Reprisal (43 page)

Charis and Joanna sat together on a deck bench vacated for them a while ago by two young men --college boys, vacationing--the courtesy their chance to speak with Charis.

With these young men, Charis had adopted the tone of the slightly older woman--almost an older sister--knowledgeable, amused and amusing, and finally dismissive, so they had wandered away dissatisfied.

"Cruel fair one."

"Joanna, I only do that, act a little snotty, because they make me uneasy.

When there are two of them like that, and I don't know them, it just makes me uneasy." Relaxing, Charis stretched her legs out straight, as Joanna's already were ... tucked her hands in her windbreaker's pockets, as Joanna's were tucked in her sweater's, and looked out over the sea toward Post Port. The ferry, groaning softly, began its slow turn for that distant dock.

It occurred to Joanna that anyone walking the deck and seeing them together, would know at once what they were.--A mother and daughter, their poses identical, their bodies certainly suggestive of each other's. ... It seemed astounding she hadn't seen, hadn't known, what any stranger must.

The ferry's horn blatted out, made the deck tremble.

"Last stop, coming up," Charis said. Then, perhaps reminded by the small waves they traveled, "Can I ask how your sea poem is going? Does it bother you to talk about it?"

"No, it doesn't bother me. It's going well, just a question of decisions. ..."

"What decisions?"

"Well, putting in and taking out. Decisions about its nature. For example, if you're interested ..." The teacher's eternal query, voiced or not.

"I'm interested."

A gull, striated gray as a warship, kited in and landed on the deck rail with a stumble and hop.

"Well, poems. ... Each line of language affects the lines to come, and the meaning and weight of the lines that have gone before. That complicates decision-making so much that you have to rely on notion, on intuition, on ...

trust. You have to trust that it's possible. You have to be ... joyful about it.--That make any sense?"

"Better than sense."

The gull sauntered; its twig legs, knob-kneed, ending in webbed feet the color of bubble gum.

"About the poem ... I feel the introduction is going well; it's fairly formal.

After that, I want to allow the poem and the sea and myself more freedom. I tend to be too concerned with structure."

"But without form, there's no poetry."

"So I think, sweetheart--but others disagree, and they have a point. A poem about ocean should move like the ocean; it should have a heavy surging relentless motion, at the same time unpredictable, that foams out lightly here and there ... blankets little sea-beasts, strikes stone in quick flickering sprays of cold salt water. ... Really, it's the wind's poem I'm thinking of.

The wind's love song to the sea."

"It's going to be wonderful," Charis said. "I can hear it in your voice."

Approval that gave Joanna pleasure despite all deaths and injury. So fixed, so woven in were pride and self-regard, apparently no horror could rip them out.

For only this hour, then, two women--their blood and bones the same, and one now mad as the other--might share a bench, and let tragedy rest.

The gull leaned out into the wind, unshelved its wings, and lifted away.

... The ferry reached Post Port's dock, backed its engines with a grumbling roar, then scraped, struck ... and rough-mating, slid groaning between the wharf's guardian pilings.

They stood, went inside the ferry's cabin, and waited in the short line for the stairway down to the vehicle deck.

"Joanna, can I drive?"

"You can drive--but I want to stop at the hospital. Captain Lowell was hurt; I want to go by and see him."

"He was hurt?"

"Yes--an accident where he was working. I read it in the paper, yesterday, when I was at the bakery."

"God, you should have told me!--And he's such a nice man."

"Yes, he is." So much for conversation. So much for the subtleties and power of the English language, that ultimate instrument, to force the gate of lies.

...

"God," Charis said. "I hope he's going to be all right."

"He probably will be.--A truck rolled down, collapsed the excavation he was working in."

"That sounds terrible. ..."

"Yes, I'm sure it was."

There were three cars parked in the hospital's wide, curved drive, but room enough left for them.

"Charis, do you want to come in?"

"No. You go on. You're the one he'd want to see."

Much relieved at not having to watch Charis standing in Tom Lowell's room, saying this or that, Joanna got out of the car and went up the entrance steps.

Two women she didn't recall were engrossed in paperwork at the main desk.

"Excuse me. ..."

"Yes?" The younger woman.

"I'm ... I'd like to visit Tom Lowell, if he's well enough."

"Lowell ... Lowell. Thomas Lowell. He was on critical, so he probably can't have visitors. He was just brought in yesterday." As if hospital words had brought hospital odors with them, Joanna smelled faint disinfectant, and a more adamant scent.

"I only wanted--just a quick visit."

"Family?"

"We're old friends."

"Well ... we have a "No visitors" here. But if you want to go up to Two, and ask at the nurses' station, you can. I think they'll just tell you the same thing."

"I'll go up and check with them. ..."

Dr. Chao was at the second-floor nurses' station, leaning on the counter and writing on a metal clipboard while an elderly nurse watched. He looked even younger than Joanna remembered him, dapper in beige slacks and a tan summer sports jacket.

"Mrs. Reed!"

"Doctor. ..."

Dr. Chao seemed pleased to see Joanna up and around, employed the physician's swift accounting glance. "You doing all right? How are you doing?"

"Much better, thank you." And she supposed she was. She wasn't weeping, collapsed ... wasn't depressed. She was something else.

"Okay. Okay. ..." Visual check completed.

"I came--I've come over to see Tom Lowell."

"Ah, not my patient."

"Two-C. Just admitted yesterday, and had surgery," the nurse said, and reached to take the clipboard. "And I think he's still sleeping."

"Sleeping," Dr. Chao said to Joanna.

"I wouldn't wake him. I only want to go in for a moment."

"Don't wake him up." Dr. Chao waggled a forefinger.

"I won't."

"In and right out?"

"Yes."

"Okay."

... There was one vase of flowers--red and white carnations--on the dresser in Lowell's room. He lay asleep, tucked under white hospital sheets, a white cotton hospital blanket. An IV tube, from a high stand's collapsing plastic bottle, was taped to his arm--another tube snaked from beneath the covers. ...

The white blanket was mounded into a large cylinder over his left leg. There was a bitter odor drifting in the room's air.

Joanna saw a small card propped against the flower vase, and stepped to the dresser to read it.

To Cap, from the crew.

Lowell, looking smaller, paler, was frowning in his sleep, breathing deeply, deliberately, as if he were working at it. His fox face was gaunt, weather lines cut deeper by some dream concern or pain barely buried. ... Joanna went quietly to the side of the bed to watch him sleep. A wounded baron of the sea, his green estates gone, his teeming silver fish now ghosts and lost to him forever.

She whispered, "My fault, Captain," and reached down to stroke his forehead.

He didn't wake. And, it seemed to her, was waiting to wake until she'd come to her responsibility. ...

"... How is he?"

Joanna got into the Volvo, closed her door. "He'll be all right. He was sleeping."

Charis started the engine, pulled away down the drive. "Poor man," she said, and drove the four blocks to the second light and intersection with the state highway west.

... It seemed odd to Joanna to be riding on the mainland, to know there were thousands more miles of people, soil, forest--miles of cities and mountains stretching west, before the other ocean.

Charis was a very good driver; she drove with full physical attention that still left room for talk. ... Frank had been a good driver. Louis had been dangerously bad, with a history of close calls while he thought of other things-perhaps, given what Wanda had said about him, imagining early-morning artillery introducing the dawn with flashing light and dreadful noise along some battlefield.

In less than an hour, Charis drove from coastal country--drifts of glacial pebbles along the highway, stretches of pine with the hardwoods, small summer stands selling hot dogs, and french fries with malt vinegar and salt --to the first slow swales of rising land, darker dirt, and the commencement of denser forests of birch trees and maples standing with the evergreens.

Joanna rested as passenger, looking out, recalling car trips in her childhood when she'd sat up in the passenger seat--on a suitcase for better seeing--while her mother drove, smoking Chesterfields and listening to folk music on the radio. Songs sung by long-haired girls, snottily certain of voices clear as water.

"Is he really going to be okay?" First break of comfortable silence in some time.

"His leg was hurt, but he should be all right." And interested in the girl's response-curiosity the most dependable human marker, after vanity--couldn't help adding, "Although I'm not sure he'll ever be the same. In the paper, it said he had to crawl from that site up to the road ... crawl, with a broken leg and whatever else. I'm not sure if even a strong man is ever the same after something like that."

"Yes, he will be," Charis said. She spoke as if she and Tom Lowell were privy to a secret Joanna had not yet discovered, some conversation of blood and the sea. Her voice, in that short phrase, was a veteran's considering an enemy respected--and though in higher pitch, didn't sound like a girl's voice at all. ... The under-Charis had been heard for a moment, alert, implacable, and dangerous. This dull gray razor-edged metal was what had been hammered out of a little girl by years of torment.

They were driving through forest now, hardwood leaves clustered dense and veiny green, filtering sunlight as they went.

Joanna rode, and worked on her poem's introduction, small changes, the couplets beginning to break apart.

The waves are the wind-bird's feather, that

display Their plumage colors with the weather; so far today, White is their sheer shade shown, and green waiting For a turning moon to tug the rollers into breaking, And row the deeper currents, heave them into motion By the haul of swinging stone that shrugs the ocean. So crawls the water child across the carpet planet, Overseen by sailing tern, plover, gull, and gannet. Of this child and stirring wind, all children after, Bearing their decoration of claw, fin, and

tentacle. Out of sea, and breezes, came the awkward variation That names itself thoughtful of its own foundation. Endowed for a moment with consciousness of spectacle, And riding the tidal occasions of sorrow or

laughter.

She murmured the introduction to herself, thinking about the inverted rhyme-scheme ending. The last six lines rhyming EFG-GFE. She liked the oddness, a slow, diverging drumbeat--a rhyme only in recollection after the steady rocking music of the couplets. ...

"You okay?"

"I was just talking to myself."

"The poem?"

"Yes. ..."

"Rhymes come first?"

"No, sweetheart, they don't--not for me. When I'm in the poem, rhymes come bobbing up like apples ... you know, when you're bobbing apples for Christmas?"

"In a pan? Trying to bite them."

"Right. No hands."

"I've heard of that, but I've never done it." Charis swung out to pass a small yellow truck overloaded with stacks of sawn lumber.

"It's fun."

"We'll do it at Christmas," Charis said, and pulled out again, to pass a years-old Mercedes the color of tomato soup.

As they went by, Joanna glanced over, and saw the woman driver turn her head to stare back. A middle-aged woman. Joanna registered that in the first instant--and in the second, saw the woman was naked, her white upper chest, her breasts exposed. And they were past, Charis moving back into lane.

"God ...!"

"What?"

"You wouldn't believe it. ..." And there'd been something familiar about the woman's face. A face she should be able to remember. ... Joanna looked in her door mirror, and could see the Mercedes dropping farther behind them. The sun flashed across its windshield, so the driver couldn't be seen.

A middle-aged woman. Naked, and staring at Joanna as if they knew one another, or should. Familiar eyes. ...

"Joanna--what?"

"Woman driving along with no clothes on."

"Are you kidding?"

"No, I'm not."

"Weird. ..."

"It's surprising, Charis, when you think about it--surprising that people manage to act and dress more sanely than they often feel. Surprising you don't see more naked people ... or people wearing bathroom rugs, with half-grapefruits on their heads."

"Bankers with penis sheaths and propeller beanies."

"Couples singing duets down the sidewalks. ..."

Charis hummed a long note, then began singing. It was another show tune--an odd taste for someone so young ... an indication of her displacement. This was

"Ol' Man River."

"There's an old man called the Mississippi ..." Charis sang out in her uneven soprano--singing with no black dialect, filling in the apostrophes--and with such passion that serfdom in the old South might have involved young blondes more than any, and her ancestors among the sufferers.

Joanna enjoyed listening to her--the forthrightness, her singing out with all her heart. The girl's voice filled the car with the best of her, with reminder of all she might have been, and Joanna began to sing with her--her voice, low alto, almost contralto. Hers was a woman's voice, richer, more certain than her daughter's ... embracing, supporting that fragile soprano. It was the first song Joanna had sung in a long time.