Search Party (18 page)

He couldn't understand what she said next. It might have been a language of Guatemala. An Indian language. It might have been the language of horses.

“I am sorry, Robert . . . your fiancée . . . I want to know . . . but now I am so tired.” Martine was pulling the red robe around her, closing her eyes. “Move the towels so they will not burn,
will you, somebody?
Merci
, and wax is melting, I think. I smell it. And keep us warm.”

Billy moved the towels back from the stove, blew out the guttering candles, opened the grate and began stirring up the coals with the poker. Alan limped over and hunched beside his brother. In the firelight they made hoods of their blankets and waved the heat at themselves. With their backs to him Robert couldn't hear what they were saying, but it seemed they were conferring rather soberly and officially. They seemed to have something in common that he had not suspected. They seemed to be men, men who had appeared while he slept a hundred years. He supposed they were doing their best to form an idea of a woman who might marry him. A woman pleasant and elderly, settled in her habits but having her reasons. Thinking, no doubt, all of them, of his secretary Rose Fitch.

All but Lupe, who sighed, “Loretta! And look! The moon is back! It's yellow! Who wants to go out before we go to bed? Come on!” She clambered to her feet with the energy in which Robert recognized an old, put-away, restless woe. In a few minutes she had them all outside, standing on the bluff wrapped in blankets, like figures who had made their way down out of the highlands and reached the sea.

The Stabbed Boy

T
HE
summer of the stabbing, he attended Vacation Bible School. Who took him there, along with his sister, who did not survive? His teacher, Mrs. Rao, from the Methodist church where the Bible school was held. How did she know them? Had anyone in his family ever been to a service there? That was for his biographers to answer.

His sister was in a class down the hall, with the kids who were already in school and reading. She was seven years old; he was five.

Because there was polio then, on the first day the teacher handed out a note for them to take home and after that each kid came with a thermos or a jar of his or her own juice. For him, Mrs. Rao brought a clean glass and poured out juice from her own thermos. She did it for his sister too, because he and his sister were her helpers and the three of them got there early. Sometimes she used the time to play the piano, always telling the two of them that it was out of tune. He came to think he could hear what she meant.

One day Mrs. Rao took him upstairs into the ladies restroom, past the open doors of the still room of wooden rows for which he did not have the word
sanctuary
, and she combed his hair with a little water. Another day she washed his hands. In their workbooks they were doing Put On the Full Armor of God, which he
would find later to be words of the Apostle Paul, about whom he would write a poem when he was in his fifties. They were pasting silver and gold breastplates and helmets on an outline of a man with bulges in his arms and legs. “A giant,” he said. Then and afterward, he spoke in bursts of one or two words. “No face.” “It's a silhouette,” said Mrs. Rao.
Silhouette
. It sounded like a bird, not a giant. He had been careful not to get paste on his hands, but she washed them anyway, leaving him with a clear memory of gray water with bubbles in it going down the drain of the church sink.

Now that he is famous he sometimes brings up Mrs. Rao in interviews. His story is not known; it is not in his poems. He's in L.A. now, and in his adult life and travels, he has never even met anyone familiar with the small once-industrial city in the Midwest where he was born. So it is not unusual for him to be asked about his youth, urged to recall something that might have set him on his path as a poet. One of these interviews in which he gave credit to Mrs. Rao's attention, her eyes, piano, black hair in a sort of coil—for this hairdo he had yet to find a word—resulted in the phone call that led to his third marriage.

“Oh my goodness, it is you! It's Lisa! I was Lisa Rao. Lisa! The Raos's daughter! I'm visiting my daughter here in town and I just had to call you up. You're right there in the phone book!” He had a little speech for deflecting this kind of admirer. But what a coincidence! She was sitting at the breakfast table and just happened to open the entertainment section of her daughter's paper and there was the interview, and there, her mother's name! “I was in Vacation Bible School with you! I can see you now, that little plaid shirt you had on every day!” Tactless reminder, and what could have possessed him, that he invited her to meet him for a drink? He must have seen her as coming at him straight out of a church basement in Michigan, from a table of paste and scissors, a woman who would say grace before drinking her juice and never come upon the life-altering taste of alcohol.

He wouldn't have recognized Lisa Rao, or seen in her any of the Indian reds and golds and graces he had added to her
mother over the years, but in the bar she walked right up to him. He had chosen the place to send her on her way, a dark bar with hunched permanent occupants and a smell of beer in the floorboards. Quickly she drank two rum and cokes. Like him, she had had two marriages. She said Frank, her favorite, had died three years ago and while they had had their rough years, there were things she missed a great deal. She suggested he come to the motel where she was staying. Her daughter had too many children to allow for a guestroom. He went with her and nothing came of it because although her way of lowering her eyes in the grip of her own imaginings had not escaped him in the dark bar, she was much too old for him, his own age. But they met again the next day, and over time and her persistent phone calls and visits to L.A. they became friends, and finally he married her. It was his one good marriage. She cleaned up his house and banned his drinking friends in favor of a private rite for occasions ending in the bedroom.

His sober friends were relieved that it wasn't one of his students this time, but they compared her to Nora Joyce: she was uneducated, crudely outspoken, and bossy, while he, the poet, as a result of what they called “the damage,” was a ruin. Under the charter of long friendship they listed his traits: could someone like her have any idea what it meant to join forces with this most embittered, tense, infantile, drunken, paranoid, alienated, critical, silent, secretive, and easily hurt of men?

Of course Lisa knew that first night that there would be scars on him, all over the chest and ribs, where his mother had stabbed with his father's Buck knife, in search of the heart. “What an awful thing to do to a little boy,” Lisa said in a practical voice. Her finger rubbing with no awe on the fat seams of scar on his naked torso made them seem a simple thing, almost something that might be discovered under the clothes of any man, just one more in a tangle of things in the past, some of them ugly, that a decent person could only shake her head at. “Ah. And your poor sister who didn't have your luck.” His luck!

That night in bed, as if he were any old friend, she reminisced.
“We lived not all that far away, but I couldn't come over to the trailer park, not even for trick-or-treat. None of us kids could. We were the Asian kids, so proper. I always wanted to. You-all had that little house thing, at the gate. We called it the witch's house, even before that happened. My mom went, she went right in there because she knew you kids were in there. She wanted you out of there. She talked to your mom. She said your mom should be in a hospital.”

His father had been the manager of the trailer park until he ran off. Thereafter, by virtue of living in the gatehouse instead of the trailers, his mother was the manager, but she never did any of the things his father had done or went outside or answered the phone. People stuck notes in a hole in the screen, left broken fans and sink pipes by their step, and torn-out stove burners and bags of garbage. Their own stove was black with the overflow of things his sister tried to cook.

He was not in kindergarten, because you had to have the shots. His sister was in second grade and had the shots; his father had seen to that, Mrs. Rao told him, giving him a choice: a father running off, ducking into the woods behind the propane tanks, or a father taking his sister for her shots. Some things allowed this choice of what to remember.

When he went back to Michigan with Lisa the first thing she did was take him to see her mother in the nursing home.

At the sight of Mrs. Rao he stopped in the door. He would not have known her, any more than he had recognized a five-year-old girl in Lisa. “It's Robbie, Mama, Robbie Forney,” Lisa said. Mrs. Rao lay on her side and did not speak, though she was awake and breathing quietly, her eyes open and looking at him. The first lines of a poem came to him. There was no way to hug someone lying in bed and he was not a man who would try that, although now he sometimes found himself wrapped in the heavy arms of Lisa without knowing how he got there. He was a famous man, but once he was her husband he meant the same to her whether he was a known poet or nobody.

He stared at a cup of water with a bendable straw on Mrs.
Rao's nightstand. Feeling shaky doing without his drink, he picked up a plastic fork in cellophane and scratched at his wrist. “Robbie's a professor now,” Lisa said. She didn't say “poet.” To him she said, “You can call her Mama, or Gloria. Call her Gloria. I guess Mama could be anybody, but Gloria is her. Take that chair.”

He sat down. “Mrs. Rao,” he said, very low.

Mrs. Rao might be ninety-seven and lying there with white hair, but she had the same big eyes in smooth heavy lids. She looked back at him. The irises had gone a lighter brown. Far down in them was a table with scissors and paste, and his sister sitting on Mrs. Rao's lap, having her fingernails cut with a pair of round-tipped scissors. His sister had laid out the scissors herself, each on top of the armor man from the teacher's workbook, while he chose the locations for the big jars of paste and the flat sticks they used to get it out. He would have no children, so for the rest of his life he would not recover the smell of the paste.

Mrs. Rao lifted his sister's thin long hair from her neck and drew it up in a ponytail. “Like mine,” said Mrs. Rao, whose hair gleamed with comb-lines and bars of light that traveled up and down the black, offering the eye a quiet for which there was not a word. His sister got down and went off to her own classroom. This was not the last day of her life, a day hidden even from his poems because there were no words for it, the day of who and why. This was a hot summer day in the first week of Vacation Bible School. He remained at the table, carefully tearing from their perforations in the teacher's workbook a set of pages containing breastplates and helmets and metal shields for the front of the legs: a page per child, enough for each one's silhouette to have on the full armor of God.

The Blue Grotto

I
T
was after midnight. Capri was counting out three minutes, with Elizabeth folded in her lap. At the age of five Elizabeth still wouldn't open her mouth for the thermometer, and Capri had to hold her arm down to keep it pressed in the armpit. She had unbuttoned the pink pajama top and carefully taken the arm, not much heavier than a table knife, out of its sleeve. The child seemed asleep. “Are you with me here?” Capri whispered.

They were sitting in the window seat in the baby's room, where Capri had almost fallen asleep after his last bottle, looking out at the water. The security floodlights fastened to the big houses across the lake made white stakes in the water. You felt like spinning out into the clear night and weaving back and forth among them. A vague feeling but it had a torment in it. The houses over there are bigger than this one, she said to herself idly. Those on the suburb side were right on the lakefront; this one on the city side was a block up the long bank from the water. Back ten blocks to the west was her own street, everything getting quickly smaller between here and there as if you were looking in the wrong end of binoculars.