It was as if she knew she had to take him in as quickly as possible, set enough of him to memory to carry her through.
“What else would you like to have a look at?” he asked.
She glanced up at his face. There was nothing lewd in the question. Or the lewdness was twined so delicately with something else, with a shy seriousness, that she never thought to be insulted. She said, “Everything.”
“Now Mercedes,” he said. “Don’t be greedy.”
“Everything,” she said again.
He smiled at her and stood up out of the grass, reaching for the clasp of his trousers. And paused with his hand there.
“Have you ever seen a man naked before?”
“No.”
He took several steps back toward the water.
“Where are you going?”
“You stay settled where you’re to,” he told her. He slipped his pants down his legs and stepped out of them, standing before her in only his socks. The skin so pale she could see a tracery of blue veins at the pelvis. Pubic hair a bush of tight curls, as if it was carefully tied up in rags at night. His
thing
. She had nothing else in her head to call it. It was hard and stood rigidly at attention. The dark mushroom cap of a head, the length of it quivering as the blood pulsed through. It was a ridiculous article to look at and for a moment she thought the urge to laugh might undo her.
She sat up on her knees, touching her mouth with the fingers of one hand. Things came over you, she thought. That’s what it meant to be in love. Unimaginable things came over you and you were a different person and wanted different things than the world suggested you could be or want. She had no idea how to tell Wish what was in her mind. It was a Catholic thing and there were no words for it in the world that was hers before she found him. He was standing too far away to touch and she extended one hand toward him. She said, “Wish.” He was already reaching to put his clothes back on and she wanted to stop him. She said, “I want to do for you.”
He looked up at her quickly. Knowing exactly what she meant, she could see that. But he turned away to pull his pants up around his waist. The angry red mark at his neck. He hauled on his shirt, buttoned it with his back turned.
It was the wrong thing somehow. Suggesting it out loud was wrong, maybe even thinking of it was wrong and he was rushing away from her. “You must think—” she said.
“No. No, I don’t.” He knelt beside her and kissed her face, kissed her mouth and eyes. “Of course I don’t,” he said. “It’s only …”
“Only what?”
“There’s lots of time, is all. To do it right. When we’re married.”
“And what was that the other night, then? When you?” He said, “That was just a taste”—he smiled at this little unintended joke and Mercedes smiled with him—“of things to come.” It made her more sure of him at the time, the unexpected restraint, his insistence on putting off the consummation, as he called it. But she regretted that now, agreeing to wait as if there was all the time in the world. She wandered through his rooms, touching this piece of furniture or that fixture he would have touched, and all the time choosing or discarding children’s names or planning the cut of a wedding dress or the colours in a quilt sewn for an imaginary bed.
She was struck by Hiram’s description of her as a gambler and had to admit there was something of a gambler’s fancy in it all—that having wagered so much there was no other way for her to feel, no other outcome to hope for. It was intangible and shadowy and as real as anything she’d ever felt. She was like a person born blind, with no experience of sight except that every remaining sense insinuates the lack of it.
Hardy came to see her at Hiram’s shop shortly after she moved in.
Mercedes was behind the counter and stood looking up at him when he came in, his hair bleached almost white by a summer on the water. She glanced down at Hardy’s hands on the counter, saw his wedding band. “Are you and Ruthie married now?”
“Day after Christmas, when the minister was over to do a service at the church.”
He told her that Clive Reid had taken a fever just before Christmas and nearly died but was on the water as soon as the weather was civil enough to fish. That the church hall had caught fire and burned to the ground, though they’d managed to save the church.
It struck Mercedes how she’d thought of the Cove and the people in it as frozen in time somehow, that their world had been suspended when she left and would remain unchanged, as they were in her mind. She felt those lives set in motion now, as if she was revising a film, the celluloid pacing through her thumb and forefinger, days and seasons, loves and illnesses and deaths. The sensation of it made her light-headed and she put both hands to the counter to steady herself.
“Sadie,” he said.
“She’s gone, isn’t she.”
“Before Christmas,” he said. “She went peaceful.”
Mercedes thought of her grandmother’s certainty, her doggedness. The only book the old woman had ever read was the Bible. Five verses every evening and she’d crawled through both Testaments half a dozen times in her life.
Peaceful
didn’t suit the woman.
“What have you got done to your hair?” Hardy asked her. “You looks some grand.”
Mercedes only shrugged. “How’s Ruthie?”
“You could offer me a cup of tea, Sade.”
She took him to one of her two rooms on the second floor and put the kettle on an electric hot plate.
“How did you know to find me here?”
“It was the only place I knew to look.” He picked up the tin of evaporated milk she’d set beside the cups. He said, “I thought this stuff was rationed for children.”
“Hiram knows some people,” she said and she motioned Hardy to a seat. She could hardly believe he was next to her, within an arm’s length. They hadn’t touched one another since he’d come in the door and she felt the absence of it suddenly, the way hunger sometimes ambushed her after sneaking up unnoticed for hours.
Hardy had never seen a contraption like the hot plate and he asked her a string of questions that Mercedes had no answers for. And then just as casually he said, “How’s things with your man? You two are still fixed for each other?”
“Is that Mother you’re asking for?”
He didn’t answer right away and she could tell he was trying to choose his words carefully. “Mother isn’t—” he said. “She doesn’t talk about it. About you.” He nodded at her hands with his chin. “You’re not married.”
“I will be,” she said. “When he gets home from overseas.”
“Overseas?”
“He’s gone to the war,” she said. “Unlike some.”
Hardy watched her awhile. The kettle shook on the hot plate and Mercedes got up to make the tea.
“You ever coming back home, Sadie?”
“Home?” she said angrily. She kept her back to him. “Home?” she said again.
When her grandmother fell ill, Helen or Mercedes read the evening’s five Bible verses aloud for her whether she was lucid enough to take them in or not. The Book of Ruth they were reading from at the last.
The Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me. I went out full and the Lord hath brought me home again empty
.
“Agnes misses you,” Hardy said.
He was near tears and she couldn’t bear to look at his face. “Don’t,” she said. She stirred a spoonful of milk into the cup.
“You’re some hard bit of gear,” he whispered. “You got no feeling for us at all, do you?”
“There’s your tea,” she told him and she rushed across the hall to her bedroom, closing the door behind her. After a few minutes he called her name, but she stayed where she was until she heard him go down the stairs and out the door to the street.
Johnny Boustani was assigned to the Intelligence office of the United States Army after Fort Pepperell was established, although he always said the word
Intelligence
as if it was some kind of joke. In the months after Wish went missing he made a number of informal inquiries and offered Mercedes an educated guess on the whereabouts of Wish’s company—Kyushu in the southwest, somewhere in the vicinity of Nagasaki—although whether Wish was still alive and with them there was no way to know. And he did his best not to answer Mercedes’ questions about conditions in the camps during those early days. When she pressed him for details he said, “I’m just the guy who moves the flags around on the table maps.”
“Someone must know something.”
“We haven’t heard much about it, Mercedes. Honestly.”
“It’s that bad, is it?”
“There’s some things,” he said, “you might be better off not knowing.”
She continued writing to Wish all through the war, sending a letter out into the long silence every month, addressing them care of his unit’s base in England. Even to Mercedes it felt like a useless exercise. But the alternative was giving him up for dead.
Mercedes said, “Hiram, what do you know about his aunt Lilly?” This was early on, when she was teasing out every scrap of information he had about Wish. “Why have they got her locked up at the convent?”
“She speaks Latin,” Hiram said.
Mercedes stared at him.
“She learned on her own, they say. When she was a girl.” He made a face. “She started speaking to the priest in Latin before she was ten, is the story on the shore. And no one could explain where she’d picked up the language. She says she was given messages from God in books that appeared out of nowhere and disappeared after she read them.”
Mercedes thought of the woman’s arm around her waist, the heat of it.
“She was living on her own for years out there until the day Wish found her,” he said.
“Found her where?”
“Haven’t Wish told you any of this?”
“No.”
“Aren’t you ever afraid of hearing too much?” Hiram grunted, as if he’d decided against going any further. But then he said, “Wish found her lying on the floor of that little shack she lived in. She had her arms stretched out like they were nailed to the cross. And she was bleeding from the palms of her hands.”
“What do you mean, bleeding?”
“That’s when they took her into the convent,” Hiram said. “Wish was more or less living with the Keatings by then anyway. Him and Billy-Peter and Tom fished together and salvaged. And they were into the shine, running it along the shore. You can hardly blame him not wanting to live under the same roof.”
“No,” she said. “You can’t.”
It surprised her to see that knowing someone wasn’t just a matter of accumulation, of simply adding details together to arrive at some coherent whole. It was obvious why Wish had told her next to nothing about Lilly. God spoke to her directly and she slept in the room next to his. He found her lying on the floor, blood seeping from her palms. She belonged to another world than this one, Patty Keating said.
Every detail Mercedes heard about Lilly made her seem more unreal. And pushed Wish a little further off at the same time. It seemed unfair that there were things you could learn about a person that meant you understood them less.
She learned to revise Hiram’s films after his trips along the coast, rewinding the movies slowly, her fingers registering each nub of broken celluloid. She stopped the machine and snipped one or two frames clear, fastened the clean ends together with a glue she brushed on. Let it set a minute and began running the film through her fingers again. People would barely notice the hiccup in an actor’s voice where these small repairs were made, the slight stutter in the picture’s motion. But if she was forced to cut out long strings of damaged film whole words or phrases disappeared. When Mr. Gruffydd stopped short of kissing Angharad in
How Green Was My Valley
, saying he had no right, when she chased him to the door and said, “If the right is mine to give,” no one in the audience but Mercedes would know she once added, “You have it.” It was like having the gift of second sight, being privy to some secret part of the world invisible to other mortals.
But something in the process disturbed her. How easily skeins of conversation and gesture disappeared from the life of a picture. She lay awake nights thinking what would happen if she forgot those words, the brief significant glances. How the shape of those stories would be altered for good.
Her last visit from Hardy came early in the fall of 1943. Mercedes was playing a game of checkers on the counter with Johnny Boustani when he came into the shop and took his cap from his head. “I was in town,” he said.
She introduced the two men and after a few moments of small talk Johnny gathered up his coat and hat and left them. Hardy watched after him and then gave Mercedes a questioning look.
“You want a cup of tea?”
“I was just wanting to set eyes on you. See you were all right.”
“I’m all right.”
He stood with his cap in his hands and he bent his head slightly, taking a long look at her. “You look a little nish, to me,” he said. “Are you getting enough to eat?”
She’d had no word from Wish since before the fall of Singapore, fourteen months previous. “I’m eating fine,” she lied. “Is someone dead, Hardy?”
“Everyone’s the best kind. Ruth had a youngster after Christmas. A girl. I wanted you to know.” He motioned his head toward the door. “This one, Johnny,” he said.
“He’s just a friend.”
It made her so lonely to see him she felt sick and she wanted him out of her sight. He seemed to feel the impatience in her and it rattled his thoughts. He was carrying a winter’s worth of news but he simply looked at her, not knowing what to say. He went to the door finally, stopped there before stepping outside.
“You can always come back to the Cove,” he said, “if things go badly down here.”
“You know the difference of that, Hardy.”
He threw his cap to the ground.
“Goddamn
it, Mercedes.” He bent over and swiped it. “You and Mother,” he said. “I don’t know which one of you is more mulish.” He fixed his cap and went out the door.
Early in 1944 Mercedes finally received a note from Wish. The card typed and signed at the bottom in his hand. It had been written eighteen months earlier, just after his arrival in the Japanese POW camp. She went straight to the Bashas’ store and jumped around while she shook the card in the air. Sammy watched her with a wide grin on his face, completely mystified. Amina grabbed Mercedes by the wrist in order to take the card and she read it aloud. Mercedes bit the skin on the back of her hand. Hearing Wish’s words in another’s mouth almost like hearing him speak himself.