The Boatmaker (28 page)

She disappears, leaving him standing in the doorway. He hears doors opening and closing, drawers sliding in and out. He feels dizzy and begins to sweat a cold, uncomfortable sweat. He needs a drink.

The door, which has drifted shut, opens slowly. Castor and Pollux pad out, rub against his legs, ask him to take them down to the cellar. At this moment he would gladly go down there with them, replace Crow's notebook and suitcase on the jumble, watch the black-and-white cats in their frenzied hunting and never come out. But the door opens again as the landlady pulls it with her foot. Her arms are filled with a black dinner suit, a white shirt, a bow tie, studs and cufflinks, patent-leather pumps. The tie is in her mouth. The boatmaker gently removes the tie from between her teeth.

“My husband's,” she says, breathing heavily. “He won't be wearing them. You can have them.” The boatmaker had no idea his landlady had been a married woman with an elegant husband. Somehow he had assumed she was always as he knows her: midnight drinker, smoker, reader of Kierkegaard, person without family.

“You didn't know I had a husband, did you?” She laughs, and he hears the crackling of fluid in her lungs. “Take these to your room and try them on. I'll be up to see where they need to be altered. You're a little smaller than he was, but close enough—and the same in the shoulders, which is the most important part. I'll be up in a few minutes. You be decent!” She laughs again, crackling and gurgling.

In the days before the dinner the boatmaker works as if nothing has changed. He wears the short jacket of an apprentice, measuring, cutting and presenting his work for inspection in a line with other apprentices. He sees how seriously the others take the inspections, how relieved they are when their work passes and they are allowed to take the next step up the ladder that leads to mastering their craft. The boatmaker still envies them, but not as much. He knows now that he will not be staying in this compound long enough to become a master in this house. The thing he is building in the back of the storeroom has changed his path.

These days, the only time he is really comfortable is in the storeroom, working with wood he has picked up before it is discarded or given away. From time to time the foreman directs that the scraps be given to poor women outside the compound walls. The past winter was a long one, even for the Mainland; in most houses there is little firewood left. The Gentile women of the Old Quarter accept the alms, then turn their backs, cursing the Jews as they make their way to their homes, where their husbands have been drinking and not working since snow began falling in November.

In the storeroom the thing the boatmaker is building has begun to find its form. The outline is there, even if one or two pieces have not yet presented themselves. He knows they will. And they will fit, even if not in precisely the orthodox way. He does not allow himself to envision the finished piece. Instead, he focuses on the task at hand. And a feeling leads him on, a glow that surrounds each piece as it shows him how it should be shaped and where it will fit.

The boatmaker works early and late, keeping his promise to the foreman not to neglect his duties. From time to time Sven Eriksson enters the storeroom, walks to the back and stands, pipe clenched, towering over him as he kneels among the pieces on the floor. The foreman looks for a while without speaking before turning
to leave. As he watches, the foreman has a different look than he did before the boatmaker was invited upstairs for dinner: a look very much like worry. Sometimes, when his work is up-to-date and he has no report to make to Jacob Lippsted, Eriksson paces the wall—once, twice, three times—puffing like a locomotive.

On a warm night, at an hour when he would usually be in the storeroom, deep in his unfinished work, the boatmaker walks through the Old Quarter wearing a black dinner suit in a style dating from three decades before. The landlady has taken in the waist and shortened the sleeves and trousers. She has done her work with skill and care, gratified that one of her lodgers will be dining at a great house in the Old Quarter. Gratified and—very surprised. She would never have expected it of the silent man from Small Island.

As she bends over the suit to take it in, memories rise in her, stirred by smells from the old fabric. There is the smell of her. From the time she was first presented at court as the daughter of an ancient and noble family she never changed her scent. And there is the smell of her husband, equally loyal to one scent throughout his too-short life. As she cuts and sews, her scent comes up from the fabric, mingling with his for the last time. She drops a few tears as she works, but the stitches are true.

The suit, like anything made to measure, is perfectly wearable, though almost comically out of date. The boatmaker, walking through a lovely spring evening in the capital, is unaware of changing fashions. To him, the suit simply feels confining. The vest, the stiff white shirt, the tie knotted by the landlady under his clean shaven chin, all of it holds him and shapes him in a way his own clothes never do. But if the suit is confining, wearing it is liberating, as if by putting it on, he has become someone else: a man who belongs at the dinner table in the House of Lippsted. Through the warm air he walks, smoking and carrying a parcel wrapped in paper.

On reaching the compound he lets himself in, nodding to the watchman, who has seen him many times at this hour leaving for the boardinghouse. He does not stop to see the look on the watchman's face as he takes in the man of Small Island wearing an elegant dinner suit in a fashion decades old.

The boatmaker goes to the storeroom, opens his parcel, takes the patent-leather pumps out, removes his boots and pulls the shoes on over the shockingly thin black socks the landlady gave him. Almost transparent, the socks are unlike anything he has ever imagined a man would wear. They remind him of the stockings worn by the woman of the town. The shoes fit in the length, pinch
slightly in the width. He goes to the door of the townhouse and knocks.

The man who opens the door wears a suit much like the boatmaker's. Without being told, he knows the man is a servant. The servant leads him up a flight of carpeted stairs into a drawing room with a big bay window that looks out over the compound where the boatmaker can be seen every day, wearing the short jacket of an apprentice.

Jacob Lippsted, dark and compact, wearing a suit of the same quality as the boatmaker's, but transported three decades into the future, stands in the middle of the room. He dismisses the servant and shakes the boatmaker's hand, drawing him into the light of a drawing room filled with priceless Lippsted pieces and paintings made up of splotches of color that seem to picture nothing but themselves.

The boatmaker finds himself moving toward the bay window. On a cushioned seat matching the curve of the bay sits Rachel Lippsted. Next to her is a man even smaller than she is, dressed in a rumpled dinner suit in a style somewhere between the boatmaker's and his host's.

“My sister, Rachel,” says Jacob Lippsted. “And our dear friend, Rabbi Nachum Goldman.”

The tiny man wears a skullcap, but he is clean shaven and without sidecurls. Around a large nose, his features are
smudged with age. He looks weary, but his eyes are bright. The boatmaker shakes the rabbi's small, dry hand and turns to the woman next to him, who is wearing a closely fitted dress the color of the sky on a perfect October night. The cameo at her throat is the one she wore at the Mint, its profile echoing her own. Her hair is up and she looks more elegant and composed than she did at the Mint.

She does not extend her hand; the boatmaker has no idea what is expected. He feels as if the other men are watching him to see whether he understands the ritual of being introduced to a beautiful woman in a drawing room filled with daringly modern paintings and priceless Lippsted furniture.

He nods in the direction of her cameo, approximating a bow. Those who know Rachel Lippsted know she is on the point of laughing out loud—feeling both pleasure and a teasing superiority. But her face shows only gracious welcome.

“May I bring you a drink?” Jacob Lippsted asks, breaking in on the boatmaker's discomfort.

“Yes. Please.”

“Any
particular
drink?” Jacob Lippsted has a bit of his sister's teasing humor, her combination of graciousness and superiority.

“Whiskey.”

“Whiskey, we have,” he says, moving to a sideboard where bottles the boatmaker has never seen before are arranged like soldiers next to their commanding officer: an elegant silver ice bucket.

The boatmaker is more interested in the sideboard than in the bottles. It is old, perhaps very old: Lippsted, in a style simpler and more austere than that of the present day. The front is light, inlaid with a geometric pattern of darker woods the boatmaker cannot identify, in spite of his months in the yard. Perhaps the wood is no longer used, possibly no longer available, even to the House of Lippsted.

As he accepts a tumbler filled with whiskey and ice, he worries about the drink. He has drunk nothing for many months, since waking up in the hospital, and does not know how he will react. In his life, he has rarely had just one drink. But he wants badly not to be drunk in front of these people, especially the woman on the window seat. He doesn't care as much about the men. But the thought of what he might do in front of her if he can't stop with one drink makes the sweat run under his old-fashioned dinner suit.

“Welcome to our home!” says Jacob Lippsted, raising a glass filled with the same whiskey he gave the boatmaker. They drink. It is smoother than any drink the boatmaker has ever tasted: perfumed fire.

“My foreman tells me you are a promising worker in wood. And Sven Eriksson, whatever his other virtues, is not a man to dispense compliments lightly. Though, come to think of it, that is one of his chief virtues to me, as a businessman.”

Jacob Lippsted laughs, and it becomes clear that one of his ways of putting people at ease is laughing gently at all the participants in a situation, including himself. Like the whiskey, this kind of teasing humor is new to the boatmaker.

The host laughs and finishes off his drink in one swift motion. “Another?” he asks the boatmaker, rising. Neither Rachel nor the rabbi is drinking.

“No,” says the boatmaker, who has drunk only enough to feel the perfumed fire in nose and throat.

“Don't tell me you are joining my sister and the rabbi in teetotalling?” Jacob Lippsted says, dramatically exaggerating his disappointment. “For them, one glass of wine is a celebration. Two is a debauch. Join me instead.”

“Maybe later,” says the boatmaker, relieved to find he can take a little of the surprising whiskey without being overwhelmed by his thirst. The sweat has stopped trickling down his back and sides under the antique jacket. He begins to feel as if an approximation of himself is present.

As he listens, he finds that Jacob Lippsted has a remarkable skill for drawing everyone into the conversation in rhythm. To be sure, the scion of the House of Lippsted has the assistance of beautiful surroundings, the warmth from aged whiskey and the frictionless, invisible attention of servants. But the boatmaker has the feeling that his host could do the same thing in a shed on Small Island, squatting on a dirt floor around a fireplace made of broken stones, surrounded by entirely different people drinking a much rougher whiskey.

CHAPTER 21

A servant whispers in Jacob Lippsted's ear, and doors slide back. They are escorted into a smaller room with wood-panelled walls in which a narrow dining table has been laid for four. The boatmaker and the rabbi face each other across the width. Jacob is seated at the head, Rachel at the foot. Tapers are lighted. Candlelight glows on silver and linen. A servant fills the boatmaker's glass with red wine.

The wine is as incomprehensible as the whiskey and the paintings. The same novel strangeness extends to the food. The roast and vegetables on his plate share names, shapes and colors with food he has eaten, but they don't have the same taste. As he assesses these novelties, he continues to be surprised that he can drink a little and not be devastated.

As he eats, drinks and speaks a few words under the persuasion of Jacob Lippsted, the boatmaker keeps circling back to the question he has been asking himself since the foreman conveyed the invitation to dine:
Why am I here?

The boatmaker is not a man of many words. But he has never been afraid to speak up when it is necessary, to say what needs saying, ask what needs asking. For the first time in his life he is afraid to speak: afraid that if he does, he will wake up in the cold storeroom under an oil lamp, wearing a short jacket, pieces of his project scattered across the floor.

Rachel Lippsted spends the meal studying the odd man in the old-fashioned dinner suit. Again, she has a memory of seeing him but cannot put her memory-picture in its frame. Where was it? And when? Wherever and whenever it was, she knows he was not dressed as he is now. Beyond that, her memory is failing her in a way it seldom does.

She watches the boatmaker as the conversation flows in the channels her brother creates for it. She can follow, participate and remain watchful, thinking her own thoughts. Long experience has made her comfortable in drawing rooms and dining rooms where conversation and mood move on many levels. She sees that the boatmaker is uncomfortable in his ancient suit. He may never have worn a suit before. She sees that in his discomfort he naturally assumes a formality, a consideredness, a slowness that fits the suit as well as the suit fits him.