Rowing in Eden (6 page)

A
GREAT HIT, THAT
P
ODDIGBATTES
C
AMP PHOTO
. T
HE SUMMER
guests laughed at how the bull in the pasture across the road seemed to lower in disapproval—or lust—toward pretty Martie and Rosamund in their swimsuits. They loved to say the silly name: Poddigbattes Camp. By the very next weekend, the photo had a spot in the upstairs hall, along with a mishmash of other photos that Martie rounded up after declaring the family needed to show some pride, for Pete's sake (young Rosamund and Martie sailing and taking swim classes and riding the horses they had kept as kids; Peg as Miss Iowa Dairy in a photo taken not long before Brick showed up at her parents' farmhouse to ask if someone with a tractor might help him get his car out of a ditch). When Franny had complained that no photo of her hung in the display, Peg tapped on a picture of herself and Brick and the older girls, vacationing in Muir Woods. “You're in this one here,” she said with a wink that Franny did not care to consider. And there were Brick and his father and Ralph Trelore in front of the offices of Trelore, Wahl, and Wahl—Brick apparently unable to erase the look on his face that said “Could somebody get me out of here?” Brick playing the piano. A much younger Brick polishing his yellow Mercedes, an open bottle of beer sticking out of his back pants pocket.

Franny considered this hallway display while, beneath her feet, another party swelled and the Rolling Stones played on the stereo—though not too loudly, as Brick and Peg were downstairs,
too. “Play With Fire”: an insinuating, queerly seductive song. Franny could not help liking it, but the singer was cruel to the girl he addressed, and it seemed he was cruel because—because her mother was an heiress in St. John's Wood and neglected the girl? All of this hurt Franny's feelings somehow, yet also made her feel both a little dangerous and a little endangered—not entirely unpleasant sensations. And, really, she could not deny that Bob Prohaski's bending her arm behind her back—“Say uncle, Franny!”—was closer to the sentiments of “Play With Fire” than to those of the forty-five rpm that Franny herself had bought in May: “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me” by Mel Carter.

A lull in the party below. Franny could hear the voices of Rosamund and Martie raised in debate.

“But absinthe is illegal,” said Rosamund—using a touch of her New York accent for leverage—and Martie, “No, no, only absinthe made with
wormwood
is illegal.”

Absinthe?

Across the bottom of the next photo in the hall display, someone had written by hand—with white ink—“Pynch Lake Huntsmen, 1897.” Such dark, unsmiling men, the Pynch Lake Huntsmen, they might have been members of a vigilante group. Guns propped on their shoulders or stuck in the ground. Wool jackets as heavy as slabs of clay. In front of the men there sat a small hill that seemed, at first, incongruous, an awkward pile of dirt. Only slowly—and only to the patient viewer—did the hill finally resolve itself into a pile of hundreds of dead birds: pheasant and dove, quail of a sort no longer found in that part of the country.

Not for the first time, Franny felt an almost embarrassing advantage at having been born so much later than the huntsmen—as if she were sighted, and they the defenseless blind. Impossible the world had ever been so old and gray and humorless. At the same time, what a wonder that the lake rocks in the corner of the big fireplace behind the huntsmen were clearly the very same rocks that could be seen in that corner of the fireplace if she were to trot outside, now, sixty-eight years later!

This thought elated Franny so, she slipped the photo from its hook on the wall and started with it toward the stairs. She would show it to Rosamund. It was not so much Rosamund as her parents and Martie who objected to her being at the parties. Before this summer, Franny had always been allowed to wander through the noisy affairs her sisters threw when Brick and Peg went out of town, so why couldn't Franny just call Rosamund aside and ask if Rosamund felt as Franny did about the photograph?

“You two need to dance!” That was Martie's voice, down below. “Come on,” Martie said, “I'll put on the Duke, and you can show us how it's done!” Which meant Martie spoke to Peg and Brick.

You sure you want a couple of old geezers out on the floor?

Well, just one song.

“Take the A-Train,” Martie put on the stereo, and Franny peered down through the banisters to watch her parents dance in the middle of that politely smiling crew in the living room. They were good—especially Peg, moving on her toes as if she wore high heels instead of bare feet. Cheek to cheek they danced, Brick rumbling his shoulders around now and then, laughing, grinning as he spun Peg across the floor. Afterward, the guests applauded, and Brick said, “Now, that's what I call music!” A girl guest said that Brick ought to play them a tune on the piano, but Peg said,
Not tonight, kids
, she and Brick were going out for a walk, he'd promised.

Which Franny understood to mean that Brick was drinking too much. “Too hard,” Peg would say, as if the drinking involved work, strain. There was a reason Brick sometimes drank “too hard.” Peg had explained this to Franny after Brick had crashed into the whatnot shelf at the home of Peg's mother and broken all of Delpha Ackerman's beloved Hummel figurines, and Delpha had called him a disgrace. Back at home again—Franny had been a sixth-grader at the time—while Peg and Franny tested the strands of colored lights for the Christmas tree, Peg had told Franny that her dad sometimes drank too hard because—here Peg took one of those breaths that Franny knew hurt when it expanded in your chest—
because
during
his first year in law school, he and a girl had been in a car accident. “That girl died, Franny, and your dad claimed he was driving, but—he wasn't.”

Why'd he do that? Franny had protested. Solemnly, Peg had picked up, then set down, a novelty bulb that remained in its box each year, as none of the Wahls' strands had a receptacle for the thing. Voice choked with tenderness, Peg said, “To protect her honor. Because she'd been drinking. Anyway, the point is, it's that memory—and having people think he was responsible—that's what makes him drink so hard. Now. Sometimes.”

Franny had not known how to respond to this sad and terrible story, but she knew she must respond, her mother was waiting, giving a brisk shake to the felt skirt that would go around the base of the Christmas tree—such a pretty thing, with its red felt reindeers with the sequin bridles that Peg had stitched on, one by one—

“Well!” Peg cast a sidelong glance Franny's way. “I thought you were mature enough to understand, but I guess I was mistaken.”

“No!” Franny threw her arms around her mother's waist, and insisted she did understand, she did. Which meant she had not been able to ask why her father had to protect the honor of a dead girl, or why their family had to suffer so for some stranger's reputation.

Up went the volume on the stereo below, suggesting that Brick and Peg were now out on their walk.

Franny returned the huntsmen's photograph to its hook on the wall. Of course she could not take it down to the party to show it to Rosamund. That would be preposterous. Pre-pos-ter-ous.

In her parents' bedroom, on the upstairs extension, she dialed the telephone number of Christy Strawberry.

“Hey, Chris, knock, knock!”

Christy Strawberry groaned. “Who's there, Franny?”

“Sacramento!”

“Sacramento who?”

“Sacramento objects belong in a church!”

“Well, Franny, I guess I'll just have to take your word on that one.”

“Come on! Sacramento? Like sacramental? I'm making up city knock-knocks! Give me a city! How about—Detroit? Just—Detroit.
Troit.
Okay. Okay. It'll be—something with a troika. You know? Those Russian sleighs? This'll be good. Because it'll be something, like, I'm talking with a New York accent, see, and when I do the response, I'll say ‘Detroit' so it sounds like I'm saying, ‘De troika.' ‘De troika's here to take you to the Russian Tea Room!'”

“What's the Russian Tea Room?” Christy Strawberry asked.

“It's in books, you know? People in New York City go there on special occasions, and they eat stuff, like, blini.”

After Franny finished explaining to Christy Strawberry what she believed a blini to be, Christy told Franny how she and Joan Harvett had talked to a boy named Kirk Toomy at City Park's bandshell that afternoon. Franny did not know the boy—someone from one of the Catholic grade schools—but apparently he had swiped Christy Strawberry's madras scarf and she had chased him around and around the bandshell stage in an effort to get back the scarf, and
it was so funny, Franny—

A small lamp sat on her mother's bedside table and Franny turned it off while Christy Strawberry talked, trying to make herself focus on the girl's words. At the start of junior high, when Christy Strawberry and Joan Harvett had asked her to go to the football games and things with them, she had been pleased. The girls in honors struck her as boring and frumpy. Christy and Joan were not hoods, but they liked boys and cigarettes and swearing out loud—
damn, shit, damn all this shit to hell
—and they pursued Franny's friendship in a way that no one else ever had. Especially Christy. Franny had spent most of the Friday nights of seventh grade sleeping at the Strawberrys' and even taking Christy along to her confirmation classes at the Episcopal church on Saturday mornings. Franny was the one in whom Christy confided when her father left her mother. Lately, however—especially when the two were together—Joan and Christy embarrassed Franny. Downtown, they shouted and hit each other over the head with shopping bags and insisted on practicing cheerleading moves. At the movies, they
threw things at people and the screen. At City Park, they walked up almost on the heels of unknown but attractive older boys, then burst into fits of laughter and ran when the boys turned; and, sometimes, when Christy Strawberry talked to boys—or even talked about boys, like now, talking about Kirk Toomey—she began to speak like a little girl.
Fwanny
, she said. Which wasn't entirely her fault, Franny knew. Tiny Christy with her naturally curly brown hair and rosy cheeks and adorable bow lips had been groomed by her parents to be the next Shirley Temple, with tap lessons and ballet and all. Still, by the time the downstairs telephone clicked, and Rosamund came on the line—“Someone needs to use the phone down here”—Franny felt quite willing to say goodbye.

“Fwanny.” Franny said this aloud as she lay back on the bed. In the dark, the ceiling sparkled with color, but that was just something your eyes did—and not even to please you, just from some sort of confusion of your eyes and mind.

Maybe she could walk down the beach to the cottage of Susan Thomas.

Knock, knock.

Who's there?

Des Moines.

Des Moines who?

Des Moines just ain't the same since the milkman stopped making deliveries.

It had been Susan Thomas who told Franny that Des Moines should, by rights, be pronounced
day-mua.
Susan Thomas went to a private school in Des Moines, The Bell Academy for Girls. Susan Thomas studied sculpture and oil painting at the Des Moines Art Museum. Maybe she would appreciate a joke built on the now standard mispronunciation of Des Moines.

However, if Franny visited Susan Thomas, Susan would almost certainly ask Franny to crew for her in Sunday's sailboat race, and Franny neither wanted to race nor to say no to the request.

So: Off the bed she rolled. Made her way down the hall to her own bedroom where, beneath the mattress of her lower bunk, lay a
slim book of poems. Scarcely larger than a fancy invitation to a wedding, that book.
Poems for Lovers.

She had kept a diary under her mattress until her mother found it, and let Franny know that the entries regarding Franny's undying love for the Beatles and the kiss she exchanged with a boy from her class were just the sort of thing that could land Franny in the girls' reformatory, and result in the loss of the Wahl family home, and Brick's being barred from the law. By the time Peg had finished, Franny felt grateful to be allowed to carry the diary to the ash can and burn it, and several months passed before she was able to look back on the day and realize her mother had been temporarily insane, and, worse, that Franny herself had been infected by the insanity.

“The sphere of our sorrow.”
That was one of Franny's favorite images in the book
Poems for Lovers.
It came from a poem by Shelley, which she read, now, by the light coming into her bedroom from the fixture in the hall:

The day that Franny had carried the poem down the shore to show it to Susan Thomas, Susan had said that if a poem made you feel as if the top of your head came off, that meant the poem was good. According to Emily Dickinson. And then Susan's father—who was a professor during the school year but tromped about in summer with his broad, nut-brown chest absolutely bare—Susan's father stopped in his thunderous passage across the Thomas cottage's
echoey floor to add, one finger raised in the air, “‘A period in just the right place is an ice pick through the heart.' Something like that.” His quote came from Isaac Babel, he said, but Susan's mother corrected him. “No, no”—a kindly, abstracted lady who wore her gray hair in a pudding-bowl cut and walked the Pynch pastures, bent over, hunting for fungi—Mrs. Thomas said, “no,
Kafka
, dear,” and Franny had made a mental note to look for something by Kafka the next time she went to the library—