Morning Is a Long Time Coming (12 page)

“Before long, I heard something, but I didn’t stop, kept right on singing, ‘A band of angels ... Coming after me-e ... Coming for to car-ry me home ...’

“Then bless the Lord, I heard the scraping and then I saw you come crawling out on your elbows. And for the first time since I knowed you, you wasn’t wearing nothing on your face. Looked to old Ruth like all those expressions you use to show had been slapped clear away.

“And so I sets you down on my lap and I commenced telling you what it was that I knowed to be true. Don’t go feeling sorry for yourself, Honey Babe, thinking that you is some motherless child. ’Cause you ain’t! You ain’t never gonna be motherless ’cause you done gone and acquired ... me!”

Europe

13

A
S
I
WATCHED
wave after sun-splashed wave break against the ship, I tried to find one that was an identical twin to another. Either my eyes couldn’t capture the infinite variations or my memory couldn’t record them. Probably both. Either way I knew, knew as clearly as if I’d been born to wave watching, that there never has been and never could be any such thing as one wave perfectly mirroring another. The thought pleased me enormously. If grains of sand,
snowflakes, and ocean waves are allowed their differences, then why not people? Why not people! I wondered if my parents could have benefited from an extended period of ocean watching.

Could they have then come to my conclusion that because people are at least as different as ocean waves, their needs can’t be satisfied with anything less than a custom job?

Here on this ship of strangers, I felt less like a stranger than I ever did on Main Street in Jenkinsville, Arkansas, or at Iris Glazer’s not-quite-open open house back in Hein Park, Memphis, Tennessee, U.S.A.

And so all this air, sky, and endless water belonged to us all. I was no longer an intruder because I have finally found a place that is for more than Baptists only. Only five days from home, I was really beginning to believe what I had before only hoped was so: that this world is vast enough and varied enough for me to find “some little space that could become my space.” But that phrase was stolen from Katherine Anne Porter.

Before the
Ryndam
left sight of the Statue of Liberty, the word was out that the novelist was occupying one of only six staterooms in first class. I was sharing the same sea air with the creator of
Flowering Judas
and
Pale Horse, Pale Rider.

I envisioned dozens of circumstances which would practically compel Miss Porter to leave, at least for a little while, her first class accommodations for our more egalitarian tourist class.

Once while deck-walking early in the morning, I spotted a lady whose face showed such strength and beauty that I
was convinced that it could belong to nobody else on this earth, but
her!
I reversed course and began following her, terrified that her immense perceptive apparatus would immediately signal to her what was happening. Yet, I couldn’t not follow.

Her brown linen purse, which bore initials in fancy script, bounced from a shoulderstrap against her back. If I could get a little closer, I would be able to confirm the K.A.P. that had to be there. But the distance, the bounce, and the whimsical route of the letters made it difficult to be completely certain.

Then from a modest distance, a man in a deck chair also took note of her approaching figure and called, “Selma, did you bring my Coppertone?”

After that I decided that I was such an unreliable judge of what Miss Porter looks like that I might as well give up looking. Well, I didn’t actually give up looking, but I did give up believing that my looking would succeed. Then, out of the blue, Arlene Hollander told me to scout up somebody to fill in for her at bridge that afternoon. “I’m going up to first class to hear Katherine Anne Porter.”

“You are going to hear Katherine Anne Porter?”

“At two o’clock. She’s going to read some of her poetry.”

“And you got invited?”

Arlene looked at me with controlled amusement which I don’t take as any great compliment. “Would I go otherwise?”

“Well, it just so happens that Katherine Anne Porter is currently my favorite writer—how did you get invited?” I asked, hoping that it wasn’t dependent upon how many advanced
degrees a person possessed. But it didn’t matter what it depended upon because I was going too. And that’s all there was to that!

With a presence commanding enough to make a West Pointer envious, Katherine Anne Porter looked at the twenty or so mostly young people who formed a crescent around her. “Anniversary in a Country Cemetery,” she announced in a voice so clear that I knew I would remember it all my life.

This time of year, this year of all years, brought

The homeless one home again;

To the fallen house and the drowsing dust

There to sit at the door

Welcomed, homeless no more.

Her dust remembers its dust

And calls again

Back to the fallen house this restless dust

The shape of her pain

This shape of her love

Whose living dust reposes

Beside her dust,

Sweet as the dust of roses.

After reading some more poems, some about Mexico and still others about love—or to be more specific, the loss of love—Miss Porter paused and with the last remnants of a Southern accent thanked us all.

The clapping which was loud and immediate was for the poems all right, but even more, I think it was for Miss Porter herself. Our way of collectively embracing her, as much for being art as for producing it.

That night I couldn’t sleep, so I dressed by moonlight and went to the starboard deck. The wind was pure virgin wind, never once having had to spend itself against either outhouse or mountain range. And the prickling chill was great enough to send small shocks to my senses. But being here on this ship, my freshly energized senses told me, was exactly the right place to be.

I took a bent Viceroy from the pocket of my blouse and with more luck than skill was able to light it with the first match. Maybe if I could adequately explain it to my parents, they would come to appreciate all the things I’ve learned in these few days. The wonder of the individuality of an ocean wave, the art of Katherine Anne Porter, and the incredible fact of people who know a lot—people such as Michael Werner and Arlene Hollander—actually liking me. Me!

Ironically, the first “real” conversation that I had with Arlene almost ended our friendship. In the midst of my telling her that I can hardly believe my luck that a guy as handsome and bright as Michael would like me, Arlene twirled to gaze at me with unconcealed contempt.

“Have you looked in the mirror lately?”

“What!” It was my hair. My goddamn hair! It needed combing so badly that even my new friend found it imperative to inform me of my advanced state of dishevelment. I wanted to run away, but I felt suspended, frozen somewhere between fighting fury and disintegrating pain. I placed my finger inside my flexible watchband and twisted and twisted until the band snapped and my skin tore and then bled.

“Well, you really should take a careful look in the mirror,” said the New Yorker, “because then you’d find out what
everybody else knows. You’re good looking. You tell amusing stories, and you listen to Michael with consummate interest.”

The ship’s library was quietly lit in a way that was completely compatible with the hour of 4:15 in the morning. By ten minutes after five, there were nine sheets of Holland-America stationery folded into an envelope that was addressed to Mr. & Mrs. Harry Bergen, Jenkinsville, Arkansas, U.S.A.

Just before bringing the flap to my tongue, I removed the pages for a final reading. I think—I felt—I had almost certainly written what I had set out to write. A letter so clean with clarity that it would be totally impossible for them not to understand it ... for them not to understand me.

It was that thought that I carried with me as I tiptoed back into my stateroom and fell, fully clothed, across my bed. And now waiting for me was just that quality of sleep that comes only to the very deserving.

I woke to the glockenspiel. I had slept through breakfast and now the ship’s steward was glockenspieling out the ten o’clock call for broth and crackers. It’s supposed to hold us passengers until twelve when a four-course lunch is served, but after the breakfasts the Dutch serve up, who needs to be held?

I headed toward the aft deck, not so much for the chicken broth as for Michael, who would never willingly be separated from food freely given. It’s not that I blame him—I mean he’s about as thin as a guy can be and still be healthy. It’s
just that once he returns to his
pension
in Zurich, then the meals become decidedly skimpy. The American students returning to Swiss medical schools are forever discussing ways to supplement their guest-house cuisine.

“And where the hell have you been hiding?” I twirled to look at the slight-chip-on-the-shoulder good looks of Michael Joseph Werner. He took a sip from the broth-filled white mug without even momentarily removing his head-on stare from my face.

“Oh, well, I’m really sorry, Michael. I guess I just slept through breakfast,” I said, grateful that Arlene wasn’t around to hear my apology. On the first day out, she asked me why I allowed Michael, a virtual stranger, to push me around.

Right off, I told her that Michael didn’t push me around—at least not very much. I tried to explain that while I didn’t exactly love Michael’s temper, it did seem familiar. It was as though he understood me now, had understood me for a long time. But as soon as that came out of my mouth, I knew I had stumbled into something dumb. So I tried to get out of it by saying that there’s something very natural about his anger toward me.

But Arlene kept looking at me with an eye so skeptical that she must have spent years perfecting it.

“For God’s sake,” I told her, feeling myself pinched into the corner. “Can’t you see that that’s exactly the way that men are supposed to treat women?”

I leaned back against the railing, close enough to let my arm whisper against Michael’s. Within moments, he seemed
soothed. “At least,” he said, breaking into a modest laugh, “you didn’t have to dress for dinner.”

I laughed too although the joke was very definitely on me. “Please excuse me. I have to dress for dinner,” were the exact words that I had used. It was the first morning Arlene, Howie, Michael, and I were in the salon playing bridge.

Actually, they were playing bridge while tutoring me in the fine art of destroying your enemies with trumps, tricks, and finesses. I was pleased, flattered even, that these smart and handsome people would bother with me.

Arlene, for example, is only three years older than me and she’s already working on her master’s degree in French renaissance literature. Of course, Michael and Howie are both very smart too, but you sort of expect that from guys who are Jewish.

Anyway, I was taking my bridge instruction on that first morning pretty well when the ship must have hit the biggest single wave in the Atlantic, because the
Ryndam
crunched forward, crunched backward, crunched forward. Then it was calm again—the ship, not my stomach. Immediately I knew that I had an old and familiar race to win, but I didn’t say that.

Instead I just stood up and with what Michael was later to describe as “stage presence” announced, “Please excuse me. I have to dress for dinner.”

Well, probably nobody would ever have known any different if Michael hadn’t, for some still unexplained reason, taken it into his head to watch me from the porthole.

And now that phrase (spoken with exaggerated elegance) seems to be known by just about everybody on board the
Ryndam
as the expression to use when you’re on the verge
of upchuking your fool head off, but wish to do so with style.

Actually Michael goes even further by assuring me that I have made a contribution for all time, not only to maritime vocabulary, but also to the international folklore of the sea.

14

T
HE CAPTAIN’S FAREWELL
dance was billed as the final and single most important event of the voyage. The Grande Salon, for example, had been closed to passengers since noon because the decorations were supposed to be both special and surprising.

The very first surprise was Michael himself, whose usual well-scrubbed scruffiness gave way to a well-ordered handsomeness. I wondered how much of it came from his blue
shirt and tan suit. The pants actually matched the jacket. And how much from the fact that for the first time since I’ve known him, his hair wasn’t falling defiantly across his forehead.

As we walked along the deck toward the Grande Salon, I told him that he looked very nice. He led me over to the railing. The lights from the deck spilled over the water and made wave watching a real possibility, but I knew Michael well enough to know that gazing at waves rather than into his dark and assertive eyes would kindle his well-exercised temper.

Then for the first time it occurred to me that looking away from this man was not about to happen anyway, for Michael’s face was beginning to fill me with the most intense kind of pleasure.

He struck a pose so casual that I knew it wasn’t casual at all. “Well, when are you coming to Zurich?”

“Well,” I repeated, playing for a moment of time. I was pleased and surprised that he liked me well enough to want to see me again. But why should that surprise me? Hadn’t he spent practically every waking moment with me? And wouldn’t I expect Howie to invite Arlene Hollander to visit him? Yes, yes, yes, but that doesn’t make it any the less surprising that Michael Joseph Werner could actually find something likable about me!