“I worry about Charlie,” Mrs. P. was saying now to Agnes. “They all go through their phases, but this has been going on too long, don’t you think?”
“He needs to get a job or be in school,” Agnes said.
“Helen”—Mrs. P. paused—“expects a lot of him. And she should—he has so much potential, but there are ways . . .” She frowned. “I’d like to find a way to lift his spirits a little.”
“I might know where the compass is.” Bea let the words escape before she could change her mind.
Mrs. P. turned. “Do you, Bea? Wonderful! Why didn’t you say so?”
“It just now came to me.”
She went into the hall, retrieved the compass, shut the drawer and stood with it, closing her fingers over the small brass circle and trembling needle. Then she crossed into the room and held it out. “It’s a bit tarnished. I can polish it up.”
Mrs. P. took it. “Charlie will love it, if it still works.” She put on her reading glasses, turned toward the doorway and held the compass in her palm. “Oh, yes—you see! True north.”
G
AGA HAD INVITED
Charlie to come over, and he’d wanted to, but as he sat there in the living room, an armchair where Grampa’s wheelchair used to sit, he could feel her studying him. (“She pays more attention to her grandchildren than she ever did to us,” his mother had remarked recently, without apparent bitterness.)
“It must be so peaceful here with none of us around,” Gaga said. “I’d love it.”
He gave her a look. They both knew she’d be bored to death.
“I hope it’s helping a little bit,” she said.
Charlie allowed something between a nod and a shrug.
“Your mother’s concerned, you know. About your health. The . . . well, the blood issue, for one thing. I don’t tend to get alarmed, but it does bear investigating, and by the right people. We know a first-rate urologist in New York. You could come stay at the Lowell for a night. With this sort of thing, there’s no reason not to go straight to the top.”
“My doc in New Bedford,” Charlie said, “won the Nobel Prize for Piss.”
Gaga smiled. “Is college interesting for you, Charlie?”
“Sometimes.”
“I’m jealous, you know. To think I never even went to college. All those courses to choose from! What’s your favorite so far?”
He shrugged. “It’s hard to say.”
“I can see how with everything that’s going on, college might feel”—she flung her hand out—“irrelevant.”
She meant because of the war, for him merely a rattling in the distance, especially since he’d stopped watching the news.
“Anyway,” she said, “it’s nice to have you back. I didn’t like your being so far away, though I admire your independence. You’re like your mother in that way. Listen, dearie, I have your birthday present. Sorry it’s late.” She pulled a small box from behind her on the couch and handed it to him. He lifted the lid. Inside sat a little compass, and under it, providing padding, some folded twenty-dollar bills; he wanted to count how many but did not.
“Oh,” he said. “Thanks, Gaga. I don’t have one.”
“It was Grampa’s. Bea dug it out from somewhere.”
“Wow. Thanks.”
“No need to mention it to the others. It’s not valuable or anything—it’s just a camping compass—but I think he’d want you to be the one to have it. He was a great hiker and woodsman when I first met him, you know. Like you are. Nonstop.”
“Thanks,” he quacked again, a bird with only one call.
“It gets harder to find you things as you get older.”
“I
like
it.”
With a sudden violence, he missed his grandfather: the polished shoes in their braces, the kind smile, the sense Grampa always gave off of having come through a storm and emerged bent but not broken. It was Grampa who’d taught him to memorize poetry, to read maps, to tell one fighter plane from another—the P-51 Mustang, the P-61 Black Widow, the F-86 Sabre; Charlie built the models while his grandfather’s voice walked him, with slow precision, through the steps. His uncle Charlie’s plane, the one he’d copiloted, had been a B-24 Liberator, with compartments for nine men. He was nuts about that plane, Grampa had said, but he never produced a kit of the B-24. It was Grampa who’d taught Charlie that if you sailed from the tip of Ashaunt straight across the ocean, you’d land in Spain. Supposedly he’d had a terrible temper when he’d first gotten sick, but Charlie had never seen it, and he wouldn’t put it past his mother and Dossy (whose childhoods were oversized, antic, in their tales) to have exaggerated.
“Enjoy it,” Gaga said. “Have new adventures with it. Explore. He’d want you to.”
Charlie put the compass in its box and closed the lid. Implicit in her comment, her gift, in nearly everything she said, was a critique aimed at him, he who was not enjoying life, who saw only holes and absences. And she was right, which made it worse. When he was small, being here—in the Big House living room with her and Grampa—had brought him to his home place. There was the grown-ups’ black coffee after Sunday lunch, and for the children, a sugar cube—just one—to plunge into the demitasse cup, then set bittersweet and grainy, melting, on your tongue. He could sit at their feet or wander like a cat, come and go, return again, no judgment anywhere, just a sense of
this is where we live
. Now, even here, he felt out of place, dropped down in this room with its painted gray floors, pale blue walls and ocean view, with its dignified, aging woman, bewildered and slightly repulsed (though she did her best to hide it) by his troubles. Like his mother, Gaga wanted him to get a grip.
“So much has happened since I last saw you,” she said. “We were afraid for you when we heard about Kent State. Did you take part in the protests in Cleveland?”
“A little. Not much.”
“It’s frightening, isn’t it? But also important. I sometimes wish I were young so I could be part of it in some way. Writing letters to politicians doesn’t accomplish very much. Your generation hates people like me, though. We’re everything they detest.”
“Not everyone’s a radical in ‘my generation,’ Gaga. And you don’t just write letters—you’ve done all that stuff for the Newark schools.”
She nodded slowly. “I believed—I still do, I think—that education is the key to giving everyone a fair chance, but I may be wrong. Anyway, it’s a slow way to proceed, and it’s not enough for them.”
“Who’s
them
?”
She waved toward the window. “The hippies. The antiestablishment radicals. They’d like to take over Ashaunt like the army did, except turn it into a commune, with sex, drugs and rock and roll. They’d paint the houses neon and cut my flowers to make chains for their hair. Imagine that! Eliminate private property. Would you jump on board, Charlie?”
“Me?” He laughed dryly. “Probably not.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not a jumper-on-boarder. And I don’t like neon.”
“You do have beliefs, though. Values. Don’t forget that. You have a moral sense—you always have. Everyone does, but some are more fine-tuned.”
“I’d turn Ashaunt into a nature preserve if I could.”
“And not live here?”
“Not if it could be a nature preserve.”
“What else would you do?”
“Stop the war! Get rid of big business! End racism, sexism! End ism-ism!” He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and the headache under them. When he lowered his hands, the air was full of blue spots.
Gaga pursed her lips. “You’re much too young to be so cynical. You used to be
engaged
, you know. When you’d come back from that camp and talk about the inner city kids you worked with, you lit up, Charlie. I can picture the look in your eyes. And you do still care. I know you do. What about the environmental movement—doesn’t that interest you?”
He shrugged. “I carried a sign on Earth Day.”
“What did it say?”
“‘Life Is a Gas, Keep It Clean.’” He had shown up and grabbed a sign, hadn’t even stayed with the group all the way to the Cuyahoga River, which, while no longer burning, was still a cesspool.
“You’re so clever! See? A sense of humor is a terrific weapon—and lacking these days. The country could benefit from a little change. Why not get involved in a political campaign? It could be helpful for you, a way to meet people, if nothing else. Girls, even. You could report back to me. Holly has been telling me how Cambridge has been turned upside down. If you don’t want to be in the middle of things, you could write about it; you’ve always been a good writer and photographer. You could
observe
.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
GAGA STOOD, RELEASING, DISMISSING HIM.
He stepped into the dark hallway, then out to the porch, where Bea sat on a bench sipping tea.
“Charlie,” she said. “Cuppa tea?”
“No, thanks.”
“Are you sure? It’s Brodies Famous Edinburgh, from our trip home.”
She might have been a statue, a figurine, so installed she looked, so comfortable, once his eyes adjusted to the brightness enough to take her in.
“Nice. But no thanks.” He had given up, among other things, caffeine. That morning he’d brewed homemade tea from boiled arborvitae leaves and gulped it down, minty and medicinal, so hot it burned his tongue.
“Oh—” Bea tipped her chin toward the box. “Good! She’d been wanting to give you that. Did you open it?”
He nodded.
“Lovely, isn’t it? A compass. I’ve always wanted one.”
Bea with a compass, forging through the wilderness in her flowered dress, carried along by her pale, stout legs. Had she ever, even for a moment, wanted a compass, or was she just trying to be nice? Charlie knew her hardly at all, despite her having babysat him sometimes when he was small. One cloudy day last August, he had happened upon her sitting alone on a flat rock on the beach, facing the sea. He’d stood at the end of the path and watched from behind. He could not see her face, just her back, broad, the shoulders rounded, and her gray hair in its bun. Beside her a cardigan lay folded. It began to rain, a few drops at first, then more, dimpling the sea, staining the rocks. Still, she sat. She might have been peaceful, sitting there; she might have been not. Finally she looked at the sky and reached for her sweater, began to rise. Charlie had left before she saw him, first backing away on the path, and then, when he rounded the corner, turning and breaking into a run.
“It was your grandfather’s,” Bea said now. “He’d be glad for you to have it. Be careful not to lose it, though.”
“It’s a camping compass,” Charlie said.
She gave him a look filled with judgment, or was it pity, or scorn? She did not much like boys; neither she nor Agnes ever had. (Decades later, when she died, she would leave $10,000 to each of the female grandchildren, and nothing to the males.) She did not like ungratefulness, bad manners or going against the grain. Once Grampa had brought up the subject of Scotland perhaps going for its independence, and Bea had tucked in her chin and said, “What, and not worship the Queen?”
He left, feeling her watch him, her eyes on his back, following him as he went across the lawn and down the path until she could no longer see him. He was in the woods; she and Agnes did not have, though they used to claim they did, eyes in the back of their heads. Probably they thought he should have enlisted, and disapproved not only of his long hair but also of his rummage-sale shirt and half-grown beard, and the way his unhappiness was written plainly on his face.
In the cabin, he counted the money from Gaga—a hundred dollars—set the compass on the windowsill and crawled into bed, exhausted in the way that only social life could exhaust him. He needed a Valium, his sleeping bag, to count the knots on the rafters until he was relaxed enough to shut his eyes. He would sleep, then, for hours, as lunch was served at the Big House, as Gaga and his aunts and mother gathered for a swim, and the truck from Giffords Fish Market drove up with the fixings for the clambake scheduled for that night at the Yacht Club with Gaga hosting—
Come One, Come All
—handwritten flyers taped on the “Go Slow Children” signs nailed to sawhorses up and down the road.
Like a baby, Charlie slept, waking to the dimming light and his father peering over him
—Are you awake, Chahrlee?
—his accent still strong after all this time, his face worried and watchful. First he filled Charlie in—Holly had arrived with her roommate from Wellesley, the clambake was starting, Mummy had gone swimming with the others—he told this and then more, until finally he worked his way around to what he’d come for. So. He thought he maybe had a diagnosis. He’d been looking into it, gone to the medical library at the hospital. Would you like to know?
Charlie sat up, gripped by fear. Not that he liked his present life, not that he wouldn’t trade it in a second for his previous one, but to hear his fate spelled out (
dia
, across;
gnosis
, knowledge).
“I don’t know, Dad,” he said.
“Oh, don’t worry, it eez nothing terrible. I think you have march hemoglobinuria.” His father was unable to keep a note of pride from his voice. “You like to run, yes?”
Charlie nodded.
“And when you run, what do you put on?”
“Huh?”
“What do you wear when you go to run?”
“Shorts, I guess. Nothing special. Why?”
“And on your feet?”
“I . . . I—” He felt suddenly forced into a corner, as if his mother had somehow rigged this all, down to the blood in his pee. “Usually I run barefoot.”
His father clapped his hands. “I knew it! This is what I told Mummy! You’ve always hated shoes. After you run, you pee, and this pee has the blood in it! Correct?”
“I guess. Yeah.”
“This,” his father went on, “is ‘soldier’s marching disease,’ or ‘march hemoglobinuria.’ Soldiers get it from long forced marches. It is very rare, with only a few reported cases. The red blood cells get crushed as they pass through the pounding feet. You must be running far, and on the road, yes?”
The wine-dark stream, his breath still heaving; even when he needed to urinate in the middle of the run, he didn’t let himself, holding it in, the blood that pooled, the pee that pressed; only his sweat escaped, leaving him slick and salty. He loved the deep pressure of running barefoot, loved, even, stepping on a pebble or shell and not reacting. Every day he pushed himself faster, returning, always, to the end of his stone wall, where he stretched, then walked behind the Red House. There, facing the sea, he peed.