Authors: Luanne Rice
Josie didn’t play with children her own age. When she saw a kid, Josie would try to pretend that he wasn’t there. Children her own age, even deaf children, didn’t understand Josie, and they scared her.
“Hello, Josie,” Mrs. Kaiser said in her melodic, singsong voice, creaking down to Josie’s level. Cass could see that Mrs. Kaiser had not quite managed to zip her dress up all the way. She debated with herself whether or not to mention it, and decided not to.
“My Barbie,” Josie said, still defensive.
“She is a bee-you-tee-ful doll,” Mrs. Kaiser said. Cass found something fake in the way Mrs. Kaiser talked to Josie. She sounded like a kindly old grandmother with perfect pronunciation, but her expression was too crisp, vaguely critical. Cass always felt she was being judged by Mrs. Kaiser, coming up slightly short.
“I know,” Josie said.
“Mrs. Kaiser, may I talk with you?” Cass asked. Usually she left Josie alone for speech therapy; Josie refused to concentrate when Cass was around.
“Of course. Please, come into the office,” Mrs. Kaiser said.
Cass sat opposite Mrs. Kaiser’s desk, Josie in her lap.
“Josie doesn’t seem to be improving,” Cass said.
“Speech therapy is a long, difficult process,” Mrs. Kaiser said. “It’s natural to become discouraged, but you can’t give up.”
“She has the most terrible tantrums. She doesn’t hear clearly, we have a misunderstanding, and she …”
“I know. She flies into a rage. You’re not the only parent to tell me that. When a child is hard of hearing, every word is a stumbling block. You must make sure she’s watching you, make sure she can see your mouth.”
“I try.”
“Well, then,” Mrs. Kaiser said positively, her chin up. “That’s what you have to do, if you want Josie to be oral. You know the alternatives.”
“My husband has a hard time talking to her.”
“Keep after him.”
“And my family,” Cass said. “My mother’s all for North Point.”
“Heavens,” Mrs. Kaiser said. “Luckily, Josie isn’t her daughter. I’m sure your mother’s intentions are good, but I think that is the wrong program for Josie. Josie does hear. She does talk. Communication is difficult for her, but not impossible. Not at all. We
don’t want her closed off in a school for the deaf. We want her to live in a hearing world.”
“I know,” Cass said, twirling Josie’s hair while Josie walked Barbie down Cass’s thigh.
“Josie has another year before kindergarten. By then she and I will make excellent progress, and she’ll enter with other children her age.”
“Are you sure she’ll be ready?”
“She will have to be if you don’t want her in North Point or Special Needs,” Mrs. Kaiser said ominously.
Not for the first time, Cass thought of how much Mrs. Kaiser resembled Cass’s first-grade teacher, who had reminded her of a witch. An old lady who used sweet talk to hide a mean streak. What was Cass doing, leaving her daughter with a witch every week?
“Special Needs,” Mrs. Kaiser said again, shaking her head.
She made the words sound like a curse—which, in a way, they were. If Josie didn’t qualify for real kindergarten at Mount Hope Elementary, the school would stick her in the Special Needs class, where she and other deaf kids would share a room with Down syndrome, autistic, and emotionally disturbed children—kids with all different special needs grouped together.
“We’ll make sure she’s ready,” Mrs. Kaiser said. “Now, why don’t you leave us for half an hour, let us get some work done?”
Cass looked from Mrs. Kaiser to Josie. “I’ll be back soon, sweetheart,” she said, watching Josie.
“Bye, Bob,” Josie said, sliding off Cass’s knee. She seemed to enjoy Mrs. Kaiser, speech therapy, everything in the office; she never minded when Cass left.
“Uh, Mrs. Kaiser,” Cass said, rising. “Could I help you with your zipper? It’s just a little undone.”
“Oh, thank you, dear,” Mrs. Kaiser said gratefully, turning slightly, throwing Cass a real smile that a true witch could never have managed.
Cass smiled back.
S
heila Keating wakened with the sense of falling from the sky, and she grabbed her glass locket in a panic. Holding it against her chest, she felt her heart beating. It fluttered fast and unsteadily; it made Sheila feel she had a moth inside her trying to escape. When she opened her eyes she checked her knobby hand for silvery wing dust. She stretched in the easy chair where she’d been napping and tested the feeling of her feet on the floor. She wanted something cold to drink, but she wasn’t ready to move yet.
The glass locket felt warm in her hand, and she peered down at it. Nothing but a milky blur. “Goddamn it,” Sheila said out loud. She hated her cataracts. She’d been thinking about having them removed until Eileen Conway had hers done. Dr. Greaves had peeled off the cataracts, and now poor Eileen wished someone would turn out the lights; brightness poured in from everywhere, Eileen said, making her eyes blink and water, and she felt like a cunner in a fishbowl, longing for deep water and nice dark rockweed.
“Goddamn it!” Sheila said louder, because no one was home. Jimmy and Mary were off to work. Sheila shook the glass locket and watched the pearl rattle around. She wouldn’t want to bruise the pearl, but she liked to watch it move. When she had her hearing aid turned on, she could hear it rattle.
Eddie had given it to her the day they’d met: June 6, 1920. He’d been clamming on Easton’s Beach, showing off for Sheila and her friends from Providence. After he’d filled his bushel basket full of
cherrystones, he’d shucked one for a snack. Right there, in that pink clam, he’d found a pearl. He’d walked straight up to Sheila on the boardwalk and handed it to her. Placing it in her hand, his fingertips had brushed her palm. It was the first time a boy had touched her.
Just last month, lighting a candle in church, Sheila had put her palm near the flame and thought of that first touch. She had felt heat, and if she’d left her hand there, she would have burned it. What Eddie had made her feel was a surge, and Sheila should have known she couldn’t recapture it with a candle in church. Sometimes, if she closed her eyes and imagined her blue straw hat, the sound of waves breaking over the Easton jetties, and the smell of clams, she could remember the surge. Not feel it, certainly, but remember it.
“Eddie, I hate it here,” Sheila said out loud, but of course Eddie couldn’t hear her. He’d been dead many years. She wondered what he would have thought of her freeloading with Jim. He had never approved of their friends who lived with their grown children—not because he objected to their imposing on their children, but because he couldn’t understand how adults could give up their privacy.
“Well, I’m alone all day, for God’s sake, that should be enough privacy for anyone,” she said crossly.
“Who are you talking to, Granny?”
Sheila’s eyes flew open. She’d forgotten Eddie wasn’t here. Cass and Josie stood there instead, grinning at her.
“To myself,” Sheila said to Josie. “Don’t you ever do that?”
“Oh, yes,” Josie said. She climbed onto Sheila’s lap and stared at her, wide-eyed. Sheila gave her a squeeze. This was her youngest great-grandchild. She could hardly remember their names, but she knew Josie. Cass brought Josie to visit almost every day.
Sheila wished Cass wouldn’t dress like a boy. Cass was her prettiest granddaughter, all pink and gold. She had the coloring of the inside of a seashell. She had a beautiful figure, but you’d never know it from the dungarees and baggy shirts she went around in.
“You’re my favorite grandchild, you know,” Sheila said to Cass.
“Granny!” Cass said, embarrassed.
“Well, don’t worry. I won’t say it in front of your sisters.”
People never admitted they had favorite children or grandchildren, and Sheila didn’t know why not. You wouldn’t announce it to the world, but privately you had good reason for loving one more than the other. One might be sweeter, one might have the soul of Ireland, one might be a car thief. Of her two children, Sheila had loved Edward better. She loved Jim, too, but Ward was her elder, her kinder, her smarter son. From the day he was born until the day he died, a golden light had shined on him.
He had amazed his mother by never crying, by talking early, by exhibiting an interest in everything from ice-skating to clamming to watching her make pie crust. Sheila would let him flute the edges, and she would always make him a grape-jelly tart from the leftover crust. Although they’d started off calling him “Eddie, Jr.,” as time went on they changed his nickname to Ward; it was the stronger, more commanding half of “Edward.” Changing it was his father’s idea. Ward aced anything he did. Tests in school, sports—he could have played football for the Providence Steamrollers.
Sheila couldn’t see it from here, not anymore, but across the room hung a painting Ward had done in high school. It was a beautiful watercolor of two boys clamming the flats at Easton’s Beach; Sheila had always assumed Ward had meant the boys to be himself and Jim. He had caught perfectly the colors of a summer day, and he’d painted the boys to be strong, with their basket nearly full of clams. That painting was Sheila’s safe. Behind the painting, taped to the frame, was an envelope. In it she kept her children’s birth certificates, various deeds and IOU’s, and Ward’s death certificate.
When Ward was sixteen, his father founded Keating & Sons Fish Company and made Ward a full partner. The plural “sons” turned out, at first, to be optimistic; Jim hadn’t wanted any part of the business. Jim joined the merchant marine, and no one heard a word from him for five years.
He was gone for Ward’s going-away party. That day was still Sheila’s happiest memory: the day before her son left for war. In some ways, it was Sheila and Eddie’s last happy day. They had never expected to outlive one of their children; by now some acceptance
had seeped into Sheila’s bones, and the thought of Ward dead no longer shocked her. It had been fifty years. She kept all his postcards of the Rocky Mountains in the Douay Bible; Ward had been stationed at Colorado Springs, in training for the Air Corps, before going overseas.
Sheila opened her eyes. Cass was saying something. “What?” Sheila asked, blinking to get her in focus.
Cass’s mouth was moving, but all Sheila could hear were whooshing noises, like waves on the beach. “What? I can’t hear you.”
Josie reached up and grabbed Sheila by the left ear. The expression on the child’s face was very intense, as if she were concentrating on an important job. Thumps and screeches filled Sheila’s ear, and she realized that Josie was turning on her hearing aid.
“Can I get you anything?” Cass asked, the words suddenly clear enough to hear.
“A ginger ale,” Sheila said. “That would be very nice.”
There were ways and there were ways to catch swordfish. The method you chose depended on how much money you hoped to make selling the meat. The easiest, laziest way was longlining. You set a long line in the middle of the sea, with fifty or so baited hooks hanging down from red plastic buoys at ten-foot intervals. You checked your loran position, so you’d know where to come back to, and then you left the line overnight. When you returned at dawn you’d see a necklace of bulbous red balls bobbing in the distance. You’d pull up each red ball and its hook, one at a time. Hanging from a few of the hooks would be swordfish. Dead swordfish. Some chewed by sharks, others just dead and beginning to bloat.
Longlined swordfish didn’t fetch as high a price as harpooned ones. Sharks could rip out fifty dollars’ worth of swordfish meat, leaving a jagged hole. Even if you trimmed the edges, people didn’t want to buy raggedy fish. Not only because it wasn’t appetizing, but because something primeval in the customer twigged that the fish had died an ugly death: drowning with a hook in its mouth while sharks ate it alive. At least, that was James Keating’s theory.
Today he and George Magnano wanted to harpoon a fish off the books, to cut up and store in their freezers. Christ, just for the fun
of it. What a day: clear and fine, diamonds on the water. Jimmy stood beside George in the tuna tower while George drove. George owned a hell of a boat, a Grady White 25 with twin Yamaha 250s. There wasn’t a ripple from here to Montauk; they were bound to spot fins. Jimmy pulled his cap down low, to keep the sun off his face. He had a skin cancer on his nose, and Mary made him wear the hat and Sea & Ski.
“What’ve you got there? A softball team or something?” George asked, flicking the peak of Jimmy’s cap.
Jimmy took it off, handed it over. Blue mesh, it had a patch with the words “Keating & Daughters” in gold script. “Little League,” Jimmy said. “Cass’s and Bonnie’s kids used to play. I still sponsor the team.”
“They got you managing?”
“What, are you kidding? An old man like me? No, that’s for the young guys. This is a smooth ride, George. This boat drives like a Cadillac when she’s on her plane.”
“Hell, on a day like this you could take a Boston Whaler to Block Island and you wouldn’t feel a bump. Flat as glass.”
“You’ll pound your nuts off in a Whaler, no matter what the weather’s like. Cass’s boy T.J. gave me a ride in his last week, and I can still feel it.” Jimmy and George laughed at the painful memories of what a Boston Whaler could do to a man.
It felt pleasant to zoom along with no particular destination. Jimmy Keating felt free and young, the way he always did in summertime. Fishermen were transformed with the summer solstice. The instant the sun crossed the Tropic of Cancer, grown men would skip out of work, climb tuna towers, joke about their balls.
Throughout the dark winter and muddy spring, Jimmy had been having deep money troubles. He could barely keep his fleet going. Mount Hope harbor had been iced in for the first time in twenty-one years, and a lot of boats were damaged. Even Lobsterville’s profits were off. It sure felt good to get away, to stare across the waves at an empty horizon.
Back in Mount Hope, Jimmy would sneak out of work and walk along the waterfront until he came to old Doc Breton’s pier. Doc had run an icehouse when Jimmy was a kid, and Jimmy had liked
to hang around, listening to Doc tell about sailing around Cape Horn on a whaling ship and bringing ivory from Africa to Deep River, Connecticut. Doc was so old, he didn’t have a tooth in his head. His shipmates had called him Doc because he had a knack for first aid. He’d known how to apply a poultice, how to use a tourniquet, how to brew a broth that would settle any stomach in gale seas.