A Private State: Stories (13 page)

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Authors: Charlotte Bacon

Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author), #test

BOOK: A Private State: Stories
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prowled around the Piazza Navona, as bony as the cats that tried to wrap their tails around his shins. He rolled cigarettes with other refugees in the shadow of the plaza's fountain and watched water stream over the long marble bodies. Everyone was hungry. Even cabbage became hard to find.
People kept leaving for America, bundling clothes and dictionaries into cracked leather bags. But he couldn't bring himself to go. He worked a little, here and there. He made some friends. There was the daughter of a grocer in the Trastevere who used to sell him potatoes. Once she'd saved him an orange.
One night in the Via del Corso, a fight broke out. A crowd of drunk Italians closed around him and a few friends as they left a
caffè
. A dancing, angry circle of boys who had had too much wine. He'd seen so much worse it was hard to even be that scared. He had started to recover a little strength. He could slip out under their arms any time. Then one of them said, "Dirty Jew, get out of Italy!"
Sale ebreo!
Over and over. And then he didn't remember much after that except the warm glass of the wine bottle he yanked from the hand of a man with dark curls. The boy whose neck he had slashed with the bottle he'd broken on the curb lay slouched against the grill of a bread truck. He remembered the smell of bad wine. He remembered the blue truck, the word "Pane" in white script, the painting of a long Italian loaf.
His friends ran with him. He bought fake papers. He became someone else. He moved to America as that someone else and eventually became a clerk in a New York bank. He paid back those friends who spent so much for the papers and the ticket. At least he sent money to them; whether they got it or not he had never known. Maybe his dollars gave some girl a new hat and gloves. Most of them were probably dead now. Some were perhaps in Israel. They were not even family.
He sat in the chair, coffee grown cold as before. Elizabeth looked at his old, square hands. It was hard to see them as hands that had
 
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slashed the neck of a boy. She could see them lifting the giltrimmed pages of ledgers and also, looking at the knuckles, wielding tools. She stood up. Her own hands were ticked with red and black marker, from papers and drafts of charts. "We should finish your tree," he said.
"Vera knows this?" Elizabeth said.
He said, "No. She doesn't want to know."
"Why are you telling me?" she said. "What am I supposed to do?"
He shrugged. "It was time. There's the tree." He pointed.
"But why do you care?" Elizabeth's voice rose. "You or Vera? Why would either of them invest any importance in anything as flimsy as a piece of paper? Three feet by two feet, which, like all paper, burned above four hundred degrees.
"It's something," he said. "This is America." Was he smiling?
"Go on then," she said, "make the corrections." She thumbtacked a new piece of paper down next to the draft and handed him a black pen. He hunched over the blank piece and made a deft vertical stroke. Working quickly, he built a city of black lines on the page. Then he started writing names. It was Hebrew, with all its unfamiliar serifs. "Wait," said Elizabeth. ''I can't read it. Tell me their names. Let me see where I was right." There had to be some small things that were clear.
He pointed his pen at one pair. "Anastasia and Moses Guttman, the great grandparents of my paternal uncle." Elizabeth had found them. Every time he wrote a new name, he translated for her. He smelled like a clean, elderly man. His collar was spotless. She stood next to, even brushed her shoulder against, a man who, nearly fifty years ago, left another for dead in a Roman street.
The names he knew were the old ones. Witoski, Keppelman. She had found many of them, but after the war, the blanks were still blanks. "Nothing there, Mr. Krystowicki? Are you sure? Your family is quite finished?" Suddenly, Elizabeth found herself angry. Angry at the abrupt end of the tree. Angry he had told her
 
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as much and as little as he had. Angry at this old, battered man for being so much more complicated than a victim. And most of all, for keeping her from feeling safe.
He walked out to the front hall. "Vera comes home tomorrow."
Where was Andrew? How had she let Kate spend the night away, even once? Elizabeth was wild to see them but asked, "Which name did you write down, Mr. Krystowicki?"
"Good night," he said and let himself out the front door through which Elizabeth saw him framed for a moment by the pair of lindens at the end of the walk, branches ripe with buds, lulled by the warm days into thinking it was time to open.
 
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Pacific
Helen looked out at the rough water and thought "Pacific" was not the name she would have chosen for this ocean. There was nothing peaceful about these waves with the profiles of sharks. The horizon swung with the boat. She wondered if the whales distinguished tracts of water the way humans did, had codes in their click-and-whistle language for Atlantic, for Indian, for dangerous reef and leaky tanker. What happened when an engine dulled the message? What if their sonar started to wobble, if the rings of sound became dented, imprecise?
The boat lurched. Helen's ring smacked the metal railing, which reminded her that Sam, who used to scold her when her imagination turned Gothic, wasn't here. She felt better when she remembered he went green at sea and was grateful she had some instinct for the nautical.
It had been two days since this group of whale watchers motored out of San Diego, and they'd only seen a distant flock of seabirds, mute
V
s dipping in the wind. As she stared at the waves, Helen couldn't stop thinking about the barracudas and the mantas like wet black capes gliding underneath. The voices of the newlyweds from Boulder passed, the pages of one of their guide books rattling in the wind. Helen's period was eleven days late. She wondered if sharks nursed.
Helen didn't notice that the birds had moved closer until she
 
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heard Melissa, the trip's naturalist, call out, "The willets are visiting!" Helen muttered The Willets Visit, thinking it sounded like the title of a children's book where roguish boys from Cornwall invade the house of Kensington cousins. She wanted to watch the birds, but Melissa's recitation of their feeding habitsdead crab and trashdulled their novelty. Could using phrases like "migration vector" eventually ruin Botticellian beauty? Melissa's skin was as pink as the curve inside a conch shell.
Several of the passengers gathered around the young woman in the stern of the boat. The newlyweds, Sue and David, hovered next to the Donaldsons, a family from Westchester. The mother was blowzy, but the man was tan, still trim, restless. Their two children had the slippery paleness of subversive adolescents. Dr. Marquand, an older gentleman, folded the corner of a page in his bird book. They were all caught in Melissa's spell of science: she could make the leathery eggs of tortoises seem as commonplace as gravity. In truth, it wasn't quite so dry. The listeners wanted facts and magic. Sue, twisting a bracelet so it pressed an antinausea nerve in her wrist, cocked her head like a willet. Anne, in a kerchief and a sweater that looked like it had used the whole alpaca, peered dreamily out at the waves.
Even though Helen was curious about Melissa's lore, she stayed put. Staring at the laces threaded through her new sneakers, she thought about the rolling hand of the ocean on the iron underside of the
Atlantis
and tried to remember why she'd wanted to spend two weeks of April with her unhappy husband searching out the gray whales. They were, she was sure, royally indifferent to humans bobbing around in a stiff-keeled boat. In spite of all this earnest interest, the animals just steered themselves from Mexico back to the Gulf of Alaska, where no one could follow them, not even Jacques Cousteau with his matchless accent.
In late March, one week after Sam had left, Helen was correcting the proofs of one of Jan Van Oort's pet projects, an encyclopedia of
 
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animals featuring plate after shiny plate. Jan ran the small publishing house in Boston where Helen edited children's books. ''Ruinous," Jan said, standing behind her. His accent was almost as craggy as Cousteau's, but he was Dutch and liked Boston because its weather was even worse than Amsterdam's. "I am courting bankruptcy with this book," he said, rubbing his hands together. Jan got great pleasure from his unequivocal command of English.
He bent to examine one of Helen's scrawls, that cuneiform of proofreaders, which dotted the margins red. "What's this?" He shook his head. "What kind of drugs are you taking, Helen love?"
He pointed to a section of text on amphibians, where Helen had turned the phrase "the density of water," into "destiny of water." The day before, she'd forgotten to hyphenate the name of a newly married author, one of the four who kept the house out of debt.
"Helen," Jan sighed, "Alexa and I had an idea." Alexa, the copy editor who worked in the next cubicle, came to Helen's desk. ''What about taking the trip alone? Screw Sam. Go enjoy yourself," Alexa said. She settled her arms across her chest, something she did when about to offer authors advice to give their writing fiber. Helen had never known her to be tempted to put two
L
s in "pavilion."
"It seems," Helen said, fingering the proofs, "my life is in need of extensive revision." Then she burst into tears and the red corrections bled into the black type. Jan and Alexa had been kind: lots of bone-shattering claps on the back from Jan, an offer from Alexa to keep the cat for two weeks. Then she was there, in the eerie pinkness of San Diego, arriving the day before the
Atlantis
was to leave. What if the boat sank? Should she tell Sam what to do with the cat, the plants, her sweaters? Was he still in Baton Rouge? She sat on a bed which could have fit her and Sam and twelve children.
When Helen fled the hotel, the clerk called, "Off to the Zoo?" But she didn't think she could face families admiring okapis and
 
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instead found herself walking down boulevards gray with the nervous shadow of palms. Buena Vista, Alameda, I am lost in a sea of Spanish names, Helen thought. Then the pavement shivered. Coconuts dropped from the trees and rolled, lopsided and hairy, underneath parked cars. An earthquake? People strolling past in macaw-bright shirts wandered just beyond the range of the rustling trees. Although she'd been worried about acquiring sea legs, Helen was glad to be boarding the next day. It was too easy to picture California as a section of graham cracker, ready to snap off at the perforated line and crumble into the milky sea.
But what am I doing in the middle of an ocean with a shipful of strangers, Helen thought, people who felt it was fine to bounce around in a suspect old tuna boat and scout for whales. At least they didn't have harpoons. She turned to face the water, closed her eyes and felt queasy, out of place. She should have been tucked behind her desk staring out at the dome of Boston's State House, a golden egg wrapped in fog. She should have bought a home-pregnancy test and called her mother. She should have been there, not gliding over an ocean where the sun set on the wrong side.
Helen got the sense that something had disturbed the air close by and looked up to see a willet. It dangled near her head, dipping like a mobile. She said, "Hello, bird," and in a way that made her uneasy, it answered. Just behind it, Helen saw something wrinkle the water's surface. Something was stirring there, and then she saw thin spray and the crest of an enormous head. They were really here. They were real. Until now, she hadn't quite believed they were real.
Whale breath misted the air. They were close. The first shot through the surface and Helen saw an enormous gray eye. Sheets of water streaming from its body, the whale rose from the ocean and pivoted on its tail. Front flippers pointing toward the sky, it opened its wide mouth. Baleen flashed. In the animal's brief spiral
 
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against the sky, she tried to take in the span of its back scratched with whorls like giant lichen. When it fell, its supple weight slammed the water and only then, on its way back down, did the flukes fan into view. Bubbles glittered for a moment after the whale left, then came a flat and magic stillness, which shimmered there for seconds before the waves erased it.
Everyone clustered at the railing, staring at the stretch of ocean where the whales had played. Seven had surfaced, pushing up from under tons of salty water for what seemed to be the sheer pleasure of entering another element. The sight had struck the passengers dumb. Even Melissa was quiet. Helen unwrapped her hands from the railing and noticed they were stiff. Anne and Sue stood next to her, rubbing blood back into fingers. No one had realized how hard they'd held on. Dr. Marquand was still watching. For a moment, there was calm. No questions, no photos. When talk leaked backHave you ever seen anything like it? Isn't that what they call spyhopping?Helen had to go below.
Lying in her wedge-shaped bunk, Helen listened to her heart pound. She had never seen anything play with such abandon. Water sloshed at her porthole and she tried to remember the smell of whale spray, its blend of fish, warm seaweed, and something oddly human. She realized she liked sleeping below the waterline and hoped to wake to a flipper or a tortoise beak tapping against the glass. Mrs. Donaldson had insisted on changing to a higher cabin, but Helen liked to listen to the thrum of the engine, the crew's quiet tinkering.
Right now she was more aware of the newlyweds and the sharp words they were exchanging about who forgot to bring 200-speed film. The southern light was going to stain the silver emulsion black, give them dark rectangles instead of pictures for their first trip as a publicly united pair. Voices rose. Helen hoped their bracelets protected against more than upset stomachs.
Early in her marriage, she hadn't minded scrapes like that with

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