The Maytrees (6 page)

W
HEN HER HUSBAND RETURNED
from the beach walk he took after he told her he was leaving her, he got into their marriage bed as usual. Lou felt his chill. He started to speak. She felt his elbow dip their mattress. She heard his rangy voice turn toward her back in the dark. Was there nowhere else on the planet’s face for him to sleep? On the whole, she did not want to hear it.

What in the name of God could she have done? They had had a good run. And if love itself, as well as Petie, was the fruit, she could keep loving if she chose, which she at forty-one did not. Petie once told them—he acted it out—that when fishermen gaffed a hooked shark aboard, to save their legs they slit its belly and gave it its own entrails to chew. She would not.

The next morning when Maytree actually left, Lou and Sooner Roy carried the white ironstone bed downstairs for Petie. They set it inside the French doors, so Petie could watch beach, sea, and sky. She pulled a chair beside him. Petie knew his father had left them. She dreaded putting what she saw as Petie’s large-heartedness to test. She placed a hand lightly on his good leg near the ankle, and saw his dark eyes jump.

One of her speech difficulties was starting. The other was proceeding. Really, she could talk only to Maytree, Cornelius, and the Cairos, dry as they were. They could trace implications to their ends and respond as if she had said those very things aloud. She should say, Your father loves you very much and his leaving is not your fault. And she did repeat those things in the weeks and years ahead. She never brought up Deary at all.

Their first morning alone she and Petie, red and blue sweaters, watched through the doors the fall of the sea. The horizon crossed each pane at a fractionally different angle. The green sea made the glare in the sky accessible.

Soon despite cruel medical protocols—Children forget pain, the doctor explained—Petie could swing on crutches like a parakeet.

That first June after Petie’s leg healed, his friends called him from the rain or frost and he left, and left her arm bones hollow. The Maytrees’ crowd closed the gap Maytree and Deary left as if the two never were. Only Jane Cairo, suddenly twenty-three, registered her entire outrage at moral wrong, scandal, evil (etc., etc., etc.), by staying away and seething in New York all summer. She told her mother she never wanted to see another body on a beach. Jane Cairo was eighteen years Lou’s junior. Lou missed having her around. Everyone else was so old. Last summer this Jane—with her professor parents and Deary and Reevadare—had cooled with the Maytrees waist-deep in the bay behind their house. Jane complained about
The Golden Bowl
; Maytree had put her on it. —You’ll get used to James, he told her. —Not sure
I want to. She wore her glasses into the water; a clothespin held back her hair. Off-season she was in Columbia’s graduate program in comp lit.

One July morning, cold stirred Lou. The tide had withdrawn to the Azores. Wind through the windows smelled of mullions’ dust. She knew Maytree had loved her. The perception was correct; only her inference was false. What should Maytree have done? Stayed in harness? She just had not known she was harness. Nor presumably does baitfish consider itself baitfish. Nor did she know how long she had been harness.

Why surprise? She remembered what the scorpion said to the camel: You knew what I was when you agreed to carry me. To marry me. What was Maytree? A man in love. Who else would a woman marry? Among Maytree’s many early loves, both the rancher and the teacher lasted over two years. Is all fair? Is love blind? There must be some precept she could have heeded. On the beach below, the pram’s red mooring buoy chained to a cement plug lay on mud. All over New England, it rained three days out of nine. She hoped Deary was worth it.

Downstairs she cracked kindling on her knee and boiled the kettle. Why sadder but wiser? Why not happier and wiser? What else could wisdom be? She drank coffee black. She would not fall apart.

She enjoyed benefits. Maytree no longer interrupted her to read aloud from his book. He never stopped doing it, though he knew it drove her crazy. And he never stopped talking. At
last she had time to think. Plus she had his dune shack now, that Maytree’s father built near the coast guard station. And she could eat crackers in bed.

She sorted and soaked beans; she would bake cornbread at five. What was it she wanted to think about? Here it was, all she ever wanted: a free mind. She wanted to figure out. With which unknown should she begin? Why are we here, we four billion equals who seem significant to ourselves alone? She rejected religion. She knew Christianity stressed the Ten Commandments, Jesus Christ as the only son of God who walked on water and rose up after dying on the cross, the Good Samaritan, and cleanliness is next to godliness. Buddhism and Taoism could handle all those galaxies, but Taoism was self-evident—although it kept slipping her mind—and Buddhism made you just sit there. Judaism wanted her like a hole in the head. And religions all said—early or late—that holiness was within. Either they were crazy or she was. She had looked long ago and learned: not within her. It was fearsome down there, a crusty cast-iron pot. Within she was empty. She would never poke around in those terrors and wastes again, so help her God. Provincetown was better. She witnessed the autarchy of the skies.

—I have to blame Deary, Reevadare Weaver confided as though it cost her. Reevadare, wearing the first djellaba anyone had seen, held forth in her garden. Hazy air brightened as the sun fell. —But what can you expect? Fourteen years is too long to stay married. (Decades later Lou determined that one of Reevadare’s ambitions had been to define a marital maximum, in years. It switched between seven or eight.)

—I hate to blame her, she was such a love…

So don’t. Both Deary and Maytree could be material and final cause without being at fault. On principle Lou avoided blaming. Reevadare’s lipstick smeared her wet corncobs.

—But she stole Toby Maytree pure and simple. Reevadare laid it out with a nod.

Lou lifted her chin. —He left freely on his own two legs.

Lou found no comfort in friends’ disparaging either Deary or Maytree. What about her own loyalty to both? They had a right to live as best they could. Did Reevadare think Lou would hate them—once she got her bearings—as if either had changed?

—He wasn’t a paperweight. No one can steal a man.

—I could, Reevadare said, in my day.

—Everybody’s sweetheart not so sweet after all, is it? Jane’s professor father had named her after his own father, Jeremy. Now he was bugging Lou about Deary. Everyone gets carried away sometimes, she thought. Hers was a private matter, weightless in any possible world scheme. She dreaded her own friends. She could persuade no one she was not heartbroken. She had seen her own mother heartbroken, and knew she could do better.

When Marblehead school let out the year her father left, Lou’s mother moved them to Provincetown’s West End on the water. Child Lou had no inkling at Marblehead breakfast, say, if it was indeed at breakfast, that this was her final glimpse of her wonderful father. She could not remember what he ate, said, or read. She began to suspect that many moments were
possibly last ones. She strove to impress what she could on her memory, which she imagined as a clay cylinder. Her mother’s fingers around a Pink Lady, the Cape’s fish flakes and laundry drying in yards, foghorn, seasmoke, school roll-down maps. In bed at night she inventoried that day’s catch: her yellow-toothed teacher’s deploring her penmanship, gulls in full cry above their dodgeball game, her friends’ high voices, and mostly her mother’s smell of talc, her smooth dress, her retreating as if kicked.

Why not drop all this saying hello and good-bye to everything, this effort both grateful and scared? That was an eventful year. Girl Lou liked her easy Provincetown friends—hardworking, laughing girls, half of them Portuguese, who directly stuck her like spat to their clump. Aware how keenly she would miss any who vanished, she never considered loving less. Presently she forgot about memorizing. New Provincetown and then boarding-school friends caught her up. Still, she attended the smallest college she could find. There she learned to skate and sing.

Now Petie went back to school, and streets and air replaced crowds. Cairos and Lou’s other summer friends would bear her abandonment tale to Boston and New York. She eased her guard and got sucker-punched. I am not going to fall apart, she had told herself, but this was an edge from which she could only slip.

Do not drive in breakdown lane, said the Route 6 signs. Do not break down in driving lane. The sea poured over the stone lip at Gibraltar and emptied.

In late September, when Lou could stir at all she moved like a glacier, the queer sort at which dogs bark. Reading Hardy always distracted her in rough patches, as when her father vamoosed. Now she might enjoy the company of solid Farmer Gabriel Oak. She read, “It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in.”

Lou (and Maytree, too) shunned drama, inside and out, as, at least, bad taste.

Why ever had she neglected to become a Buddhist? Low blood pressure. Anyone could see how fat the Buddha was.

She had no force to fight what held her as wind pins paper to a fence. She was a wood horse, a rock cairn, a jerry can of pitch. She found herself holding one end of a love. She reeled out love’s long line alone; it did not catch.

She fell apart. She should have lashed her elbows and knees, like Aleuts.

A
BLAZE, SHE SCRAPED THE
pot. She boxed her paints. She scoured the sink till the sponge reverted to spicules. Petie gave her wide berth.

One cold June morning Cornelius appeared. —Say, Lou, I wish you’d stop poisoning yourself. She did not whine or voice any grief or anger. Did it show?

After Cornelius left she climbed the steep street to Pilgrim Monument. She mounted the monument stairs in her camel’s hair coat and red earmuffs. From the top she looked at flat sky, flat sea, and flat land. She was ready to want to stop this. Thereby she admitted—barely—that she could choose to stop. For one minute by her watch, she imagined liking Maytree impartially. For only one minute by her watch she saw him for himself. That day, having let go one degree of arc only, for one minute, she sighted relief. Here was something she could do. She could climb the monument every day and work on herself as a task. She had nothing else to do. Their years together were good. He was already gone. All she had to do for peace was let him go.

Within a month she figured that if she ceded that the world did not center on her, there was no injustice or be
trayal. If she believed she was free and out of the tar pit, would she not thereby free herself from the tar pit? What was this to, say, losing Petie? Why take personal offense if two fall in love? She knew they reproached themselves. Maytree was party to fits of enthusiasm. Loving was Deary’s nature. What would any of this matter two hundred years hence? She had many decades more to live. Whether she lived them or not was her call.

To drive her mental cylinders Lou climbed to and up Pilgrim Monument daily in every weather. Sometimes she entered fog. From the monument’s top she loosed Maytree like sand. She saw the sand drop onto roofs and yards. After only seven or eight weeks’ relinquishing Maytree, she saw the task would take practice, like anything else. She planned to work at it for a year, shedding every grain of claim. After seven months she had what she called “a grip on letting go.” When anything unwise arose in her henceforth, she attended to it by climbing the monument, at whose top she opened her palm.

So she pulled her own stakes in the matter, stakes she herself pitched. That she could withdraw them was news. She could guy out Orion and spread him like a spinnaker, a chute to fly beyond her own self-love. If earth’s sky got confining, there were plenty more. Why did monks fast? They had to be half dead to do this? For if you knew a continent was there, you could find it again and again. Could she detach from Petie? Of course not, not now when he needed her. But in our culture parents released a child’s person like a balloon. Of course, they kept the love.

It was then Lou began to wonder: If overcoming self-centeredness was the goal, then why were we born into a selfish stew? And who even studied this question? Would the Cairos know any books to bring her? For she meant to keep this cast of mind and renew it.

Two decades later, as it happened, while she was washing around Deary’s deepest and most noisome bedsore, she asked herself: If she, Lou, had known how long her first half-inch beginning to let go would take—and how long her noticing and renouncing owning and her turning her habits, and beginning the slimmest self-mastery whose end was nowhere in sight—would she have begun? Would she have turned herself over like a row of salt hay? Tossed herself to loose her own chaff? It took her months to learn that she could get clean for more than a minute at a time. Consciously she looked out for resentment, self-cherishing, and envy. Over years she formed the habit of deflecting them before they dug in. But she lived through those years in any case, and now she lived from that steady ground she won. More distances opened as she opened. Not that town, national, and world life as it was going did not give her fits.

Moreover, as bonus side effect, she got to do this—to dip terrycloth in a warm-water basin in sight of the sea, and wash Deary’s old skin, and irrigate her bedsores’ holes, and change the water and change the cloth and do it again. Plus, she now had a houseful. If having a houseful was a desideratum. She might have debated it—at this far-future point on Deary’s bed’s edge—if she had any time.

A
FTER HIS BONE KNIT,
Petie became Pete, who pondered facts. What did sweet-eyed Deary, his former beach playmate, who drew him even when he was eleven and triggered his fancy and remorse, see in his shriveling, peeling father—who must be well over forty, with his knuckly hands too big for their wrists, his white hairs in his nose and ears, the wrinkles in front of his ears, and his notebooks fusty, and his jokes embarrassing, and the books he wrote so thin you could use them as shims? Surely Deary loved and was loved generally; she could take her pick. Why pick a man who kept saying
a priori
? Surely his father had aged beyond any passion save his old chore of amassing lore to take to his grave. Maybe Deary needed a live-in carpenter. That badly? He did good work.

On his mother’s dresser and on the kitchen wall he saw his father in photographs she likely left up for his benefit: his father raising a striper by a gill; his father and himself in silhouette, rowing. He saw in the photographs his father’s tight shoulders, loose smile, long limbs, and eyes a stripe of shadow hid like the blindfold of a man about to be shot.

A few winters ago he broke his leg at that frozen inter
section. His father, holding him across his arms, had openly kissed his head and muttered something. His father, it turned out, knew he was running off with Deary the next morning.

What gave adults the cheer to tolerate their hypocrisy? Even his mother praised generosity and hoarded; she preached industry and barely worked. Perhaps every generation passes to the next, to hand down to yet more children, an untouched trunk of virtues. The adults describe the trunk’s contents to the young and never open it.

Pete no longer told his mother much. When he was ten he had ensured, kindly enough, that she stop instructing him. If she would only quit telling him it was cold when it was cold. At fifteen he gave her little time. She was probably struggling. When his father left, she had cut her hair. Outside he used to see her by the monument then, or on another of the seven hills, hatless and red-nosed from sun or frost. Once she abruptly and without antecedent said—He is the most noble and considerate man I ever met. Pete nodded, ducked, and kept moving, fast.

Now in summers and falls Pete passed clear nights on a sleeping porch. If he woke, he saw Orion’s torso rise beyond Truro and climb. At dawn the hunter was all abroad and fading, like his memory of his father, like a dead man’s arising weak. He rolled on his belly; he bit a fingernail and turned west to Bonobos’ house. In classrooms he imagined real Orion—the Orion of the dunes’ black night, whose visible arms held visible weapons—as the hunter was crossing behind the hot sky invisible as an Apache.

To what goal might a young man’s ambition run? He hoped to crew on a fishing boat and finally own a boat and catch and sell each fish in season. And privately—

Walking to school one morning through sleet, he began tracking his alewife thoughts as a game. He learned he did not think. He witnessed ghost parts and motes on parade disappear. A girl named Marie several grades older; her smile; his spinster teacher who for all he knew was once the object of his father’s lascivious eyes; his damnable father who didn’t know even how to take care of his mother. These bits deployed before his gaze as football fans after the last kick swarm. Now he and others roamed the world feeding or vaccinating people, palpating mastitis in zebus. Crowds came, girls in saris, there they went. He had no idea this gabble reeled and garbled his head ever, let always.

Quailing, he imagined aiming his mind as a knight aims his sword. Could anyone, has anyone ever tried to, master his own mind using only that mind as tool? Did his brain contain a pack of selves like Musketeers, each smaller and farther back and waving a sword? And what might such a stunt win, apart from peace of mind? What man his age wanted peace of mind? His agitation fueled his power. Right? But what kind of power did a man have when screaming meemies ruled his thoughts?

For the next few years especially, and long after, Pete played at maneuvering his own ephemera like toy boats. Surely, he thought, it must be easier to drill a troop of baboons. Either the task was impossible or impossible for him.

He failed to still his bilge. He could replace its slosh with
only more slosh. Why was this basic control so almighty tough? Other people appeared to think. He easily persuaded his fingers to write. He could not get his brain to do anything. Was he crazy? In real life he never stole cars or slugged guys or raped girls—so how could these stale schools of resentment, these monotonous flappings of weed, how could these minnow filmstrips unman him? They were not wishes or instincts. They were floating junk the tide rocked. He was taking pains to watch his brain take out trash. Indifferently, those windrows buried and blinded him. Why attend this nonsense? Because his hope of mastering himself attracted him.

How hard could it be? Someday he would appear before his awed father as a perfected human. A fisherman who fed hungry Africans. So perfect he never felt superior, even to his weak and contrite father. A youth’s thought no less idle than any windblown straw, it still stuck him like a dart.

The following summers he grew; he set and pulled fish-nets all night from a wagging boat; he worked on himself. Winters in his solitudes he worked on himself. He had begun by remembering his father’s coveralls. One leg’s pocket held a wood carpenter’s rule that folded, foot by white foot, to make a ten-ply stack.