Daughters of the Revolution (2 page)

Now Heck carried his father’s briefcase. He carried his father’s thermos, so he wouldn’t have to spend a nickel at the coffee shop. Heck’s father had been an extravagant figure who always bought the best of everything and wore it to shreds. When he died, at forty-nine, Heck’s mother could not bring herself to give away his shoes and bespoke suits. The wingtips Heck wore every day to school were thinned by wear but beautifully soft. Old as they were—Heck’s father had died the spring Heck graduated from high school, twelve years ago, and the shoes had been ancient then—they still smelled faintly of the citrusy chemical his father had used to clean them, the secret of which had gone down with him.

Now Heck was not anything like his father. He studied physiology and gross anatomy and worked on Mrs. X., peeling away her epidermis, dermis and subcutaneous tissue to examine the loaded liver, the black lungs. The work was different from what he’d expected; it shocked him. He had not yet seen her face.

He wanted a day on the water—the challenge, the experience of the crossing. Lil liked, on Saturdays, to go swimming at the Y pool while he made French toast with EV. Lil no longer spoke about becoming a professional swimmer, which had been anyway a dream. He couldn’t blame her for wanting things. He wanted things, too: He wanted her. They had always rubbed up against each other well. She’d dated his roommate first, then someone else he knew. At first, she had pretended not to like him. Walking by him at a dance, she’d bumped into his chair,
which had produced an encouraging buzz between them. One evening, he’d called her up—“Is this Lily Field?”—and invited her out for a drink. To his surprise, she didn’t pretend to be busy; she didn’t make him wait. They went to a cheap place on Charles Street. He never had money except the disheveled-looking bills his mother flung at him at lunch on Sunday afternoons. He threw these untidy dollars on the bar, glad to see them go.

“You’ve brought me to a tawdry barroom,” Lil accused him. She was beautiful, her hair held up somehow by two chopsticks; she laughed at him. She took his hand and then—not that night, but the next one—she kissed him at the door of the apartment building where she lived with three other girls in a demimonde of ashtrays and underpants. She kissed him under the stone lintel, hard on the lips. She demanded that he talk. She gave him books to read, and she swam for two hours every day. He began to think about what he could tell his mother—because from his mother’s point of view, Lil was not better than Maeve, the last girl he’d brought home.

In the end, they eloped—she took a long weekend from school and they borrowed Rebozos’s car and drove to Elkton, Maryland, where they were married by a justice of the peace with a scar across his neck. Lil wore a silk suit—a cheap silk suit, she said disdainfully—and afterward they spent the night in a crumbly hotel Lil found charming. They slept together, ate pancakes, drank stingers in the lounge, then drove home at the last possible moment, leaving at four in the morning so Lil could be back by ten for her class, The Radical Dramas of Bertolt Brecht.

Lil had savings, “money from my Grammy,” she said. She used it for a deposit and several months’ rent on a two-room apartment on the wrong side of the Hill. Here Lil produced the empty mayonnaise jar in which he stirred their first Rob Roys,
and she began to cook—BLTs and Welsh rarebit. It was better than life. They each played new parts, performing scenes of domestic comfort and sexual freedom. They met at three for what Lil called “love in the afternoon.” Then she stood in her baby-doll pajamas over the stove while he mixed drinks. At home, his mother nagged him about medical school, why he must become a doctor—he must do it for himself. How proud his father and grandfather would be! In the apartment, Lil drew him out and encouraged him, until he felt medical school had been his own idea and there was no danger of his life veering in a direction he did not want to go.

Their daughter had not yet learned to breathe fluently. Her breathing lacked some essential quality—continuity, rhythm—every breath was different. He wondered at this lack of organization, focus, will or instinct. Heck could hear Lil now, in EV’s room, her respiration loud and instructional.

Lil walked into the bedroom, said, “Hello, finally,” then undressed. She peeled off the turtleneck sweater and pulled her blue jeans down over her hips without unzipping them. She slid the chopsticks from her hair, which fell darkly around her shoulders, climbed into bed, laid her head on his arm. He pressed against her. “You want to do something?” he asked, parting the curtain of hair with his fingers and whispering into her ear. He reached his other hand between her legs, guided by heat.

She answered by climbing up, sliding on like a ring. He closed his eyes, then opened them. Light from the ceiling fixture poured down on her shoulders, her muscles long and elastic from swimming. Her face looked elegant and remote as she began to move. Her teeth gleamed.

A fearful glow of fertility surrounded her. If Heck asked whether she’d put in the Thing—the rubber cap that pushed
unpleasantly back at him—she might stop to check again on EV, who might wake up. Or he could take her as she was and run the risk.

He received the pressure of her body against his, pressed back. She opened more to receive him, and he felt he could expand infinitely to fill the space she’d made. He played with this sensation, tested its boundaries. She cried out—but softly—and he rolled on top of her. Her eyes closed and she disappeared into a private zone, which freed them. Then she came, holding him tightly, with her legs wrapped around his back, her face flushed and blurry. The walls of her body beat against him in delicate paroxysms. He thrust up into her several times before pulling away, and she returned to the present, to the bedroom, to her usual intense focus. She slithered down under the sheet, where she kissed and licked him until pins rose up from underneath his skin and he exploded.

A gray, ordinary darkness woke him. His wife lay beside him in a fetal ball. He dressed in his warmest, lightest clothes—twill pants, thermal shirt, varsity jacket, crew socks and sneakers—and walked into the kitchen. The sky turned pink at the edges and the thermometer on the porch read thirty-nine degrees. The kitten’s milk had turned opalescent in the rain, which continued to fall lightly into the bare maples.

He plugged in the percolator, which he’d loaded with coffee the night before, and heated water in the kettle to prime the thermos. He mixed two tins of deviled ham with mayonnaise and pickle relish and made sandwiches, which he wrapped neatly in waxed paper; he didn’t want Rebozos to feel he was slumming. Heck wished he had homemade cookies to put into the lunch, something beyond price. But Lil didn’t make cookies; she didn’t keep sweets in the house. Two apples sat in a bowl on the kitchen table. They’d begun to shrivel, but they might revive in the cold. The milk carton in the refrigerator was nearly empty, so he cooked and ate his oats with water. Rebozos liked
milk in his coffee, so Heck heated the rest of it in a Revere pan, poured the milk and coffee into the thermos and tightened the suction.

He brushed his teeth, then stopped in his daughter’s room. EV’s adenoidal breathing sounded disorganized; her eyelashes flickered in a dream. Heck leaned down and kissed her cheek.

He whispered good-bye to Lil and kissed her on the mouth. Her hands reached for his face. “Have fun. Come home,” she said, eyes still closed. He took the Rambler, which would pin her close to home for the day. Usually, Heck appreciated the simplicity of their arrangements, and would rather do without than spend. But this morning, money seemed all that held him back from being fully himself, his fear that Archer Rebozos would say, “To hell with sandwiches, Heck; let’s have a hot lunch at Drake’s,” the fear he couldn’t pay his way. Not a fear, a fact. He owed the future. Even before his father died, Heck had been a scholarship boy. His mother worked in the Goode School office. She ate milk toast and dressed in castoffs from her well-heeled friends in town, whose tickets to Symphony Hall she snared when they got cancer or ran away. But she sent him to college, “the best there is,” she said proudly. Sundays when he went over for lunch, she threw dollar bills at him or stuffed them in his pockets. When Lil complained about money, Heck felt guilty about his mother, who lived on less.

The fan blew tepid air and the faulty timing belt eased into a rhythm. He hoped they would take the kayak out. Heck liked games, rules, training, a definite opponent, a goal. He turned the wipers off, willing the day to clear. He drove for a few minutes, his vision slurry, then turned them on again.

In his eagerness, he’d come too early. Now he walked up and down in front of the locked-up boathouse, trying to keep warm. After twenty minutes, he went back to his car and poured out a cup of milky coffee. He held the hot cup in his hands briefly, then rolled down the window and poured the coffee on the ground.

A taxi pulled up beside the boathouse and a young man wearing a waterproof windbreaker and holding a duffel bag climbed out. Heck jumped out of the car with his pack and ran toward him.

“Hey, Hellman,” Rebozos said.

“You didn’t have to get a car,” Heck said. “I would have come for you.”

Rebozos grinned. “I didn’t come from home,” he said.

A few white clouds opened up, revealing orange light behind. “Weather’s clearing,” Heck said casually.

Rebozos looked at the sky, then slapped the trunk of the taxi as if it were the rump of a horse; obediently, it drove away. He set the duffel bag on the ground, unzipped it and brought out a ring of keys. Then he walked away from Heck down a gangway into the boathouse. A moment later the wide door groaned and cracked open. Heck tossed his pack over his shoulder—it wasn’t heavy—and jogged down the gangway.

The kayak sat on a rack—sleek, engineered, German. The green trim looked wet. Rebozos’s father had arranged to have it brought into the country. Heck ran a hand along the hull and a current passed through him. He wanted what this boat wanted.

“We could take her out on the water,” Rebozos said.

“We could do that,” Heck agreed.

“You’re not dressed for the weather, Hellman.”

“You’re not, either.”

“I don’t care. I don’t have a wife and a kid.”

“She’ll take care of me if I catch pneumonia.”

The boathouse yielded one life jacket, and Rebozos cursed the boathouse. “Stupid, stupid—” he said. “They’re all on the other side.” For a moment it seemed they could not go; then, out of a kind of honor both men understood too well to protest against, they said nothing. Rebozos tossed the life jacket into the hold with Heck’s thermos and the sandwiches. Rebozos had everything ready, a sea chart and a guidebook open to a page
that read, “Wilde Point to Maude’s Duff by Paddling: Classic Route of Wampanoag Braves.”

Heck felt lucky to be part of it.

Eight miles across. They’d warm up while they paddled, then load the kayak onto the ferry and ride back. He’d tell Lil about it after they had a drink, or after dinner. It depended—on her. Maybe he would never tell.

“You first,” Rebozos said. Heck climbed forward, splashing his sneakers. Rebozos ran through the water up to his shins, pushed off and jumped aboard.

The ferry beat them out. Her iron jaw opened for passengers, crates of oranges, bags of mail and the short line of cars that breathed clouds of exhaust. Then she detached herself from the dock and headed from Penzance Point to Capawak, the island where, three hundred years before, the Native Americans had helped the English survive the winter. Heck and Rebozos had no choice but to follow in her matronly wake.

They paddled southeast. Heck drove the kayak forward.

“I went fishing here once with the Head,” Rebozos shouted. “We caught sea bass and pogy.”

The sun shot through a bank of silver clouds. “I spent last night with a French teacher from Wilde High,” Rebozos confided. “Ooh la la!” He made another remark, which Heck didn’t hear. The ferry slid through the water and cut them loose. The shore dissolved. The paddle’s blade sliced through the water like a hot knife through cake.

At school—at Goode—Heck and Rebozos had been part of a brilliant class of boys, the kind of boys the Head mentioned when he spoke against the possibility of coeducation—why it would never happen. From the outside, Heck and Rebozos and
virtually all the boys shared an almost familial resemblance: Their teeth were organized into martial ranks by orthodontia, and they wore their button-down shirts buttoned up. (Heck and Rebozos veered from the norm in that both were left-handed, so the master usually segregated them at the short end of a work-table to prevent their elbows from knocking against the elbows of the right-handed boys as they wrote in their blue books.)

Some of the boys dated girls in the summer, held hands in the movies or skinny-dipped in a quarry, but school demanded the better part of their lives, and it was here, in tutorial rooms, in the gymnasium and the fields beyond, that they recognized themselves in the traditions of the school. They’d been chosen to run the world, but first they had to read
King Lear
and
Heart of Darkness
, pass trigonometry, write an argumentative essay in six paragraphs, translate a hundred lines of Virgil and dissect a fetal pig.

Heck was a day boy; Rebozos boarded. The first year, Rebozos never went home—not one time. It was even unclear where “home” might be, since the house on the island had to be closed up for winter. Rebozos’s parents hid away in Arizona or the West Indies, or his mother needed to recuperate from some not-too-serious affliction, an infection in her eye or a touch of eczema or hysteria, that made it impractical for Rebozos to join them.

The Head—Goddard Byrd—asked Heck’s mother to do something for the school and invite Rebozos to spend Thanksgiving break with the Hellmans. She said yes, of course, although the prospect of a visitor made her anxious. Heck’s father was still alive, but she managed it, as if she entertained a constant stream of boys. She sat at the cherry table with her half-glasses on the end of her nose. “The Rebozos boy is used to the best of everything,” she said. She bought butter and real maple syrup from Vermont, put strawberry jam in a clay pot. She bought wine and fresh-ground coffee and tomatoes.