Ship Fever (15 page)

You were always good sailors.

This is a lake on which it is impossible to get lost. But so much else is gone, all the remnants and relics of our family. The house, of course: but also your mother's rugs and sofas and chairs, and your lamps and bureaus and paintings and knickknacks, and Aunt Agnes's cups, and our old books—everything, really. And when our father's widow disappeared from our lives and disposed of the dogs, it was as if our family had never existed. It was as if we'd imagined our history. All that is left is the shared set of memories we have of our last days with our father in that house that wasn't his house.

He asked after you, during our last day with him. He thought we were back in our old house, and he wanted to look at your picture in the living room. We sneaked downstairs and took the picture from the hall and dusted it and brought it upstairs to him. We told him we'd brought it to him so he wouldn't have to move. We did not have the heart to tell him that there was no living room, filled with books and our family's things, with your picture hanging from its cord.

Was he glad to see me?

Of course he was. Have you seen him since then?

No.

Were we really speaking with Suky? Was Suky really speaking with us? Bianca says yes, absolutely. I say yes, sort of, maybe.

Nothing happened after our sail on the lake—we didn't see our father's ghost or feel his presence or even reach any sort of peace or understanding. We were comforted, of course; Suky's voice fell on us like balm. But I believed that what we'd done was wrong, and even as Bianca couldn't help showing her triumph at having lured me into speaking with Suky, I couldn't help resenting it.

That night we shared a room with two beds in a new motel where no one knew us. We slept uneasily and guiltily, aware that we had left things undone and that there were people in the village whom we should have visited. The next morning I dropped Bianca at the airport and then I drove home.

Now I can't talk to Bianca about what went on then, or
earlier, because Bianca is gone. The stories we've made of our past have come to nothing. A month after we met in Hammondsport for the anniversary of our father's death, she fell in love with a landscape painter our father's age and moved with him to a house on a cliff in Costa Rica, where she has no phone.

I live back here in Hammondsport now. Around the time that Bianca took off I quit my job and decided to move; Boston, where I'd lived for more than a decade, suddenly seemed like a place where I'd set no roots. When my colleagues pressed for reasons for my decision, I told them I'd inherited something from my father that required my attention. Quite quickly I learned that any mention of his death would stop the conversation. No one will pass the screen thrown up by that word, I've learned. Behind it I could and did—still do—conceal my confusion.

Only Bianca felt entitled to pry. When I told her my plans, she told me I was making a big mistake; this, after all the complaining she'd done about my job. The last time we spoke, I was in my lab in Boston and she was at the Houston airport. She said, “You're crazy. There's nothing in that place for you.”

“It's what I want to do,” I said. “Why is it any stranger than moving to Costa Rica with someone you hardly know?”

“Because it
is,
” she said. “Those people—you'll always be who you used to be, for them. Is that what you want?”

This, like the predictions she'd made in Boston, would turn out not to be true. But even then, not knowing that, I said, “Would that be so bad? Is that worse than being with people who don't know anything about us?”

“Oscar knows me,” Bianca said. “He knows what I want him to know.” Meaning, I think, that he understood her in terms of the stories we'd manufactured together.

For a minute we were silent, listening to the low roar of airport noise and the hum and whisper of the instruments in my
lab. “Come with me,” Bianca said finally. “I'm all for your getting out of that lab, but it's stupid to go back home. Oscar wouldn't mind if you came to stay with us.”

“Maybe next year,” I said. “Maybe I'll come for a visit, once I figure out what I'm doing.”

“Maybe I won't be here by then,” Bianca said.

We promised to write and hung up, disappointed with each other. Honestly I think we have felt this way since our last conversation with Suky. Hallucination, perhaps; but if it was we shared it. Since then, though, we have found it almost impossible to share anything.

I moved back here after that phone call and rented an apartment that I only kept for a little while. Then I did two things even more distasteful to Bianca: I got a job teaching chemistry to sophomores and juniors at the school Bianca and I had attended, and I moved into a house in the village, with Harry Mazzullo and the white dog.

Harry is, was, my father's lawyer. The white dog is not the one Bianca and I saw by the creek in Boston but one of the dogs my father cherished. The other dog is dead; when I tracked down the family who'd taken him from the pound, they told me he'd barked uncontrollably until they'd had to put him down. But one day, shortly after I moved back, I found the white dog by accident as I was walking through the village. He was sprawled on a broad porch, looking completely at home, and when I knocked on the door of that house Harry opened it and greeted me as if he knew me.

“Rose?” he said. “Rose Marburg?”

When I nodded he said we'd been introduced at my father's funeral. I didn't remember this; I remembered almost nothing of that day. Bianca and I had been in the back of the church, as if we were guests and not daughters, while our father's widow had accepted condolences up front. At the cemetery we had
stood at a distance, talking to no one, and then we had left. When could Harry have met me?

But he swore he had. And when I said, “How did you get that dog?” he said he'd had it for more than a year. “Your father's wife,” he said. “After the funeral she was so…confused. She was making a lot of decisions very fast, and I was worried about the dogs—your father was very attached to them.”

“I know,” I said.

“They'd gone to the pound. I'm sure she didn't mean to do that, but she was under a lot of pressure. By the time I got there the brown one was gone, but no one wanted this one and so I took him home myself.”

All this time, it turned out, the dog had been safely with Harry. Harry took me out to dinner that night, and a week later he took me sailing. Cool water, a gentle breeze, a bottle of wine. This is where the shameful part comes in. Already I had sketched our history for him, and I'd told him the story of the wild night Bianca and I once shared in Boston. But while we were out on the lake, while I was relaxed, a little drunk, almost hypnotized by the water, I told him about the vision Bianca and I had had, which in different ways had caused both of us to move.

Harry sat quite still and listened, only his hands moving on the tiller and the sheets. I told the story just as I remembered it, a dialogue in which I played both parts. My mother's questions I rendered high and thin and soft; our responses lower, slower, doubled. Two sisters speaking simultaneously with one voice.

Harry didn't shrug or make a face or look at me as if I were crazy. How calm he was, how cool. Perhaps his years as a lawyer have exposed him to stranger things. He said, “That's interesting. I knew your mother a little, when I was a boy. She was quite a woman. So were your great-aunts, for that matter. That was one of your great-aunts, wasn't it? The woman who moved in with you?”

“It was,” I said. “She took care of us.” We were not, apparently, going to pass judgment on either the scene with Suky or the way I'd rendered it.

“I remember,” Harry said. “And when she was sick, I remember that you and Bianca took care of her.”

A few months later, he asked me to move into his house and I accepted. I live with Harry because of the way he absorbed my story; because he was good to my father near the end; because he tells me tales about my father's last days that I would otherwise have no way of knowing. Tit for tat, my secrets for his. It's not much of an excuse to say that perhaps I sensed this was what I'd gain.

Five weeks passed between the time Bianca and I last saw our father and the time we returned for his funeral. During those weeks I was back in Boston and Bianca was in Dixon, New Mexico, where she was working on a garlic farm. During those weeks, Harry said, some strange things happened.

Bianca and I had envisioned our father the way we'd last seen him—how could we imagine anything else? Guilty, horrified, we'd imagined him alone. On a Friday night, we had left that house together: both afraid, it seems to me now, that the one left behind would never find the strength to leave again. Or maybe both afraid that the one left behind might somehow gain the upper hand. And then there was also, beyond these fears, the problem of our father's wife.

Leaving, we had told ourselves that she was due home within the hour. By then we'd realized that our father wanted her, not us; our fussing and cleaning and cooking only tired him, and none of it led to what he wanted. He welcomed the filth, we had come to see, and the signs of his abandonment. He believed these signs would sway his wife and bind her to his side for his
remaining days. Each night of our visit she'd called, and the change in his voice when he talked to her had been unbearable to us. By the time we left, we almost understood that all our efforts had only postponed the moment when he might have his wish. The clean house we left behind meant his wife could feel free to leave again come Monday.

But we'd buried that thought beneath our need to feel that we'd done some good; in our departure, finally, we acted with one mind. Only back in our own worlds could we see the ambiguous nature of what we'd given him.
Alone,
we said to each other, when we learned she'd disappeared again.
How could we leave him alone
? But while it's true that his wife left after that weekend visit and didn't return for good until three weeks later, the fact is that even then he wasn't alone. There was a nurse with him for several hours each day: I spoke with her frequently on the phone and always felt relieved after hearing her voice. She was strong and practical and had a nice laugh. She bathed our father, and washed his sheets and changed his bed and cooked some meals.

Bianca and I thought his wife had hired the nurse, meaning by this to prove that she was capable and we weren't needed. But Harry told me a group of our father's old friends had been responsible.

“What friends?” I said. We had not known that our father was that close to anyone. He golfed with a group of men: other winemakers from the valley, a doctor, a dentist, a broker. They had never seemed like more than drinking buddies.

But Harry said they'd rallied when it became clear that my father was dying. They hired the nurse, he said. They rented a gadget that would buzz in their homes if my father pressed a button for help. And they paid, Harry said, for my father's funeral. Harry claims that Peter Couperin—the same Couperin who'd figured in our mother's stories as our father's greatest
rival, but who'd been hardly more than a name for us—organized the other men, and that together they did what they could to ease our father's last days.

Perhaps he was more than a name. I remembered Couperin, vaguely, as a red-faced man who spoke too loudly. When Bianca and I were young he used to visit our house sometimes; always, after he left, our father would make fun of him and his pink Catawba. They'd had an argument when Bianca and I were in college, over some land that Couperin had sold to a real-estate developer. I wasn't aware that they'd seen each other much after that.

But Harry said that the last few years had brought hard times to Couperin as well. He had developed a bone disease that was eating its way through his spine; he was in a wheelchair and his head was held upright by a brace that stretched from his shoulders alongside his ears to end in a metal halo pinned to his skull. One son had died; a daughter was in a drug-rehabilitation clinic. Harry, who was Couperin's lawyer as well as my father's, says that when he brought the news of my father's illness to Couperin, Couperin had first laughed and then cried and finally said, “Look at us two old buzzards—after all these years, the both of us sick and alone.”

Harry, at Couperin's request, brought my father to Couperin's house for a reconciliation. It was something, he said: those two old, beaten men, their families lost or scattered, one in a wheelchair and wearing a halo and the other frail and in pain, perched on chairs in front of Couperin's fireplace and getting drunk on Couperin's oldest brandy. Harry was there, sitting in the background. He says Couperin said, “What are we saving it for?” He also says the two men talked some about their children.

When Harry told me that I didn't ask him anything; I suppose I was afraid to know. But later, after I'd slept on that story for a couple of days, I asked him if he could tell me what they'd said.

“I'm your father's lawyer,” Harry said. “You know the things he told me have to stay private.”

“You weren't at that conversation as a lawyer,” I said. “Were you? You were there as my father's friend.”

Harry admitted that this was so, but all he would do was answer me in generalities. Couperin had said something nasty about my father's daughters, who couldn't find the time to take care of him, and my father had said that we had visited just recently and that we planned to come back again soon. We were good girls, he said.

“He said that?” I asked Harry. “Did he say anything specific about either of us?” I couldn't help asking that. Harry gave me a skeptical look. Then he said, “Your father told Couperin that you had a great job and that he was very proud of you.”