Friend of My Youth (23 page)

She could listen to Bugs’ breathing. Little flurries and halts, ragged accelerations, some snags, snores, and achieved straight runs. She could hear Bugs half-wake, and shift and struggle and prop herself higher up in the bed. And she could watch the captain, when he came out for his walk. She didn’t know if he saw her. He never indicated. He never looked her way. He looked straight ahead. He was getting his exercise, at night, when there would be the least chance of having to be sociable. Back and forth, back and forth, close to the rail. Averill stayed still—she felt like a fox in the brush. A night animal, watching him. But she didn’t think he would be startled if she should move or call out. He was alert to everything on the ship, surely. He knew she was there but could ignore her, out of courtesy, or his own sense of confidence.

She thought of Jeanine’s designs on him, and agreed with
Bugs that they were doomed to failure. Averill would be disappointed if they were not doomed to failure. The captain did not seem to her a needy man. He did not need to disturb you, or flatter, or provoke, or waylay you. None of that
look at
me,
listen to
me,
admire me, give me
. None of that. He had other things on his mind. The ship, the sea, the weather, the cargo, his crew, his commitments. The passengers must be an old story to him. Cargo of another sort, requiring another sort of attention. Idle or ailing, lustful or grieving, curious, impatient, mischievous, remote—he would have seen them all before. He would know things about them right away, but never more than he needed to know. He would know about Jeanine. An old story.

How did he decide when to go in? Did he time himself, did he count his steps? He was gray-haired and straight-backed, with a thickness of body around the waist and the stomach speaking not of indulgence but of a peaceable authority. Bugs had not thought up any name for him. She had called him a canny Scot, but beyond that she had taken no interest. There were no little tags about him for Bugs to get hold of, no inviting bits of showing-off, no glittery layers ready to flake away. He was a man made long ago, not making himself moment by moment and using whomever he could find in the process.

One night before the captain appeared, Averill heard singing. She heard Bugs singing. She heard Bugs wake and resettle herself and start singing.

Sometimes in the last months Bugs had sung a phrase during a lesson, she had sung under her breath, with great caution, and out of necessity, to demonstrate something. She did not sing like that now. She sang lightly, as she used to do in practice, saving her strength for the performance. But she sang truly and adequately, with unimpaired—or almost unimpaired—sweetness.

“Vedrai carino,”
Bugs sang, just as she used to sing when setting the table or looking out the rainy window of the apartment, making a light sketch that could be richly filled in if she chose. She might have been waiting for somebody at those times,
or wooing an improbable happiness, or just limbering up for a concert.

Averill’s head had pulled up when the singing started, her body had tightened, as at a crisis. But there was no call for her; she stayed where she was. After the first moment’s alarm, she felt just the same thing, the same thing she always felt, when her mother sang. The doors flew open, effortlessly, there was the lighted space beyond, a revelation of kindness and seriousness. Desirable, blessed joy, and seriousness, a play of kindness that asked nothing of you. Nothing but to accept this bright order. That altered everything, and then the moment Bugs stopped singing it was gone. Gone. It seemed that Bugs herself had taken it away. Bugs could imply that it was just a trick, nothing more. She could imply that you were a bit of a fool to take such notice of it. It was a gift that Bugs was obliged to offer, to everybody.

There. That’s all. You’re welcome.

Nothing special.

Bugs had that secret, which she openly displayed, then absolutely protected—from Averill, just as from everybody else.

Averill is not particularly musical, thank God
.

The captain came on deck just as Bugs finished singing. He might have caught the tail end of it or been waiting decently in the shadows until it was over. He walked, and Averill watched, as usual.

Averill could sing in her head. But even in her head she never sang the songs that she associated with Bugs. None of Zerlina’s songs, or the soprano parts of the oratorios, not even “Farewell to Nova Scotia” or any of the folk songs that Bugs mocked for their sappy sentiments though she sang them angelically. Averill had a hymn that she sang. She hardly knew where
it came from. She couldn’t have learned it from Bugs. Bugs disliked hymns, generally speaking. Averill must have picked it up at church, when she was a child, and had to go along with Bugs when Bugs was doing a solo.

It was the hymn that starts out, “The Lord’s my Shepherd.” Averill did not know that it came from a psalm—she had not been to church often enough to know about psalms. She did know all the words in the hymn, which she had to admit were full of strenuous egotism, and straightforward triumph, and, particularly in one verse, a childish sort of gloating:

How blithely and securely and irrationally Averill’s head-voice sang these words, while she watched the captain pace in front of her, and later, when she herself walked safely down to the rail:

Her silent singing wrapped around the story she was telling herself, which she extended further every night on the deck. (Averill often told herself stories—the activity seemed to her as unavoidable as dreaming.) Her singing was a barrier set between the world in her head and the world outside, between her body and the onslaught of the stars, the black mirror of the North Atlantic.

Bugs stopped going down to lunch. She still went to breakfast, and was lively then, and for an hour or so afterward. She said she didn’t feel any worse, she was tired of listening and
talking. She didn’t sing again, at least not when Averill could hear her.

On the ninth night, which was the last night out, before they were to dock at Tilbury, Jeanine gave a party in her cabin. Jeanine had the largest and best cabin on the boat deck. She provided champagne, which she had brought on board for this purpose, and whiskey and wine, along with caviar, grapes, heaps of smoked salmon and steak tartare and cheese and flatbread, from the unsuspected resources of the kitchen. “I’m squandering,” she said. “I’m flying high. I’ll be wandering around Europe with a knapsack on my back stealing eggs out of henhouses. I don’t care. I’ll take all your addresses and when I’m utterly broke I’ll come and stay with you. Don’t laugh!”

Bugs had meant to go to the party. She had stayed in bed all day, not even going to breakfast, in order to save her strength. She got up and washed, then propped herself back against the pillows to do her makeup. She did it beautifully, eyes and all. She brushed out and teased and sprayed her hair. She put on her grand soloist’s dress, which Averill had made—an almost straight-cut but ample long dress of dark-purple silk, its wide sleeves lined with more silk, of iridescent pink and silver.

“Aubergine,” said Bugs. She turned to make the dress flare out at the hem. The turn made her unsteady, and she had to sit down.

“I should do my nails,” she said. “I’ll wait a little, though. I’m too jittery.”

“I could do them,” Averill said. She was pinning up her hair.

“Could you? But I don’t think. I don’t think I’ll go. After all. I think I’d rather just stay here and rest. Tomorrow I have to be in good shape. Landing.”

Averill helped her take off the dress and wash her face and put her nightgown back on. She helped her into bed.

“It’s a crime about the dress,” Bugs said. “Not to go. It deserves to get out. You should wear it. You wear it. Please.”

Averill did not think that purple suited her, but she ended up discarding her own green dress and putting on Bugs’. She went down the hall to the party, feeling strange, defiant, and absurd. It was all right—everybody had dressed up, some to a remarkable extent. Even the men had decked themselves out somehow. The artist wore an old tuxedo jacket with his jeans, and the professor appeared in a white suit of rather floppy cut, looking like a plantation dandy. Jeanine’s dress was black and skimpy, worn with seamed black stockings and big chunks of gold jewelry. Leslie was swathed in taffeta, with red and pink roses on a creamy ground. Over her curvy bum the material was bunched out into one huge rose, whose petals the professor kept patting and tweaking and arranging to best advantage. It would seem that he was newly entranced with her. She was relieved and proud, shyly blooming.

“Your mother is not coming to the party?” said the professor to Averill.

“Parties bore her,” Averill said.

“I get the impression that many things bore her,” the professor said. “I have noticed that with performing artists, and it is understandable. They have to concentrate so much on themselves.”

“Who is this—the Statue of Liberty?” said the artist, brushing the silk of Averill’s dress. “Is there a woman inside there at all?”

Averill had heard that he had been discussing her with Jeanine lately, wondering if she was possibly a lesbian, and Bugs was not her mother but her rich and jealous lover.

“Is there a woman or a hunk of concrete?” he said, molding the silk to her hip.

Averill didn’t care. This was the last night that she would have to see him. And she was drinking. She liked to drink. She liked especially to drink champagne. It made her feel not excited but blurry and forgiving.

She talked to the first mate, who was engaged to a girl from the mountains and showed an agreeable lack of love interest in herself.

She talked to the cook, a handsome woman who had formerly taught English in Norwegian high schools and was now intent on a more adventurous life. Jeanine had told Averill that the cook and the artist were believed to be sleeping together, and a certain challenging, ironic edge to the cook’s friendliness made Averill think that this might be true.

She talked to Leslie, who said that she had once been a harpist. She had been a young harpist playing dinner music in a hotel, and the professor had spotted her behind the ferns. She had not been a student, as people thought. It was after they became involved that the professor had her enroll in some courses, to develop her mind. She giggled over her champagne and said that it had not worked. She had resisted mind development but had given up the harp.

Jeanine spoke to Averill in a voice as low and confidential as she could make it. “How will you manage with her?” she said. “What will you do in England? How can you take her on a train? This is serious.”

“Don’t worry,” Averill said.

“I have not been open with you,” said Jeanine. “I have to go to the bathroom, but I want to tell you something when I come out.”

Averill hoped that Jeanine did not intend to make more disclosures about the artist or give more advice about Bugs. She didn’t. When she came out of the bathroom, she began to talk about herself. She said that she was not on a little vacation, as she had claimed. She had been turfed out. By her husband, who had left her for a sexpot moron who worked as a receptionist at the station. Being a receptionist involved doing her nails and occasionally answering the telephone. The husband considered that he and Jeanine should still be friends, and he would come to visit, helping himself to the wine and describing the pretty ways of his paramour. How she sat up in bed, naked, doing—what else?—her fingernails. He wanted Jeanine to laugh with him and commiserate with him over his ill-judged and besotted love. And she did—Jeanine did. Time and
again she fell in with what he wanted and listened to his tales and watched her wine disappear. He said he loved her—Jeanine—as if she were the sister he’d never had. But now Jeanine meant to pull him out of her life by the roots. She was up and away. She meant to live.

She still had her eye on the captain, though it was the eleventh hour. He had turned down champagne and was drinking whiskey.

The cook had brought up a coffee tray for those who did not drink or who wished to sober up early. When somebody finally tried a cup, the cream proved to be on the turn—probably from sitting for a while in the warm room. Unflustered, the cook took it away, promising to bring back fresh. “It will be good on the pancakes in the morning,” she said. “With brown sugar, on the pancakes.”

Jeanine said that somebody had told her once that when the milk was sour you could suspect that there was a dead body on the ship.

“I thought it was a kind of superstition,” Jeanine said. “But he said no, there’s a reason. The ice. They have used all the ice to keep the body, so the milk goes sour. He said he had known it to happen, on a ship in the tropics.”

The captain was asked, laughingly, if there was any such problem on board this ship.

He said not that he knew of, no. “And we have plenty of refrigerator space,” he said.

“Anyway, you bury them at sea, don’t you?” said Jeanine. “You can marry or bury at sea, can’t you? Or do you really refrigerate them and send them home?”

“We do as the case dictates,” said the captain.

But had it happened with him, he was asked—were there bodies kept, had there been burials at sea?

“A young chap once, one of the crew, died of appendicitis. He hadn’t any family we knew of; we buried him at sea.”

“That’s a funny expression, when you think of it,” said Leslie, who was giggling at everything. “Buried at sea.”

“Another time—” said the captain. “Another time, it was a lady.”

Then he told Jeanine and Averill, and a few others who were standing around, a story. (Not Leslie—her husband took her away.)