On the River Styx (3 page)

Any day but today he might have been a stumpy Italian
fisherman sleeping in the sun, his short legs sprawled in the bottom of any small boat in the world, but today he was a tough Brooklyn guinea with his cap over his eyes and a smelly shirt on his back, who didn’t give a damn for the water, the sun, the morning, but especially not for the drowned man softening somewhere beneath them, nor the frightened family in their new vacation clothes who waited for the fifth day on the pier.

Dave spat noisily into the water. It was bad enough rowing around in the sun with two hooks dragging without having to watch a guy like this take it easy three feet away. And worst of all, Joe was right. There was no sense in rowing, no sense at all.

Dave rowed furiously, then rested the oars again. He watched the water drops fall from the blades. The body was sure to be off in the other direction.

Amusement deepened on Joe’s face. Dave waited for the brown hand to rise to the cap, then dipped the oars again in the teeth of the smile. But the smile judged him with confidence:

“How you doin, Dave?”

“All right. It’s getting kind of hot.”

“Yeah, it must be. That’s okay, though, long as you’re getting your exercise, ain’t that right, Dave?”

The smile broadened. Joe pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket and flicked one up. Dave refused it with a nod.

“The fish ain’t bitin so good.” Joe pulled the cigarette from the pack with his lips. “I guess there was plenty to eat the last few days here in the bay.”

Joe secured the fish lines to the stern cleats and brought
his hands up behind his head, chuckling at the subtlety of the implication.

“Why not boat them oars and take it easy, Davey Boy. You ain’t provin nothin.”

“I’m not trying to.”

“Okay.” He was watching Dave pull the oars in over his lap, and Dave, uneasy, drew a cigarette from his own pocket and lit it before he remembered. He glanced at Joe’s expression.

First of all you didn’t like the fish lines and beer, and now my cigarettes ain’t good enough for you, it said.

“I didn’t feel like one a minute ago,” Dave said. Joe didn’t answer. They sat still in the hot boat until he spoke.

“I guess you got a lot of dough in your family, huh, Dave?”

“Lay off, Joe. What difference does it make?”

“No difference. I’m just askin. It ain’t nothing to be ashamed of.” Joe opened a can of beer without looking at it. “Like this guy we’re lookin for, he wasn’t ashamed of it. He bought hisself a little boat to take the family joyridin.”

“So what?”

“So he got hisself drowned.” Joe laughed.

“And you’re not sorry for those people?”

“Sure I’m sorry. Sorry as hell. Still and all, they shoulda gone home like they was told.”

“So we’re not going to do a thing.”

“Sure. We’re gonna float around and look at the scenery until the guy pops up and asks for a beer.”

Joe was smiling again, but the corners of his smile pointed down instead of up. Dave shifted on the seat. The sun was hot on his back, and his legs were cramped. What
in hell was so funny. From where he sat, Joe’s grin looked six inches across. And dumbly, he watched Joe lean forward and lift the oars from the oarlocks and lay them along the gunwales on top of the seats. To resist would be to expose himself again.

He eased himself onto the floorboards in the bow of the dinghy, his back to Joe.

“Atta-boy.”

Joe’s laugh ruffled through his hair, fell back with a triumphant clatter into the stern. Good Old Joe. One more smile and he’d ram an oar down Good Old Joe’s throat. Suppose that family was watching them from shore? Even the drowned man must be waiting for them now. He might be two inches under the dinghy, or rubbing softly against the drifting hull. Perhaps even Joe was nervous about him. Joe said he’d pop up like a rubber ball on the fifth day.

D
AVE STIRRED UNCOMFORTABLY
, peering at the water of the bay. Not a sound, not even a gull, just the heat and the dry paint smell of the dinghy and Good Old Joe in the stern, nursing plans for someone else’s wife. Dave laughed at this idea, and the laugh caused a suspicious stir behind him.

Joe’s voice was loud in the silence of the bay. “You hear how it happened?” The tone was innocent.

“How what happened?”

“The rich guy.” Joe pronounced the words slowly. “The rich guy that got hisself drowned.”

“Oh yeah, the rich guy. The rich guy that got himself drowned.” Dave paused. “Well, the way I heard it, Joe, this rich guy bought himself a little boat to take his family joyriding and got himself drowned.”

Under the noon sun, Dave’s rage swarmed through him like fruit flies in a heated jar. He crouched in wait for Joe’s reaction, afraid at the same time to turn and face it. Joe’s tone, however, conveyed no hint of the wound.

“That’s right, Dave. How did it happen?”

“I don’t know exactly,” he parried. “The guys told me he tried to make it ashore to get help after they capsized.”

“He tried to make it ashore okay, so he could save his own ass. I guess you thought he was a goddam hero or somethin.”

“Yeah, I guess I did. I guess I thought he was a goddam hero or something.”

“Well he ain’t. He run out on his wife and kids.” Joe’s voice was suddenly angry. “It’s bad enough havin these rich guys get salty on us and gettin hung up on sand bars and makin us risk our necks to save theirs, but I never thought they was all yella.”

The words hung in the silence overhead as if unwilling to drift away over the empty bay.

“Oh sure.” Dave nodded his head philosophically. “That’s the thing about rich guys, Joe. You wouldn’t believe it, Joe, but all rich guys are yellow. The richer the guy, the wider the yellow streak, every time.”

Dave turned to face Joe, excited to see his smile waver, fall away entirely.

“Don’t get smart with me, Davey Boy. I’m wise to you. Just don’t try that sarcastic shit on me, understand?”

“What’s the trouble, Joe?”

“Look, Sonny, I’m warnin you, don’t get snotty. You’re lookin for a smack in the mouth’ll last you a long time, understand? So watch yourself.”

Dave felt his own smile flutter mournfully on his face.
It didn’t belong there, not because he was afraid but because the game was over, and now he was suddenly so angry that he spoke with difficulty, in a gasping, distant voice: “C’mon, Joey Boy, relax. Smile. Laugh. You don’t care about the rich guy, you’re just out here to lay around and scratch your balls.”

Joe didn’t hit him, only flipped his beer can over the side and hauled in the fish lines. And aware for the first time of the picket boat coming up behind, Dave groped aimlessly for the bow line. Joe grinned as they rigged the lowered pulley to the dinghy. “It’s okay to shoot your mouth off with the boat comin, Davey Boy, but I’m gonna take you up behind the boathouse soon as we tie up.”

He watched Joe’s raucous reception on the boat, his easy way with the other men. On the return, Dave’s anger fizzled away in wide, erratic circles over the bay, like a stray wasp, until it disappeared entirely. The boat was early, he’d made a fool of himself, and he was going to have his head knocked off for nothing. They hadn’t even found the drowned man. To hell with him.

He stepped onto the pier and turned to wait for Joe, who stood foremost in a grinning knot of men. Dave sensed that he was expected to act, and turned away. He stopped short at the sight of the corpse.

The water was sliding from the drowned man’s clothes and escaping through the slats of the pier. Dave listened to its uneven tick on the dead water around the pilings. The terrible apathy of the carcass only made him wonder why they hadn’t wrapped it up in canvas and taken it away before the family arrived. Joe was right: those people should have gone. What could this thing mean to them anymore?

Looking away, he saw the Old Man coming down the
road to the pier, attended by two men with a stretcher, but the breeze, tacking momentarily, shocked him back into the dead man’s presence. He stepped away, shouldering Joe.

“That’s why they come for us early,” Joe said. “The fifth day, just like I told you.”

Joe glanced at the bulging mask and turned back to Dave.

“Five days in the water don’t do much for a guy.” He studied Dave’s expression.

“He don’t look much like a hero, huh, Dave? Imagine a family hangin around five days to have a look at that.”

Dave stared at the face again and sat down abruptly on the edge of the pier. “Leave him alone,” he muttered, his voice far away.

“I ain’t botherin him one little bit.”

When Joe laughed, Dave opened his eyes. He saw the proffered cigarette in the dark hand, but he could not move. Joe tapped the cigarette against the back of the hand.

“Here they come,” he said.

They watched the drowned man’s family approach the foot of the pier, like a knot of sheep unsure of their footing, then glanced at the stretchermen, who were pushing the body onto a rusty square of canvas.

“Snap it up, you guys, give ’em a break.” Joe’s tone was urgent under his breath. “C’mon, Dave,” he said. He headed down the pier with the picket boat crew.

Dave stood up, but his legs moved uncertainly. The sun was very hot. He watched the other men meet and pass the oncoming family, both groups moving shyly, in single file. Following Joe Robitelli’s example, most of the men had removed their caps.

1951

I
n 1941 Grandmother Hartlingen, Madrina to the family, was considerably older than anyone I had ever known, “too old for Christmas presents,” as she said. She had given way gently to her years, lowering the window upon her past as on a too early snow, yet thoughtfully aware of its delicate weight on the high eaves of her household.

None of her family lived beneath her roof, nor even in the township of Concord, but they were present nevertheless, in neat smiling ranks upon her bedroom tables, ones and twos and threes, and in various postures of memory throughout the rooms. Most of them would gather for her German Christmas, and the rest had preceded her into the ground. These she had long ago forgiven, they lost no favor on the bedroom tables, represented only a certain unsatisfactory transience, like gypsies or violets.

In the dark December of 1941, I alone among Madrina’s descendants suffered no misgivings about her festival. To a boy of fourteen, German Christmas meant receiving presents twelve hours in advance and Christmas Day free to enjoy them, and had nothing whatever to do with Germany.

The relation of Christmas to war seemed as tenuous to Madrina as to myself. She had visited Germany but twice in her lifetime and did not intend to visit there again. At the same time, although she was born in New York City, a heritage of Christmas in Bavaria was imprinted in the first pages of her mind, not only of the Hartlingen gathering itself but of the beauty of this tradition to all Germans, at home or abroad. For Madrina, like a fountain sinking back into its well, had returned unconsciously to her source as she grew older, and had long since astounded her countrymen of Concord by referring to herself as High German. No shell threatened the household of habit her universe had become, and although she crocheted for the soldiers, and was offended by the Red Cross refusal of her offer of blood—good German blood, she assured them—she saw no grounds whatsoever for renouncing her German Christmas. It never occurred to her, in fact. Those of the family to whom it did occur awaited in vain the reprieve from Concord, and finally, not daring open rebellion, forgathered uneasily on Christmas Eve. It was the last German Christmas ever celebrated in our family, for Madrina died late in the following year.

Everybody forgathered, that is, except Cousin Millicent, aged fifteen, who refused to leave the car.

My cousin was known in school as Silly Milly, and, as cousins are apt to be, she was ill-favored and even a little distempered. She contributed to family gatherings her own
special brand of lackluster silence, as if life in general were a personal affront and no stratagem on the part of others would make her a party to it. Milly was the last descendant Madrina would have suspected as the viper, and Milly’s parents, Uncle Charles and Aunt Alice, were as startled as the rest of us. Milly’s teacher in school, her one friend in the world, had lost a brother at Pearl Harbor, and Milly’s awareness of the forces of good and evil was far keener than my own. After all, I told her, Madrina isn’t celebrating a
Japanese
Christmas.

We had gone to sing Christmas carols in the country church. When the tramping of boots had died in the hallway, and the family, the snow still white on their heads, had picked their way into the living room and paid homage to Madrina, there was a moment of silence for the mutineer.

“Good,” Madrina said, taking the census through her lorgnette, attached by a wisp of chain to her collar. I can remember how struck I was by this large matriarchal woman with a full-featured serenity of visage entirely absent in the generations grouped before her. “Good,” she repeated, “you’ve come at last. And where is Millicent?”

“Silly Milly,” I remarked, from behind the Christmas tree. I had winnowed my presents from a heap which cornucopiaed from the base of the spruce to the shoulder of the hearth, and was engaged in arraying them in good order for opening. The face of the tree was splendid in red candles, with fine antique ornaments, gilt and silver, garnet and emerald, and Bohemian crystal of the sort Madrina said was no longer made. “Silly Milly,” I said, “won’t come to German Christmas.”

Uncle Charles requested my silence, and Aunt Alice stepped forward.

“It’s nothing, Madrina,” she said, and smiled.

“What? What’s nothing? Don’t smile at me that way, Alice. Are you ill?”

“Milly’s taking a stand,” Uncle Charles announced, and I saw my father wince. “I’m sure she’ll be in in a while, Madrina.”

“Taking a stand? What on earth is he saying?” Madrina seized her lorgnette again and peered at her elder son as at an impostor. “The child is far too young to take a stand on
anything
.”