The Maytrees (5 page)

M
AYTREE WALKED FAR ON
the black beach. His hot eyes cooled. Invisible clouds blocked the sky and its atmospheres where noises of people dissolve. The sea beside him, a monster with a lace hem, drained east.

What happens to a person! Of all life’s pitches, you notice only the curve. Or, late, the beanball. He had not meant to say that about his loving her! A brutal, terrible thing to say when you leave someone, even someone who made allowances. Low tide smelled like green pennies.

Before Lou, Maytree had traveled here and there around the heart, the raucous heart. Byways, dim-lit bars always changing hands. Once a great handful of girl out west told him—I never did love you, I just thought I did. They were watering their horses at an irrigation ditch. How mean of her to salve her spitcurled conscience by trying to take away their past! In the kitchen he had started to use those very words on Lou—they sprang readily to mind, as wounding words do—but he stopped himself.

He heard but could not see water. The beam from Wood End Light flicked. Count on me, it said to helmsmen. To him it said nothing.

Probably not the man’s fault! The car flat-out rear-ended the bike. Thank God he was leaving. Past time. He might have stuck around not knowing that Lou’s universal solvent had unmanned him. How he had admired it in her, that deep patch of calm! She seemed to live from it and expand it year by year. Now he despised it. An inner self that expands to include more and more runs to compassion, for which he had no belly. A woman’s forgiveness weakened a man’s arms and back. So did its sob sister, pity. It would not stand up to fight. Who could prevail against it? Conrad called pity a form of contempt.

Probably not the man’s fault. Let’s see her forgive this one, his leaving her for Deary. He passed the garbage fire. Reef Thayer nodded,—Dark night.

Holding Petie in his arms that afternoon, seeing his unmarked skin, Maytree wanted to take him to Maine, to let Deary mother him as she longed to. His leaving condemned Petie to being spoiled. And stuck with Lou’s pauciloquoys.

One long-ago summer day, Petie was little, playing in low waves. Maytree watched Lou swim out to the bars and stand up wet. There were two kinds of stinging jellyfish out there, as well as Portuguese men-o’-war and sharks. She looked to be standing on the sea’s skin offshore in dazzle. When she came in, he asked, How was the water? and salty Lou kissed him. Petie, old charmer, reached out his chilled jelly arms to be picked up. Not a baby lover, Maytree loved Petie more the older he got. Of course he had to cede her everything, including Petie. What cost. He must really be in love.

Seaweed around beer bottles made another tide line. He saw the high tide line—shell bits and turnip parings, paper, fish racks, shark cartilage, culch. A line of stranded baitfish. Driftwood full of salts that would make blue and green flares in flames. For all he knew, those new black clouds bottomed just above his head.

Even the mudflat was matte. Last spring in the mud at Drummer Cove, two men oystering the bay at low tide got stuck. Their struggles drove their boots and legs deeper. It was April in an area of summer cottages; no one heard their shouts. Drummer Cove off Blackfish Creek had a ten-foot tidal range. When the tide came in, it drowned them. Later at a sunny half tide their torsos stuck out again, bent. The harbormaster in his boat dragged their bodies out chained under the armpits.

On the black beach he stepped on a jellyfish mesoglea, the hard gel that spread the medusa from which the bloodless colony dripped. He felt the thing give under him like raw meat and his foot slid.

Of course he thought he would love Lou and stick by her forever. He believed a lifetime was not long enough. (Why did he bother to train his memory if it was only going to torment him?) Of course, through almost all human history, life expectancy was eighteen. His honoring his fourteen years’ marriage to Lou would probably have set a world endurance record once. He already spent with one person several monogamous lifetimes. He was forty-four. He never really loved
Lou. He saw that now. He loved only himself in her eyes. Her silence was paper on which he wrote. She always thought and felt precisely what he hoped. She loved making him happy. Was he his own or not?

When he was alone with Deary, he saw that her own desire scared and sapped her. He must relieve her. Absurdly, in the past week his duty was not to stir her. And today that blue-spangled jerk broke Petie’s leg.

If he had known when he was fifteen how completely women would color his life, that he would sacrifice project, position, and ambition for this woman or that, and drop all he gained; if he knew that a woman’s happiness could float or sink his own, decade after decade—why, he would have jumped ship. Jumped ship before he met the girl with a spitcurl in Wyoming. Tonight was no time to relay his sorry wisdom to Petie, Petie whom he was forfeiting for a woman’s stubbornness over a technicality. Some uncharacteristic natural mercy prevents boys’ foreseeing what they would do for one woman or sacrifice for another. It was just as well.

Would he walk all night? The beach’s debris spread wider. He remembered reading that on a beach Ian Patterson encountered the sole of a human foot. The writer thought at first he was seeing a shoe sole. But it was someone’s plantar skin, callused, striated with ridges like isobars. Its toes were gone. And the dogs had eaten Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel, ate her all but her palms.

His tongue felt tidal ridges on his palate. A night with
out stars restored a person to his place. He offered himself as proof to favor his plan: Would a good man like him leave his family for no extraordinary reason? He was moving not from but toward.

Forty-two is the most dangerous age, the Japanese say. He soldiered on two years past that. Why use strength of mind to fight love? Love was stronger. The bout was rigged. Willpower was an idea that appealed to everyone, especially kids. Was it not by using teeth-clenching force of mind that his grandfather stopped drinking, that Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile, that boys stanched weeping and men marched sleeping? As a force, willpower proved almost null. Attraction beat strength of mind every time. Reading and writing poetry drew him. He loved it because he knew it. As a way out of himself it was a chance, however small, of his hand’s catching from nowhere the gift of writing something good, however small. He could not force himself. Neither would Roger Bannister have trained unless his hope of breaking the four-minute mile inspired him. He, Maytree, had no more strength of mind than any other decent man.

Lou would be asleep now. She would get over it. The solitude of immensity lay round about him. A piece of mono-filament snagged one shoe. He found and pocketed the hook. From nowhere, snow touched his mouth. It must be snowing into the water and mud.

Lou’s being an angel was the damned trouble. Or was it Deary’s fixity. No: there was no trouble—he frowned—only joy. He never thought to be in love again. Since Lou he sought
only Lou. He hated sneaking. It marred his love and respect for Lou. This afternoon while they tended Petie in the hospital and at home, Deary had driven a borrowed clunker of a car ahead to Maine with their things. They would meet over the bridge off-Cape. Best go right away. Goonight Lou.

E
ARLIER HE COULD NOT
believe it of Deary. Except now he must. It was true: free spirit Deary forbade him her bed. She denied him, Deary the biddable, the generous warm heart. No hanky-panky. Made betrayal sound cute. He had never suspected her of this quirk. The much-married and much semi-married Deary who slept loose in sand? Who enjoyed one boyfriend after another? And he, her true old friend, could not be one?

Deary balked on a fall day. They had rowed and floated down the Herring River. They spilled into light. Among marshmallows they saw a brown cow. Later he and Deary were back at the shack. She sat two steps down and rested her head on a box. One dimpled arm looped under his knee. Up his trouser leg, she fingered his hamstring.

—You don’t want Lou to find out? Neither do I. The only person apart from Petie she loves more than you is me.

—No, that’s not it at all. Of course I don’t want Lou to find out.

He waited. A habit he picked up from Lou. A pepper scent of winter already, sea dense. How could falling in love, surely
a good, drop one like a mantrap into lies? Was love a fruit that soiled your hands? My, she was relaxed. They had just been kissing on the bed. He felt like a child again, humiliated and in thrall, and at his age. Or as if he were courting Lou, who had similarly held him off—but he had expected Lou to hold him off.

—I’ve never had a love affair. She pulled his knee toward her. He welcomed the strain of misery that thinned her voice.

—What, never?

She unhanded his knee. —And my loving you all of a sudden has nothing to do with it. I’ll never have a love affair.

—What, never?

—It’s a decision every woman makes again and again.

In the distance blue crescents of cast shade draped from dune cornices and blowouts. Deary who loved him and desired him, who played snare drums in a bar careless of her ever-looser dresses, was too good for him? When it was breaking his heart even to imagine stooping so low and risking, and losing, Lou? His wife to whom he was forever joined in love?

—What about the flyboy from Otis? Rudy Dupeau?

Dupeau spent his leaves with her. —You lived with him. She stood to face him from the bottom step. —A nice change of scene for him. He slept twenty-four hours. Hands on hips. —I made him cornbread, boiled kale with fatback, hotted up some clams. He griped about the higher-ups, polished his shoes, and slept some more.

He must have looked skeptical.

—Certainly, we kissed. It settled him down.

It did not settle Maytree down. Why else had he brought her to the shack? Why did she go along? Why so stubborn over a technicality?

In all the years he had known Deary she did not lie. She met his eyes stricken. What did they both fear? Or was it excitement? He drank a gallon of water; nothing wet his mouth. Deary licked her cracked lips. They were a mess. From the shack steps he saw three clouds long as pickets charge from over the sea. A fishing boat set out. Its transom’s tin patch flashed.

Far more onus attached to divorce than to a discreet affair. No wonder she kept marrying. What if everyone married every lover? Any number of women he knew held open house. His past month’s turmoil whenever he caught himself imagining he might one day betray his Lou and their marriage he loved—was in vain? Not even hardly ever? He thought Deary promoted divorce and remarriage as Reevadare did, for its bracing effect. Those were high ideals, in his own, his brave girl. Her warm limbs hooked his heart to the world.

He lifted her curls. Her head quivered. He cupped his palms over her hot ears. Her ears were soft as Petie’s, flat to her head. He held them for dear life.

To enjoy simple and god-given loving she thought at first that she required the folderol of marriage, and even, save the sailors, of wedding? Was she so terribly old after all? At forty-seven, she had no gray hair. She was born during World War I. Could three years’ age difference mean separate worlds? A few years after the war, when, historians said, European class bounds broke, and others said aristocracy
had dropped both its faith and its duties, Deary would have been six years old—scarcely an age by which a girl’s sexual mores entrench. She got it somewhere, or it got her, this business of waiting for marriage. “The littler the maid, the bigger the riddle, to my mind.” Damned if Maytree would marry again. His parents were dead. She would have to settle for cohabitation. Which was not at all the done thing. —Until Lou knew they were serious lovers, and gone, she now specified, whether or not they married. Maytree thanked bohemians everywhere.

That day with Deary at the shack gulls again rose from the beach to blow over the dunes like ashes. He had to go. He wanted to think, but at home he had to act—here on this thrust stage without walls at what someone called the limit of the world. Where his tongue died in his mouth. Do I want to be this young again? Your sweet life I do. With Deary under his shoulder he entered the moving edge of air.

That was in the fall. It struck him often, even then, that a real affair with Deary might last only a month and do less harm.

Now he trod black cordgrass where the beach narrowed. Burning trash limned a stick figure ahead. At his feet Maytree made out a bird’s neck bones. His jacket’s collar, turned up, shielded his neck only a bit. How had it come to this? His telling Lou sickened him. Best go right away.

T
HE
N
AUSET TRIBES ON
Cape Cod had nothing with which to build monuments. They marked big events’ sites by digging ceremonial holes. They kept these sand holes well dug out, here and there and year by year. Everyone who passed, seeing the hole, recalled its occasion.

The Maytrees and their crowd marked occasions by getting lit, as did, it must be admitted, most peoples on earth.

The Maytrees’ story was not worth a hole in the ground. The Nausets—the Pamets, the Wampanoag—told a story like the Maytrees’, or perhaps they did not, wherein their founder, now a star, was originally a whale from the deepest waters of antiquity. Some winters this divine whale beached himself to feed famishing villages. Villagers offered his bones back to the sea, where he put on weight. He came again in famines when the people needed him. Then She, Corn, appeared from sunset lands rattling a pouch. She taught the people to sow, parch, and grind corn. The whale surfaced. The two fell in love.

The whale, knowing his people would never again starve after they learned to parch corn, was free to go. He carried Her off on his mighty back and never came again. Often he
sent to his people stranding whales—blackfish—as remembrances. The Maytrees performed no heroic deeds, neither Toby or Lou, and both acted within any decent heart’s scope. They became not constellations but corpses.

The last anyone saw Lou alive, thirty-nine years later, she was doubled over, walking with two black canes up the steep dune to the shack. Her canes’ tips she had fitted into rubber plungers to spread them on sand. Her legs like gutterpipes extended from corners of her red dress. Her arms worked the plunger-canes. From each wrist hung a full straw bag. That year she permitted her Pete and Jane Cairo, of the tormented hair already gray, to help her hoist two months’ supplies straight up loose sand from the jeep track to the door. She let them prime and pump the well to fill gallon jugs and lug them up the path to get her started. Most years she shook her wide, white head and refused aid. —She’s impossible, they said, fond and scared.

The grown son was a solid stump. In profile he resembled his father squashed—eyes set deep directly under browbone. He and his wife Marie and Jane Cairo tried to imagine Lou’s carrying a full water jug up sand, her knees lacking cartilage. How did she manage—with two canes, with one cane, or no canes, and the jug? At least weekly one of them crossed the dunes to learn if Lou was alive, and if so, to refill, if only on the sly, buckets and jugs at her well, and carry them up to the shack. Old Cornelius still lived in the dunes, and checked on her, too.

One morning Jane Cairo learned that Lou Maytree was not alive at all, but, prone on the bed, was blue on her low side—ventrally—like a boat with fresh bottom paint. She was white above the waterline. Otherwise she looked quite like Ingrid Bergman, as people used to say when Lou and Ingrid Bergman were young.

That day Jane saw Lou had brushed and braided her hair and wound it in coils on her head. A neat trick, holding a hand mirror. She had dressed in a lace-bodiced nightgown and thoughtfully crossed her arms. Jane tried to close Lou’s eyes. In the end she covered them with scallop shells from the windowsill. Already blowflies walked into Lou’s nostrils. Greenbottle flies slipped under the scallop shells to find her eyes; one bluebottle fly worked a lip’s corner. Where had the flies come from? How did they know? Jane smelled no odor. Lou had been eighty—not enough.

Jane lowered the bedspread. Her glasses fell on Lou’s neck. She drank two quarts water. At the pump she filled every jug from the house. Where should she do this? For she must wash Lou’s body now. Later the gown and bedding. Pete could haul the messed mattress to the dump.

The Cape’s nonconformists, including the Maytrees, had consigned their burnt bone knobs, which they imagined as fluffy stove ashes, to a biplane pilot, Loopy Devega, who lived near the airfield. For a fee he would scatter ashes like a sower, over the sea.

Even Jane Cairo was old, decades hence, when the paper reported that Loopy Devega possessed on his bookshelves
some 170 crematorium seven-pound cans. The first time he tried to scatter ashes (he said), and also the second time, “they all blew back at me.” The newspaper never told what became of the ashes. The Maytrees liked bookshelves. It would all fall into the sea eventually.