The River Queen (8 page)

He didn't call the next day, and she knew it was over. She'd spend every New Year's Eve for the rest of her life sitting with her sister and brother-in-law, childless as they were, embittered and alone. Then in the evening the phone rang and my father said, “I'm sorry I didn't call earlier, but I thought you'd need to rest.”

He offered to drive her to work on Monday morning and she accepted. When he picked her up, my grandfather sat in the front seat. Every morning after that my father picked her up with his father in front. Then one Friday night he invited her home to dinner. My mother told me that Grandma Morris didn't care if she was a two-headed monster with green hair. She was thrilled that “Sonny” was bringing a girl home. In her more bitter moments my mother would quip that she was the only Russian Jewish woman my father had met who could “pass” among his fancy German Jewish friends.

The following Monday when my father picked her up, his father got out of the car and moved into the backseat. They didn't really know each other. I'm sure if they had, there would have been second thoughts, but they were married six weeks later. And I was born thirteen months to the day after that. They had another child and, as the soothsayer predicted, built a house near the shores of Lake Michigan.

11

I
T IS
odd to move through the world without caffeine. It produces in me a strange, sleepwalking state, as if I'm wrapped in gauze. Though I'm feeling rather Zenlike the next morning as I rise. I am not sure when I was last coffee-free. Perhaps in eighth grade. I am used to waking to the smell of dark beans brewing, the promise of an infusion to start the day.

But as I rise the next morning there is none to be had. Certainly not on board. We still can't boil water and I'm sure the people who run The Depot are recovering from the night before. I pad onto the deck where Jerry is staring at the newspaper from two days before. “Good morning, Mary,” he says.

I give him a nod, then grab a water bottle from our cooler, which is now filled with floating shards of ice like an Arctic spring. In the head I pop my prescribed medications. I pee into my jar and brush my teeth with bottled water. Then, leaving Jerry muttering about yesterday's news and Tom nestled topside on his air mattress, cooing sweet talk to Samantha Jean, I'm off.

It is a pleasant morning after the storm as I cut across the park, and for the moment I have no regrets. Albeit drugged, I made it through the night. I wasn't raped or killed. The boys perpetrated no crimes against me as far as I could tell. To my complete surprise I slept rather well and enjoyed the gentle rocking of the river, which I found preferable to an electric storm.

There is a crispness in the air. A hint of fall. It's the kind of midwestern morning I remember. A gentle breeze blows as I wander past a grove of trees on St. Feriole Island. From the plaques that line this island I learn that this was once an important gathering place for French-Canadian fur traders and Native trappers. It was inhabited until 1965 when floodwaters crested at 25.38 feet and inundated the island with more than five feet of water. One hundred families were moved inland under the federal relocation program. Now the Mississippi continues to flood periodically (in 2001 the island experienced a double crest flood with a height of 23.75 feet), and St. Feriole Island has become a park.

I pause in the grove where I take in deep breaths. It seems that a tornado does wonders for the quality of the air. I walk on, stopping to explore a large yellow brick building, abandoned and gutted, which was an elegant old hotel for decades. In its next incarnation it became a slaughterhouse owned by Armour until it was closed in 1965. I gaze into its gutted lobby, trying to imagine animals, bludgeoned to death in this vast, hollow space. I move on. Just beyond the grove and across the tracks sits the Villa Louis—“the house on the mound.” The Villa Louis is an elegant old home that has in recent years been refurbished and returned to its former splendor. I was hoping to visit, but it's just past eight and a sign informs me that the villa doesn't open until ten, at which time Jerry wants to sail. I've brought my journal and my watercolors with me and I am content to plant myself on a stone block in front of the villa and scribble and paint for an hour or so.

I have kept these journals for years—as I wandered the dusty streets and marketplaces of Central America, as I traveled across Siberia. I wrote in them when I lived in Paris and when I was under house arrest in Havana. On the inside cover I always write “Reward,” but I have never lost one, though once in Spain a young man raced off a train to give a journal back to me and I kissed his hand. And on the Vltava in Prague a boat vendor accepted one as collateral so my daughter and I could rent a pedalboat.

Mainly these are working journals, but inside of them I also keep a diary and paint. I cut and paste boarding passes, snapshots, local flora. What happens around me, what is said. The bizarre, the inane, the weather, the everyday. I write it all down here. I jot in the margins and paint the pages in the colors of my moods.

My first journal was a gift from my father. He gave it to me on September 12, 1967, before I sailed to France. This was thirty-eight years to the day before I left on this journey. He had my name embossed in gold and inside he wrote, among other things, “This book with its blank pages is for you to bring to life.”

My father never visited me that year. He was loathe to travel beyond the safe confines of his world as he defined it. At the airport his eyes filled with tears as he rushed back to his car and waved good-bye. Inside the journal he gave me I wrote of revolution. I hung out in the Latin Quarter with French students, determined to overthrow the state. When May 1968 began I found myself at the barricades, embracing the struggle. My last words in that journal were “Shit on them all.” It was my rebellious year.

My daughter, Kate, purchased for me the journal I am using now. She bought it when we were in Florence just weeks before I was to begin this Mississippi journey and Kate was heading off to college. We had always been close. In baby pictures you can't tell us apart. We love olives, chocolate, and burned onions. I don't know anyone else who loves these three things. And now she was leaving. Who would borrow my silver belt, my cashmere shells? With whom would I play Balderdash or work out at the gym?

But, despite our similarities, Kate and I had our issues. She was pulling away and I was desperate to hold on. I was petrified of her leaving and that made her all the more ready to go. We quarreled about this over the years as I think many mothers and daughters do. But I left my parents' home and never went back. I assumed she would too.

I feared this trip to Florence would be our last hurrah. We had ambitious plans for our time together, but wound up spending most of our afternoons hanging out at a café in the Piazza della Republica. One morning I spilled espresso all over my journal and was upset. The pages turned wrinkled and brown.

Later we went to see an exhibit of drawings by Michelangelo. On the wall were framed pages of brown manuscript with drawings and writings in Michelangelo's own hand. “What's this?” I asked my daughter.

“Oh, just some other artist's coffee-stained journal,” she replied. We went into a paper store and Kate bought me a new journal for my river voyage. “To my favorite traveler,” she inscribed on the inside cover. “You make everything beautiful.” On one of its creamy pages I begin to sketch. I'm not very good at this, but I enjoy passing the time. I'm trying to draw the villa. I do landscapes, still lifes, sleeping cats. I almost never paint when I'm at home, but I've done this for years when I'm on the road.

I'm not sure how long I've been here when a car pulls up and a man and a woman get out. They are nicely dressed, which I am not, and they look at me and smile. “What're you up to?” the man says.

I'm embarrassed now. “Oh, I just like the building.”

He glances at my painting and nods approvingly. “Well, do you know what you're sitting on?”

“Oh, no, I don't.” I jump up, thinking that the cement block I'm seated on is some kind of heirloom.

“You see,” he goes on, “the carriages would pull up next to this stone block so that the ladies wouldn't have to show their ankles when they stepped down. It was considered indiscreet. Come back later. You can take a tour.”

“Oh, I'd love a tour. It looks so beautiful. But I'm on a boat and we're only here for a short while. We have to sail.” Even as I say this, I'm aware that “sail” isn't the right word, but how do I call what we do? Float, putter, drift? Careen? Nothing seems quite right.

“Oh, yeah? Where are you sailing?”

“Down the Mississippi,” I tell them. “I'm writing a book about it.”

They seem intrigued. “Well,” the man says, “we're expecting the wives of the governors of Illinois and Iowa at ten, but I think we could arrange a special tour for you right now, don't you think, Linda?” He turns to the woman.

“I don't see why not,” she says. And he unlocks the gate and I follow them inside. They open the doors to the villa and Linda Travis leads me around. We walk into the entryway with its chandelier and blue-papered walls as Linda lovingly shows me the grain painting of the woodwork, the Lincrusta walls, the brocatelle curtains.

She explains how this house came of age during the arts and crafts movement and also during the time of Frank Lloyd Wright. Both Wright and William Morris took a more simplified and organic approach to decor. Ninety percent of the house has been returned to its original form. Linda shares with me the resurrection of this private house into a public museum, complete with the family portraits, dolls, original silver and crystal, largely because family members returned their inherited possessions for the restoration of their ancestral home.

But I am more taken with the story of its former owners, Nina and Louis Dousman, a handsome, stylish St. Louis couple. Louis Dousman built the Villa Louis and they lived here with their five children. They were a loving family until Louis died suddenly of what appears to have been appendicitis at the age of thirty-seven. Nina was then advised to sell many of the assets, including Louis's beloved racehorses. Nina married again and moved to New York. But after the failure of that marriage, she returned to St. Feriole Island to raise her children at the Villa Louis.

This house is also a story of the river and its changing fortunes, for Villa Louis had its heyday during the time of steamboats and fur trading. Prairie du Chien, the mainland city that lays claim to this island, was once a major trade center. But as the river economy shifted, the city came to depend more on farming and the local industries of clam fishing, button manufacturing, and a woolen mill. As fortunes fell, so did those of the Dousman family, and eventually they left this island behind.

As Linda Travis guides me, I linger at the cots where children slept. The bed where Nina dreamed alone. I wander slowly through the rooms where servants lived. I gaze at the kitchen where butter was churned. The garden with its artesian fountain. The cook's garden with its heirloom bulbs. I am consumed by the fate of families, by vicissitudes of everyday life. Love and its loss haunt these walls.

My father built the house where I grew up on the banks of Lake Michigan. It was on the North Shore of Chicago in a town of ravines and bluffs and old Indian trails. When our house was being built, he often took me there. I was perhaps three or four, but the smell of sawdust and fresh paint still makes me think of home. My father would walk around with a set of blueprints, telling the contractor where to move the bathroom, where to put a door.

One day he was talking to his contractor upstairs in the unfinished frame of the house and I wandered off on the floor below. I found a double-edged razor blade, which I'd never seen before, and I sliced my arm. When I showed him, my father shuddered. “Oh my God,” he said. He wrapped my arm in his handkerchief, as blood dripped into the wood, leaving a stain. Eventually it was covered in tile. Even though I haven't lived in that house in almost forty years, I like to think that this part of me remains.

I loved that house. I loved its white brick and green shutters, its garden and its proximity to the lake. Its address, 105, remains my lucky number to this day. If I get on a flight, and it's #105, I know I'll be safe. My father loved that house as well. After all, he designed it. He watched it being built.

My father told made-up stories about a brook and a bridge, about a lady who lived inside a pumpkin, and one about a little snowflake. He told them to me night after night. He embellished them and made them better and I loved the lilting sound of his voice. Each story had a theme, which boiled down to this: Never leave home. Don't go away. Bad things happen if you don't stay near. I suppose he should know. He hated travel, and, as I look back, I think there was something agoraphobic about him. He couldn't stand anything he couldn't control.

Every winter my parents did go to Florida for a “getaway” week without us, but my mother began to complain. He never wanted to do anything. He wouldn't go in the water. He'd just sit on the beach. One year she told him that if he didn't go in the water with her, she wouldn't come down to Florida again.

So my father went into the sea. He was up to his knees when he felt something stinging him around the legs. He bent down and soon it was all over him, all around him. He was engulfed in the sticky blue tentacles of a Portuguese man-of-war. At the emergency room the doctors told him it was the worst jellyfish attack they'd ever seen.

After that he never went near the water. For the rest of his life he stayed high up on the sand in shoes with kneesocks, a baseball cap, and sunglasses, his eyes scanning the sea for predators. In his later years they wintered in Florida. When I went to visit and would go for a swim, he'd sit on the seawall with binoculars, scanning the water for sharks.