Ship Fever (14 page)

Who has it now?

The painting?

The painting.

We don't know. It's gone. We had rushed to Hammondsport after his phone calls to find him alone except for the two huge dogs in a filthy and uncomfortable house. The dogs followed our father everywhere. They slept on his bed, laid their heads on his knees, looked at him imploringly. He was weak and could no longer walk them, but although they were frantic with restlessness they would not leave his side. They growled and lunged at us at first, and even after several days they leapt from our father's bed and barked each time we moved from room to room or even from chair to chair. At night we willed ourselves not to stir and wake them. In the mornings we watched as our father groomed them with the last of his energy. One had white hair, very long, which flew out with the strokes of the comb. The other had hair that was shorter and brown. Our father's arms and legs had grown very thin but his middle bulged from the tumors in his liver.

And what has happened to these dogs?

The dogs are gone; it's a long story and you don't want to know. On the first night we were home we fed them biscuits and then rubbed a chicken with oil and garlic and herbs and roasted it in a hot oven for an hour and forty-five minutes. Our father's hands began to shake as the smell filled the house. “I have no appetite,” he said, but this turned out not to be true. He had no energy with which to cook or shop, and the foods he managed to make for himself were in no way appetizing. His wife was there but not there, present but absent; she had taken a job and an apartment in Syracuse and came home only on weekends then. As there was no one around to cook for him, he had convinced himself that the feeling he felt wasn't hunger. But when we sat him down and placed the food in front of him water came into his eyes and his mouth. His head was hardly higher than the surface of the table. When he lifted his fork he was so anxious to greet the food that his neck craned and his mouth thrust forward. He ate very fast, smearing his mouth with fat and dropping fragments onto his shirt. His irises were pale blue against a field of yellow shot with red. His hands were heavily wrinkled, dry-skinned, swollen, and discolored. Earlier, one of the dogs had rested a paw on his forearm and left behind a trail of bruises.

What did he look like?

Didn't we just say? Dry, pale, shrunken, shriveled. Not the way you remember him. The top of his head came below the chin of one of us, below the nose of the other. His hair was thin and gray and the skin on his forehead was mottled. When he walked his legs were unsteady and splayed. His hands shook until he'd had the first two or three drinks of the day. After they steadied, he cut apples in half and tossed them at the dogs, who adored
them. The dogs also liked grapes, he said, but in July, when we visited him, the grapes here were only wishes.

Were you frightened?

Not frightened, exactly. Years ago, when Aunt Agnes was sick, we had taken turns nursing her. Our father wasn't around very much; the winery was flourishing and he was busy becoming rich. During the time when we were alone with her, we had learned about the relentless disintegration of the body. Perhaps you're familiar with this—the drying and thinning of the skin, until the slightest blow or scratch leaves blood behind. The rubbing together of fleshless bones, the sores and bruises and rashes and welts, the loosening teeth and the bleeding gums, the clumps of hair coming out in the comb, and the alternating waves of hunger and nausea. All of this was familiar to us; none of what was happening to our father was unexpected. Although we were, of course, surprised that he was still drinking so heavily. And the first night we stayed in the house, before we became used to it, we were surprised to find the two huge dogs in bed with him, their heads on pillows and their paws thrown across his body.

Tell me what you left behind.

Men. Several men, for one of us; for the other a lover with jet-black hair and narrow feet, who had ended a long dry spell in Boston like a flow of cool water. The skin over this man's ankles was pale and so thin that the blue veins were visible, and this seemed lovely until the day we had to bathe our father's feet and saw the same veins over the ankle, beneath the dry and fragile skin. Our father wore baggy boxer shorts that gaped at the fly when he bent to pat one of the dogs or pick up a bone or a brush. He had always done this, but we had not lived with
him for many years and had forgotten how disturbing it was. The men with whom we share our beds wear narrow pants that cling closely to their bodies.

And what did she leave?

The wife?

Her.

She took off so fast she left half of what she owned behind. We weren't sorry to see her go. There had been several women since your departure and she was the worst of them. We disliked her voice, which was affected and loud. She left behind a blue hassock embroidered with swans, several sets of expensive sheets, a cabinet full of cosmetics, and a refrigerator full of food. She had cooked for our father; all of them did.

She'd begged him to sell the house and the winery, so they could be free to travel. It was time, she said. After half a century of being tied to that piece of land. We think she also hoped, in the back of her mind, that by freeing himself of the property he might free himself from you. For a while he kept your portrait over their bed in the rented house, although she objected. After their first trip, to the Grand Canyon, she came home and moved your portrait to the basement. The second trip, the one to Bordeaux, went badly as well. What could she have been thinking? That the chateaux and the acres of vines on the stony soil would not remind our father of what he'd given up for her? It was then, we think, around this time, that she realized the house and the land and the vines had been a large part of what had attracted her to him. She was forty-five and on good days looked younger. She bought some clothes and went off to Syracuse and found a job, from which she returned to the rented house on weekends.
Halfway present, halfway absent. In her absence, our father seemed unable to feed himself.

Where did the money go?

We don't know. Grapes were down, and so was the price of land, and he didn't get what he should have for the property. Then there were trips, and bad investments; probably she took the rest. Who can say? When we arrived, we cleaned out the refrigerator. We found a red enamel pot containing the remnants of a barley mushroom casserole, part of a pork roast gone slimy and slick, four half-empty cartons of milk, liquefied broccoli, rotten lettuce, three-quarters of a red pepper, a container of instant pancake batter, old bacon, stale bread, moldy cheese, dead fruit. On the porch were large boxes full of old vegetables, which our father said had come from the produce stall in the village and would otherwise have been thrown out. Much of the money had disappeared in the year before he got sick, but he refused to talk about this with us. On the porch, where we sat for an hour in the warm sun while our father was taking a nap, we looked at the lake and the fallen trees and the expensive lawn furniture now rusted and worn, and one of us said to the other, “This is a different way of being poor.”

We had a problem, we knew: the problem of our father, who could not feed himself, and the dogs, who could not feed either themselves or our father and also could not walk themselves. We had lives of our own, elsewhere, and soon we would have to go. In those other lives, in our real lives, we sank down at night into beds with men who were precious to us, who had strong thighs, strong arms. But during this visit we slept with no men. We slept with each other, on the bed that was not a bed, and when we rose we fixed our father breakfast and then went to the market and bought more food and then came home and fixed
him lunch and fed the dogs as well. We walked the dogs in the marsh south of the lake. The largest dog, the white one, every day pushed his way through the weeds to the rim of black mud and sank down to his shoulders. When we came home, we wiped him off with a cloth. Always, before we were done, he tore himself from us and bounded into our father's room and leapt up on the bed and curled himself next to his master.

You were jealous of the dogs?

Our father said, “They are all I have. They are the only ones who treat me affectionately.” He was talking about the dogs, not us. We were cleaning and cooking and shopping and wondering what to do; we couldn't agree about anything. We argued about what we should do for him and how we should do it. One of us would want to peel fruit for him at the same moment the other decided he needed meat, a roast. Sun or shade, hammock or bed, hot tea or cold juice—always chaos, always conflict. We quarreled one night, when he said he'd like ice cream: which of us should be the one to fetch it and which the one to stay behind with him, for a private moment when we might be redeemed. We wore him out, and for all that, neither could feel like his favorite.

Our father sat on one of those wrought-iron chairs that had served as decoration in the summer-room of our old house, but which here had become the sole, inadequate kitchen furniture. A moth flew against the window over the sink and then fell into the standing water and drowned. Our father had always been a small man, but we had never noticed it before. After he ate he felt tired and went back to bed. The white dog lay like a person beside him.

His head on the pillow?

On two pillows, turned to face our father. We went to the store. We bought spinach fettucine and fish and grated hard cheese and
butter and muffins and coffee and cream, and when we came home we washed the kitchen floor, which was suddenly, mysteriously, covered with small ants. Against the baseboards were drifts of dog hair. A doctor called and then another; appointments were made. In our houses, we told each other, the counters shone in the sun. At night we undressed in darkness and avoided looking at each other's bodies. You know how differently we are built—one tall and rounded, one short and spare—but in the light of our father's disintegration we seemed identical in our health and smoothness. Our father told us a story about your mother, our grandmother, and how she and Agnes and your other aunts were raised by their mother after their father died and left them the vineyard and no men to cultivate it. In the Ukraine, he said, at about the same time, his father, our grandfather Leo, was struggling to establish vineyards for Stalin. He said our family had been drawn together by forces that felt like fate. Later he mentioned that he had borrowed heavily against his life insurance and had not been able to pay the money back.

Do you wish you'd stayed?

Yes. No. Yes. How could we stay? We had our own lives. But it's true that despite that we thought of staying, talked of staying. On our knees on the kitchen floor, scrubbing the accumulated dirt and dog saliva and ant tracks and juice from a surface that for months had seen only the briefest sweeping, we looked at each other and said, “Anyone could walk into this house and tell there are no women here.” And this was a strange thought, for both of us—that much of what had gone wrong had to do with the absence, not only of women, but of women willing to do those things that have always been women's work. Our father's wife was a busy woman, successful in her own way and seldom home. We were busy ourselves, and gone. And so there was no cleanliness, no order, no smells of good food cooked
with care and eaten with pleasure, no signs of the raising of children, no curtains ironed, no flowers tended and cut for the tables. No one to relish a clean yellow counter shining in the sun. Our father could not do one thing to make life pleasant or comfortable for himself.

Didn't you do what you could?

We abandoned him.

Didn't he welcome your help?

We abandoned him.

Wasn't he glad to have you there?

He died one August weekend, when we were absent and his wife was present. She was furious with us for coming to visit and then furious that we couldn't stay. She'd moved back to the house for his last weeks, and when we returned for the funeral she opened the door as if to let us in and then started to say something and flushed and slammed the door on us. She couldn't keep us from the church, but she wouldn't let us into the house and so we stayed outside. We drove around the lake, up into the vineyards on the hill near where our old place had been, and when it grew dark we simply stopped the car where we were. There was no one around and the sky was very clear. We took two blankets out of the trunk and spread them on the ground and lay there, talking and holding hands. We slept, we think, toward morning, because we were not awake when the dew fell, and we woke covered with cool water. The sun crept over the hills across the lake, lighting the mist that filled the valley. We thought we sensed you there, but we weren't sure.

After the funeral, we tried once more to come into the house.
We meant to take the dogs, about whom our father had been very worried, and the portrait of you, and a few other small mementos. But again his wife would not let us in. She had already found homes for the dogs, she said. She had already let go of the lease on the house, already arranged for the sale of the few pieces of furniture that were left and the removal of the things she wanted to her new apartment in Syracuse. She had a new life, she said, and she wanted to start it, and that new life didn't include us. So we left.

But last week, one of us said over the phone to the other, “We should go back, it's been a year.” So we made arrangements and met each other here, and although there were strangers living in our old house, as there have been for many years, and although of course the house where our father spent his last days had been cleaned and rented to someone else, and although the dogs were gone and everything we'd ever known, we thought we had done the right thing.

We rented this boat at the dock near the post office, and as soon as we'd sailed into deep water, both of us realized you were near. One of us took the tiller and the other handled the sheets.