Spartina (18 page)

His father hadn’t ever complained about the big things. Just old family quarrels, his new neighbors. Small complaints about small matters. He talked about another boat, never got one built, complained about the new boatyard, about rising prices. Then became quiet.

Dick had taken the old man’s quiet to be disappointment in his son.

They’d been short with each other, that was certain.

When Dick told him he wanted to go to the Naval Academy his father had told him he doubted he’d get in. Dick was unsure of himself, took what his father said heavily and silently.

It turned out the old man had thought admission was only by congressional appointment, that it took a political connection. One of the old man’s gripes was that Rhode Island was in the hands of Irish, and later Italian, politicians.

Dick spent his junior year in high school building a boat in the basement of the small house in Snug Harbor. His father complained of the noise. Dick spent most of his senior year on the water in his boat.

Here on this porch Dick saw another view. All this white fretwork, all the green lawn. Behind it the lush meadows, wet each morning with night mist. And the old man’s careful hopes—marrying wisely and late, “good stock,” he’d often said. “Your mother and I are both of good stock.” Maybe he’d meant to reassure Dick. Dick had finished the thought with “And what went wrong with you?” The old man had expected a long, good marriage, he’d even expected that the Pierce boat would be saved, not the Texeira boat.

He hadn’t been lazy in his expectations. He’d worked the farm. He’d worked his boat too. But he’d believed in his marriage, he’d believed in the natural order of the Pierces’ owning land. And even
after Uncle Arthur sold his portion and moved away, the old man had believed in a providence for the Pierces. It was as though he was able to fend off disappointment—not unhappiness, Dick knew he’d grieved for his wife—but he kept at bay his sense of being betrayed that loss gave rise to—loss of his wife, loss of half the Pierce land—by building a boat. When the boat was wrecked, all the bitterness came into him at once. He kept it in him the dozen years until he died.

And his petty snapping and griping had just been the leakage from his bitterness; the great mass of it he carried whole.

Dick tried to remember a time with his father when the old man had been easy. Some pleasure they’d had together. Every one seemed tinged. There was fishing, the old man had taken him fishing often enough, some of those times weren’t so bad. Silent dim evenings casting for striped bass outside the gut on a strong ebb tide, the motion of their boat at anchor soothing both of them. The dark tide ran out under them, the calm swell lifted them gently on its way in to breaking on the sandbar, a hiss of white in the dusk. The little boat held just right between the running out of the tide and the slow roll of the sea.

To get them there Dick would row out the gut, take the channel around the sandbar, cut in behind it outside the breakers, and set the anchor. Pay out some line, cleat it. His father would sit for a minute, looking around. For a long time Dick thought he was checking to see if Dick had got it right. Years later, when Dick took his own sons out fishing, he realized it was just a pause. The old man did the same thing every time. He’d look to see how far down the sun was, look the other way to see if the moon was rising, then spit over the side to see how fast the tide was running. He’d nod to himself and pick up his rod.

They’d fish till the sky was as dark as the water and the tide slacked enough to let them go home.

Dick used to think that wasn’t much. High-moon tides near dusk weren’t all that frequent, striped bass were only around half the year at most.

Now, as he stood looking at the white fretwork on the porch of the Wedding Cake, it still seemed little enough—not for him, he was neither here nor there, but little enough balm for his father’s bitterness.

Dick looked down from the fretwork toward the gut. The view was cut by new planting and a new piece of construction on Sawtooth Island, an open picnic shelter, no walls, just columns holding up a little roof. The new planting was willow trees. If they’d only put the willow trees in, they might have made good duck blinds.

Marie Van der Hoevel came up through the opening in the seawall. She’d been swimming too, her mass of hair was shrunk onto her narrow head. She was wearing a huge white robe which she held closed with both hands. She was walking with her head down, so she didn’t see Dick till she got near the porch steps. She was surprised, didn’t seem to place him. He tried to explain who he was.

“Oh, of course,” she said, “Dick Pierce, out on the boat, the swordfish. Captain Parker. And out there.” She turned to point to the island and then regathered the folds of her robe. “The clams, the clambake. Of course.”

She dipped one foot and then the other in a bucket of water to wash the sand off. “I’ll be back in a minute. Schuyler’s around someplace.”

Dick said, “I think Parker and him are doing some business.”

She was gone. Parker and Schuyler appeared on the lawn beside the porch. Schuyler turned a hose on the basket of whelks. Parker was holding a shell in his hand, fitting the Silly Putty back in place.

Parker said to Dick, “We’re off. Schuyler and I are off to New
York.” He came onto the porch and gave Dick his car keys. “You think you could drop my car off at the Kingston station? I’ll be back in two, three days. I’ve got another set of keys—just leave it in the parking lot.” Parker went back down the side steps to Schuyler. Dick followed along, wanting to ask what was going on but feeling out of step.

Parker and Schuyler went around to the driveway and put the basket in the trunk of Schuyler’s car. Parker started to get in. Schuyler said, “Let’s eat here. We don’t want to stop on the way.”

Schuyler led them into the kitchen. Dick didn’t recognize a thing. The pantry wall had been taken out, there was a new stove, refrigerator, the works. Schuyler got a frying pan out of a cardboard packing box, got plates and cups out of another.

Parker sat down at the kitchen table. Dick stood beside him and said, “You going to call this a complete run?”

“Getting close, Dickey-bird, getting close.” Parker cocked his head at him. “Oh yeah. You want to get to your boat. Tell you what. You go on and use the lobster money. Keith took off so fast, he can wait for his share.”

Dick said, “You got enough to go to New York?”

Parker said, “Yeah. I’ll stop by my place.”

Schuyler shut the refrigerator door and said, “Let’s just go. I’ve got some change.”

Parker pinched the front of his shirt with two fingers. “I’m a little ripe.”

Schuyler took Parker upstairs to show him the shower and lend him some clothes. Schuyler came back with Marie, asked her what she’d like for breakfast.

“Just orange juice and coffee.”

“Ah. As my friends in the business used to call it, the whore’s breakfast. How about you, Dick? Everything?”

Dick nodded. He was startled by Schuyler’s remark, he couldn’t
tell if there was a sting in it. He looked over at Marie, who turned her face toward him at the same time. Her eyes were wide open, a pale gray-blue. “Schuyler did a documentary on whores. He’s fascinated by whores. He knows everything about them.”

“That’s not quite it,” Schuyler said. “I had a favorite pair, they’re retired now. They specialized in shy prep-school boys. They had pennants on the walls, St. Paul’s, St. Mark’s, Deerfield, especially Deerfield. They had a Yale banner too, the one that usually says ‘For God, for country, and for Yale,’ and they had added ‘and for Sue and Sally.’ What I wanted to do was film the testimonial dinner that some of their clients gave them, but they wouldn’t agree. All I ended up with was pieces of interviews. You see, they really considered themselves educators. They’d explain things to the boys, you know, birth control, erogenous zones, postcoital tenderness. They had the most wonderful lecture on being nice to your girlfriend.

“The boys would come in from the Rough Rider Room drunk on rum and Coca-Cola, one of them would have the phone number, and they’d finally get up their nerve. And what they got was this gem of a talk. Sue and Sally would take two at a time into their bedrooms, sit them down, hold their hands, and explain it all. Then they’d give them a little sponge bath and administer the final exam. And then onto the next two. It was a perfect fifties institution.”

Schuyler looked around from the cutting board full of scallions and cheese.

“I’ll wait for Parker.” He put slices of bread in the toaster but didn’t lower them in. He started beating eggs and said, “Among other things, there was this element of latent homosexuality. I mean, the sexual links among the boys who were in on this, so to speak, together. But I never could get anything more than interviews. That was years ago.” Schuyler sighed. “Maybe I should interview them
now.
They live together, someplace on Long Island. God!
A kind of counterpoint to
Grey Gardens.
Lido Beach instead of East Hampton.”

Marie said, “Why don’t you just finish what you’re working on?”

“Ah. My darling,” Schuyler said, “I forgot to tell you. It must have been the rush of trying to move and give a cast party.… Elsie showed some footage of the documentary to the group in Providence and they loved it. Better still, they came up with more money.”

“How much?”

“Twelve thousand. Of course they did say they expect the whole film completed on schedule. I mean that somewhat optimistic schedule I gave them at first. So I may have to …” Schuyler turned around and smiled at Dick. He said to Dick, “The secret of a light omelette is to beat the whites separately. I’m sorry this is taking so long and we’ve been boring you with … The film we’re talking about is the one you and Parker are in. Do you get Channel Thirty-six?”

Dick was about to say he didn’t have a TV. Marie said to Schuyler, “Luck is going to ruin you. Your good luck and charm are going to rot you from inside.” Marie said this softly and lightly. Dick looked at her to see if she was angry. She looked slightly happier than usual, but otherwise neutral. She was as pretty as always. Her hair was dry now, and it fluffed up above a bright-blue hairband. She was wearing a white tennis dress with lots of little pleats in the skirt.

Schuyler said, “I should be embarrassed, shouldn’t I? But, you know, good, earnest people seem to like to help cute little hippety-hoppers like me.” Schuyler turned to Dick. “What Marie doesn’t approve of is the way I get money out of thin air. Or so it appears to her.”

“So it appears,” Marie said. Her expression didn’t change. Schuyler, on the other hand, furrowed his brows with puzzlement, then lifted them in surprise. Then smiled pleasantly at Dick. “Are you a cheerful sort of fellow?”

Dick said, “If there’s something to be cheerful about.”

Parker came in, wearing a blue seersucker suit. He still had on his white sneakers. Parker said, “Dick’s a little on the negative side, but he gets the job done. You got to say that, he goes all the way. What do you think? A little tight, but I don’t suppose I got to button it.”

Schuyler poured the eggs into the omelette pan and shook it lightly. “Just right. What do you think, my darling?”

Marie turned her head. “Absolutely wonderful. Except for the shirt. I think just a nice white tennis shirt instead of all those stripes and buttons. Don’t you, Captain Parker?”

Schuyler said, “I think she may be right. Especially with the sneakers. Try another shirt—they’re in that blue duffel.…”

Schuyler scraped the scallions out of one frying pan onto the eggs in the other pan. “One thing I’ve always wished to be appreciated for is being cheerful. I mean, luck is just luck, but being
cheerful
 … It’s a regular Boy Scout virtue, isn’t it? Part of the Boy Scout pledge—”

Marie said, “So you’re going to New York today.”

“Yes, my darling. I’m leaving now, because starting tomorrow I have lots of things to do with my luck and charm, among them a shitload of work in the editing room, that well-known sump of luck and charm. So if I’m going to help Captain Parker sell sea-shells by the seashore, it will have to be today. Those three guys are coming this afternoon to help you finish up moving. The only thing you have to do is tell them what goes where. I even leave it to you where they should put my piano.”

Schuyler pushed the toast down, folded the omelette over, and got three plates out of a carton on the floor.

Without liking Schuyler any better, Dick was beginning to get on his side. Marie was like one of those fish who take the hook and just sulk on the bottom—no runs, no jumps, no play—takes forever to get them up without breaking the line.

Parker came back in. Marie was right, he looked better with the plain white shirt. Marie’s face brightened up some for Parker. She sat up to take him in, her eyes getting wider as her head came up, like a china doll’s. She was a knockout, no question about that, you could put her picture on a fashion-magazine cover right alongside any other model’s—frame her face, which seemed to float, crystallize her widened eyes, her finely drawn sharp lips. Dick wondered if Schuyler ever figured he’d made a mistake, if Schuyler ever wanted more bounce. Or maybe he knew what he was getting, a shining ghost who made her clothes move right.

Schuyler, Parker, and Dick ate.

Dick said, “Good eggs.”

“Wait’ll you try the coffee,” Parker said. “It’ll set you right up. It’s rocket fuel.”

“Where do
you
want the piano?” Marie said.

“See if it’ll get through the door into the back room. Did you know,” he said to Parker and Dick, “I spent the year after I got out of college on a ship? I played the piano in the cocktail lounge. That’s why I didn’t get seasick on your boat. Maybe I should leave the piano here in the Wedding Cake and give myself my old job back. I don’t know why I ever quit. The food was good, I had a cabin to myself, I got to play with the toys. They had a swimming pool and a gym, and you could shoot skeet from the top deck. And I didn’t mind the work. Well, I did in the end—I refused to play ‘Autumn Leaves’ and I started telling jokes.”