Ernie's Ark (14 page)

He stepped outside, taking in painful gulps of air, imagining the hundred other ways his marriage might have gone. It had started to snow, a lacy feathering that landed wet and silent. He was about to retreat when he spotted Tracey, parked across the street, waiting. He marched over to her as she rolled down her window. “Get out,” he told her.

“You take this money,” she snapped, thrusting the bills into his hands. “I won’t leave till you take it. I mean it.”

He saw just then a snippet of the hardness she’d been trying to overcome. It pleased him unaccountably, the aftermath of a bad life still present in her voice. He reached into the car and slapped the bills down on the dashboard. “You cut my mother’s face.”

She nodded gravely. Her upturned face looked puffy and stained. “He told me to do worse than that. I saved your mother’s neck, is what really happened.”

“And you want, what, a medal for that?”

“I never wanted to hurt her. You have to believe me, I had nightmares for years.”

“You—” It hurt to talk, as if his throat had been badly bruised and only halfway healed. He managed to say, “What are you looking for? Forgiveness?”

She shook her head, her mouth melting downward. “No,” she said. “But I was hoping.”

Snow filtered down the back of his shirt. He stepped back, eyeing her corded neck, her old eyes, her shabby car. “Just go. Keep your guilt money.”

“Wait,” she said. “Please. I have to tell you something. Your mother wasn’t scared of me. I was a desperate little loser with a knife, but she wasn’t scared.” She blinked at the snow falling into her open window. “I think it was because she could see I was redeemable.”

James stood in the spongy street, gazing at this luckless, hapless, used-up person who had come up from Connecticut with a stack of new bills. What on earth would his mother have done?

“I’ve got two kids now,” she said. “Two ex-husbands.” She made a laugh-cry sound and wiped her eyes again. “You want to
talk baggage, I’ve got a trainload, and yet as soon as I’m finished paying my moral debts, this wonderful guy is going to marry me. He pulled me out of the muck and still he’s going to marry me.”

James glanced up the street, and down. His mother would have stood here, listening. This was a son’s knowledge and he was glad to have it. He leaned on the car door. “How many,” he asked, “how many debts do you have to repay?”

“More than I can do,” she said. “They’re hard to track down. I found your parents from the court record.”

“Are they all like this?”

She shrugged. “One guy slapped me, but at least he took the money. Listen, do you want to get in? You’re all wet.”

He studied her for a few moments, then rounded the car and got in beside her. Vinyl seats, no floor mats, a wicker cross dangling from the rearview. He felt a pang of pity that he hoped his mother would approve of. “Everybody has debts,” he said.

“Well, my conscience is in worse shape than most people’s.”

It occurred to James then, sitting in this car that smelled faintly of transmission fluid, that Tracey’s conscience was probably in better shape than most people’s. Better than his, certainly. The car’s bare interior seemed muffled and safe. He envied her the luxury of confession. To whom could he confess?

I never loved my wife. I carried on with women half my age. I was a terrible father. I was a terrible son.

“There’s no such thing as a clean conscience,” he told her. “You won’t feel as cleansed as you think you will.”

Tracey regarded him without pity, without judgment; it was the way he imagined alcoholics met one another at AA
meetings. “It’s never too late to start fresh,” she offered.

“Oh, it is,” he said. “It is absolutely too late.” He looked out through the scrim of snow at his parents’ house. “Some things aren’t amendable.”

“That’s true,” she agreed. “But some things are.” She held his gaze. “I was hoping this would be one of them.”

The world seemed so full of transgressions at the moment, so full there was hardly room to take a breath. To erase just one, to have that power, did not seem like something he could turn down. He felt useful. He felt called. “Listen,” he told her. “I’m her son. I can forgive you on her behalf.”

“Really?” she said, her lips parting. “Oh. Wow. My God. Thank you, really. You have no idea.”

She slipped the money from the dashboard and he took it. She shuddered with relief. If his father refused the money, he would send it to his daughter in Alaska, or wherever she was by the time they got back. Karen would know; Karen would know precisely.

He shut the door and headed across the street, hunching his shoulders against the snow. Behind him he could hear Tracey’s car rattle into gear. Ahead of him lay his father’s house, and the ark, steadfast and hulking, seemed to move as the snow gathered upon it. He stood staring at it despite the cold, this object of mystery that belonged to one man and one woman upon whom some trouble had been visited, failing to put them asunder.

He entered the house, which had gone silent. Karen was sitting in his mother’s chair. “He’s upstairs,” she said. She shook her head slowly. “God, Jamie.”

“I know. God.”

“People have all kinds of secrets,” she said. She gazed up at him. “Did you think I’d come back? After you were finished with Miss Teenage America?”

He tilted his head to really see her; she was not angry. “I think so,” he admitted. “Probably.”

“There was a time when I might have,” she said. “But not now. You know that, right?”

He nodded. “I’m so sorry,” he told her, enunciating the words.

She smiled wearily. “Thanks.”

“Can I sit with you awhile?” he asked.

She slid over. His mother’s chair wasn’t big enough for the two of them, but he wedged himself next to her, sliding his arm along her shoulders. The coming evening edged in, certain and safe, as reassuring as the long-ago feel of his mother’s hand. He listened for sounds of his father. After a few minutes his hip fell asleep, his knee began to throb. But he didn’t move. Something about the waning of this sorrowful day felt wondrous and unearned, like a snow day or a magic spell or forgiveness, and James did not want to be the one to end it.

Kenny Love, student and searcher

Kenny Love sauntered home from his shift at the VideoMart to find the kitchen lights on and his father and stepmother looking at him as if he’d just walked off a spaceship. His father announced, “Your mother’s uncle died.” This would be Uncle Ellery, his mother’s only relative.

Before Kenny could decide how he felt about his great-uncle’s passing, his father handed him a letter—a dry boilerplate explaining that Ellery Lydon had bequeathed to Kenny Love his house in Long Ridge, all its contents, and nine thousand dollars
to do with as he wished.
He could take possession, if he so desired, on the seventh of February. The remainder of the estate was going to an outfit called Feathered Friends.

Kenny stared at the letter. He had met his great-uncle only once, when he was eight, just before his mother left. They lived in Connecticut then: he remembered a long car ride to Maine, his mother steering with one hand and with the other punching the buttons on the radio.

“Is this a joke?” he asked. His father could not be trusted even in minor matters.

“What it is, Kenny, is an opportunity,” said his father, a hawk-nosed ectomorph who liked to display his long, artistic fingers by draping them over chair arms. “You can sell the place and put the money toward your tuition.”

“I’m keeping it,” Kenny said, deciding on the spot. “I’m moving there.”

His father went on as if he hadn’t heard. “You’ll work at that video joint till next fall, just as we planned, and then honor your commitment to Harvard University.” The way his father always added “University” to “Harvard” made Kenny, a devout pacifist, want to rip his father’s lungs out through his throat.

“I don’t have a commitment.”

His father’s eyes went steely. “If you think I’m going to let you sidewind your career at Harvard University just because of this goddamned Thoreau kick—”

“It’s not a kick,” Kenny said. “I told you fifty times I wasn’t going.”

Now Cindy chimed in: “Why didn’t Faye’s uncle leave the place to Faye?”

“He left the bulk to a bunch of birds, all right?” his father said. “Old bachelors go funny at the end.”

His father’s words hurt. Kenny lifted his fist, in which the letter crackled agreeably. “Wasn’t this addressed to me?” he asked, tight-lipped.

“It was from an attorney-at-law, Kenny,” Cindy said. “Your father had to open it.” She said “attorney-at-law” as if she were reading him a scary story.

“Thoreau went to Harvard,” his father said.

Kenny narrowed his eyes. “He refused to accept his diploma.”

After a long, melodramatic argument in which Kenny held fast, his plan forming beautifully in his head, his father concluded feebly: “You’ve got a mind for math, Kenny, not philosophy. This is a stupid, kid stunt.” His mouth continued to move, but he was psychologically hog-tied and he knew it.

Kenny felt hot with power, giddy with it. He was no kid; he was a seventeen-year-old man about to graduate from high school an entire semester early, working thirty hours a week for road money. In truth he hadn’t expected to save enough for the sort of wilderness experience he had in mind. He’d thought of trekking through Alaska, exploring the Amazon, camping on the banks of Lake Victoria, some form of extended meditation that would require a Thoreauvian purity of body and soul that he did not expect to encounter at a dorm party. Now, amazingly, God and his great-uncle had dropped a ready-made meditation into his lap at the eleventh hour. He saluted his father and Cindy, then spun out the door.

Throughout that long, cold, meaningful evening, Kenny sat on a bluff overlooking the smelly Maine town his father had settled him in. Kenny hated this town, which had the nerve to call itself a city. For going on a year now, the place had been tense and coiled and strike-ravaged. His small group of friends, normally placid and aimless, had divided into passionately separate camps—scab sons against striker sons—leaving Kenny, the sole professor’s son, floating out on the fringes, irrelevant, which is how he’d felt in every place he’d ever lived.

It was Thoreau who had saved him, who had painted a romantic halo around the razored edges of his aloneness. He would make his cash bonus last two years, the same amount of time Thoreau had taken to find his soul. He would live in Ellery Lydon’s house—he remembered it as a simple cabin surrounded by firs—freed from the small-minded politics of so-called civilized life, freed from the caprice of so-called friendships. He would ponder his place in the universe, something his father seemed utterly incapable of despite those drapey fingers.

In the end it was Cindy who drove him northward to his inherited house. She took a day off from her flower shop and added a basket of red carnations to the few things Kenny had packed into the trunk. From day one Cindy had been bribing Kenny and Francine with good deeds and floral arrangements. Francine had fallen hard; their mother had been gone for many years and Francine, who was thirteen and fat, didn’t appear fussy about who might take her place. “You don’t have the constitution for this, Kenny,” Francine said, hopping into the front seat. Apparently Cindy had invited her along. “Wilderness experiences test your grit.”

“Talk like a normal person, Francine,” Kenny told her.

Francine folded her arms, haughty as a schoolmarm. “I’m just
saying,
you weren’t raised gritty.”

Cindy started the car. “Experience increases our wisdom but doesn’t reduce our follies,” she said, quoting, as was her wont, from her daily planner. At the last possible second, Kenny’s father strode stone-faced to the car and they shook hands through the window—a mulish formality, since they had not spoken a civil word for weeks.

The ride to Ellery Lydon’s house took three hours. A light, dry snow fell briefly, the Christmasy kind that made Kenny feel like a character in a movie, a man on his way to boot camp or a gold rush, leaving the womenfolk behind. The house, a well-appointed bungalow with black wooden shutters, sat at the end of a bleak, sparsely inhabited outskirt road. Empty fields fell away from both sides of the house, and the lot resembled one of those grief-stricken landscapes from a Wyeth painting. Away down the back field, the terrain rose sharply to a four-mile crew cut of firs that gave Long Ridge its name.

“This looks cozy,” Cindy said, pulling over. Though the house was missing the tight circle of trees Kenny had added to his memory, the inside was almost exactly as he remembered it: spare, pleasant rooms scented with pipe tobacco. His father’s house, with Cindy’s frothy touches, seemed silly and irrelevant by contrast. As Cindy and Francine helped bring in his things, he tried to remember more of his visit here: a smallish man with enormous hands; birds ribboning around the yard; ginger ice cream. His mother, tall and jittery, smoking a cigarette, staring out the kitchen door at the broad back field.

“Some wilderness,” Francine said from the parlor. “The phone works.”

“It’s a rotary,” Cindy said. “Isn’t that precious?”

Indeed, everything worked. Nothing had been turned off or shut down, as if Ellery had been loath to let an inconvenience like his own death mar the running of his household. Kenny offered Cindy and Francine a drink of water from the kitchen tap—
his
kitchen tap. The water ran cold and clear. “Kenny,” Francine said, gaping at him, mournful as a puppy. “Why didn’t he leave me anything?”

“Probably he didn’t know about you,” Kenny said. “Mom’s not big on updates.”

“Oh, Kenny,” Cindy said, “I’m sure that’s not true.” She rested her hand on Francine’s shoulder. “Your great-uncle probably thought you were too young for an inheritance, honey.”

But Kenny knew better. Their mother had dumped the two of them with no ceremony—no tears or parting words that Kenny could recall—to move to London, England, in the hope of taking up a new life. She called the two of them once a year on her birthday, a thread of contact between their brief summer visits to her depressing apartment in the theater district, where she edited copy for a science magazine.