The Maytrees (4 page)

There was a fatal problem. There always is. Provincetown people too, and all people worldwide who could swing it, were also bare tissues living under roofs. An honest way through, all but changing the whole idea, would be a set of interleaved narratives, Boston people and desert villagers. He would stress only certain aspects. Dwellers. And!—or, but! If he moved adobe dwellings from Arizona to Mexico, he could use
holi, holi, huqui, huqui
, to Mayans the sound of grinding corn on a metate. The words would console him for losing
Anasazi
, a
word he had just learned from the
Globe.
Some year, somehow, he would work into some poem
rini, rini, manju, manju
, the sound of bullock-cart axle in Hindi.

So he added his playful bits to the world perceived. How much better to heal and prevent disease; feed and inoculate and teach kids; provide sturdy breeds of animals and seeds! But poetry seemed to be his task, and the long poem his form as it had been Edwin Arlington Robinson’s. Quarterlies and reviews, like some anthologies, printed his short lyrics. He endorsed Edwin Arlington Robinson’s view that anthologies preserve poems by pickling their corpses. Always omitting Robinson’s real, long work that future readers would never know, anthologists forever reprinted “Richard Cory” who went out and put a bullet through his head, and no wonder.

Petie at eleven surfcast the backshore for bluefish crashing bait, and in the fall for stripers. He freed a wing-hooked cormorant that slashed his throat. His mother fed his many friends ship’s biscuit and honey. They overturned outhouses on Halloween. He met the fleet every night. He jigged squid by lantern light and leaned on pilings on piers. He had an old dory and often kept it running, afloat, or both.

His fondness for humans did not extend to girls, who were less interesting than frogs, and noisier. Girls had no skills but clustering and jacks—a ball game they played sitting down. Girls had no higher wish than to get old enough to wear makeup. He owned rocks he respected more. From afar, very far, he studied one high-school girl.

Winter in calm air Pilgrim Lake froze. When it froze without snowing, everyone skated. One night Lou and Maytree skated arm-in-arm on black ice in half a gale. The lake lay in the expanse between dunes and highway. Others from town brought wood for a bonfire from which sparks joined stars. The two warmed each other on an iced marsh-grass hummock by the fire. They watched Petie dash among his friends. Now she saw bigger boys at one end of the lake jumping barrels. She watched Petie join them. Not tall, he was sturdy. When he jumped a laid-down barrel and skated away, the boys added another barrel. He cleared those two side-by-side, so they added another. Petie had been a marvel all along. By the time the boys quit, each had smashed up gloriously at least twice. When they landed, they slid on ice until stopped by the foot of a dune. These were the boys she used to watch Maytree coach at football.

Lou turned to Maytree and saw his firelit pupils deepen to hers. He was letting her in, as always, and holding her there. His skin glowed; she slipped from a mitten to warm his cold cheek with her palm. For three days it had blown 30 knots from the west. He put his arm around her, and she leaned her face near his face so she could hear him in wind. She tilted and felt his jaw move before he kissed her forehead.

He pressed her close to say part of the poem in her ear. She touched her forehead to his. How absurd that brains could not embrace, although she favored the present arrangement.

They walked all the way home. She longed for the life she already possessed, a life large as clouds’. Mightily, as she had these three days, she opposed the wind’s push. Her coat pressed her back; cold blew through her wool slacks. All at once, as they walked still in the open, the wind died. Someone shut a valve? Her stance nearly toppled her; he caught her. Her ears pricked. The silence unnerved her. The air’s emptiness felt like Maytree beside her had died. They looked at each other. —I feel like I’ve lost consciousness, he said, hoarse. He was in his early forties. His face was open. He seemed not to have noticed that consciousness in him was a wind.

The next morning, as Maytree’s skull pinched off arterial flow to her arm, she told him—she grew talkative at such times—that when her mother left for New York, she had asked her how she could leave Provincetown. —What do you like better in New York? —You’ll laugh, her mother said. —No I won’t. —All right: It’s the light. Lou had laughed. She loved the silver light in New York canyons too.

And where was Lou’s father? No one knew. In Marblehead, when she was a tall and bookish twelve her mother asked her one night to set the table for two. Her father often missed dinner. She and her mother sat to chilled consommé madrilène,
roast potatoes, and lamb. Beyond the dining room windows, Marblehead harbor grayed. The sea floated a red oval: a cloud reflecting the sun now down. Her lovely mother’s composure broke. She covered her face and left. Lou ate in silence and eyed the cold water. The next day her father missed breakfast.

At middle school a day later her friend Phoebe told her, You didn’t know?—that her father had left town with her eponymous aunt Lou, her mother’s sister. Of her tall father she retained several small memories and one big one. He loved her; they loved each other. She stood behind his chair and smelled his hair. She never saw him again, or heard from him. Someone said he married her aunt Lou and was spending the summer in Rough and Ready, California. Her mother’s face hardened and stuck. She never spoke of the man. Lou knew then that her mother was tallying her father’s faults and perfidies. She did not know then that polishing this grudge would be her mother’s lone project for the balance of her life. Lou was in college when her mother moved to the West Village and gave her the house on Cape Cod Bay.

Sometimes now Lou searched old albums to test her proposition that nothing so compels a woman as the boyhood of the man she loves. She saw a snapshot of boy Maytree in cap and knickers dwarfed by his cross-eyed father on a wharf. In the prints, Maytree’s cap’s shadow blacked most of his face. Here again he crouched on the beach, as at a starting block, between his hairy mother and his visibly half-dead grandmother, in a wind harsh with that present’s brine. In those
prints she saw unease in the boy, as if he had been scanning the offing for the man.

No, it was she who sought for the man in the child. She could not find him, so the boy seemed to her lost in a deafening wind. The boy seemed—wonderfully—to need her without knowing it. But he did not, not yet. Perhaps, she asked later, he never did?

T
HAT WINTER THE CROWD
on the frozen corner parted for Lou, saying, He’s okay, it’s all right. She saw Petie across Maytree’s arms; his legs dangled. She saw Maytree’s bent head and his bombardier jacket’s fleece. He was passing his chin back and forth across Petie’s forehead. —Just a hurt foot, someone said. No one fools a mother. Fractures to both legs, probably pelvis, possibly back: quadriplegic. With one hand Petie held his right leg. His eyes lodged back just beneath his shed-roof browbone as Maytree’s did. Maytree’s pale eyes were lights glimpsed in a cave; Petie’s eyes were themselves caves. When he saw her, he smiled and turned his head away. —It’s all right, Lou said. Maytree rubbed his cheek against Petie’s forehead.

Lou reached for Petie and saw Maytree secure his knees as he started to hand him over. Petie jerked and said, Yipes. No use moving him. She felt his cold pea jacket. She saw he was not going to cry.

Lou stroked Petie and sought Maytree’s eyes. He looked up the street and said that a Zevar brother had examined Petie, guessed a simple fracture, and drove to fetch local Dr. New.

How could any mother let her child ride a bicycle? Petie
lodged in the lobing sheepskin elbow of Maytree’s bombardier jacket. Possibly in shock, he lifted his head and waved at friends.

—Where is the driver? Maytree bit his lips. She knew he would not curse in public. —They chased him on bikes. Someone had moved Petie’s mashed bike to the road’s edge. Petie often, as even now, seemed to be running for governor. At this intersection, face square and white, he hollered and joked and grabbed hands.

The narrow town favored bicycles over cars. Presently some men appeared far up the silver road, cap flaps down. A mainland man walked between two adult cyclists. She did not know him, which usually meant nobody did. Taller than the others, he wore a brimmed felt hat and a double-breasted coat down to his flat shoes, suggesting the silent-movies landlord who says to war widows with children, “You must pay the rent!”

Dr. New drove up in his Ford and nodded at Maytree, who lowered Petie—Whoop—to recline on the backseat, and Lou climbed in front and cranked the window down. The driver of the car who hit Petie neared. He stood against a telephone pole and crossed his arms. By then many witnesses had told her, told them all, that the car pushed the bike off the road by hitting it. The man’s coat’s shoulders lifted and he looked up as if sighing. As the Ford pulled out for the hospital, Lou saw him look expressionless at Maytree, who had started in a low voice,

—Why in the living hell…The crowd closed in to hear. Not much happened in winter on land.

—It was probably not the stranger’s fault, she said. She was waiting at the hospital. How would she feel if they owned a car and she hurt a child with it? She saw Petie and other children flying over handlebars all around town, everywhere she drove her putative car. Low-flying children. They would be a danger in themselves. The poor man. Poor everyone. Petie had wide bones. Tomorrow, she and Maytree could maneuver their own ironstone bed down two sets of stairs to the half-basement by the beach. Petie could recuperate handy to bathroom and kitchen, they could see and hear him to help him, and he could watch through panes the day change, the tides, and the stars.

That night Lou watched Maytree pour brandy in a glass. He still wore a navy blue sweater under his overalls. Petie had a broken leg. Did she want brandy? She shook her head. She sat at the green kitchen table.

Brandy he drinks? The tenth-anniversary-present brandy from four years ago we’ve sipped on Christmas mornings only?

It was okay if he did not move. The cast was heavy; its edges scraped. In his own bed that night under low eaves, whenever he drowsed he rolled over his handlebars again and hit the street. Odd—his friends usually broke their collarbones. He heard raised voices from the kitchen. Once he heard his name. His mother came in, stooping under the eave; she soothed him and sang him “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”—how
touching of her, really, though funny. He used to like the song when he was little. His parents had always been swell. After another sleepy interval of handlebar-flying, his father entered with his hair sticking up, sat lightly on the bed, and handed him a flowery teacup of brandy.

—Brandy all around? his mother said.

—That ought to help, he said, and pretty soon it did.

—It might not all be the man’s fault, she had said when they came down.

Gently Maytree knocked over his chair and cursed back and forth and in toto implied in rare words that he, by contrast and on balance, found the man grievously at fault. The series ended “son of a sea-cook.”

Maytree sat and covered his face with his hands. Lou found herself by habit checking whether his sweater’s elbows rested on spills. He rubbed his eyes. These last two or three weeks, something bad had worsened. Lou did not know what, but it was her, something about her. He had been close-shaven or unshaven, gone to the dunes, sleepy, jumpy. In her company he wrapped himself in misery like a robe. Between them self-consciousness bulked as a river silts its channel. They sat to smoked mackerel and turnips and plied Petie with questions. Only these few weeks. They chewed and chewed. She dumped her plateful and washed. She sought to avoid him and secure privacy.

Sometimes these past weeks at dawn he started between them a deliberate chat. —And what’s your plan for the day?
His bad acting was worse than silence. When friends came by, both of them roused: they ate, and Maytree told knock-knock jokes.

During all their other years’ short silences—but not this one—while they slept, while stars held fast their spots beyond the window and seas concussed the beach, they woke together as if at a temblor. They turned and rolled. They met and sought and hit. Then they talked under the blankets, holding each other’s arms or ribs or hands. She searched out his eyes in the dark, and regarded him in the long way of longing and knowledge, and in the longer way of love. There had not been much of that this past year.

At the green kitchen table Maytree was biting his lips from the inside. This meant a speech. He bit his lips from inside before he chewed Pete out. It meant a speech he would rather skip and she would rather miss. She held her head erect. A gust shook the glass and jerked the lamps’ reflections. She rose to wash dishes.

Now he was crying. He rose and held her as if he just remembered something. Tears traced his face creases and dripped. She held him. Crying—Maytree? He had sniffled a bit when his mother died. They disliked drama.

—I will always love you. Believe me.

Now what. She removed her arms and stepped back. Fast as shock she knew now what, what alone could come next, and her blood in every vessel tripped. Not her Maytree. Never her Maytree, who loved her, as he just unsaid.

Maytree and who? She waited for it. She squared her
shoulders. If this was not shaping up to be Maytree’s finest hour, it might as well be hers.

He composed his mouth and backed till the old stove stopped him. Why could he not have launched this speech when they were both looking out at something, or tending to Petie with his broken leg? Did she know him or not, this wet-faced epistomeliac? He put his hands in his overalls’ pockets, slid them out at once, crossed his arms, and finally uncrossed his arms to stand before her as if before a firing squad.

—I’m moving to Maine.

He’s moving to Maine.

—When?

—Tomorrow. Petie will be fine with just you. I’m sorry.

—Where in Maine?

—An island in Casco Bay. Why?

—I’m just used to…it’s a habit. She thought she might take a seat.

—When will you come back?

She saw Maytree draw a breath and in his decency let it out in silence.

She would not ask why. An island in Maine was just the place for a carpenter poet. When had he seen this island, if he had? Last summer, when he crewed on Sooner Roy’s schooner
Joyce Shatley
for three weeks. Who else was gone then?

—I never did love…anyone…

Go, you idiot, she merely thought, and he stopped cold. At the kitchen table she held her head still and cocked, as a robin listens for worms.

He waited standing, as if his being less comfortable at this moment would be his just deserts, all of them.

Everything familiar to her altered, as if she only now remarked his red lids, his lips he was still nibbling from within, the deep pair of lines by his mouth, the hollow cheeks his smiles cracked, his—very fine!—small oval head—enough. My. Time expanded. What was keeping him?

Reappraising Maytree and his every act and word for the past few years could wait. She would have the rest of her life to pace lost ground. How were she and Petie to live? On alimony, like everyone else. In fact, she bought almost nothing, food and fuel. Maytree was evidently ceding their house. She would not run to her mother in New York, unless for funds. She had no say. She had a son with a broken leg.

Maytree had not moved. Truly? He stood forlorn as a clown. Give him not the hook but the gaff. He rubbed his face and felt for his Luckies and went out. Her kitchen: its limed walls where they hung their friends’ frenzied paintings, the dry money plants whose ovals clicked in the vase, the kindling box, mismatched chairs, the cast-iron gas stove whose warming oven took wood, the Bakelite radio, red pie chest, blue teapot, iron kettle; applejack on a shelf with poetry books, a shell sculpture, a cotton bag of chessmen, the stenciled breadbox, and her apron on a china hook. Petie was asleep upstairs, or drunk if he drank that whole cup.

Tomorrow? Just like that? He must have been packing in secret. When did he decide, make lists, figure, and pack—so
that at this last minute, on the day Petie broke his leg, he was set to go?

How were he and Deary going to live? Both elbows on the green table, she rolled her head’s weight from one fist to the other. No reason to be surprised. This sort of thing happens all the time.