The other day. I told you that.
You didn’t tell me. I would have remembered.
Aunt Grace came in following her dog and they were silent for a moment.
Oh, Aunt Grace, Constance said. D’you know anyone named Harris, someone Mother knew?
Aunt Grace pulled in her chin thinking. She shook her head. Then she remembered something. We had a cousin named Harry.
Who was he? Margie said eagerly.
Bit of a pansy. Sweet man.
Did Mother know him?
She must have met him. Why what’s she saying?
That he pulled her off a garden wall or something.
Margie and Nina laughed.
That doesn’t sound like cousin Harry, said Aunt Grace.
Or like Mother, Constance said.
The surface of the water was torn up and navy blue. She was out on the water when the news came about Paul. It was years later, it was years ago. Is there a Mr. and Mrs. Lord on board?
The girls must have burned down the house, Oscar had chuckled. Ann was below cleaning up the lunch dishes and heard the sails flapping and felt the boat stop, headed into the wind. She came up the steps into the bright cockpit and saw at the stern the Coast Guard boat and thought they were being checked for life preservers. The captain wearing a yellow slicker held the railing and was talking to Oscar and Matt Hallowell both of whom looked disturbed listening. When Oscar glanced back at her his face was frightened. He signaled to her to come forward, keeping his arm out as he turned back to listen, the arm suspended out as she clutched her way past the ladies’ legs, sensing something terrible in the way they watched, hair blowing in her eyes, the boat rising and falling with the swell. When she got near she heard injury to the head and Oscar turned and held her arm tightly and looked at her mouth not at her eyes. He said, It’s Paul. She turned to the Coast Guard man. What? she said. An accident, he said. Who was he anyway and why was he telling them this and how did he know and what was it? A Mrs. Abbott had contacted them … Ann looked at Oscar. It was instantaneous, Oscar said. A boat overturned on the river … his face was not equipped for this, he was shaking his head. When did this happen? Ann turned to the Coast Guard man bobbing up and down. We received a call this morning from a Mrs. Abbott, it happened yesterday evening and they reached her this morning in Cambridge from the camp apparently … Ann’s mind broke into pieces. Yesterday, she thought. Yesterday she’d gone swimming at dusk in a dark green cove where they’d anchored, the second night of their cruise, she’d eaten cheese on a cracker as the sun set, had he still been alive then? As she ate blueberries for dessert he was not, as she slept in the rocking boat he was not … she thought she would faint, the sails were flapping madly. The Coast Guard man below her was young with his slicker well worn and cracked and his voice was thin under the flapping and the wind when Oscar asked him, Did you speak with Mrs. Abbott? No, sir, he said. It wasn’t me. My wife took the message. Paul was at camp in Virginia where they did take canoes on rivers and Abbott was there in the house in Cambridge to receive the call. All that fit, but Paul was barely twelve and that this had happened did not fit. It did not fit at all.
15. SWIM OF THE SECOND HEART
Her forehead was pressed to the door frame. Now it begins, she thought. She stood there a long time. There was a noise outside and hope flared up—he was coming back—then she realized it was a door slamming up at the house.
She turned and went into the bedroom. She crossed the room and stood in a place she’d never stood before in the corner where probably no one had ever stood and pressed herself aga
inst the wall and closed her eyes. She remembered how he’d felt and it was like a stab into her and she sank into a heap. She began to sob and the sobbing grew in force till she thought her spine would snap and it went on she couldn’t tell how long. When it subsided she stared dumbly like an animal in shock. Her body felt numb and throbbed dully. Scattered around the room she saw things from long ago, the wedding. The green bridesmaid jacket hooked under a light fixture, nylons tangled in a chair, her jewelry pouch unzipped on the bureau. She heard a car and looked out dazed over the sill and recognized the red taillights of Ollie Granger’s car. So, they were finally calling it an evening.
A body can have no peripheral pulse and still be alive.
It was loud and shaking in the room.
Can this vibrating be very good? Mrs. Wittenborn said. And still no one answered. She held Buddy’s hand and still blew smoke back over her shoulder. Out the windows the horizon was constant. The lights on shore did not change.
The doctor stood above him, stethoscope in his ears, frowning as if determined to look serious. His quiet manner did not inspire confidence. He did not meet anyone’s eye. The brace he’d fashioned for Buddy’s neck out of knee braces had slipped down and didn’t appear to be doing any good. Then Buddy’s lips moved. The stern lines on the doctor’s boyish face went slack and he leaned down.
What is he saying? Mrs. Wittenborn stood up and stepped back to give him room.
The doctor pressed his fingers on Buddy’s throat and listened with the stethoscope to Buddy’s chest. Everyone watched except for Vernon Tobin who was sitting with his back to them, staring out the salt-blurred window.
Did he say something? Mrs. Wittenborn’s voice had a hysterical edge.
The doctor folded his stethoscope and looked at her blankly. He shook his head.
He was pacing outside on the lawn. A squirrel twitched, a blur in the flower beds. Soon she will be gone, he thought. Soon it will seem as if she is somewhere else, but she won’t be anywhere.
Teddy repeated these thoughts in order to make them real. Above him out of the quiet he heard a groan of pain. It came through the open window. The sound was otherworldly and deep and yet more real than anything around him. His heart stood still. He wondered for one panicked moment if it would beat on. It seemed it could not, then it did, it beat on. But he was rattled by the sound—to think that such a sound had come from his mother …
Through the French doors he saw the figure of his wife hurrying toward him, waving at him to come inside. She was without the children, here to pick him up. He let go of the thought of his mother, it was too hard to hold onto. He did not have the strength. Then it occurred to him how unusual it was to see his wife without the children. Since the twins were born his wife had changed. She was so taken up with them he hardly recognized her as the woman he had married.
A choice was before her. Either she could never move off the floor and stay forever among the folds of her green dress or get up quickly now and stand and do something. She thought, If I don’t move now I never will and unthinking her hand reached for the bed and she pulled herself up. She was a little wobbly. She stepped and slipped on a little rag rug and the room lurched and the jolt shot her back into herself and her balance came instinctively back to her. She stood tingling in the middle of the room.
He had made his decision. Later in life Ann would learn that when certain men made decisions no matter how much it might torture them afterwards they would stick with their decision. Men, she learned, would rather suffer than change their minds or their habits. They could develop elaborate systems for containing pain, sometimes so successful they would remain completely unaware of the vastness of the pain they possessed.
She had to get out, she could not stay there.
But it was so tiring, one foot in front of the other. It was a long way back to the bed. She paused at the window and saw the edge of a stone bench and the white hydrangea Oscar liked glowing in the dusk and the shadows gathering beneath the bushes. Oh god a sharp pain in her side nearly split her in half god that was a bad one. She pressed all her weight onto the sill. The nausea passed and her vision cleared and she looked down to the dark ground and beneath her saw sprawled the coat he’d spread and the two of them lying on it. If every life had high points and low points there would have to be one point higher than the rest, the highest point in one’s life. So, she learned, that had been hers.
A new thing had come to her after all.
A shadow moved beneath her. It was a person. She turned back toward the bed and saw a shadow under the door not moving. They were all around her, shadows moving and shadows not moving. No one knew who was watching whom.
She inched back to the bed and lay herself brittlely down. Across the ceiling his eyes appeared huge as parasols. Then he was sitting on the cedar chest at the foot of the bed, his shoulders and face turned away. She said his name. He dropped his chin in her direction showing that he heard her and tipped his ear toward her listening. Ann Lord did not get up again.
Lizzie Tull stepped over the raised threshold out of the throbbing room into the wind and the predawn light which was slashed by a yellow band along the horizon. She stood at the railing and dangled her hands in front of her with the water behind and stared past to the wake and waves without seeing any of it.
When the ferry docked in Rockland Harris Arden didn’t wait for the ramp to lower before stepping on and hurrying over to Lizzie who came out of the violet shadows with her arms crossed, shaking her head. We lost him halfway over, she said.
Harris Arden opened the heavy black door of the passenger area for her as Vernon Tobin stepped out. Vernon had an unusual stare and after one step tipped forward with his feet rooted to the floor. Harris Arden caught him and eased him back inside.
It’s O.K., he’s just fainted, said Harris Arden, as he and Lizzie Tull slumped Vernon Tobin onto the nearest seat.
The Wittenborns and the doctor down at the other end of the passenger cabin beside the body on the cot all looked to see another body being carried in the door. They looked without surprise, watching the way animals register the approach of a human in the distance, waiting to measure the danger before deciding there’s no need to run. Their faces looked as if they would never register surprise again.
Mrs. Wittenborns arm was curved around the head of her son.
She took off her dress. The dress belonged to the night and to him and she would never wear it again. She stepped out of it and put on pants and a shirt and tennis shoes and left the room.
There were no people in sight when she came out of the cottage and walked up the wet grass. It was growing lighter and instead of feeling hope with the lifting of the darkness she felt the beginning of all the battles she would have to wage for the rest of her life. She followed the dark footprints up the hill and where they turned toward the house she left them and took the path down to the shore. She would see him again, but it would not be the same. She felt the tug of fatigue inside her but also felt strangely airy. They were all asleep by now she thought and she wondered if Harris was sleeping too or if he’d gone first to the other woman. She wondered if he’d kissed her yet.
But no one had been asleep.
Lila and Carl were awake at the inn getting ready to catch their plane. Later when they called from the airport in Boston to say good-bye they were unable to get through. The phones on Three O’Clock Island, all three numbers, were busy.
Lila would never forgive her mother for not letting them know, for keeping her from knowing what any stranger who picked up the Boston papers Monday morning knew when they read about the accident on page three or what anyone stepping up the soft steps of the general store on Three O’Clock Island would overhear about the Wittenborn wedding. Gigi tried to persuade her mother to call them, but Linda Wittenborn found this was one thing she could still control. She could at least allow her daughter to have the one honeymoon she would ever have. Lila never wanted to think of that honeymoon again.
/> She thought instead of what she’d missed—their house on Brattle Street full of people mourning Buddy and how she’d never know the long nights of sandwiches put out at midnight and the card games and the radio playing the ball game behind the discussion of funeral arrangements and drinks being made morning noon and night and the flowers coming in and the letters piling up. Lila could read the letters kept in the ribboned boxes but she never saw the coffin in the church aisle or watched it being lowered into the ground at Mt. Auburn Cemetery or heard Gigi reading Edward Thomas’ “Rain” or seen Spring Tobin sprinkling dirt trance-like into the grave.
When Lila and Carl returned from their honeymoon they were met at the airport by all the Wittenborns standing there with terrible smiles. Lila knew right away something was wrong. Back at the Brattle Street house she went immediately up to Buddy’s room and stood in it feeling she was at the top of a mountain in thin air. She felt she’d turned into a block of wood except for the flame of fury inside at her mother. Buddy’s clothes were still folded in his drawers and his jackets were still hanging on their hangers. His shoes had the laces tied because he kicked off his shoes and she thought how his fingers had tied those knots. On his bedside table were some paperbacks, the top one was Raymond Chandler. A glass ashtray had a penny and some golf tees in it. Lila picked up a yellow tee and felt Buddy’s tooth marks on the stem.
Margie and Constance were reading the cards.
Ralph and Kit Eastman. These are pretty. This gardenia’s from Mr. Shepley.
That’s nice.
Margie picked a small envelope off a plastic prong stuck into orange and yellow lilies. This is from … Geoffrey.
Who’s that?
He does her hair.
Who’s this? It came yesterday. Constance took a card out of the bowl. Maria Arden.
I don’t know. I asked Mother but… Margie shrugged.
