The Almanac Branch (17 page)

“Irresponsible in the sense that there was no hoax?”

“I don't know anything about hoaxes. I can tell you I've never lied to you, or to your brothers, or your mother. It's not how my life works, and I think you know by now, that's not how I want your life to work, either. Hoax. Grace, I don't know. She was bitter. I had my dream and was doing it.”

“She had hers too, you know.”

“I won't deny that. I still wish her dream had worked out with my own.”

“Faw, that's what I want to talk about.”

He was sitting with a pile of paper in front of him, and to me he seemed so fragile at that moment that I followed my instincts, and stood quiet. I was trying to figure out how a daughter speaks to her father. Since I didn't know what precisely it was I was getting at, or hoping to get at, I couldn't press any further than this. I decided the matter might best be laid aside. But while nothing revelatory came of our talk, something very concrete did come of it: Faw quite abruptly began to address me as an adult. He asked me what I wanted to eat for dinner. He asked me if I'd like to come with him to Portugal (I didn't—I preferred to stay at home,
that
would be my job in the Sprawl, to maintain the edge on the stationary, to be there, as they say, to be
there
for my father). I decided that, albeit his response to my questions about Neden and my mother's note was obfuscatory, clearly fudging, I was going to side with him, no matter what he was up to, no matter who he was. He was my father. He had for whatever reasons stuck by me longer than my beloved flare man, than my dear Desmond fantasy, than my mother even, and he was my core.

I still feel this way, though the core threatens to melt down, like that at the blushing center of some insensate nuclear reactor.

I may as well tell you about my husband, since I was destined to have one. For me marriage was five weeks or so of bliss, followed by years of ballasting. Even now I don't dislike my husband—as I say, we've never bothered to divorce, though we've agreed that if sometime one of us meets someone and would like to get married again, the other would not stand in the way of a divorce. Various of his friends have accused him of still being attached to me, or being lazy about things, and have told him that he ought to go ahead, given that we have been apart for so long, and get the matter legally finalized. I don't know—I don't reallycare—why it is that he's reluctant to file the papers. He knows I wouldn't fight him. For my part, I find that being married and not living with your husband makes for excellent defense on occasion. I still wear my wedding ring when I go out to parties, or to the movies with friends. It is antisocial as can be, but provides a distance. And while that chestnut about certain men being even more attracted to a woman who has a wedding band on is true, the wedding band can serve nicely in its capacity as a collar with which all comers may be restrained.

The drawn-out process of our separation is more indicative of our relationship than any detailed history of how we met, and fell in love. In brief, though, we met after I dropped out of college. I had gone to New Haven to study Russian. Faw encouraged me, as he believed even then that the next World War was going to be economic rather than atomic, and that a knowledge of Russian would be useful, because Russia was to become our ally—a not unprophetic analysis. But it wasn't in my fate to learn any language but English, and though I switched majors nothing seemed to work for me, and every class felt like an island class—I was the outsider, somehow, and couldn't fathom protocol, couldn't concentrate on lectures, so preoccupied was I with studying what the other students were doing, looking at what sort of pencils they wrote with, what clothes they wore, what quirks and oddities of character defined them. The most I could say for myself is that I became addicted to reading novels, mostly 19th Century, Austen, George Eliot, James; nothing assigned, of course—indeed to escape thinking about assignments.

I had determined to stay on in New Haven (actually East Haven, down near the sound) for a while, I didn't know how long, rather than move back to New York and live with Faw, or back to Shelter Island, where Djuna and Webster held forth—Webster had moved into the main house, to help her with keeping up Scrub Farm, as Faw still had a habit of going out on weekends; it had become moreand more the place where he felt he could think most clearly. Often, I took the ferry over from New London to Orient, where Web picked me up, and spent Sunday with them, talking, eating and—when Faw went up to his bedroom to make phone calls—watching television. I loved those Sundays, but after I stopped going to classes altogether, after I made no pretense either to my professors or myself about my interest in continuing toward a degree, it became harder to go to the island and face him, to sit at the pine table in the kitchen and invent subjects that were discussed in classes I'd cut, talk about the Bulldogs and what sort of scores their teams were producing on ludicrous lawns in ludicrous stadiums, and all the rest.

My youthful adoration of Shahrazad, it became apparent those Sundays, was not misplaced. I loved her for the latticework of fictions she was able to invent in order to save her life and the life of her sister, but the more I tried to invent, to lie, the more I appreciated how easy it was to initiate, how difficult to sustain. Faw was no King Shahryar, either—neither so ruthless, nor so easily taken in, he remembered the slightest detail of anything I mentioned, and there was no statute of limitation on his memory. My stories had begun to entangle themselves, much the same way I have seen fishermen who are greedy and not content to be working one line but must have three or five going at once can get tangled while the surf keeps rolling in and the hooked fish begins to run one line over and under another.

I confessed. And was surprised, as ever, by the response. Faw, who professed to hating quitters, presented absolutely no resistance to my dropping out of school. “Fine by me,” he said, “what do you think, Djuna?” Djuna was still one to toe the middle course, but allowed that she had never got a degree. “And a fine lot of good that's done you,” Webster said, but he was called down with laughter. It didn't seem to matter. “And so what are you doing over there, for godsakes, why don't you come back home?” Thiswas the question I had hoped to avoid, because in fact I didn't know the answer to it, but did know that home was somewhere I wasn't ready to come to yet.

I then told another Shahrazadesque lie. “I've met someone.” Djuna placed her fork down noisily in her plate. “Met someone,” Faw said. “Yes.”“Is it serious?” Djuna asked—it was a straight television line, and I appreciated it, because to that I could make a straight television answer, “I don't know yet.”

Whether it was predestined or because I felt myself under the need to fulfill the expectations that were generated by my lie there is no saying, but on a Tuesday—a fall day crackling with dead leaves that tripped down Orange Street toward the red cliffs above the monument park where I had hoped to finish my walk—I met him, he was walking too, the man who was going to be my husband, and we talked, I can't even say exactly why, and sat on a bench, and then later wound up drinking silly concoctions at Archie Moore's bar, and Desmond, and the flare man, and all my childhood and adolescent furies were set free. True, I was a little drunk, but I remember vividly what it was like being with him, the streetlight glow coming down through the bay window in the huge old house where he rented a room. We were in that room for three days. We ate what food he had, but never went out, except for an hour or so in the evenings, to Archie Moore's, which was right around the corner. And the bartender knew what was going on even before we did, he quipped, So when are you going to get married? We got our blood tests on the fourth morning, got our license. After that, of course, what could we do but get married, and so we did.

We drove north for our honeymoon, far up into Canada, because I had got it in my mind I wanted to see the Aurora Borealis. He went along with the scheme, though he told me that the chances we would actually see the auroral lights were slim. I knew we would. We slept in the back of the station wagon we had bought for the excursion, buriedunder blankets. The higher the latitude, the more my anticipation grew. We'd been two weeks out from New York when Warne (spelled self-consciously thus, pronounced like “warren” of rabbits, an animal we were destined not to emulate) became impatient with my quixoticism, and we had our first argument. “Don't you think that we better put some kind of time limit on this thing?”“Why?”“Because enough is going to be enough is why, and why is it so important that we see the aurora anyway?”“I don't know,” I admitted. “Well, I think we ought to go back. It's ridiculous what we're doing. It's cold up here”—it was, too, that day, rain in sheets across the rich brown landscape—“and if something goes wrong with the car—”

I wondered, that night, whether in some implacable and immature way I was trying to emulate my father, the traveler, the quester, the Don Quixote. My poor husband had a reasonable point.

To keep the peace I agreed to three more days and nights, no more. Standing out with him along a desolate stretch of farm road that was the thinnest line on our map, hundreds of miles north of the border, and witnessing the green-yellow pulsing bundles of light, on the second night of the allotted three, was the high point of the marriage. I knew we'd see them, the lights, and we did. Discharges across the length of the sky arced at such great altitudes before us that none of it seemed real at all. Overhead, and back behind us to the south, the stars brightened the heavens, and the canopy before us winked and raced with magnetic flames. It was a huge, electrical curtain. The windows in the back of the wagon fogged with our sleeping breath that night, and the next morning we turned back.

When Warne took the offer of a job from my father, my adoration of him—which had been, as I say, so strong for a short period—took a blow. It wasn't fair of me to think less of him for having taken Faw up on what was, after all, not such an unusual arrangement between fathers and sons-in-law, but I couldn't help myself. There was something too subordinate in it for
me
(does this sound grossly selfish, grossly unpalliative?); here I was, someone who'd never looked on Faw as a presence, more an absence, and this agreement between the two of them brought him in as benevolent dictator, or so it felt. “He treats me just like anyone else in the company,” Warne sighed, not liking the platitude any more than I did.

I proposed several lame alternatives, one of which was to move up to Canada and become farmers. Of course, when Warne countered that I wouldn't know “one end of a pitchfork from another” I couldn't legitimately disagree. “We can learn,” I said, and I could see how frustrated he was with my moody idealism.

He stayed with Geiger, and the breach, having been opened, kept widening until I had to tell him, one morning before he was about to leave our little apartment on the West Side for work, “I don't love you anymore.” Perhaps it was the strength of Mother's note to my father when she'd decided to leave him for Segredo, that I drew on—such irony, since part of me would always hate her for that note—because while I hardly knew what I was talking about, I was able to argue with some skill about my decision to leave. “We don't have to be final about anything,” was what I said, avoiding, and consciously so, Erin's pattern of finality. He went ahead to work. The subtleties of guilt have never troubled Warne much, and the vigilant work he has done for Geiger over the years probably never rubbed up against whatever ego he's got hidden there somewhere inside his handsome head.

After the marriage broke down I developed a passion for secrecy. What other people didn't know wouldn't hurt them, and by the same token what they didn't know they wouldn't be able to use to hurt me. It was an even exchange, and one controlled by myself, which was the way I was learning to like things, or so I thought.

I packed with every intention of going to Cyprus. Knowing nothing about Cyprus I settled on it as my destinationin the same way Faw had chosen Shelter Island. Cyprus drew me to itself by not just an attraction to a sound, or the thought of some shaggy-barked pine; no, there was a logical sequence behind my attraction. Cypress is a tree, and trees are wood. Wood is not metal, and metal is what Gabriel Segredo loved. What Gabriel Segredo loved I was duty-bound to hate. And so Cyprus made irrefutable sense.

There were two problems with my plan, though. For one, unlike Canada, there was strife in Cyprus. And, two, unlike Faw—and later on Berg, too—I had come to realize that there was never going to be solace for me in travel. The road meant only more confusions, more details for me to be unable to absorb and try, and probably fail, to understand. I already felt alienated from myself, from my confused husband, and everyone else around me. Why objectify such loneliness in hotel rooms, listening through their thin walls to conversations in languages I couldn't begin to comprehend? I was in no mood to tear my hair out for no good reason.

Djuna answered when I called. She had aged, which came as a surprise to me, I could hear it in her voice—yes, aged, even though it hadn't been such a long time since last we spoke: maybe it was that I could hear with some greater accuracy. Maybe it was I who had changed.

She was enthusiastic about my “coming home,” and disbelieving about the finality with which I spoke of my separation (my comment to Warne notwithstanding). I packed a few things, and left that same morning. It was autumn, dry, and burnt-orange everywhere. The rented car felt consoling around me as the landscape, the warehouses, the overpasses, and industrial mayhem, softly fell behind me, giving way to the flats and farms of the end of the island.

When I pulled into the drive, the first thing I did was to walk down past the orchard to the marsh. The osprey nest was still there, atop its utility pole with its rusted cylindrical power box and salt-eaten lines. It looked more substantial and solid up there on its perch than ever. I realized, atonce, why. The ospreys had been coming back every year, mating, raising their brood, and adding to the nest. How could I have doubted that it would still be there? It had become a symbol of stability for me, I knew, as I walked, a plain and shameless smile across my face, back to the house—and I was glad I'd placed my superstitious trust in something as durable as that nest. The next morning, when I got up, I looked out into the cherry tree, and there was nothing there but branches and leaves and sour fruit that the birds were plucking. As much as I liked the sensation of being here, I looked at my suitcase and knew where I had to go. Scrub Farm was close, but wasn't right. Just as I'd been brought to Shelter Island when I was a girl, Shelter was what I should leave to become a woman. I didn't unpack. Djuna was less surprised by all these changed plans than I might have expected. She stood on the porch as I drove away, and I could see her in the rear-view mirror as she walked back inside to telephone my father, as I'd asked her, to tell him to expect me in New York by early afternoon. On the way in I stopped at a roadside vegetable stand after the ferry had docked and bought several stalks of Brussels sprouts, a burlap bag of potatoes, and some squash. I looked forward to seeing my father. I wanted to ask him whether, in all his travels, he had seen the Aurora Borealis.