Whirligig (12 page)

She shook her head.

“Some things,
kindelah,
you know inside.”

The brooch, I now remembered, had been a gift from my grandfather, presented at their fortieth-anniversary party. Had the blue dress been a favorite of his too, back in the years when it fit her?

We drove without speaking. We passed close by the apartment house she'd lived in before joining us. She said she didn't need to see it. But one block later her hand came up.

“Turn at the mailbox there. One more stop.”

We were in a residential neighborhood, older and well kept. Half a block down she asked me to halt, then to turn around to put the car on the other side of the street. We idled in front of a two-story house with a fanlight over the door and a porch occupied by four rockers.

“I stop here for me and for you,” she said.

I couldn't see the link to either of us.
“Why here?”

She pointed a shaky finger to the left.

“The toy?”
I asked.

She nodded. Mounted on the corner of the low porch wall was a whirligig, its propeller turning in the late afternoon breeze. I studied it. It was a figure of a whale, with a white triangle that was supposed to be its spray. The spray moved up and down above the blowhole. On top of the spray sat a black-haired woman.

“Look,” said my grandmother.

We stared at it. The breeze picked up, making the spout clack up and down like a sewing machine needle. I glanced at my grandmother. She was smiling.

“Somebody,” she said, “I don't know who, said there shouldn't be laughing after Auschwitz. That nobody could ever want to laugh again after the things that happened there.” She rotated her head toward me. “But I was there,
kindelah.
Yes, very terrible. What I saw you should never dream. But I can also tell you that all those that died want that we should have a life with laughing. Not sad all the time, always reading books about Nazis and men who like killing. They want us to laugh all the laughs that were taken away from them.”

I looked at the whirligig. But I was sniffling, not laughing.

“People are not all Hitler,
kindelah.
People are very good also, like the one who made this wind toy to give happiness to everyone who pass. People are good—even some Germans. When the bad memories came back in my head, here I walked to remind myself of this. This, not the other, I want to remember when I think my thoughts before I die. This I tell you, who have the permit for learning. I'm old. I have the permit for teaching.”

I leaned across and threw my arms around her. It was a long time before I let go. Then we both gazed at the whirligig. I wiped my eyes and watched the whale spout. I glimpsed a smile on my grandmother's mouth. I felt it leap, like a spark, to mine. I turned off the car's engine and rolled down all the windows. I have no idea how long we sat there.

“Everybody Swing!”

Though his last name was Bishop, Brent felt like a rook, riding north on I-95, making another end-to-end chess move along the country's perimeter. He traversed the Alligator, Plantation Tour, and Robert E. Lee belts, then tried to sleep through Washington, Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, and Newark, the steaming streets and long skeins of graffiti magnifying his yearning for Maine. He transferred in New York at the Port Authority—the one place his father had urged him to avoid—and managed to hold on to his wallet and his life. The bus rolled past the exit for Milford, Connecticut, where he'd lived for two years. He looked out but didn't recognize anything, then forgot to get off in New Haven and call his grandmother, as he'd promised he would. He changed buses again in Boston, where he had an aunt and uncle and cousins, none of whom he desired to see. They were his past. The bus crossed a bridge, high and arched like a silver rainbow. A sign welcomed him to Maine. Brent stared out. This was his present. He stepped off into it in Portland.

It was 5:00
P.M
. He strolled Congress Street and found his way to a bed-and-breakfast, the first he'd ever stayed in. He was primed to like it, but found it too similar to a small dinner party with strangers, his overly sociable hostess interviewing him about his trip with great interest and trying to get him to converse with the other guests at breakfast. The simplest questions forced him into lies. He preferred the less demanding social life of the bus and restaurants and motels. He'd have rather been out in the country as well, waking to the ocean instead of to the garbage truck below his window. He decided to move on, got a ride with one of the guests who was heading north, glimpsed a billboard for a campground on Casco Bay, and climbed out in the village of Weeksboro.

A series of signs led him toward the camp, taking him past a small grocery, where he stopped to replenish his food supply. He came to the Town Hall, then the village green, and stopped before a poplar tree, its leaves shaking and shimmering in the breeze, the ancestors of all whirligigs. Nearby stood a statue of a Civil War soldier. Brent approached as if he'd been summoned and found himself reading through the list of Weeksboro's fallen Union soldiers. The past was palpable here, a feeling that deepened when he detoured through the cemetery and found a slate headstone dated 1798. People, he noticed, had died young in the past. He thought of Lea. Many graves belonged to children. Pushing on, he passed between two white churches glaring at each other across the street, then turned left onto Bolton Road, and half a mile down reached Howlett's Campground. It was privately owned, a fact made obvious by the continuing parade of hand-painted signs:

“Welcome! Glad You Found Us! —Cliff & Vera.”

“Free Firewood, Showers, and Ping-Pong. Also Free Fog, Rain, and Mosquitoes.”

“Park At Any Unoccupied Site, Then Check In At Office.”

“Office Hours: From Whenever We Feel Like It Till Whenever We Don't.”

He looked at the Prussian blue sea while he walked, half surprised it wasn't labeled with a sign. Striking out down a path to the water, he surveyed a sandy cove, then returned and passed through a grassy camping area with many free spots but no privacy. He continued on and found a site more to his liking among the trees, with a table, a barbecue, and seclusion. He could see none of the other campers. There would be no need to hide his work, a physical and psychological luxury.

He pried off his pack, dug out his tent, and strung his rope between a tree and a table leg. The tube of orange plastic hung on this, becoming triangular when he climbed inside and unrolled his sleeping bag. He lay down, listening to the wind and the waves. Strange, he thought, that he'd kept to the coasts. Lea's mother hadn't required this. Was it because he'd come from Chicago, near the center of the country? He'd certainly fled as far as he could, turning his gaze away, out to sea. Each of his four vantages had been different. He inhaled the air, delightfully cool and sharp-tipped with evergreen scent. “I'm in Maine,” he said aloud, then confirmed this astounding fact by naming in order every city he could remember on the four bus trips that had brought him there, his geographical Genesis.

He walked to the office to check in. It was empty. The date, tide times, and weather report had been written on a chalkboard. Past issues of the Portland
Press Herald
lay on a table next to a sign reading: “Please Place Most Recent On Top.” Brent began to wonder if the Howletts' small universe was entirely self-service. He opened a paper to the weather page, studied the national map, then checked the details for Seattle, San Diego, and Tampa. He pictured his whirligigs in their respective weathers. He almost felt he could look out through them and see people passing and birds overhead. He moved on to other distant scenes—postcards sent by previous campers. They were tacked to a corkboard, overlapping like shingles, many with their messages facing out. He read them all, sampling other lives, hoping for a hint on where to point his own. Nearby was a shelf marked “Book Exchange,” another
camera obscura
offering views of the campers' lives:
Getting Organized, All for Love, The Best of Charlie Brown, Codename: Attila.
He was leafing through the latter when a white-bearded man in overalls strode in.

“Put one in, you can take one out. Anything else I can do for you?”

Brent savored his strong Maine accent. “I just came to check in. I'm in number 18.”

“Back among the spruces.”

Brent had thought they were pines. He made a note of this.

“That's a real good site for building your wrist muscles.”

Brent was baffled.

“From slapping mosquitoes.” The man opened his registration book. “That table there in 18 is new. The old one had more names on it than the Constitution. Went to the dump and found half a dozen perfectly good two-by-eights. Just needed a few rusty nails pulled out. The Lord doth provide. And the dump's where He does it. Most folks don't realize that.”

Brent signed in. The man glanced around.

“I built half my house and all of this office from what I picked up there. Right down to the doorknobs.”

Brent looked but could find no sign of the room's Frankenstein-like origins.

“Helps keep the price down. Ten dollars a day. How long would you be staying with us?”

“Three or four days.”

“All summer, you mean.”

Brent stared. The man gave no sign of jesting.

“No, just a couple of days.”

“In Maine, lad, a couple of days in July
is
summer, beginning to end.”

Brent ambled back to his camp, noticed the table's fresh coat of red paint, and vowed to be careful with his drill and saw. He felt anxious to start. He made a sandwich, decided to pick his next project while he ate, then couldn't find the whirligig book. Three times he checked all his pack's compartments. He'd been reading it coming into Portland. He realized he must have left it on the bus. He pictured it traveling on without him, crossing into Canada perhaps, inspiring someone to build a string of whirligigs that Brent would never know of.

He ate. Without the book he felt abandoned. Searching for it, he'd found he was very low on hardware as well as wood. A blue jay perched nearby, raucously panhandling him. He threw it some bread, thinking of fairy tales in which generous deeds are rewarded tenfold. No mountain of building supplies appeared. But in his mind there materialized the notion of a whirligig all his own, its plan found in no book in the world, its ingredients his remaining scraps and whatever he could scavenge, as the campground owner had. Surely there would be wood on the beach. He emptied his pack so as to use it as a carrier and marched toward the water.

The tide was out, its wares spread on wet sand. He picked up shells, fishing line, a length of rope, but little usable wood. The air was brisk. Two kayakers passed. He followed them enviously with his eyes and scouted the islands on the horizon. Coming to the end of the cove, he clambered up onto great slabs of granite and crossed them until he reached another beach. Here he gleefully picked through a long bargain bin of driftwood. He salvaged what he could from an old lobster trap, then discovered a pair of sand dollars, and was so intent on looking down that he didn't notice the woman seated against a rock until he'd almost tripped over her.

“Sorry,” he said. Then he saw she had a watercolor set and was painting a crab shell beside her. “That's great,” he added.

“Thanks.” She brushed aside a long strand of gray hair and smiled up at him. “I'm not so sure it has the proper
ness.
What do you think?”

“What's ‘ness'?” he asked.

She cleaned her brush. “Well, in the case of a crab shell, it would be roughness to the touch, lightness, hollowness…”

Brent bent down and judged. “Definitely.”

“You think so? I'm glad.” She glanced at him. “Do you paint?”

“Not really. Just a little bit, sort of.” He thought of his recent efforts—oversized eyes, drips running down the wood—and watched in wonder as she somehow ferried the crab's qualities to paper.

“A sort-of artist? That's me, too.”

She was small and tanned, dressed in jeans and a moth-gnawed blue sweater. Brent thought her thick gray hair beautiful and wondered why his mother dyed hers.

“When I was your age I honestly dreamed of painting world-famous masterpieces.” She mixed a pale orange. “Now I just paint.” She did so in silence, then turned toward Brent. “This morning they played some Corelli on the radio. Composed in 1681. Don't you find it amazing that we're still listening to it, whole centuries later?”

Brent wondered how long his whirligigs would last. “I guess so.”

“Amazing, and rare. The darkness swallows up most of us.” She swirled her brush in a jar of water. “Not that he could know we still play it.” She gestured toward a house, tall and white as a lighthouse, out on a point. “I very nearly walked outside and called, ‘Hello, Arcangelo Corelli!' as loud as I could across the water. Is that crazy? Have you ever wanted to do that?”