Drowning Lessons (3 page)

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I thought you'd like it.”

“It isn't a question of like,” said Frank, climbing in. “I'm old enough to be your grandfather.”

“Oh, so it's a question of age, is it?” Before he could say anything, she reached forward and kissed him again, a slow kiss on his lips.

He watched her red bathing suit get smaller and smaller as he rowed, turning into a red dot as he hurried back to his wife.

That afternoon he held Dorothy up in the shallow water. He did the same the next afternoon, helping her practice her breathing, teaching her to reach with her arms and turn her head from side to side. She wore her green one-piece bathing suit. It made her skin look ghostly white.

“Kick,” said Frank, buoying her up. “Kick!”

“I'm kicking!”

“Hello, Frank.”

The woman from the Icehouse stood there, on the dam, holding her dog on a leash.

“Kick,” said Frank, ignoring her.

They spent the rest of the afternoon practicing in the shallows, with Frank teaching Dorothy to kick and tread water. He taught her the freestyle stroke and had her practice it with her feet touching bottom. “Frank, my arms are tired,” she kept saying, until finally he relented. “Fine,” he said. “You're doing fine. We'll pick up tomorrow.” The next day, before lunch and after his morning swim (he had not seen the woman from the Icehouse, which both relieved and disappointed him), he brought his wife with him out to the float.

“Are you sure I'm ready for this?” she asked him.

“Don't worry,” he said.

While mooring the boat, Frank saw a red dot in the distance. As they drew closer, the red dot waved. Frank nodded.

“What is it?” said Dorothy.

“What? Nothing,” said Frank, turning away. He stepped onto the float. “Come on,” he said, taking her hand.

“I'm really not sure if I'm ready.”

“You promised.”

“I don't want to do this, Frank.”

“Please — don't let me down.”

She shook her head. “Frank, let me stay in the boat.”

“Don't let me down!”
He gripped her arm.

“I'm not letting you down! This has nothing to do with
you
! I don't want to swim. I don't
feel
like it. Let
go
of me!”

“Please.”

“Let go, Frank!”

“Damn you.”

He let go. The boat had drifted away from the float. Instead of falling back onto the seat, his wife fell forward, over the side. She came up thrashing.

“Frank!” she spluttered.

“Swim!” he said.

The woman from the Icehouse stood there, watching, waving. Frank's eyes darted back and forth from his wife thrashing in her one-piece bathing suit to the woman on shore in her bright red bikini. Though only several hundred yards, the distance may as well have been measured in light years. It was the very same distance, he reflected (dimly aware of his wife's spluttered cries), that had stood between him and joy, him and the vigor of his youth, that impossible distance of dark, deep water. No amount of swimming, his own or anyone else's, could broach it.

Frank!

To cross that distance you had to do more than swim.

Frank!

As he watched his wife struggle, an irresistible force gripped and held him frozen — a vibrating electric force that numbed his shoulders and turned his arms and legs to quivering bars of lead. It came from all the way across the water, from where the woman from the Icehouse stood watching him.

Help!

“Jesus!”

He dove in.

The water was cold and dark, dark green. Bubbles smashed into his face. He followed them down and down until his muscles and lungs began to cringe, then surfaced to catch his breath, then followed them down again. In the green darkness he saw nothing, only the pale explosions of his breath as the churning water multiplied the bubbles in all dimensions. He groped blindly, kicking at the darkness until his lungs began to explode. He rushed
up into the wavering cone of light, his left leg striking something on the way. Snatching a razor-sharp breath from the surface, he plunged again, found her, and brought her up a dozen yards from the float. With one arm around her wide waist and one for the water, he dog-paddled her to the ladder. Somehow, in a series of movements that cut a wedge out of time, he lifted her out and up onto the float, where he lay her on her back and pinched her nostrils and breathed into her, his warm lips pressed against her cold ones as he massaged her heart. She retched back to life. He rolled her on her side and watched her cough water. Then he sat with his hand on her shoulder, his feet over the edge of the float, his face dripping. His heart pounded in his chest like a wire beater thrashing a dusty old rug.

He looked to shore.

The red dot was gone. There was no gray car, no black barking dog. No light burned in the Icehouse, which looked as weedy, as empty, as abandoned as ever. A blue heron sailed overhead. A breeze swept the lake in a gray parabola. He closed his eyes and sobbed, tears mixed with lake water dripping from his sagging, creased face.

“I'm sorry,” he told no one. “So sorry.”

With his eyes still closed he felt himself drifting; he felt he could drift like that forever. When he opened them, he saw the clouds shifting high above the trees. He looked down at the water in time to see a creature — a pond skater or a water strider — walking there.

THAT SUNDAY MORNING
when I told her, “Mrs. Wolff is dead,” my mother groaned, cocked her head, pursed her lips, and said, in a voice barely loud enough to hear, “Che peccato.” The next day she lay in her bed, sick, calling to me in her Death Voice, “Alberto? Albert? Sei tu, Alberto?”

Of course it was me; who else would it be? Not Geordie, my twin, who preaches in Vermont. I stood at her bedroom door, like I've always stood there, like I've stood there my whole life, helpless. But this time I did something different. “That's it,” I said, marching over, tearing the bedclothes off her. “I'm taking you to the emergency room. They'll do a million useless tests; then we'll go home. Okay?” I felt just like Geordie saying it.

Having piled her into her mint-condition green '68 Rambler American, I drove my mother to the hospital, where they're testing her for meningitis.

She doesn't have meningitis.

So I leave my mother in the hands of experts and go to pick up Lenny Wolff, whose mother is dead. It rains. Lenny's father, wife,
and eight-month-old baby boy huddle in a corner of his childhood living room, surrounded by plastic buckets, Tupperware bowls, and pots catching drops from a leaky roof. Everyone's saying carefully sentimental things like
she's in a better place now
. With his barrel chest, thick neck, and bowed, ruddy head, Mr. Wolff looks like one of the huge red water valves at the reservoir pumping station where he works and where I sometimes visit him. Lenny has a two o'clock appointment with the priest.

“You're late,” he says first thing when he sees me.

“Sorry,” I say. “It's raining.” As if he hasn't noticed.

“I'm on a very tight schedule,” says Father Moynahan, a man with thin blue eyes and thinning hair who speaks in a soft, cautious voice. Everything about the man is cautious, grotesquely moderate. He meets us by the confessional. There's a wedding in progress, so he doubts there'll be many “takers.” “They don't like to come during weddings,” he says.

Lenny stopped believing in God the year we graduated, the same year he quit smoking. Since then he's been waiting for the Catholic Church to collapse, as if his piety had been the main thing supporting it. Only his mom's side of the family remains true to Rome; the rest are lapsed, agnostics, Jews, while most of his friends are atheists like me, Geordie, and Clyde. Though she attended Mass every Sunday, Mrs. Wolff always sat in the last pew, alone, like a shy man in a porno theater. Her mouth would open to sing, Lenny once told me, but no sound ever came out. Father Moynahan, who'll be performing the service, doesn't seem to remember her.

“Was this by any chance the Mrs. Wolff who lived at the Good Samaritan Nursing Home?” he asks Lenny.

“She lived with my father,” Lenny answers, his brown eyes narrowing to rusty blades.

“I see,” says Father M. “That must be another Mrs. Wolff.”

“Yes, it must,” says Lenny, stabbing him repeatedly.

Why the hell does Lenny want me here? To keep him from punching the priest? Since the day Geordie and I met Lenny, I've always been slightly afraid of him. It was Clyde Rawlings who brought us together on the rock at Bennington Pond back when we were still in puberty. The DePoli twins were the only first-generation Americans in this small New England factory town, the only atheists, our dead father a scientist and inventor. We'd learned to hate and fear Catholic boys, pimple-faced, plaid-necktied hooligans who'd beat us up at the bus stop for being “Guineas” and not believing in God. We expected no less of Lenny, who loomed barrel chested and fierce on our rock like Samson over the Philistines. Clyde made introductions. “Lenny Wolff, God-fearing Catholic, meet Albert and Geordie, blaspheming atheists.” My twin and I froze like headlight deer and remained frozen as Lenny smiled and shook hands with us. Still, there was violence in the guy. You could feel it.

“And you say there are to be Jews at the service?” Father Moderation asks, drawing out the word “Jews,” stretching it like taffy.

“My wife among them,” says Lenny.

“You didn't want a Jewish service?”

“My mother was Catholic.”

“That's right … that's right. And your father?”

“What
difference
does it make?”

Father Moderation smiles. “Well, my son, you see, I need to know, if you'll pardon the expression, just what sort of group
I'm ‘up against.' Non-Catholics can be, well, impatient with our ways.”

“I can imagine,” says Lenny.

“At least you won't be preaching to the converted,” I say, trying to lighten things up a little. The priest turns hopeful eyes to me. “What about you? Are you Catholic?”

“Lapsed. Apostate.”

“Oh.” He nods. “I see.”

The priest turns back to Lenny to discuss his role in the eulogy.

“My advice would be keep it short and sweet,” he suggests. “A requiem mass can seem quite lengthy.” Lenny, who played King Arthur in the Immaculate High production of
Camelot
and now earns pin money clowning for kids at birthday parties, looks bugged. “I think you should leave that up to me, shouldn't you, Father?” he says, clenching and unclenching his fists. “She is my mother, after all.”

They go over more details, schedules, transportation, parking.

“Well.” Father Moderation stands. “I must check the confessional.”

He shakes hands with us, giving mine a series of soft, gooey squeezes, like he's milking a cow. As we cross the church parking lot, Lenny's cheeks burn red while his usually red lips go pale. “I'll say whatever the hell I want at my mother's funeral, you Mick pederast son of a bitch,” he grumbles.

“What did you expect?” I say, unlocking Mom's antique Rambler.

“A little flexibility would've been nice.”

“Oh yeah, right, sure,” I say. “A little flexibility. ‘We'd like a little flexibility, let's go to the Catholic Church.' Give me a break.”

I turn, hoping to see him smile, but he just sits there in the passenger seat, staring out the windshield, kneading his jaw, flexing his fists.

I drive Lenny home, then head back to the house.

Once there were five of us, Lenny, Clyde, Geordie, Stewart, and myself. All summer long we'd dive and swim in the reservoir, also known as Bennington Pond, kicking and thrashing our way to a tiny island at its center with a thirty-foot ornamental lighthouse. Lenny, best fighter of us all but worst swimmer by far, nearly drowned twice. The first time Geordie saved him; the second time Stewie hauled him up onto the rocks. We got along as much out of inertia as anything, though we did share a pessimism about small-town life and trusted everyone else much, much less than we trusted each other. We also did a fair amount of all-American goofing off, with Lenny usually laughing hardest of all, like the time he did his impression of a guy throwing up, using a lukewarm bowl of Campbell's cheddar-cheese soup. (We were stoned.)

Stewie was our second-hardest laugher, also our biggest-hearted goofball. To his lasting credit he turned the whole world into a bathroom joke. Unfortunately, the world included motor vehicles. Three days before graduation, he plowed himself and his dad's Pinto into the town flagpole, which stood at the center of Main Street. We lined up at Stewie's open coffin, paying respects to the powdered jelly doughnut that had been his face, expecting this, too, to be one of his cruder jokes, though no one laughed, not even Lenny. He and Clyde blubbered magnificently, while I envied them, having failed to shed a tear of my own. Nor did Geordie turn on the waterworks. He looked more bored and angry than weepy. The fact is, the DePoli twins have yet to cry at
a funeral. Maybe because we don't believe in God. Or maybe we don't believe in
death
.

Having taken Lenny home and garaged my mother's creampuff Rambler, I walk back to the hospital, to see how she's doing. I've got nothing better to do, and besides, it's only three miles, all under a sky stuffed with clouds. Like many hospitals this one is near a cemetery, and I take a shortcut through it. Death may not impress me, but tombstones do: tiny, tidy stone homes for the dead, so neat in their manicured rows. Some aren't marble or granite, but cast in metal to look like stone. I play a game with myself, guessing from afar which stones are fake, testing for hollowness with my knuckles. A sudden wonder grips me. Is Papa's tombstone fake? What about my grandmother's? And Stewie — do Stewie's bones rest under a phony stone? If so, what of it? Do souls need to live
anywhere
? Do they care less where they live? Such are the thoughts of minds meandering through cemeteries on cloudy days.