The Whole World Over (17 page)

Tactful Uncle Marsden claimed that in fact he'd been lost in this room
before they added the labels and the board. And it was true that his
wife, Liz, had been entirely in charge of the kitchen until she died. Uncle
Marsden was as old-fashioned as those wavy-windowed cupboards,
cooking out of cans when he had to cook, which was only when no one
else was there to do it for him. (Chili overdose, Saga called it, when she
came back from being away and saw all those cans in the recycling box.)
Left on his own, he'd pile dishes in the sink till none remained in the
cupboard. Pansy had scolded him for assuming that "some female"
would come along and wash them, but Saga defended him. He was
seventy-five years old. If men his age could cook and clean, they were
gay or they were chefs.

When Aunt Liz had ruled over the kitchen, she kept a radio on, a
neverending backdrop of NPR, even when others were there to keep
her company. If you stayed for long in the house, it began to feel like
a stream that flowed beyond some unseen window, a stream of news
delivered with accuracy and taste (Cory Flintoff's pious voice had never
deserted Saga); of book reviews, bluegrass, Bach, and curious jokes
about Scandinavian people; of "all things considered"—or at least all
appropriate and dignified things. When Saga moved in, she found this
patchwork of information, especially the news in the morning, its words
words
words,
an assault on her tender senses, but she did not feel she
had the right to complain. One morning, when Uncle Marsden saw her
turn the volume down, he walked across the room and pulled out the
plug. "You know what?" he said. "I loved my wife dearly, but this, I
never liked this. Who wants to start the day with shootings, lootings,
and stock market plunges?" To Saga's quiet delight, that was the end of
radio in the house; soon after, they decided to do away with the TV as
well. They agreed that nothing was lovelier, more soothing and peaceful,
than to hear the ocean in the distance, to gauge the state of their
own modest world by the changing rhythms of wind and water rather
than by the voices of reporters, even if they did sound like heroes from
leather-bound novels.

The morning of Michael's ridicule, Saga heard Uncle Marsden argue
that her presence kept him from turning too far inward, possibly losing
his marbles—and he had always liked her. He would never, he said, take
in a "student boarder," as Michael had suggested. What a preposterous
idea. "And aren't you afraid that said individual would hang around till
I became senile and then dupe me into leaving everything I owned to
him or her, not you? Some small-time Basia Johnson? Say, why don't I
let a room to a comely buxom blonde from my department who can
tend my garden
and
my doddering but still intact libido, then marry me
on the sly and sell this place to a developer when I croak? White elephants
like this make fabulous upscale condos, you know. Just have
a look at what those sharks from Hartford are threatening to do down
the beach!"

Saga loved it when Uncle Marsden stood up to his children like that.
It always silenced them. She hoped he would live to be a hundred. She
fed him lots of salads and green vegetables and slipped tofu into his
soups; gratefully, he ate what was put before him. For her absences, she
stocked up on cans of organic chili and bacon made of free-range
turkey. All he asked was to have a big rare steak and a banana split
every Friday night, the night he "went to town." Literally speaking, he
almost never went to town, except to give an occasional lecture. Mostly
he stayed right there: reading, gardening, poking about in his collection
of mosses, fixing all the things in the house that, as if in a relay, were
constantly busting, one right after another.

She typed for him, too. Though he didn't have to—at least, not to
keep his title at Yale—he still published articles in scholarly horticulture
journals. He knew a lot about intimate relationships between plants
and dirt and snails. People in the neighborhood referred to him as the
Famous Snail Guy or sometimes the Famous Salad Guy, because a long
time ago he had made some discovery that revolutionized the productivity
of lettuce growers, repelling snails and other pests without the use of
dangerous chemicals.

Saga had no trouble reading her uncle's prehistoric cursive; it looked
so much like her mother's had looked, the siblings having been taught
by the same lone teacher in the one-room schoolhouse back in rural
Wisconsin. So she'd take his handwritten yellow pages and type them
up. This took longer for her than it once would have, since she was still
relearning the layout of the keyboard and sometimes had to hunt for letters
one by one. But Uncle Marsden had never known how to type, and
now that he was semi-retired, he shared his New Haven secretary with,
as he put it, the "faculty sproutlings."

It was Uncle Marsden's idea that she make labels, just like the ones
she'd made in the kitchen, to put on all the drawers and pigeonholes of
the captain's desk he used like a miniature warehouse. It would help
them both, he said.

Well, last weekend Michael had shown up with his wife, Denise, and
you didn't need the dumbwaiter or the servants' stairway to hear his bellowing
through the entire house. "Jesus H. Christ, this piece is Federal,
Dad! You let her put these labels on the wood? They'll rip off the original
varnish. Jesus!"

"And whose desk is it, Michael? Is it mine, or is it already yours?"
she'd heard Uncle Marsden calmly reply.

"Don't you give a damn about anything? This desk isn't 'yours.' It's
been passed down through the family and happens merely to be
in your
care
at this moment in time!"

"Yes, and it's your hard luck, young man, if my 'care' happens not to
be museum-quality. I am not a curator at the Frick. If the furnishings in
this house make you lose sleep at night, then it's hardly worth—"

Michael groaned. "Oh Dad, please don't start with the yard sale
threats. That may have worked on Mom, but it won't work on me. Stop
covering up for her! We have to find a
real life
for her—I'm talking
about what's good for Saga. You think you're protecting her, but you're
not. You're only postponing the hard facts of reality here. I never agreed
with you when—"

Uncle Marsden cleared his throat loudly. "So! So let me see, what's
good for Saga is to respect the varnish on the furniture?"

Michael uttered a noise of strangled frustration, and Denise said,
"Calm down, sweetie. You had a very stressful day."

Michael had an all-around very stressful
life,
as far as Saga could tell,
and only by choice. He was some kind of money trader in the city, and
when he wasn't arguing with his father, he was on the phone reciting
numbers. His wife wanted babies—everyone could see that from the
way she looked at the visiting grandchildren who ran in and out of
Commodore Perry's house across the street all summer long—and Saga
suspected there was some kind of tension for Michael there, too. She
could feel it in the air around that couple when they were together, just
the way you could feel fear or shame or rage in the air around a dog.
None of Saga's cousins had children; Frida and Pansy weren't even married,
though they were both past thirty. Saga knew they weren't happy
about this, either. Uncle Marsden, on the other hand, seemed oblivious;
he loved and tended his plants. At his age, that was nurture enough.
He'd had his children late, he told Saga, and never assumed that grandchildren
were part of his life package. Nor would he pry into what he
considered his children's private lives. Saga wouldn't have contradicted
him there, but sometimes she got the feeling that Pansy and Frida felt
neglected by their father, that they
wished
he would pry. She'd seen them
trade pointed looks at the dinner table when Uncle Marsden did not
pursue certain topics they brought up on their own.

While Michael had been in the study that previous weekend, having
his outburst, Saga had been in the kitchen, peeling onions for dinner.
Quietly, she'd gone to the mudroom, put on her jacket, and walked
down the road toward the beach. Michael's temper was quick; if she
came back in an hour, he'd behave nicely toward her, or he'd be on the
phone spouting his numbers, and Denise would compliment her on the
soup, and things would be . . . civil. After dinner, Frida and Pansy would
get out the Scrabble board. It was a custom that went back to their
teenage summers, when the three girls hung about on the porch in their
wet, sandy bathing suits. Now they'd insist that Saga take a thirty-point
handicap. She still liked playing, but words could be devilish: when she
searched hard for one, sometimes the effort unleashed a whipcrack of
too many other, unnecessary words. Say she had a V on her rack; her
mind could spew forth, too raucously, top speed,
vivid, vivacious, verve,
valve, vulva, Vesuvius, valorous, voracity,
words by the dozen. It was
like a crowded escalator when someone who reached the bottom got off
but stood still.

Or a single word would pop out in relief, on display, like a peacock
fanning its tail. The word would fill her mind for a few minutes
with a single color: not an unpleasant sensation but still an intrusion.
Vascular . . . vivisection . . . valedictory . . .

On the way to the beach, she had stopped by the culvert, and that
was when she had found the puppies. This wasn't the first litter she'd
found there, and sometimes Saga imagined that a rumor had spread: if
you had puppies or kittens you had to get rid of, this critter lady down
by the beach would pick them up. Saga didn't know if she liked this idea
or not, if she should be angry or relieved.

Because the fact was, if you took them to the nearest animal shelter,
the one where she'd made the mistake of taking those poor wild cats
she'd betrayed, they would probably be dead inside the week. It was
the only shelter for miles around, so it was way overcrowded—and
out here, off season, there wasn't much demand for pets, even for the
most adorable puppies. That was how, talking to the one nice guy who
worked at the shelter, Saga had heard about Stan and the place in Brooklyn
where they kept the animals for however long it took to find them a
home, where they never put an animal to sleep unless it was terribly sick
or too badly injured. ("They," as it turned out, was basically Stan.)

The pups had writhed about in their cardboard box, with nothing but
a dish towel for warmth. According to the calendar, it was spring, but
the wind off the water in the evenings was bitter. Saga tried hard not to
think about the puppies' mother, how desperate she must be to know
where they'd gone.

She'd sat on the edge of the damp, cold cement and picked them up,
one by one, pressing them against her belly, under her jacket, for a dose
of warmth.

"Time for a little commute," she said as she slowly lifted the box.
"No cause for alarm." Before heading back up the road, she had turned
for a moment toward the sea. In the late afternoon light, the water was
gray wrinkled with orange. Tiger water, she called it when it looked like
that. Rhino water was smooth and leaden, dull as smoke. But her
favorite was polar bear water, when the moon hung low and large, as if
too heavy to rise very high, and scattered great radiant patches, like ice
floes, across a dark blue ocean.

She'd looked all around for the moon, its sly early ghost. Not yet.

"The moon is my friend," she murmured to the puppies, something
she would never have spoken aloud to another person, hadn't even told
the doctors and therapists who swarmed about her for nearly a year. Or
at least she didn't think she had. There was so much she would never
remember and so much she would forget again and again.

She had shown the puppies to Uncle Marsden, then taken them out to
the garage. There, she had lined a larger box with newspapers and
raggedy bath towels, plugged in a heat lamp, and transferred the puppies
into their nest of clean, pink warmth. Not a mother, not even close,
but better by far than a damp cement cave. She'd fed them warm milk,
from the baby bottle she kept in the pantry, then finished making her
soup.

At dinner, there'd been discussion of a feud over valuable land not far
up the shoreline. A condominium developer had offered a large sum of
money to the widow who wanted to sell the land and move to Sarasota.
Uncle Marsden's neighbors, the owners of the biggest houses, were trying
to persuade the Nature Conservancy to buy the land, to keep it for
the nesting birds—though really what they wanted to keep was their
open view.

"Maybe you should just marry her, Dad," joked Pansy.

"Hoo
hoo
! My dear, she's a good fifteen years older than I!"

"Oh, and that's right. You have Saga after all." She smiled at Saga.
"He doesn't take advantage, does he?"

Saga blushed. She decided Pansy didn't mean to embarrass her. "He
takes advantage of my housekeeping abilities—such as they are."

Uncle Marsden frowned at his daughter. "Hanging about with
teenagers is making you crude." Pansy counseled kids in a poor high
school, one thing Saga held in her favor no matter what she said—but
Uncle Marsden had hoped his children might become academics. None
of them had.

"Have a sense of humor, Dad. Studies show it helps keep your arteries
open."

Michael had been mostly absent from the table, making and answering
phone calls. Uncle Marsden had learned to ignore his son's attachment
to the phone. Saga imagined that Michael's attitude toward his
clients was like that of a brain surgeon toward his patients: nothing personal,
everything dire.

After loading the dishwasher, Saga had played Monopoly with Uncle
Marsden, Denise, and Pansy. (Frida lived up in Boston and came down
only every couple of months; Pansy lived in New Haven, an hour away,
and dropped by most weekends.) She'd let them buy up all the little
houses and red hotels so she could go bankrupt first and slip away to
bed. Her plan had been to wake up early on Saturday morning, even
before her uncle, and she had. She'd eaten a quick breakfast, called Stan,
left her note, fed the puppies and cleaned them up, then smuggled them
onto the train in her big plumber's bag. She'd had to stay in the city for a
few days—Stan had been elusive—but the corner she had carved out for
herself had made it feel almost perfectly safe.