“I can’t find Manitou,” I said.
“We’ll find him.”
“I can’t find him.”
He turned from the chairs. “Oh, Fern.”
“What if he washed overboard?”
“Come here,” he said and pulled me into a hug, then sat in a chair he’d righted.
“I want my bear.”
“We’ll find him,” he promised again.
“How do you know?”
“Because he would have had to go aft or on the bridge to wash overboard. Can he climb stairs?”
“Not by himself.”
“Well, then.”
“But what if he slid aft? I told him to stay with me. He didn’t listen. He was a very bad bear.” I sniffled. “Do you think I’m a bad girl?”
“I think you’re a very big girl to be so little.” He patted his lap and pulled me up. “It’s over. You’re safe.”
My whole body ached, but now I knew it was my arm. “You hurt your bad hand.”
“Banged it up is all. Piston in the starboard engine jammed when we came out of the turn. We have to put into port.”
I twisted on his lap. “Are we there?” I meant Menominee. Because if we were docking in Menominee we must have gotten through Death’s Door in the storm. We’d missed the man with the green light, and it was so rough if he’d come out to look for his children he might have been swept away.
He laughed. “Nowhere near. Captain had to change course to keep her afloat.”
“But we burned up all the dry coal.”
“We’ll take on more when we get to Manistique.”
“The cups in the galley broke. Everyone’s going to need coffee, and now there’s no way to drink it.” I began to cry. “I was looking for you.”
He stroked my back.
I dried my face against his good sleeve. “It was Dick Butler brought me up from the engine room. Even though he was needed below.” I couldn’t get over it.
“He’s got a good side, I guess,” Alv said. “Not that I ever see it.”
“He told me to pray for you.”
“I bet.”
“He did. He told me to pray for everyone, and I asked if that meant you too.”
“So did you?”
I nodded. “I prayed to Jesus. Do you think he listened? Because I never pray when they tell us to in Sunday school, and he might know.”
“I guess he must have. We’re alive.”
“Were you scared?”
He seemed to think about it. “No.” I could hear the smile that lit his face, this time for real. “No, no, I wasn’t. I was too busy.”
“I might have been a little bit scared,” I admitted.
“Of course you were. You were by yourself.”
“Do you think Whispers is okay?” It was the first I’d thought about our kitten since the storm began.
“Cats have nine lives.”
“But what if this was his ninth?”
“Well,” Alv said with deliberation. “If I was a cat and I had learned anything from my other lives, I don’t think I’d stow away on a boat with a bosun who hated cats. Especially if I was black cat.”
Slowly I nodded. “I think you’re right. He didn’t know any better, so this must be his first.” We were both of us wet and cold, but I took comfort in the rough canvas of his jacket. “What if your hand is hurt so bad you can’t play the piano?”
His breath stirred my hair. “Ah, Fern, I guess that wasn’t really going to happen. I’ll be a sailor.”
“Me too,” I said, just as my father opened the door to the lounge and scooped me up.
“She’s okay, sir,” Alv said. “A little hungry maybe, but Sam will fix us up.”
My father kissed the top of my head. “We’ve had a bit of weather, lille, but it’s okay now. You’ve been brave liten jente.”
I buried my head in the wool of his uniform, which was all wet because a wave had shattered the pilothouse windows, and with a muffled voice I promised, “Daddy, I did what you said. I never left my cabinet.”
36
What a liar I was.
37
When you own property on an Atlantic beach, you remember the names of the storms, not just the ones that struck, sending the ocean washing down the streets along with mattresses, appliances, and roofs, but the ones that threatened before they turned course or petered out, though not until you’d spent hours in front of the nightly news, tracking the radar images of the hurricane’s advance. Ed, my husband, and I hadn’t yet bought the cottage at Wrightsville Beach when Hazel hit in 1954. The first storm we sweated was Donna, watching TV back in Raleigh. I recall Bonnie because that year we had a bad nor’easter too and the north end of the island lost several feet of beach. And everyone in North Carolina remembers Floyd because it caused such terrible flooding down east. Oddly, the worst property damage Ed and I suffered was not at the coast but in Raleigh, when Fran came inland to knock the power out and topple the big willow oak in our front yard, sending it through the roof into a second-floor bedroom and totaling both of our cars. Bob was a Gulf storm, no risk to us, but we tracked it anyway because it seemed such a novelty to be following the first storm named for a man.
Then there are the catastrophic storms no one can forget: Andrew, Hugo, Katrina.
But on the Great Lakes even the worst storms come and go unchristened.
38
But I see I’ve failed to say much about my husband. I met Ed shortly after I finished college, where I learned to be a teacher instead of a sailor, and for a few years I taught first graders how to read out of the successors to my Elson-Gray primer, those Dick and Jane readers with their insipid family, Mother, Father, and little sister Sally, along with their pets, Puff the cat and Spot, who was, yes, now a dog. How privileged and oh-so-very-white they were, a bit of mischief the worst that ever befell their small, perfect world, though on the surface of it most of my students seemed to come from families just like them, and later you might have mistaken ours for one too. Those were more innocent times, people like to say, and I suppose they were if you consider that innocence is just ignorance dressed up in nice clothes. What harm, I have often wondered, did the lie those books told do to the children whose secret guilts, fears, or longings went unrecognized? This would have been the midfifties, an era that painted itself in the same bland colors as those books despite the dark tones beneath the surface. Did I err, I wonder now, in never telling my children about my childhood? And though you might think that over the years they would have asked, the truth is children have very little curiosity about their parents’ lives—they’re much too absorbed in their own. I know almost nothing about my own mother, but I have to wonder how much more I’d know if she had lived. And what was it about my own children that I failed to see as I went about the business of being a good wife and mother? I left teaching while I was pregnant with Ellen—in those days you weren’t allowed to teach once you began to show. Ed was an electrical engineer who got in on the ground floor of electronics, he made a good living, I didn’t have to work. Later I volunteered for the hospital, but I was home to sign the permission slips, bake the cupcakes, and chaperone the field trips as my children ascended through school. I didn’t return to teaching when they grew up because I felt I’d been away too long or maybe because I felt it had never been my true calling, though I suppose when I chose to teach first grade it would have been out of some desire to reclaim my own ignorance, to recreate that illusion of innocence by observing it in my students.
What can you say to probe deeper in a world so full of surface?
What are you afraid of? What do you want that you know you’ll never have? What have you done that you can never tell?
And what do you say to your own children when they come home each night, for in a way they are lost to you their first day of school, when they enter a world that excludes you and begin to accumulate secrets you don’t know enough to ask and if you did, would they answer? Instead you greet them
with those lame standard questions: How was your day? What did you do in school? and they respond with stunted words that say nothing. What feelings did they hide, those two children I loved as unconditionally as I had loved Alv, even though they grew up to become strangers, the way children often do.
I moved east, first for boarding school, then on to Wheaton College, where I was finished, certified, and stamped with approval. On graduation the president presented each of us young women with a favorite recipe written out in calligraphy on parchment that was rolled just like a diploma. Mine was for hamburger pie, and to tell the truth my family loved it, though by the time Ellen graduated from college she would have hit the roof if the chancellor dared to gift his female grads with recipes. There is a sea change between us that I can’t overcome as much as I would like. If I told her that I once longed to become a sailor, she would wonder rather impatiently why I didn’t, would insist I just didn’t want it enough, didn’t try. But for all the liberation she claims, the truth about Ellen is that she is domestic by nature and was from the start. Oh, she can criticize the toy kitchens, the Tiny Tears and Betsy Wetsies Santa brought because she doesn’t remember they were what she wanted. She was nothing like me, a girly girl, all baby dolls and frills, who at the age of three was already mothering her little brother. But these are things she would not like me to remember, even if she hasn’t really changed and now wants to mother me, much as she resents it.
Ed grew up in Plymouth and went to MIT. He too was an only child, and my children cannot know how deeply I regret that we could not provide them with cousins. Having had none myself I know what a wonderful gift that would have been. Ed’s parents were still alive when we married, and they lived on until their early seventies, when they died in quick succession, heart attacks for both, sparing us the need to care for them in their old age, the way Ellen thinks she needs to look out for me, though boss me around is more like it. I don’t mean to sound flippant. Small as Ed’s family was, I welcomed it and was welcomed into it. And then we created our own.
We met at a party in Cambridge. I had gone on from Wheaton to teach in Boston, where I enjoyed the old graveyards, the narrow streets of the North End, the riverfront, and easy distance to the Cape, though for me the ocean never quite equaled the lake, not at the north shore, not off Cape Cod, and not later in North Carolina, but that is hardly the fault of the ocean. That first year out of school I shared a two-bedroom apartment on Charles Street with three other women, all teachers like me. We had fun, but you wouldn’t exactly call it wild times, nothing like the extended youth my grandchildren are enjoying. There were parties on the weekends, and at one of them Ed and I struck up a conversation about a particular kind of tree that grows in the park between Storrow Drive and the river, though what tree—what its name is—I can’t remember. We talked about the trees, about the river and the Harvard boys who were endlessly out rowing for crew, we fell in love and got married, and then when we had children we talked about them. I have said that Ed was a kind man, and he was. I have no regrets about our marriage, though through those years of raising children and even after, the children seemed to be the middlemen around whom the marriage was conducted. But that is not so unusual, I think.
We had a good life, an ordinary life, and I guess that is what surprised me. Ed took a job, and we moved to North Carolina. We had two children, and there was to be a third, but I miscarried in my fourth month, and after that we were through. I loved Ed, I loved my children, bossy little Ellen and that quiet, scientific boy, Paul, who seemed to have been engendered by that first conversation Ed and I had at the party, for he was endlessly fascinated by nature, the plants and the bugs, and we were surprised that he didn’t major in biology; instead he took premed, met a Frenchwoman, and became a doctor in Nîmes. But I grieved for them too, for even in that more innocent time in a city such as Raleigh they lacked the freedom I had known, that easy access to the woods, to the lake, and to the river. Raleigh was too far inland, there was no river, no lake, no endless horizon. But then, as I say, who knows what secret lives my children lived? We took them to the state parks, to the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Smokies, we hiked, in the summer we went to the beach, Ed and I bought the cottage at Wrightsville, and later, when they were older, we traveled out west so they could see for themselves the grandeur of our country, the Black Hills, the Grand Canyon, Painted Desert, Bryce, the Arches, the Tetons, Yellowstone, Glacier, Yosemite, the Olympics, Mount Rainier, the Columbia River Gorge, Big Bend, Joshua Tree, King’s Canyon. It was my first time to see those wonders too, but we saw all that majesty as tourists, they didn’t grow up with it in their hearts and in their blood. It was their country, but it didn’t belong to them the way this little corner of Michigan once belonged to me. Perhaps Raleigh did, though they left it soon enough of their own volition. There was the beach, of course, three hours away back before the interstate, but there wasn’t much wildness to Wrightsville even then, and we didn’t live there, we owned a cottage that we rented out and used ourselves only a few weeks each year.
And then one day they were grown up and gone, and I mourned the way all mothers do. Ed retired, and we traveled. We toured Europe, even went to Norway, to the northern coast, where some of the Sami still practice their traditional way of life, though by now the greatest number of Sami live in Oslo, so assimilated most Norwegians bear some Sami blood. Ed enjoyed Karasjok, but I felt dispirited, sampling authentic Sami cuisine, hearing traditional songs, then buying souvenirs at the Sápmi cultural park. Somehow I had imagined discovering Sami herding reindeer and living their lives instead of demonstrating them for tourists, though I didn’t let on. Never in the fifty-nine years of our marriage did I let the past gurgle up in my throat, because I had swallowed it whole, just like the snow wasset once swallowed ships and their crews. My husband was a man who allowed me to live at the surface, and I was grateful to him because the surface was the only place I felt I could survive.
Of course, there was a war to worry about when our son was a teen, but it ended before he had to register. And though Ed suffered at the last—he had cancer—his suffering was mercifully short. I miss him, though I missed him more when I still lived in the house we’d shared in Raleigh, when I would turn around to tell him something only to remember that he wasn’t there, though what I meant to tell him, I can’t say. Little things. They’re what a life is made of, that quotidian of grocery lists and holidays, the bird feeder outside the window, the dogwoods in spring and tomatoes from the garden in summer, the succession of dogs and cats, the TV shows we followed, and news of the day, and then, before you know it, it is gone, all of it, even when you live a life as long as mine.
When Ellen was born, the wife of one of Ed’s colleagues warned me that a mother’s life is made up of long days and short years, but that is true for everyone, not just mothers. One moment you are a girl standing on the shore of a great lake and the next you are an old woman.
39
My father went down in the Armistice Day storm of 1940, which began late in the morning of the eleventh with southeast winds and rain that quickly changed to hurricane-force winds from the southwest and driving snow. At least that is how it began for him. In fact the storm had begun four days earlier, when a low pressure center off the island of Vancouver moved inland, destroying the new Tacoma Narrows Bridge. A secondary storm developed in the southern Rockies, and on the Texas panhandle winds reached 66 miles an hour. Today’s meteorologists describe such a storm as a Texas hooker, a low pressure system that moves east, then hooks around to the Upper Midwest. But in those presatellite days, without television or internet, we didn’t track storms the way we do now, and by the time word reached the Chicago weather office on the tenth, it had closed for the night. In Minnesota the holiday began with such mild weather duck hunters celebrated by turning out in shirtsleeves and light jackets. Before the storm was over more than fifty of them would freeze to death. That same morning in Chicago the temperature fell from 63 degrees to
20 in an hour. But at 8 a.m., when my father left Menominee for Frankfort, he must have anticipated blue skies and a pleasant journey.
It seems unimaginable now that no word came over the radio. Surely the destruction of the Tacoma Bridge would have been reported, though perhaps it was not considered national news or if it was I don’t suppose anyone in the Midwest thought it of concern to them. At any rate my stepmother paid little attention to the news. She listened to her music shows and took things as they came. And if my father had any premonition at all, the most he would have said to his crew was, “Well, boys, it looks like we may have to tolerate a bit of weather.” To us, my stepmother and me, he would have said nothing; he wouldn’t have wanted us to worry. He knew how sudden and fierce November gales can be, when cold air sweeps down from Canada, bumping against warmer air from the plains. Sailors call the resulting storms the Furies. But my father was a prudent captain, despite the railroad’s pressure. He would never knowingly risk the lives of his crew. Even when the Manitou had a leak the engineer failed to report, he brought us through the storm.
I was at school when the temperature in Frankfort began dropping and the wind began to howl around the building. At noon we walked home with the wind whipping at our backs, unaware that at the north end of the lake, at the Lansing Shoals light, winds would soon reach 126 miles per hour. Farther south, off Pentwater, the William B. Davock and Anna C. Minch went to the bottom. Another vessel in the same vicinity, the Canadian Novadoc, ran aground and broke in two in waves so tremendous the coast guard refused to go out to rescue her crew. At Ludington the Pere Marquette ferry City of Flint was unable to make the harbor entrance and had to be scuttled on the beach. Two other fishing tugs and a motor cruiser sank at the far southern end of the lake. My father’s ship was caught in open water on its return from Menominee. She went down with all twenty-eight of her crew somewhere between St. Martin and the Manitou Islands.
Across the Great Lake Page 19
