Duma Key (21 page)

“What does it say to you?” she asked. “Wireman? Edward? Either?”

That was a very minor slip, but of course I was attuned to slips. And that time my own name was the banana peel.

“Recess?” Wireman asked, and shrugged.

“Of course not,” she said. “If it were recess, they'd be
playing,
not all bunched together and gawking.”

“It's either a fire or a fire drill,” I said.

She leaned over her walker (Wireman, vigilant, grabbed her shoulder to keep her from overbalancing), and planted a kiss on my cheek. It surprised hell out of me, but not in a bad way. “Very good, Edward!” she cried. “Now which do you say it is?”

I thought it over. It was easy if you took the question seriously. “A drill.”

“Yes!” Her blue eyes blazed with delight. “Tell Wiring why.”

“If it was a fire, they'd be scattering in all directions. Instead, they're—”

“Waiting to go back in, yes.” But when she turned to Wireman, I saw a different woman, one
who was frightened. “I called you by the wrong name again.”

“It's all right, Miss Eastlake,” he said, and kissed the hollow of her temple with a tenderness that made me like him very much.

She smiled at me. It was like watching the sun sail out from behind a cloud. “As long as he is still addressing one by one's surname, one knows . . .” But now she seemed lost, and her smile began to falter. “One knows that . . .”

“That it's time to watch
Oprah,
” Wireman said, and took her arm. Together they turned her walker away from the play-table, and she began to clump with surprising speed toward a door in the far end of the room. He walked watchfully beside her.

Her “television room” was dominated by a big flat-screen Samsung. At the other end of the room was a stack of expensive sound components. I hardly noticed either one. I was looking at the framed sketch on the wall above the shelves of CDs, and for a few seconds I forgot to breathe.

The sketch was just pencil, augmented by two scarlet threads, probably added with nothing more than a plain red ballpoint pen—the kind teachers use to grade papers. These not-quite-offhand scribbles had been laid along the horizon-line of the Gulf to indicate sunset. They were just right. They were genius writ small. It was
my
horizon, the one I saw from Little Pink. I knew that just as I knew the artist had been listening to the shells grind steadily beneath him as he turned blank white paper into what his eye saw and his mind translated. On the horizon was a ship, probably a tanker. It could have been the very one I'd drawn my first evening at Number 13 Duma Key
Road. The style was nothing at all like mine, but the choice of subject-matter was damn near identical.

Scribbled almost carelessly at the bottom:
Salv Dalí
.

iv

Miss Eastlake—Elizabeth—had her cigarette while Oprah questioned Kirstie Alley on the always fascinating subject of weight-loss. Wireman produced egg salad sandwiches, which were delicious. My eyes kept straying to the framed Dalí sketch, and I kept thinking—of course—
Hello, Dalí
. When Dr. Phil came on and began berating a couple of fat ladies in the audience who had apparently volunteered to be berated, I told Wireman and Elizabeth that I really ought to be getting back.

Elizabeth used the remote to silence Dr. Phil, then held out the book the remote had been sitting on. Her eyes looked both humble and hopeful. “Wireman says you'll come and read to me on some afternoons, Edmund, is that true?”

We're forced to make some decisions in a split second, and I made one then. I decided not to look at Wireman, who was sitting to Elizabeth's left. The acuity she'd exhibited at her play-table was fading, even I could see that, but I thought there was still quite a lot left. A glance in Wireman's direction would be enough to tell her that this was news to me, and she'd be embarrassed. I didn't want her to be embarrassed, partly because I liked her and partly because I suspected life would hold a great many embarrassments for her in the year or two ahead. It would soon be more than forgetting names.

“We've discussed it,” I said.

“Perhaps you'd read me a poem this afternoon,” she said. “Your choice. I miss them so. I could do without
Oprah,
but a life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is . . .” She laughed. It was a bewildered sound that hurt my heart. “It's like a life without pictures, don't you think? Or don't you?”

The room was very quiet. Somewhere else a clock was ticking, but that was all. I thought Wireman would say something, but he didn't; she had rendered him temporarily speechless, no mean trick when it came to that
hijo de madre
.

“It can be your choice,” she said again. “Or, if you've stayed too long, Edward—”

“No,” I said. “No, that's all right, I'm fine.”

The book was simply titled:
Good Poems
. The editor was Garrison Keillor, a man who could probably run for governor and be elected in the part of the world I came from. I opened at random and found a poem by someone named Frank O'Hara. It was short. That made it a good poem in
my
book, and I waded in.

“Have you forgotten what we were like then

when we were still first rate

and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

“it's no use worrying about Time

but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves

and turned some sharp corners

“the whole pasture looked like our meal

we didn't need speedometers

we could manage cocktails out of ice and water . . .”

Something happened to me there. My voice wavered and the words doubled, as if the word water from my mouth had summoned some in my eyes. I looked up and said, “Pardon me.” My voice was husky. Wireman looked concerned, but Elizabeth Eastlake was smiling at me with an expression of perfect understanding.

“That's all right, Edgar,” she said. “Poetry sometimes does that to me, as well. Honest feeling is nothing to be ashamed of. Men do not sham convulsion.”

“Nor simulate a throe,” I added. My voice seemed to be coming from someone else.

She smiled brilliantly. “The man knows his Dickinson, Wireman!”

“Seems to,” Wireman agreed. He was watching me closely.

“Will you finish, Edward?”

“Yes, ma'am.

“I wouldn't want to be faster

or greener than now if you were with me O you

were the best of all my days.”

I closed the book. “That's the end.”

She nodded. “What were the best of all your days, Edgar?”

“Maybe these,” I said. “I'm hoping.”

She nodded. “Then I'll hope, too. One is always allowed to hope. And Edgar?”

“Yes, ma'am?”

“Let me be Elizabeth to you. I can't stand being a ma'am at this end of my life. Do we understand each other?”

I nodded. “I think we do, Elizabeth.”

She smiled, and the tears that had been in her own eyes fell. The cheeks they landed on were old and ruined with wrinkles, but the eyes were young. Young.

v

Ten minutes later, Wireman and I were standing at the end of the
Palacio
boardwalk again. He had left the lady of the house with a slice of key lime pie, a glass of tea, and the remote control. I had two of Wireman's egg salad sandwiches in a bag. He said they'd just go stale if I didn't take them home, and he didn't have to press me too hard. I also hit him up for a couple of aspirin.

“Look,” he said, “I'm sorry about that. I was going to ask first, believe me.”

“Relax, Wireman.”

He nodded but didn't look directly at me. He was looking out at the Gulf. “I just want you to know I didn't promise her anything. But she's . . . childish now. So she makes assumptions the way kids do, based on what she wants rather than on the facts.”

“And what she wants is to be read to.”

“Yes.”

“Poems on tapes and compact discs don't cut it?”

“Nope. She says the difference between recorded and live is like the difference between canned mushrooms and fresh ones.” He smiled, but still wouldn't look at me.

“Why don't you read to her, Wireman?”

Still looking out at the water, he said: “Because I no longer can.”

“No longer . . . why not?”

He considered this, then shook his head. “Not today. Wireman's tired,
muchacho,
and she'll be up in the night. Up and argumentative, full of rue and confusion, liable to think she's in London or St. Tropez. I see the signs.”

“Will you tell me another day?”

“Yeah.” He sighed through his nose. “If you can show yours, I suppose I can show mine, although I don't relish it. Are you sure you're okay to get back on your own?”

“Absolutely,” I said, although my hip was throbbing like a big motor.

“I'd run you in the golf cart, I really would, but when she's this way—Dr. Wireman's clinical term for it is Bright Going On Stupid—she's apt to take it into her mind to wash the windows . . . or dust some shelves . . . or go for a walk without her walker.” At that he actually shuddered. It looked like the kind that starts out as burlesque and ends up being real.

“Everybody keeps trying to get me into a golf cart,” I said.

“You'll call your wife?”

“I don't see any other option,” I said.

He nodded. “Good boy. You can tell me all about it when I come to look at your pictures. Any time'll work. There's a visiting nurse I can call—Annmarie Whistler—if the morning works better.”

“Okay. Thanks. And thanks for listening to me, Wireman.”

“Thanks for reading to the boss.
Buena suerte, amigo
.”

I set off down the beach and had gotten about fifty yards before something occurred to me. I turned back, thinking Wireman would be gone, but he was
still standing there with his hands in his pockets and the wind off the Gulf—increasingly chilly—combing back his long graying hair. “Wireman!”

“What?”

“Was Elizabeth ever an artist herself?”

He said nothing for a long time. There was only the sound of the waves, louder tonight with the wind to push them. Then he said, “That's an interesting question, Edgar. If you were to ask her—and I'd advise against it—she'd say no. But I don't think that's the truth.”

“Why not?”

But he only said, “You'd better get walking,
muchacho
. Before that hip of yours stiffens up.” He gave me a quick
seeya
wave, turned, and was gone back up the boardwalk, chasing his lengthening shadow, almost before I was aware he was leaving.

I stood where I was a moment or two longer, then turned north, set my sights on Big Pink, and headed for home. It was a long trip, and before I got there my own absurdly elongated shadow was lost in the sea oats, but in the end I made it. The waves were still building, and under the house the murmur of the shells had again become an argument.

Start with what you know, then re-invent it. Art is magic, no argument there, but all art, no matter how strange, starts in the humble everyday. Just
don't be surprised when weird flowers sprout from common soil. Elizabeth knew that. No one taught her; she learned for herself.

The more she drew, the more she saw. The more she saw, the more she wanted to draw. It works like that. And the more she saw, the more her language came back to her: first the four or five hundred words she knew on the day she fell from the cart and struck her head, then many, many more.

Daddy was amazed by the rapidly growing sophistication of her pictures. So were her sisters
—
both the Big Meanies and the twins (not Adie; Adie was in Europe with three friends and two trusty chaperones
—
Emery Paulson, the young man she'll marry, had not yet come on the scene). The nanny/housekeeper was awed by her, called her
la petite obéah fille.

The doctor who attended her case cautioned that the little girl must be very careful about exercise and excitement lest she take a fever, but by January of 1926 she was coursing everywhere on the south end of the Key, carrying her pad and bundled up in her “puddy jacket and thumpums,” drawing everything.

That was the winter she saw her family grow bored with her work
—
Big Meanies Maria and Hannah first, then Tessie and Lo-Lo, then Daddy, then even Nan Melda. Did she understand that even genius palls, when taken in large doses? Perhaps, in some instinctive child's way, she did.

What came next, the outgrowth of their boredom, was a determination to make them see the wonder of what
she
saw by re-inventing it.

Her surrealist phase began; first the birds flying upside-down, then the animals walking on water, then the Smiling Horses that brought her a small measure of renown. And that was when something changed. That was when something dark slipped in, using little Libbit as its channel.

She began to draw her doll, and when she did, her doll began to talk.

Noveen.

By then Adriana was back from Gay Paree, and to begin with, Noveen mostly spoke in Adie's high and happy lah-de-dah voice, asking Elizabeth if she could hinky-dinky-parley-voo and telling her to ferramay her bush. Sometimes Noveen sang her to sleep while pictures of the doll's face
—
large and round and all brown except for the red lips
—
scattered Elizabeth's counterpane.