Float (17 page)

Duncan hammered plywood over the shattered window while Mrs. McNordfy swept up the glass. Nod was gone. While Duncan had been running around trying to find nails, hammer, wood, and ladder, all stored separately in far-reaching parts of the house, garage, and boat shed, Nod had donned his raingear and left for the dock. By the time Duncan returned to the library with tools, Nod was already shouldering his way across the darkening lawn, listing to the right with a full can of gas. He raised his hand without looking back when Duncan screamed, “Come back!” over the wind. Since he would not listen to reason, Duncan could only hope that the wind would keep pushing him back until he gave up. While all this was going on, his mother rummaged through the library shelves looking for a book of party games.

“We haven’t had a party in so long.” She sighed. “I’ve forgotten the rules to ‘Two on the Tower.’”

“It’s like Truth, ain’t it?” said Mrs. McNordfy.

“Oh, much better than Truth. You make believe you’re on top of a tower with a friend on either side, and confess which of them you would push off first. Where could that book have gone?”

“Mom.” Duncan put his hammer down just as the rain began to hit the plywood in heavy splats. “Why would you want to play something like that? It sets everyone up to get hurt.”

“Speaking of hurt, my boy,” said Mrs. McNordfy, leaning on her broom, “how’s them feet of yours?”

His bare soles had gotten cut on the glass when he picked up the wheel. Blood stained the parquet, and this was not the kitchen floor, designed to hide such accidents. Duncan lifted a foot. Dirt seemed to have staunched the bleeding. “Just needs a good scrub.” He looked meaningfully at the floor. “That could use a good scrub, too.”

“Yesh, yesh, yesh,” said Mrs. McNordfy, pushing her broom around.

“Half of them,” his mother said, blowing dust off a gray volume.

“Half of what?” he asked.

“Only half the guests would get hurt playing the game. The other half would be very pleased.” She opened the book and flattened a silverfish with her finger before closing it with evident satisfaction. “Time to hang the swordfish bait outside so everyone will know we’re
en fête
. Duncan, dear, move the ladder to the porch.”

“I’ll hold it steady for you, Mrs. Leland,” said Mrs. McNordfy. “Then I got to get out of here before my old Bob worries.” She emptied her dustpan into the trash barrel she’d pulled in from the kitchen, making the room smell of garbage.

His mother stopped at the door. “I almost forgot, I brought your shoes in, Duncan, dear,” she said, pointing to his loafers on the library table. “You left them in the dining room. Please try to be a little neater. We are expecting company, you know.”

And then she left. Duncan looked around the room. The ship’s wheel was leaning against a bookshelf. His blood was smeared on the floor. Leaves and papers had been blown all around the room and out into the hall, but his mother’s priority was to decorate the outside of the house with glow sticks. Mrs. McNordfy didn’t even take the trash barrel with her when she left.

He picked up his shoes and turned them over, knowing what he would find. Freshly painted white crosses on the soles, done with Wite-Out by his mother, who believed that they protected sailors from sea monsters and sharks. She periodically swept through the house marking all the shoes and boots, especially right before a storm. As for herself, she rarely wore anything on her feet at all.

~

Duncan knelt before the fireplace, lighting matches. He was getting his knees dirty with ash and wondered if he would have time to change. He’d been so nervous about Cora that he just couldn’t decide what to wear and ended up being both too formal and too relaxed for the occasion. His tie wouldn’t lie straight, his jacket collar kept popping up, and there was some sort of bleach stain on his chinos, but he didn’t know what could be done about it all now. The guests were due any minute, those who were still coming. The storm was big and it was bad, and phone calls had been pouring in over the past hour with cancellations, but they would still have over a dozen adventurous souls. The wind roared as it swept over the top of the chimney, sucking out the matches as soon as he lit them. When he finally got a corner of a newspaper going, the driftwood caught all at once in a violent flash, throwing salty sparks of colors. Duncan looked at his watch. Nod had not come back yet. His mother said there was nothing to worry about—he was probably at the Boat Club biding his time inside one of the sheds until he saw an opening in the weather. Duncan was lost in distant thought when he heard a door creak open behind him.

“Still mad at me?” asked Slocum, his head peeking in.

“Mad? Why would I be mad?” asked Duncan, standing up and brushing debris off his pants. “Mad that you pulled a small fortune out from under my feet? Or mad that you’ve set me up to be disposed of?”

“
Amuse-bouches?
” Slocum held out a plate of food that couldn’t be identified as fish, flesh, or good red herring, and Duncan hoped Cora would know enough to eat something before she came. “Day boat scallops with caper raisin emulsion,” Slocum said helpfully. “A peace offering.”

“No peace. I thought we were friends. I thought we were partners in jellyfish plastic.”

“We are friends,” said Slocum. “That’s why I knew you’d want to sacrifice a few piddling potential profits for my life. And don’t think I’m not grateful.” He turned to look at Duncan’s mother as she entered from the library with a tray. “Voilà! The
vino sacro
has arrived!”

The fireplace puffed back as the library door closed behind her and filled the air with smoke. She held up a black tin tray of jelly-jar glasses filled with mulberry wine.

“A sip with your snack, my hearties?” She wore damp white ducks and a striped jersey, and her braid was dripping water on the floor. A slicker had been no match for the driving rain when she hung her party lights. Duncan looked out the window, and against the complete darkness he saw the luminescent sticks strung out on a fishing line, draped from pillar to pillar and jerking madly in the wind.

Chandu, his thick coat heavy with water, collapsed with a sigh on the hearth, where the warmth of the fire released his doggie odors to the air. Duncan held up his hand, refusing the wine, then turned to the drinks table for a beer. Slocum cleared a spot for his platter.

“I’m worried about Nod,” said Duncan, opening his Harpoon Ale. “Don’t you think we should do something?”

“Nod is a grown man,” said his mother. “You have to let him do what grown men do.”

“Which is what?” asked Duncan.

“It’s about time you found out,” she said.

Slocum artfully whipped a glass from his mother’s tray before she put it down on the coffee table. “Risk their lives in foolish escapades?”

“You see that painting?” His mother pointed to a paint-by-number replica of Rembrandt’s
Storm on the Sea of Galilee
. “Christ yells at the wind in the face of a storm and prevents the boat from sinking. Cousin Biddle painted that for your father and me as a wedding present. There’s much to be learned from art.”

“Nod can shout at the wind all he wants,” said Duncan. “But it’s not going to save him.”

“Notice how Christ stays calm in the midst of great turbulence. He floats above all the hubbub. Try to be more like that. Like Nod.”

What is this? Duncan wondered. A Jesus complex by proxy? He would have loved to discuss this with Cora, but he had promised himself that he would not start talking about his mother while trying to win back his wife.

“My Sunday school teacher, Mrs. Havelock?” said Slocum. “She taught us that the Galilee storm was a metaphor for troubled souls.”

“The point is,” his mother continued, waving Slocum’s words away, “you have to have faith.”

“Faith,” said Slocum. “Yes, indeed.” They were quiet for a minute as they all continued to stare at the poorly executed painting. “Did your cousin stay in the arts?”

“Poor girl died of the chestnut blight before she made a name for herself.”

“Mother, that’s a horticultural disease, not a human one.”

“Duncan.” She sighed deeply. “You’ve always had such a limited mind. Even as a child.”

Duncan stared at her. First Slocum turns on him, then Nod dumps on him, now his mother. He was about to say something about how it was better to have a limited mind than a snapped one when Slocum once again stepped in between them.

“Annabel,” said Slocum, steering her attention to a figurehead on the wall, “tell me about your angel here.”

The figurehead, hanging high up on a wall, had wormholed wooden curls and a distracted look. Her angel wings were long gone, and her white paint was worn away. “Great-Uncle Winnie on my mother’s side,” said his mother, “served as captain on the
U.S.S. Gabriella
in the Napoleonic wars. He died heroically in battle, so rather than commending him to the sea, they sent him home in a cask, preserved with alcohol. Years later, when the ship was decommissioned, the navy sent the family the figurehead. There’s devotion for you.”

“I didn’t know America fought in the Napoleonic wars,” said Duncan, knowing full well that the figurehead had washed up on the beach in Lucius’s time. He wondered if his mother knew she was lying or was just straight-out delusional.

“This is no time, Duncan, dear.” As she bent to pick up her tray, the end of her braid knocked some scallops to the floor. “I hear guests! To your stations, men!”

And then she disappeared into the front hall, where Duncan heard torrents of water hitting the tile and shouts of greetings, with an unfamiliar voice saying, “The rain falls on the good and bad alike.” There seemed to be a struggle to get the door closed against the wind.

Slocum was still admiring the figurehead. “Sailors used to believe that gales would subside if a naked woman appeared before them. That’s why so many of these are bare-breasted. You don’t often get to see the tits of an angel.”

“My mother’s driving me crazy,” said Duncan.

Slocum slapped him on the back. “You know what Clover tells Harley: People are given the mom they need for a particular incarnation.” He offered his glass to Duncan. “Here, this pungent little wine will give you a fast push out of the gate.”

“I wouldn’t use it to give a pig an enema, as my grandfather used to say,” said Duncan. “Besides, it’s only a gentle push out of the gate, low in alcohol.”

“The fun isn’t in the alcohol,” said Slocum. “Mulberries are a known hallucinogen.” He swallowed the drink and smacked his lips. “Your mom probably hasn’t touched ground in years.”

Duncan became so abruptly disoriented it seemed as if the floor had washed out from under his feet. He felt the too-familiar sensation of his skull emptying of sound, but this time he did not let his mind just drift out with the tide. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. A hallucinogenic mother. His whole life suddenly started to make sense. He put his glasses back on and turned to the photo on the mantel with her posing with the marlin, and there was that look in her eyes. She’d probably been drinking the wine for days to celebrate her marriage, more so during the difficult landing of the marlin. Could an overdose have triggered a bummer trip, which prevented her from ever going out on the water again? The same with his father’s funeral. She’d gotten pretty looped that day and hadn’t left the house since. For that matter, his father was known to throw a few back now and again, especially at lunch, before he sailed back to work.

It could also explain a great deal about Nod. He was born nine months after the honeymoon, conceived during this binge. That couldn’t be good.

Duncan felt the beer settle in his stomach like bilge water. “I thought it was the family genes.”

“It was the family wine,” said Slocum, refilling his glass. “Amazing that a few berries can be transformed into a mind-altering substance.”
He lifted his nose and sniffed, and they both looked toward the back hall, where a finger of black smoke beckoned from the kitchen. “Please, God, not the sea slug,” said Slocum, and he was gone.

~

Outside, it was raining like all possessed. Duncan gazed at the fire. The chimney cap could not keep the water out, so it ran down the flue lining and popped into steam on contact with the fire. If it was true about the wine, he could not wait to tell Cora. His family was not particularly crazy; they were just drugged out of their minds. He and Cora could have normal kids as long as they kept them away from Grandma’s jelly and decanters. To save what was left of his mother’s mind, he would go down to the cellar and tap the casks, but he couldn’t do anything about it now. Cora would be arriving in a few minutes, and he hadn’t even programmed the music. The right songs would convey his joy and evoke the more romantic and forgiving aspects of Cora’s psyche. He was thinking something moving and classical. Ravel. Beethoven. The Who.

But first he removed an open bottle of mulberry wine from the drinks table and hid it behind the sofa; then he knelt down at the stereo dock in the corner and fiddled with the iPod wheel. Guests continued to arrive. Newcomers entered brusquely, as if thrown in by a wave from the sea, filling the room, but Duncan was lost in thought. He had just clicked on “Pinball Wizard” when he heard a voice that made his barometer drop. He stood up too suddenly and, for the second time that night, felt himself with nothing to stand on.

“Syrie. What are you doing here?”

“What kind of a welcome is that?” Syrie wore an ice-green shantung silk dress so sheer it could have been threaded through a ring. Her earrings glittered like fishing lures, and milk-white pearls touched her collarbone. Her little dog was tucked into an evening bag she wore across her chest. She swiveled her attention to the stereo. “Have you ever noticed how great pieces of music follow the stages of sex? Desire, arousal, climax, and resolution?”

“Go!” Duncan hissed. He could see what was happening quite clearly now. Just as with the incriminating seagull pictures, Syrie was part of Osbert’s elaborate plan to catch him in compromising positions. Or worse, she was an actual assassin. Now that he knew he was capable of producing normal children, he became very protective of his life. “Go home before Cora gets here.”