Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) (40 page)

· 32 ·

Later that afternoon, rake in hand, Miranda surveyed her yard, covered with the truth of fallen leaves—red swamp maple, yellow sugar maple, scarlet sumac, and the latest to turn, deep purple sycamore. The seasons had come round, to a time you'd be crazy not to think of as foreboding, given the Columbian winter.

Orville was raking by himself, on the crest of the slope.

She stared across the sluggish river at the indolent rolls of hay with their elongating shadows on the foothills, the pink glow of the sun falling toward the peaks of the mountains. Straight overhead a series of lumpy gray clouds were spread far apart, but as they neared the lowering sun they packed more tightly into formation, turning pink. A wedge of pink-tinted geese flew west, homing to all that red, that heat.

She planted her good leg firmly and reached down with the rake. Using it as a support, she pulled the leaves slowly into her pile.

Scritch . . . scritch.
Move your feet, plant your leg, reach out, pull.
Scritch . . . scritch.

She had worked down the slope of the backyard from the two pines. Her pile was in the corner where the raccoons attacked the garbage, on the edge of the dirt road heading toward the turnaround at the railroad tracks and the river. The afternoon was clear and cool; as the sun fell it would be cold. The raking was warming her, as did her sense that Cray and Amy were having fun doing something with water, somewhere upstream, maybe even up at the ruins of the old Wild Brothers Mill, built in 1824 as the English tied up the textile trade in the valley, up at Stuyvesant Falls.

One of the good changes, she thought, was how close Amy and Cray had gotten. And the buzz about her thesis among the New Yorkers was a strange new affirmation of her perspective and skill as a writer. The agent had helped her emphasize the irony of the text and had gotten her an assignment for a small piece in the Travel section of the
Times
. The idea of suddenly having some paying writing assignments both terrified and thrilled her. She and Cray might just be okay. As she worked to bring out the humor, she could hear again Orville's big laugh, how he enjoyed learning of the folly of the Columbians. The memory, now, brought on a certain sadness. She blinked, back in the reality of the raking, the leaves, him. She was constantly worried that she might start to be showing—at just over three months now. Her body was feeling full and warm, breasts and tummy stretched, nipples tender. To her surprise, her body felt whole, even healthy. Sensual. It reminded her of the first time she'd been pregnant, with Cray, with Joe. A happy, expectant time. Not like this.

Scritch . . . scritch.
Trying to fathom it all.
Scritch . . . scritch.

As of a month ago, he was free to leave. He'd gotten the money and the house. Bill was in a coma but stable. He and I, she said to herself, have leveled off. We don't see each other much, and when we do, it's more like good friends, or a sister and a brother. And yet beloved sister and brother who know it's fruitless to talk about the trauma of the past in the family. We find ourselves sitting together and talking, side-by-side rather than face-to-face. I love that, having him as a good brother right now—and it'll help in the future. The past is too big for the present. We're out of our depth. And his going back to his Italian? Sometimes it bothers me, sometimes not. We've settled into finding a distance at which we can be kind. Wary, but kind. Except for one thing: he's still
here!
Right over there! If he stays much longer, I won't be able to hide the pregnancy from him, not even with these bulky clothes. I'll have to tell him face-to-face.

A week ago, more out of frustration than bravery, she'd asked him, “What are you waiting for? Why aren't you leaving?”

“I can't yet.”

“Why not?”

“I'm waiting for Bill to live or die.”

She leaned on the rake and looked up the slope at him.

Scritch scritch . . . scritch scritch . . .
Orville looked down the slope at Miranda. She was wearing the same bulky white fisherman's sweater and cute sailor's cap that she had last autumn when they'd fallen in love, on that first picket line at the Worth, just after the schoolhouse meeting. His breath caught, more in his gut than his chest. Trying to steady himself, he looked up at the two pines soaring high over her house, but they only brought him back to that day coming out of the schoolhouse and catching the scent of cedar and staring up at the spruces and seeing the hawk in the rain.

Again he looked back down at her as she leaned on the rake, looking at him. A flame of red hair peeked out under the knobbly white of the cap. A glint of green eye under dark lashes, the creamy white cheek, rouged a little from the effort and the chill. Her face lately had looked beautiful, all aglow. She was so happy at the stir her thesis was making. Strong shoulders, strong chest, white wool rounded over her breasts, which moved like live animals, say whales, why not, underneath as she raked. Sexy. Bad leg, good leg. Worn jeans, solid boots.
Grounded.
He felt a jolt of the old excitement for her, for all she was. His passion sailed up, leveled off. Before it could fall he started raking intensely down the slope, to bring his pile of leaves into hers.
Scritch scritch . . . scritchscritchscritch . . .

She heard his insistent
scritching,
saw him working fervently at the pile, pulling the lumpy center along down toward her, leaves tumbling over each other like loose fur on a big, rainbow-colored dog. And then she watched him charge back up the slope to herd in the stragglers and entice them into the edges,
flumphphing
them up onto the heap and then tumbling them all down toward her. He did this with happy abandon, a big kid at play. She laughed.

He heard her laughter and renewed his effort. Soon the front edge of his pile was near her pile. He got down on his knees and pushed his into hers, onto hers, over her rake, over her boots, and then just lay there, to her mind like a big puppy, looking up at her.

“A big pile!” he cried out happily. “A humongous pile! Gargantuan, man!”

“Nice raking.”

“I was lonely up there.”

“And now?”

“Not lonely at all. Come on down in here with me.” He patted the enormous pile. “Soft and scratchy and sexy and fun.” He smiled. “And sexy.”

“In a second,” she said. “There's something I want to talk about.”

“Oh, God!” he cried, clutching his chest in feigned horror. “Get ready for World War Three.”

“
You
don't have to talk if you don't want to, but it's something
I
want to say. As a way of . . . how to put it, a historical explanation.”

“Sounds okay. Will it hurt?”

“Don't think so. All you have to do is listen.”

“What's it about?”

“Selma.”

“Yeoww!” he screamed, jumping up, holding his belly where the rake/sword had gone in, struggled to pull it out to no avail, and, whimpering and staggering, fell on his back into the huge pile, sinking down, feet up, rake like a lily, playing dead.

She laughed hard. It was the first time in a while that she'd let go, let him break through the muted, hold-your-breath portent of whatever it was they still had together.

“You big jerk.”

“Okay. Ready.” He leaned on an elbow. “Selma.”

She leaned on her rake looking down at him. How cute he is today. Sexy, yes. Ever since she'd been back she'd been surprised at how big he was, heavier and more solid than she recalled. His short chestnut hair with its bald spot, his large forehead and blue eyes and hawk's nose and delicate lips, his surprising reddish beard—the year had given him more substance, made him more substantial. His leaving made him less so.

“In particular,” she said, “Selma's lie to me about your staying with her.”

“Go for it,”he said, with trepidation.

“When you told me it was a lie, I was shocked, angry. She had duped me totally.”

“Classic Selma. So far so good.”

“But then—”

“I knew it. A Selma-justifying ‘but.'” She stopped, gave him a look. “Okay, okay. Sorry. Fire away.”

“But then I started thinking. Maybe what she was doing was imagining you as better, or imagining the better part of you, something like that. Imagining . . . putting what she held as the best of you out into the world.”

“Keeping the worst of me for herself and me?”

“Maybe,” Miranda said, a thoughtful look on her face.

“Like she did with herself. Showed the public a saintlike Selma, and inside the house, at least to me, she was ferocious.”

“But which one was real?”

“Selma at home was dead real. I knew who she was, believe me.”

“But people in town would say the same thing—that they knew who she was—and they'd say she was terrific. She did accomplish things here, which we know isn't easy! The Library, Olana, the Hospital Auxiliary. And she stepped in and helped a lot of people directly, too. I watched her. She was amazing. People loved her.”

“Did you?”

“I want to say no, and that's mostly true—she was hard to love—but when I think back to the only heart-to-heart we had after a committee meeting at the Library, well, right then I did. The story she told me that evening was loveable, and she was loveable telling it. Screwy, but loveable. After all that had happened to her, her surgery, her losses, she still had a vision. I had a sense that as a girl and young woman in New York that vision had been bright, but that when she came here she had to put it aside. She put her head down and took care of Sol and raised her kids, figuring that after things calmed down a bit she could get back to her vision again. And then, years later, she looked up and it was gone. She was left with, well, ‘the Columbians' and with the two adults who'd been her children. And Sol's model airplanes. So, I guess she was a woman with a lost vision, lost out there or up there somewhere. A woman forced into a lesser life, historically a fifties life, down on the ground. And she went after that life with passion.” She paused, considering this. “Almost as if it were the other one, the old one.”

“Like a Sherman tank.”

“In a way. Driven—or trapped—by her time and her history.”

“Well good for her, and hurrah for Columbia. But it's just a lit-tle bit difficult—even if she is a public saint—to have her beat down your spirit in the comfort and privacy of her home. But, hey—don't listen to me, I'm selfishness incarnate. I care more about myself than about the welfare of the Columbians, imagine?”

“I can't.” She smiled. He did too.

“She's like Schooner that way. In public a winner, in private . . .”

“What?”

“God knows. They were friends, Henry and she. I never knew that. He hung around the house when he first came back. Now I see why. To her he was the good son, I the bad. I never told her about his beating the shit out of me when I was a kid.”

“Why not?”

“He said he'd kill me if I did, and because whenever I did tell her anything she always managed to make it worse. The woman had the empathic skills of a rhino.” Orville felt his spirit fading, just talking about her. He didn't like the way this was going. “Look. It's simple. She told me that I was, at heart, one of the most ungrateful, selfish wretches who ever walked the face of the earth and then, when she talked about me to you and others, said I was a combination of Moses, Sandy Koufax, and Dr. Kildare.”

“That's how I saw you too, of course.”

“Not still?”

“Could be,” she said, and immediately regretted it. It was going too far, toward hope. “The only way to justify it, I guess, is that that's what mothers do. I do it myself when I talk about Cray out in the world. I try to show him at his best out there—and it's not a lie. Mothers tend to imagine the better parts of their children to others. Not unusual.”

“No, it isn't. What gets me is the extremes of her two Orvys and that she never put the two together.” Heat was rising around his collar. “One minute she's accusing me of being the greatest narcissist who ever lived, the next she's saying I'm the greatest humanitarian. It's called ‘delusion.'”

“Or hope.”

This surprised him. He stared up at the fall sky, the light flying fast from it, west. “Thanks, but that's all I can take today.”

“Me too.”

They stared at each other.

“Come on down in here with me,” Orville said, “just for a second.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Has to be longer.”

“Deal.”

She lowered herself carefully, using the rake as a support. The tines bent, but held. The leaves felt soft and scratchy through her sweater. She laid her head on his shoulder, sharing his view of the sky. Their bodies fell slowly down further into the pile, like one of those soft dream-fallings. They could see the low light hitting the tops of the pines.

They lay together, acclimating to the touch of each other's bodies. Since she'd come back, they'd touched each other only as friends do, slight kisses and hugs at hello and good-bye. Now something else was going on. The sensual, even at their worst times together, had been a refuge, and it started to happen again.

They kissed, first softly and then more. They hugged each other, their motion sinking them deeper so that the leaves mostly covered them, the light coming through all scarlet and gold and purple. It was so deliciously secret. They fluffed the coverlet of leaves up over them thickly, so the filter of leaves against the sun was too fine to let in much light. The earthy scent reminded Orville of lake water, and Miranda of childhood before the polio, playing in the Gulf of Mexico on the swampy shoreline of “the walking trees,” the banyans.

“Feels like we're under water,” she said. “Like big sea creatures. Without gravity.”