Good-bye and Amen (12 page)

At present, I'll admit it, I don't understand why we believe in the resurrection of the body. But when I was six I believed I could heal people with my voice and touch. I thought I was a little vessel filled with something magic. By the time I was eight, I didn't believe any such thing. For a while the world seemed so complex, so deceptive, it seemed like a miracle that I could tie a bow and day after day it would keep my shoes on my feet.

When I was twenty, I believed that the rule of law was the way to salvation. That
laws
could be made so consistent and applied so fairly that everyone, truly, could have an equal chance to pursue happiness. I also believed I would spend the rest of my life with Rachel Cohen. What I understand now is that things change. Spirit evolves. It doesn't matter what I believe right now, it only matters that I practice faith and am willing to tolerate mystery. If I want to practice tolerating mystery by believing that Mary was a virgin and born without sin, who does it hurt?

For a long time I couldn't believe
anything
I wanted to. The law was a way to deal honorably with an uncreated universe, a world that had grown by accident. Including the accidental truth that unselfishness, and concern for our fellow men, must be an adaptive characteristic because most people seemed to prefer, innately, to be good, if you don't wreck that impulse by scorning them or starving them or depriving them of sanity and love. I thought God was a fraud, but I believed in evolution.

And then one day I heard a woman weeping whose body wasn't there.

 

Monica Faithful
You know what my favorite season was in the Christian calendar? Lent. Forty days, most people think of as a dark wilderness time of deprivation, resisting temptation. The first Sunday in Lent is my favorite because we have the Great Litany, and all the crosses are wrapped, and there are no hallelujahs.

When we were in seminary, when most of us gave up sugar or alcohol or smoking, so we would remember Christ's time in the desert, Norman did something else. He would never talk about it; he just said that instead of giving up something, he was adding something to his practice. Those were the happiest times in our marriage. When I talked to him, he really listened. He was gentle, he was present.

I know he practiced reading the Bible in the Swedenborgian way, which he had learned from my father. You read every passage on three levels, historical, personal, and celestial. If you read about Satan taking Jesus to a high place and saying, “Go ahead, jump, let's see the angels catch you,” you have to figure out what that moment was in your own life, and how you handled it.

Maybe that was it, maybe that was all. Whatever it was, he didn't go spinning off in his head and forget me. I wish I knew what it was he used to do, and whether it would help now.

 

Bobby Applegate
The early years of our marriage, we would take Annie and Adam up to Leeway for the Fourth of July. There were fireworks at the fairgrounds that you
could see all over the village, and someone always had a big family picnic. Then I'd go back down to Boston and El and the kids would stay all summer, and I'd get up when I could. We got the rooms at the back of Leeway, and Sydney and Laurus and their houseguests were up in the front rooms where you get the sun and see the water.

Monica would come for a week or two in August. Usually it took about four days before Sydney would do something to her that would have her in tears. She'd write poisonous screeds to Nika and leave them on her breakfast plate. It would be about how she had left her mug in the living room the night before instead of carrying it to the kitchen, but then zero to sixty she'd get to what a thoughtless, worthless disappointment Monica was to everyone who knew her, doomed to have a miserable life.

Here would sit the rest of us, enjoying the crackling fire and the blueberry pancakes and Sydney would be chatting away at the head of the table while Monica turned white, looking at this plateful of bile from her mother. Then Nika would leave the table and go over to Jeannie's or Amelia's for the day, and often the night, and Sydney would preen and bat her eyes at the houseguests.

 

Eleanor Applegate
Mother couldn't seem to help herself. I think it was chemical, with her and Monica, nothing either of them could do a thing about. I know Mother tried to be good, and I believe she suffered after she'd savaged somebody but she didn't seem to remember that for long. There must have been something addictive, delicious to her, in the attack. She often denied, but she never apologized, unless she accidentally sank her fangs into someone like Bobby,
who could fight back. Then she'd get terrified and be abject, which wasn't so pretty either.

Bobby put a spoke in Mother's wheels. One day one of the poison epistles appeared at Nika's place at the lunch table. Papa must not have been there. When Nika came in, Bobby said to her, “Give it here.” Nika handed it across to him without reading a word. Meanwhile Big Syd sits there like lovely Mrs. Ramsay with her beef en daube in
To the Lighthouse,
dishing up Ellen's fish chowder to the Bennikes.

When Bobby finished reading the note, he got up and threw it into the fire. Then he said, “Nika, your mother wants to know if you'll be out for dinner again this evening.” Nika turned and said, “I plan to be in for dinner, Mother, but if that changes I'll let you know.” “Thank you very much,” says Sydney, absolutely rigid. I've never loved Bobby more than at that moment. There wasn't a thing Mother could do to show how angry she was because she was giving her Gracious Hostess performance for her favorite Scandinavians.

 

Bobby Applegate
She didn't dare attack me; she knew I could take her grandchildren and not come back. I'd rather be on the Cape with my own family anyway, and she knew it. She only really enjoyed it when she flamed someone who had to take it, her children or servants. Eleanor says she couldn't help herself, but she bloody well could; she never did it in front of Laurus, for instance.

She got me back, though. After we left she sent me a bill for all the hours Linette Gott spent on our family laundry that summer. Isn't that wonderful? The bill was huge, too. I mean, I was just getting started, both Terry and I were
putting most of what we made back into the firm, and the money meant something to me. And nothing to her. Do you suppose she made Linette count the diapers and so on? When six little baby socks went into the wash and only five came out, did we still have to pay for washing the one that went missing?

 

Jimmy Moss
Really? I don't remember Mother doing anything like that.

 

Is there marriage in Heaven? Certainly. For those to whom marriage was Heaven on earth. There is also useful work, for those who would not be themselves without it.

And sex. Yes. As I understand it.

Well, really. I'm afraid I'm just not the right one to ask about that.

 

Bobby Applegate
My
mother used to say that Eleanor was the daughter she always wanted. She really meant it. They used to go shopping together, have lunch and giggle. More than once I remember walking into our apartment in the evening and hearing Eleanor laughing in the kitchen. You know, the way once in a long while you laugh until you cry? I'd think, Oh, Amelia must be here, or one of El's prep school buddies, but there in the kitchen would be Eleanor and my mother. They'd both try to explain what was so funny. One time it was that my mother told El you don't want to give children bad ideas they don't already have, like don't warn them not to put beans up their nose. They
couldn't even get the sentence out, they were laughing so much. No wonder Sydney couldn't stand my mother.

 

Eleanor Applegate
Marnie Applegate really was a heavenly woman. I joined her Topics Club, and now Annie has joined, a new generation. It's a holdover from a different time for women, I know that. But it's fun. We're doing Bloomsbury this year. Annie is writing about Leonard Woolf. Somebody told her that the struggle in any marriage is over who gets to be crazy. For Leonard and Virginia it was no contest. Or for my parents, for that matter.

I'm doing Manners. I'm reading old etiquette books. Did you know that it is deeply wrong and shocking to allow your butler to wear facial hair of any kind? Emily Post, 1928 edition. Oh, I miss Marnie. She'd be loving this.

 

Bobby Applegate
I'm sorry our youngest two never knew Mom when she was well. The good die young.

 

Eleanor Applegate
Mother used to fuss at me for leaving my husband alone in Boston all summer. But the heat in the summer was punishing and the babies got prickly rashes and cried. And Bobby said, Don't be ridiculous. Go. It's better for you, it's better for the children. I'll be there as much as I can. It was only a five-hour drive. It was almost as if Mother
wanted
something to go wrong with my marriage.

 

Monica Faithful
I didn't get to Dundee more than two weeks a summer, once we moved west. Often Norman didn't get there at all in those years. Eleanor and Bobby
were renting the house on the Salt Pond by then, so there were years that we hardly saw each other. But when Bobby did come up, it was, Let the good times roll.

It took me a long time to see that part of the reason I married Norman was I thought he was like Bobby. Bobby likes to be happy. He likes to laugh.

 

Charlesie Applegate
By the time we got to Dundee in the Summer of Sharing, the boatyard was flat-out and into overtime, getting the Internationals ready for the racing season. All the cruising yachts were done, except for the
Stone.
The only way I could get Auggie Dodge to have her ready before the end of July was to offer to let his father race her in the Retired Skippers' Race down in Camden, which was three weeks away.

 

Bobby Applegate
I thought that was enterprising of Charlesie. Plus, he went down to the yard and worked on the boat himself alongside the crew, without pay.

 

Nora Applegate
Of course, what Daddy doesn't know is that instead of the cruise they couldn't go on when the boat wasn't ready, Charlesie and his little friends “borrowed” some whalers from the yacht club and went out to Beal Island and got totally wasted. They spent the night in the graveyard and one of them saw a ghost…A horrible woman with eyes with no pupils. I know this because a couple of my friends from town were with them. They don't usually have access to such good dope.

Afterward, one of Charlesie's friends got beaten up by the guys who bring drugs in from Stonington. It never oc
curred to Charlesie and company that by bringing their own drugs and giving them away, they were interfering with a local economy.

 

Jimmy Moss
The summer I was Charlesie's age, I was sent to Denmark, to work on a pig farm owned by some friends of my father's. The family was all up in Hornbæk at the beach, at least the mother and the children were. The father came and went. He had a mistress in Copenhagen, which everyone thought was normal. I was shocked.

The oldest daughter was my age, very beautiful. We had less than no interest in each other. I was in love with a girl in Dundee named Frannie Ober. Frannie gave me my first marijuana. It wasn't very good, she grew it herself, but we smoked a lot of it. In Denmark I felt as if my real life was going on in Dundee without me. Frannie was in Dundee, waiting tables at Olive's Lunch. Our whole crowd would be there together every night, and I was a world away, in a place where all it took to isolate me completely was for everyone to speak Danish. Which came pretty naturally to them.

Of course I later came to realize I'd felt most of my life that my real life must be going on somewhere else.

It was a rich farm, built around a courtyard. The house was in front, but the farm buildings were all attached to it, all the way around, so you could herd all the livestock and peasants inside and lock the gates if some neighboring baron arrived with bad intentions. Like something out of
The Seventh Seal
. When someone from the family was at home I ate with them. Otherwise I ate with the farm workers. Their favorite food was a mash made of beer and stale bread that was mixed in great vats in the farm kitchen. The pigs ate
better. I've never been so bored and lonely and hungry in my life.

I rode a bike into the village to see if I could find any action, but when anyone spoke to me in Danish and I couldn't respond, they assumed I was German. They were polite; Danes are a polite people. But you don't want to be looked at like that.

I was allowed to go down to Fyn to my grandparents' beach cottage only once. Not that that was so lively, but there were pretty girls in tiny bathing suits on the beach there, some topless. We didn't get a lot of that in Dundee, Maine. My only other escape was to go into Copenhagen to stay with Aunt Nina. The first time, she drove up in her little deux chevaux to get me. I still remember driving out of that courtyard with her, while the rest of the men were finishing up the Friday chores. If I'd spoken Danish I believe my sentiments would have been, So long, suckers.

Aunt Nina took me to concerts, and to jazz clubs in the city. She tried to get me to play the piano, which no one had in a long time, but I looked at those keys and felt they would burn my fingers if I touched them. The keyboard seemed to pulse. It had a sick glow, and could expand and contract.

Honestly, that last is probably a vision from later. But it was Nina's keyboard I was seeing. Later in the summer Aunt Nina went to France and left me the keys to her apartment. I spent a weekend there, part of the time with some Spanish girls I'd met at Tivoli Gardens, and one of them left a long black cigarette burn on the kitchen table. The table was new. I never mentioned it to Nina, and she never mentioned it to me.