Sister Age

by M. F. K. Fisher

  The children sat in the middle, where the absurd shell was widest, and Mr. Henshaw settled in a casual way by the motor and the thing to steer with.

  She resolutely stared at the backs of the girls’ heads and the top of his worn old cap, until gradually the moving air pulled off her shroud and she could watch the bay flow away from them. Then they chugged slowly into little coves and swampy places at the south end, where the motor quieted and they sat waiting for birds, listening to the small water sounds from under the eelgrass and floating algae. Once, the old man lifted out his oars and rowed as silently as in a canoe toward some herons dozing on a mudbank, all with one foot up, swaying a little as they dreamed. The humans watched them for several minutes, and then the birds must have scented or felt something alien, for without any visible signal they rose together from the earth and flapped away, perhaps affronted by such an attempt at integration, or familiarity.

  By the time the Clara got back to the pier the sun was blazing. Mr. Henshaw, who had been even quieter than the rest of them during the two hours or so, helped them out, said, “That will be three and a quarter,” and tipped his cap as Mrs. Allen paid him the peculiar sum.

  They all thanked him, and then Holly said, in an alarmed way, “But how about tomorrow?”

  He laughed a little. “It’s up to you, Ma’am,” he said noncommittally.

  So they agreed to the same rendezvous, and walked back to the motel, and after sandwiches and sherry or milk as indicated they took pleasurable naps until time to go fishing or book reading, also as indicated. They had fried fish for supper, and after two nights of eating in the overcrowded, stuffy restaurant it tasted fine. And once in her bed, Mrs. Allen felt it rocking a little, like the Clara.

  Tuesday, and then Wednesday, they cruised around, not talking much. There was a little excitement in the port, with a couple of tuna boats taking on fuel, and a big haul of abalone to unload at the cannery. One of the old men caught an eel while Mrs. Allen was at the store, and the girls told her that Mr. Henshaw was wonderful with it, not afraid of its horrible teeth, its impossible strength. He pulled off its skin like a glove, while it was headless but still writhing, and of course he took home the best part for dinner. The mouth had kept snapping in the severed head and one of the men kicked it into the water and rolled up the skin to dry.…

  Thursday, though, they went out in the late afternoon, for a change of light, Mr. Henshaw said. They looked at the great Rock from several places on the darkening bay, and he talked about it. Gradually, he was saying more. He knew a lot about birds, fish, plants, and the children asked him questions and listened like hypnotized mice to all he said. And the mother came to know, but without asking, that he was one of the drifters who live in little ports or on the deserts in the cold months, picking up odd jobs when they need to, renting a shack or living in a trailer or a tent, fishing, or perhaps digging, in deserted mines. Then in the summer they head back for the mountains, to walk, hunt, pan for gold. “There are a lot of us like that,” Mr. Henshaw said without any implication of self-pity. “It’s a fine life for loners.”

  His wife had been named Clara. She was a very refined woman, he told Mrs. Allen on perhaps Friday morning—always frail, and a great reader. She spoke French and played the piano, and when she felt well enough she gave lessons in their house in Nevada City. When he had to be away there was a good lady companion for her. The house had a fine concert-grand piano in it, always tuned for her. The way he talked, over the sound of the motor or very quietly when they floated into a swamp canal, made Clara seem like a lovely shadow, something to be protected, a rare flower.

  “It’s too bad she had to die,” Holly said. She always came straight to the point.

  “Yes, it is,” he said mildly. “I did what I could, but it was no life for someone like Clara, to have me away so much. I was a mining engineer,” he added, as if he should explain his absences from the beautiful delicate woman. Then he made loud noises with the motor, so that birds rose angrily from the reeds, and the boat headed back to the pier.

  Each time they paid him, the sum was different, and always ridiculous: $2.79, $4.05. Mrs. Allen never smiled, nor did he. It was a game, and she could play it as well as he, and not yield him a point by asking why he charged these capricious fees for what had plainly become the main reason for their being so happy there—even better than being the best fishermen of the season, if not of all time.

  After Friday’s bill was solemnly settled, Susan said, “Mr. Henshaw, we have to leave next Wednesday. Early. So don’t you think maybe it would be all right to go out sometime this weekend, maybe for a half hour if you have a lot of business?”

  Holly did not say a word, but as was always the case when she felt something deeply, her face was white and her eyes were large and almost black. She stared up at him, sending out waves of appeal.

  Mr. Henshaw put his hand on her head and said to Susan, “No, honey. I’m all booked up. Regular customers. And I have some heavy thinking to do. But if it’s all right with your mother, we’ll surely make it on Monday, maybe at nine, because we’re in for some hotter weather. Is that O.K., Ma’am?”

  Of course it was, and they walked back almost dejectedly to the motel. The woman was surprised to find how much she would miss the slow cruisings around the bay, the sound of the Clara’s rambunctious little motor and then the lapping silence when they drifted toward resting birds, or hung over the boat side to watch fish and strange mud creatures below in the brownish tidal waters along the shore, or when they beached on secret bits of pebbly sand to fill their pockets with smooth pieces of jade, worn bottle glass, or, once, some rust-colored carnelian. It was part of a healing dream. They all needed more of it.

  That night after supper (canned soup, and eggs on toast, for the girls had had no heart for fishing that afternoon, and instead they had walked on the dunes), Mrs. Allen proposed that they simply close the door and go inland for a night. Susan and Holly were drawing listlessly, yawning and occasionally muttering pettishly at each other. They looked at her with amazement, and said, “Leave here? Leave everything just as it is? Where would we go, to be like this?”

  She looked around the shoddy, airless room where she slept on the couch at night and where they cooked at one end and ate in the middle. It seemed too safe, suddenly, too perversely alluring. The walls were pinned with dozens of the girls’ drawings. The coffee table was piled with books. The two rods stood in the corner, neat and ready for bait, for action. We must get out, she said to herself. We must practice, do a try-cake, before it is too late.

  “It would be fun,” she said. “You know what this place is like on weekends. We could leave everything just as it is, and go to Atascadero maybe, or stay in San Luis Obispo, and maybe go on up to San Juan Bautista … visit some beautiful missions, eat some good Mexican food.…”

  There was no real enthusiasm, but the next morning things looked bright and there was a definite spark of adventure in the air. It felt good to get into dry heat, away from the ocean. The hills were beginning to turn tawny, their lion color. The car ran like silk. They sang a lot, and to the mother the little port grew as distant as a night thought, except that the children were plainly preoccupied. At lunch at a drive-in, for instance, Holly said out of nowhere, “The thing I like about Mr. Henshaw is that he really smells so good.”

  Susan and Mrs. Allen laughed helplessly at her solemn manner, and the woman asked, “How do you know?” Then Susan grew serious, too, and they told her that when people are close together on the pier, or the wind is right in a boat, you can smell a lot. Some of the old men, no matter how nice, how helpful with trouble about lines and hooks and all that, really were what Grandfather would have called fruity. But Mr. Henshaw was clean the way Grandfather had been, with an early-morning smell of shaving soap if you got near enough (“Like about a foot away,” Holly said, chuckling), and always with a fresh shirt or white clean skivvy.

  Susan said, “Well, my favorite thing, what I mys
elf like best about him, is that moustache. I think all men should wear them.” She was very grave, thinking, no doubt, about the future.

  Her mother had a hilarious wish to quote the French quip that a kiss without a moustache is like an egg without salt, or something like that. But somehow she didn’t, and the talk shifted to something else, like whether to call ahead for rooms at a hotel or order apple pie à la mode and take a chance later.

  Thus the two days passed, while they were refugees from not seeing Mr. Henshaw for the short time, just as they were refugees from not seeing the other old man forever. Mrs. Allen was interested by how easily the girls talked about both men, with no real sadness. Susan asked, “How old do you think he is?” and her mother thought she meant the grandfather for a minute and then realized she meant the living man.

  “Maybe seventy,” she said, not caring.

  “Oh no!” both girls cried out. And Susan said, “That’s almost as old as Grandfather!”

  “Well,” her mother said crossly, “he was almost eigthy, and Mr. Henshaw is younger, much younger. He may not even be seventy.”

  “He doesn’t act it, anyway,” Holly said, and laughed proudly. “The way he handles that Clara, and jumps in and out … the way he gaffed that shark—”

  Susan took up the litany. “—Yeah, and who could skin a fighting eel like that, just one long pull, holding it with his foot where the head was? He’s a remarkably young seventy, I’d say,” and both girls bent over, cackling and giggling.

  So in a way the weekend was one long love song to the old beach bum, and Mrs. Allen was relieved that all she had to do was listen to it, and not add any verses of her own. What if they had asked her what she herself liked best about him? She was too old for such childish games. She would evade. She would be prim, and certainly not mention his eyes, his teeth. She would perhaps talk of how he showed them the herons, or the way he knew the tides.

  They headed home, home to their snug, shabby cave in the motel beside the lapping harbor waters and the night sounds of commercial boats heading out and talking with bells and toots. It felt fine to be back. They ate in their pajamas: hot milk toast, one of God’s better gifts to weary travellers. The beds were turned down in the other room, the couch was made up, the gimpy old bridge lamp was set in position for a few chapters of something as far back in the woman’s life as Treasure Island, when out of the coziness flew hard facts from her children. They exchanged a firm look that signalled “Now is the moment,” and Holly, who was always the more direct, said firmly, “We’ve been thinking about your getting married, Marnie.”

  Susan backed her up hurriedly. “Yes, we really think you should. We’ve talked it over a lot of times, even before Grandfather died, once we knew he would have to, and we’ve been looking around.”

  “Thanks very much,” Mrs. Allen said.

  “Well,” Holly said, “you didn’t have much time to do it yourself. But we knew you had to get a divorce, all right, and we love seeing Papa now and then, and the way we all still love each other even if he’s mostly in London and places.…” Her voice trailed off, and she looked pale.

  Susan picked up the thread, tactful as always. “The thing is,” she said earnestly, “that it would be good for all three of us to know a man to be with. Holly and I are still too young to be married. But you’re not too old, I guess.”

  “Thanks again,” Mrs. Allen said with fake politeness.

  Holly cheered up: she knew her mother was being sarcastic—a good sign of life or interest. “We thought for a while, after Grandfather died, or maybe it was a little before,” she corrected herself carefully, “about the milkman. He’s really a nice man, kind of fat, but he could lose it. And his wife died a couple of years ago of cancer. We asked him.”

  The woman felt helplessly moved and angered and touched and a lot of things she had pushed out of her conscious life. She felt like weeping. So she snapped, “For Pete’s sake! I don’t even know his name. I hardly know what he looks like. All I do is pay his bill once a month. You girls are out of your darling sweet meddling minds, all right. It’s the sea air, the salt, the iodine.…”

  “Grandfather didn’t die at Morro Bay, and we were thinking about it before then,” Susan said quietly, and her mother felt ashamed as well as stupid.

  “The fact is,” Holly said, “that we have been wondering if you might consider marrying Mr. Henshaw.”

  Mrs. Allen was astounded. The girls sat looking at her over their empty bowls. Suddenly they seemed very old—much older than she would ever be—and their eyes were stern but compassionate.

  Finally she said, in a plainly feeble attempt to be the head of the family, “We’re all tired. Let’s go to bed. Thank you both for thinking about all this, but we’re tired now.”

  She kissed them almost passionately as they lay silent but loving in their beds, and she had to work hard to follow the words in her book, so filled was she with tenderness and sorrow.

  ————

  The next morning they were waiting at the pier well before nine, and Mr. Henshaw had the Clara all swabbed down and some clean canvas on the seats for them. The girls were planning to leave their poles with an old pal on the pier, perhaps to flip out a bit of lunch after their early jaunt, but their captain said why not bring them along, so they raced back for bait and then they putted under way.

  Mrs. Allen wondered complacently if anyone noticed how well she now stepped into the little boat. But then, they had always been polite, if at all aware of her gradually slowing fear of being so close to the water and in such a frail craft. At first, that morning, she felt a kind of shyness, remembering the strange conversation of the night before, but the bay was so beautiful, and the children looked so brown and easy, and the man was so neatly shaven and brushed, with bright-blue eyes and white teeth and the perky old cap, that she was pervaded with well-being. Somewhere, invisibly into the merciful atmosphere that can absorb terrible things, she was shedding years of sadness, thin pieces of tired spiritual skin that floated up and melted forever into the air, like wisps of smoke, like a bird’s notes, up, gone into something else. She sat smiling behind her dark glases, looking over the glint of water toward the great Rock and the open rough sea beyond. The sun grew hot.

  Mr. Henshaw was more silent than ever, but finally he said above the sound of the motor, “Girls, how about trying a little slow trawling? I can slip up some back waters, and you fish over the prow there. Your mother can move back here facing me. Take your bait forward with you. You’ll need plenty.”

  Mrs. Allen made the shift cautiously, but with her new courage to balance her, and the delighted children baited their hooks and let them float out languidly as the Clara made a small wake on the shallow waters. She looked at the helmsman, the fisherman, the miner, the loner, and with a sudden inner clarity she knew what was coming.

  He took off his cap, and barely above the slow sound of the motor he said in a low voice, “I would like to propose marrying you. I know your name, but I’m not going to call you by it now. I am very serious. I love your children, and I could see to it that they learn what they are meant to do with their lives. You are a fine woman, from what I know. I would be away most of the time, because I live like this winters and I’m a mountain bum summers, but you could live anywhere you wanted to, and I would never bother you except to be your friend.”

  He put his cap back lightly on his thick white hair. He was looking at her steadily, thoughtfully, with great calm. She, on the other hand, felt confused and flabbergasted. The motor throbbed mildly along, and behind her she knew the girls were half overboard, trailing their baited lines. The wily little brats, she thought suddenly, the sneaky brats! This was all planned, a plot.

  “The girls don’t know my thoughts,” he said. “And to go on, while we can, I don’t smoke and you don’t, but it would not matter if you liked to. And I don’t drink, except maybe a beer with some fellow, when we turn up a big fish or a nugget. But I know you like good wines, an
d it would please me to offer them to you.”

  This is turning into a drawing-room comedy, she thought fiercely, out here in a beat-up rowboat in sweltering tidelands with a weird old man and two little sad, helpless, lonely children.

  He went on calmly, “They will be all right. I think Susan should have every chance to paint and dance, and the younger should be a lawyer or perhaps a doctor. I’ve been pondering all this, Ma’am. It’s short notice, but I’ve been thinking hard about it, and I hope you will, now that I have made myself clear.”

  She was numb, dumb, dry as a crumb—not peeved at the children anymore, certainly no longer affronted by this dignified attack on her hard-won separateness from the active human race, but simply numbed, struck dumb, dried out like an old crust on the shelf in an empty house. The sky lost color. The water was flat and dead.

  Mr. Henshaw said, “Yes, think about it, because there is not much time. You must leave for your duties. I must head soon for the mountains. I would probably not live to see the girls as fine beautiful women, but I would help it happen. I would be your helpmate.”

  He called past her blank face, “Tide’s changing, honeys. Time to head back. Reel in and hold on, and I’ll show you how the Clara can hit the top of the water.”

  By the time they docked, they were breathless and wet with spray and vibrating with excitement, even there on that little calm bit of bay. As usual, Mr. Henshaw handed them up and out. When Mrs. Allen asked him, straightfaced as usual in the game of his whimsical fees, what they owed him today, he laughed a little and said, “Today’s on me! This was my party, business and pleasure both!”

  “Oh, Mr. Henshaw,” the children said protectively, worried about his cavalier generosity.

  “Oh, Mr. Henshaw,” she said. She felt relaxed and fine with him, after the exciting ride back. His strange proposal was part of the dream she was in, already half forgotten or pushed away, at least consciously. She made a little joke and said, “You know, you’ll never be a millionaire this way.”