Daughters of the Revolution (3 page)

For privacy, Heck’s mother and father had separate bedrooms, but for the duration of Rebozos’s visit they arranged to sleep together, which produced a strange vibration in the air. Heck’s mother greeted the boys with cookies and hot chocolate and fussed over them, until Heck suggested that he and Rebozos take a walk. They trekked down Otis Street, past faded Salem-style houses and maple trees with hand-shaped leaves in reds and ochers, and Rebozos talked. He talked like no boy Heck had ever heard. Most boys talked about the sports they played, their heroics on fields and courts, about girls and the uselessness of Latin, about whether a supreme being (God, Vishnu, Krishna, Yahweh, Allah) existed in a literal form. Most boys were also at ease without talking. None of this applied to Rebozos, who talked as if he had never lived among ordinary people.

Rebozos did not go often to Capawak Island; he’d spent last summer in Europe and what he called “the Near East.” His father sent letters to banks, and Rebozos took himself on a tour of London, Paris, the Dordogne, Florence, Rome, Athens, the Aegean Islands and Istanbul. But a Greek island, that’s where he’d live if he could. “What would you do there?” Heck asked him, curious not just about Rebozos and Greece but about what it might be possible to do.

“I would do everything,” Rebozos said,
“hic et ubique.”

In Paris, Rebozos had sex with a prostitute. His father arranged it, booked him into a certain hotel, where Rebozos waited for a knock on the door. Her name was Jeanne—
Zhann
—or so she said. Rebozos drank a brandy at the café downstairs beforehand, which produced a vision: He was an actor in a play and his part was simply to play a role, adding whatever of himself he could—nothing Shakespeare didn’t say better. He became human when he fucked her; he entered the consciousness of man.

In Greece, Rebozos said, he met Greek boys who had done it with older men.

“How do you know? How did you talk to them?” Heck asked.

“In broken classical Greek.”

They walked all the way to town. Rebozos led them into St. Vitus to look at the stained glass, although he noticed immediately that the landscape windows didn’t really show the iridescent quality of Tiffany’s “favrile” glass. One portrait, beautifully colored, showed a woman weeping; the face and hands and aspects of the robe were overpainted to capture expressive detail. Rebozos showed Heck how to look for the floating of lead and solder; then they walked around the common, which held, Rebozos said, the dusky yellow that Childe Hassam caught in his famous painting—“a modest petticoat of yellow gunpowder.” Then he talked about architecture and Unitarians, until suddenly it was dark. Heck became so caught up in it all, he didn’t realize how long they’d been gone. He worried out loud about the time and his mother. She would have been frantic since the minute they walked out the door.

Rebozos simply leaned into the street and hailed a cab. Everything he did was easy.

It was easy to be drawn to money, as if it were a quality of character. Heck felt drawn to Rebozos’s generous, untroubled spirit, for example. “Come out to the island for the weekend,” Rebozos once said—they were in college—and they took the ferry together. As if Rebozos could really know these people, his parents—how could he? Yet the chintz-covered couch held him in a familiar way; the dogs on the lawn knew him and liked him.

The Rebozos family lived in silence and space. Mrs. Rebozos wrote articles analyzing the condition of women in various cultures in the American Southwest and the West Indies; Dr. Rebozos worked upstairs, behind a closed door, on matters of
state. They gathered for lunch and dinner like an electron cloud around a nucleus, then dissipated. In the evenings, two living rooms contained two fires, and sometimes no one was there at all. In the mornings, Mrs. Snow put out coffee and whitefish for anyone who wanted it and then withdrew, leaving an elegant vacancy. Heck and Rebozos went outside one foggy morning and picked mushrooms—blewits, Rebozos said,
Clitocybe nuda
!—unusual in this season. (Heck knew nothing about mushrooms, but he trusted Rebozos.)

Heck had brought them all wool scarves he had knit himself: royal blue for Mrs. Rebozos, deep gray for Mr. Rebozos, and crimson for his friend. “You made this?” Rebozos asked, holding the scarf reverently across his hands. During the long weekend Heck spent with them, Mrs. Rebozos wore her scarf constantly—wrapped around her sweater’s neck, around the collar of her bathrobe.

They played tennis on the Rebozoses’ clay court and Heck won every set. “Cut me some slack, for Christ’s sake,” Rebozos said. And Heck laughed, disbelieving. No one had ever asked him to be less than he was.

Another day, they walked along the edge of some rocky cliffs as the sun set. Rebozos wore a cashmere sweater and sunglasses. He pointed out mushrooms in the grass: “Milk caps, witches’ hats.”

Heck and Rebozos squatted at the edge of a pool that ran off into the ocean. Squatted, because of damp grass, and then, as they talked, sat, their khaki pants gathering moisture. Rebozos gazed through his dark glasses at the ocean and confessed a secret: “I have a young daughter I haven’t met. She was born six months ago, in the islands. She worked for my parents at their place there. You’ll disapprove, Heck. The mother—my lover—is a Negro woman. I suppose I loved her. She never told me about the pregnancy until after the baby was born. Stupid, stupid. But what can you do?”

Wind—had the ferry blocked it?—blew through Heck’s varsity jacket and used the resistance of his body to press the boat back toward shore, though there was no shore, no distance, just a bed of gray scallops over which he and Rebozos jangled. The sky glowed metallically and a fiery light poured across the surface of the water. Heck’s paddles struck the surface like matchsticks. He blinked away ice. He was a machine, made to go forward, to stroke and stroke. The plan became less important—lunch on the ferry, arriving, returning, having a drink with Lil later, telling or not telling her what he had done. The subject of the day had changed to something unsayable. Heck’s arms felt stronger than when they’d first started out—his muscles hot, greased. The ocean toyed with them, batted them off course and then pretended to leave them alone, lifting and dropping the boat as casually as a gull dropping a mussel on a granite shelf. Heck wiped some moisture from his face and saw red; his tongue must be bleeding. In a pause between the undemocratic waves, he turned and saw that Rebozos had removed the life jacket from the hold and put it on.

A mass of shore lay ahead, and sometimes it did not lie ahead. Rain fell from the gray sky and drizzled down Heck’s head and face. His eyes stung, ached and fooled him. Here stood Mad Rock, an almost vertical pile. A cormorant with a gaping wound in its head looked down sadly on the men in the boat. “We have to stop,” Heck shouted. “I’ve got to fix this old bird.”

“I want to eat,” Rebozos called up from behind.

“I brought sandwiches and coffee.”

“After this hell? I want a hot lunch and a drink.”

Heck had the stronger arm. He put in at the rock, stepped out of the kayak and lifted the cormorant—its body stiff and its
eyes dull—in his arms. He held his hand tightly over the wound until the bird relaxed and draped its long black neck against Heck’s shoulder. Soon it revived; its body began to hum like a machine and it slipped its wing under his arm. Wings were arms, Heck saw, and arms wings. The long bones and the blue-black feathers fit perfectly. That was it, exactly. The way out of this was up.

Rebozos, still wearing the orange life vest, knit a bandage with silver needles and thin white yarn. “I’ve shot a cat for supper,” he called out.

The cormorant flew straight up and away from them. Heck paddled on, making up the time he’d lost. His head felt light. He would not mention the life vest; it was beneath him. (But he and Rebozos might not be friends after this.) He rose above it and flew along the shoreline. He saw open land where a fire pond looked like a blue bladder in a brown body. He saw fins in the water, slicing through the offshore swells. He saw Mad Rock, two miles out, and two figures in a kayak, paddling away from the rock; one of them wore an orange life jacket. He saw a baseball sailing into the air. He saw his mother covering her mouth with her hand—was she ashamed?—and Lil’s face, smiling at him, one of her front teeth folded slightly over the other. He saw Mrs. O’Greefe, holding her arms against her chest, her dress transparent in the rain. Water ran backward up his face, forcing tears into his eyes. Mrs. X. sat up and removed the cloth from her face. The pilot dipped, rode first on one wing, then on the other. For an instant, Heck saw an impossible thing: a kitten with large ears and almond-shaped eyes standing on the rock. “Where did you learn to fly?” the passenger asked the pilot.

“I am a Wampanoag brave,” the pilot said. “This is our ancestral air.”

The wing dipped, and when it rose again, the kitten had disappeared.

She wrapped herself in her thrift-store kimono and walked to the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee. But the milk carton stood empty on the counter and the percolator sucked in the brew with an esophageal hiss. She left Heck’s little mess for later and looked in on EV, who also breathed as if she were drinking through a straw.

Back in bed, she planned her escape, an hour of reading. But Heck’s shy eyes watched her in the dark and made her wet with desire. She saw herself through his eyes, from the outside; the way he looked at her, the way men looked at her, helped her to see herself this way. O’Greefe, cheap as a two-cent stamp, had the heat cranked down, but the bed held a memory of warmth. The kimono, silky but not silk, also held her own heat in. She ran her hands over her skin, her breasts larger than before EV, and saw herself as if she were a bird flying overhead and looking down at a woman unfolding under her unfolding kimono. Even her mouth felt aroused.

“Veux-tu que je débarrasse la table?”
she whispered, the language all silk and velvet and pearls.

The apartment roared like a hollow shell. She folded and unfolded herself, lying tangled under the warm, ugly Hudson Bay blanket her Uncle Frank had given them for a wedding present, a practical and insinuating gift, made to last.

The spongy mattress (Heck’s parents’ ancient nuptial bed) held her in a watery embrace. She wanted a lot. She wanted more. She had everything she needed. She turned her head, opened her mouth and swallowed—like a pill—her little cry of ecstasy.

Wind whipped the water up in peaks. The Brewsters’ sitter shook sand from the blanket and packed the canvas boat bag, preparing to take her two charges home. She’d brought
them to the beach with a thermos of hot chocolate and they’d made a castle, although the sand pecked at their eyes and faces, and their hands went numb from digging moats and pressing cold sand into turrets. Just now, she’d caught the older one, the boy, watching her when she squatted among the rocks to pee. She’d made them put their hands over their eyes and sing “Frère Jacques” in a round so they wouldn’t hear her splashing, but this one, his eyes were wide open.

The boy was also the first to see the two men spill into the gray water about two hundred yards offshore. He pointed, and the sitter doubted what she saw—two men? No direct signal, no sound told her that what she saw was true. But the boy, who had the empathy of a frog, pointed gravely, and the girl cried out, “Two mens in the water!”

The sitter pulled off her red sweatshirt and the two shirts she wore under it and stood before the children for a terrifying instant in her bra.

They stood in front of her with their mouths open. “Go—tell—run!” she said, and ran, right up against the waves and through the whitecaps. Then she dove and swam.

She was not just any sitter, but a certified lifeguard, covered with a rubbery layer of fat. Cold and water did not scare her. Even when she could no longer feel her body, even low in the water, when she could not see where she was going, she swam in a line, the water like fire at her feet.

One man touched the sides of the boat. She saw long, feminine fingers spread on the bow, not really holding on, just touching it. She could not see his head or face. Then his fingers lost contact with the boat and sank into the water. The other man, buoyed up by a life jacket, flailed toward her.