The Maytrees (9 page)

D
URING ONE SNOWY
S
ATURDAY
morning cartoon commercial Deary asked Maytree, Did you know that back in Provincetown I could see children’s auras? Petie’s was blue! He did know that. She repeated herself at ever-closer intervals. When did he notice he tuned her out like wind, like halyards’ knocking masts? He had vowed himself to their life together, not to every word she spoke.

Maytree stepped into his study and rubbed his face. He heard the television playing the Poet and Peasant Overture in full orchestra. Things must be working out for Bugs Bunny.

How had he now loved Deary for—almost—twenty years? Or did he. He used to listen on edge, for years and in vain, to uncover where, in any anecdote’s avalanche, dropped the flake she thought might interest him.

Early with Lou, then with Deary, and again now, he returned to this: Why can love, love apparently absolute, recur? And recur? Why does love feel it is—know for certain it is—eternal and absolute, every time? He opened a notebook and found a passage he had copied from Kafka’s letters to Felice. “I have no crazier and greater wish than that we should be bound together inseparably by the wrists.”

Of course Kafka wrote letters to Felice only when they were apart. Love letters do not so much document daily love’s long hours as precede them. Now after these many years in Maine, Maytree wondered if Kafka ever felt that being bound to Felice by the wrists was a wish crazier than he knew.

He began on a blank page. Three explanations for love’s recurrence presented. Perhaps everyone gathers or grows an enormous sack of love he hands whole from one beloved to another. In this instance, the beloved is love’s hat rack. Or, second, perhaps love is delusional. The heart never learns and keeps leaping the length of its life, rising to lures made of rubber hiding hooks. Or, third, perhaps he never really loved Lou, let alone his other girlfriends, and, having learned love by loving, had found in Deary his true mate at last.

All three—even the usually irresistibly tempting true-mate-at-last hypothesis, for which both Maytree and Deary were by now many years too experienced—apostasized. They apostasized by saying love between man and woman, or anyone and anyone, beyond those eighteen months that science allows for infatuation, was imaginary or theater, or inertia, or convenience. A view looking to Maytree ever more plausible, but he knew he had truly loved Lou for years and still did. Since all apostasized, he was missing options, unless the premise—that there is such a thing as love, and it recurs—was false, so that apostasy was really a lapse into truth, like Galileo’s. But then which belief was largest, which afforded hope, by which could we live? Was romance hierophany, or some fowler’s snare that yanked a culture by the toe? Lucre
tius declared that love was only a shudder mammals used to procreate. Lucretius drank a love philter, fell in love, and died of suicide from a broken heart—doubtless, Maytree thought, to the delight of everyone.

Deary’s legs felt weak, she told him later; she could hardly get up the stairs. She was out of breath. She had back trouble. She was old. Her neck hurt. Would he rub her back? Was her back still beautiful? Could he build them an addition—a bigger dining room in which to hang three chandeliers?

The lasting love he studied, not mere emotion, might be willful focus of attention. It might be a custody of reactions. He circled this view for years. Love as directed will did not sound like love’s first feeling of cliff-jumping. Call that period eighteen months or seven years—call it anything but infatuation! It must be acknowledged and accounted for. Recently science had nailed down its chemistry: adrenaline. After eighteen months, the body balks at more adrenaline. Then what? He had loved Lou for years and years. On and off, mostly very much on. Those loving years, and their persistence, must also be credited. People used to die so young! Maybe lasting love is a rare evolutionary lagniappe. Anthropologists say almost every human culture on earth gives lip service, and lip service only, to monogamy. He was scrupulously loving in mind and body toward Deary in order to make reparations to the moral universe. He was grateful for the chance.

Lasting love makes no scientific sense after the kids can hunt and gather. Yet statistics note that if one of a long-married couple dies, the other often dies soon after. Maybe love in that case is a term so wide it includes both infatuation
and mutual, habitual dependency. Screw that. Why? Because he knew better. That it was outside science’s lens did not mean it did not exist. As Maytree aged, lasting love was starting to seem more central to a man’s life even than work. Even than building a career and even writing poetry! Anthropology had proved against its expectations that the ideal of lasting love and also its undeniable (if minority) presence was well-nigh universal, in culture after culture from the Stone Age on.

Say that evolution came up with the eighteen months’ infatuation. That might be long enough to get Baby on his feet and arranged for, if only by Grandpa or siblings. Then the man can go off and impregnate someone else. Why then do old people fall in love? Why stay loving? The feeling of love is so crucial to our species it is excessive, like labor pain. Lasting love is an act of will. It is a gentleman’s game.

To Lou’s raised light Maytree had once set his face. “Time was,” said a Wessex rustic, “long and merry ago now!” He loved her, whatever that was, merry ago or not. He skipped over his undeniable knowledge that he had also loved Deary deeply for a while at first, a
while
he had been prolonging. He was obliged to love Deary. Now with and for Deary, he had wrapped his hands around oars, iced them fast, and kept rowing.

L
OU HOPED SCANDALOUSLY TO
live her own life. A subnormal calling, since civilization means cities and cities mean social norms. She wanted only to hear herself think. She admired Diogenes who shaved half his head so he would stay home to think. How else might she hear any original note, any stray subject-and-verb in the head, however faint, should one come?

She pushed the tiller hard over, came about, and set a slashing course upwind. The one-room ever-sparer dune shack was her chief dwelling from which only hurricane or frost exiled her. Over decades, she had reclaimed what she had forfeited of her own mind, if any. She took pains to keep outside the world’s acceleration. An Athens marketplace amazed Diogenes with “How many things there are in the world of which Diogenes hath no need!” Lou had long since cut out fashion and all radio but the Red Sox. In the past few years she had let go her ties to people she did not like, to ironing, to dining out in town, and to buying things not necessary and that themselves needed care. She ignored whatever did not interest her. With those blows she opened her days like a piñata. A hundred freedoms fell on her. She hitched free
years to her lifespan like a kite tail. Everyone envied her the time she had, not noticing that they had equal time.

The bay and ocean and daytime sky did not change. Lou lived in color fields. By habit, she ignored the Cape’s man-made changes. In town it was tough to break the habit of checking skies every hour or so. These new people kept imaginary beasties away using streetlights and spotlights. Not one of them asked about burglary rates. They thought they knew. They unknowingly brought their big-city obsession with crime and appearance and status as rats bring etc.

When winter forced her back to town she braced to enter the same low-ceilinged cave most Americans lived in unknowingly. Always in May the Milky Way returned to belly overhead, as if equinoctial storms made of the galaxy a spinnaker that opened to north winds. Any fuss reached her anyway, even though she ducked just as, swimming, she took a breaking wave by diving under it.

Three days a week she helped at the Manor Nursing Home, where people proved their keenness by reciting received analyses of current events. All the Manor residents watched television day and night, informed to the eyeballs like everyone else and rushed for time, toward what end no one asked. Their cupidity and self-love were no worse than anyone else’s, but their many experiences’ having taught them so little irked Lou. One hated tourists, another southerners; another despised immigrants. Even dying, they still held themselves in highest regard. Lou would have to watch herself. For this way of thinking began to look like human
nature—as if each person of two or three billion would spend his last vital drop to sustain his self-importance.

In September and October, Lou stayed in the dunes to surf-cast. After sunset, the sky drew out its dying. The sea climbing her legs was suddenly warm, a wonder. Until a wave knocked her down, she was herself sea and skies in equipoise. A hitting bass jump-started her. She caught the shrieking reel as the fish ran the line; she set the hook.

The next day Jane Cairo visited Lou’s shack on the way to Cornelius’s. And she brought swaddled Tandy! who was the size and shape of a one-quart thermos. Tandy’s yellow face (previously purple) was peaceful. When Lou held the light baby, she said, You forget. Jane said everybody without exception studied the baby’s face at length and eventually said, You forget. Cornelius called her You Forget. Later that night Lou felt a friendly greeting from Maytree in Maine. She felt his surprise jig several times a year. Did it rebound from that old backboard the moon? Hallo, she said back like Toad, amused.

Maybe someday a thought or two would come. In the meantime she cleared the landing strip.

N
EWLY ASHORE IN
C
AMDEN,
Maine, Pete wore his sweater belted into his pants. A Greek cap, canvas land shoes. He liked this time of evening, yellow pier lights, indoor rooms glowing blue as the sky’s last edge, and Cassiopeia asprawl. When his vessel
Marie
’s motor cracked in the Gulf of Maine, he hauled out the two-stroke, the old eggbeater, and they limped to the nearest boatyard. In Camden, if this tiny outboard could make Camden within their lifetimes, they would seek a cheap boatyard, wait for a new engine, and fix or replace the pump. How would he and his estranged father act? Pete at thirty-two was ready to meet him man-to-man and father-to-father.

Once on the wharf as Pete dropped his duffel from dock to deck, his father’s face appeared behind the water—narrow skull, laugh creases, alert eyes under brows like shakes—and Pete felt the barometer needle swing over like a helm.
SET FAIR
. He had hopped aboard. The needle stayed over ever since.

He remembered playing catch, rowing. His father let him open and shut his folding ruler. They dug clams. Sometimes his parents danced to Louis Armstrong on the radio and sent him aghast out the door. When his father looked up from the
flats, or looked beyond the downstairs French doors to the bay, he tended to say,

These memories were thin tokens. Long ago Pete had forgiven Deary’s betrayal. She was the one adult in town who had a good time.

And what would his own firstborn, little Manny, remember of him? Everything! His son was extra conscious.

Pete climbed the steep Main Street sidewalk. He found the couple’s side street named at its top. He knew the house number. He could always join the rest of the crew at the boatyard.

He saw her dark slacks on a porch, a green couch, knees up, white ladylike bun showing over a pillow; she was reading the
New York Times
. He saw lamps, a sideboard, a heater, and a Persian rug. He opened the screen door and walked in. What if his face rang no bell? She gave a cry, and he helped her rise. She held him fast. She was short. She tilted her face up and said, Petie! Your room’s ready.

My room?

—What is it? That voice came from inside. His father entered the porch, thin as a pipefish, tall, orange-and-white eyebrows, loose limbs, full head of white hair, nice-guy face. He wore his belt high. Their eyes met over Deary’s head.

Here was the look he used to dread. The sticking point for Pete had been his father’s twenty-year silence. Often Pete’s partner Sooner reported that his own father had seen
Maytree at their college reunion. So he even came to Massachusetts every five years, and still never even called.

Pete saw his old father’s smile kindle and tremble. So many easy lines crossed his skin that his eyes looked like pokeholes in screens. Pete held out his hand. Maytree surrounded him as if for keeps, and, in the process, Deary. At his collar Pete smelled the man’s neck like warm copper. His hair smelled like him alone. I must hold back, Pete thought; he knew his enthusiasm could scare people. Then he saw his wet-faced father, not holding back. Oh—he used to read him books, that’s what he did. Pete felt his father’s tensile arms, felt his knobbed shoulders’ heat and tone. He remembered the round faraway voice in which his father read him stories aloud day and night long after Pete himself could read. Blue carpenter’s chalk smudged the pages.

Why had he waited? Why had he not—as his mother urged him to—invited him, both of them, to his and Marie’s wedding?

—Hell’s bells, his mother had said back at home. You poisoned yourself after all. —It’s not that, he said. He did not say that meeting his father would embarrass them both. He knew his mother would ridicule his using embarrassment as an excuse not to do what was right. Yet surely she understood embarrassment?

Now in Camden father stepped back, possibly lest Deary suffocate. —Whiskey? he said. Vodka? Gin? Here was the same long face blushing, the same shambling friendliness. His wild brows arced down and his wide mouth arced up, giving
him a hopeful look. Pete had seen this expression squinting in deckel-edge snapshots. Now the rays pleating his father’s temples were deep. He was sixty-four, Pete knew—much younger than Deary, younger than Cornelius, three years older than Lou Maytree. He had the zip of a tern.

—Gin, thanks. His father carried his head a bit forward. What should he call him? His short orange-and-white beard angled like a train’s cowcatcher. Deary, hanging like a toddler, still had Pete hooked with both arms.

What sort of love was twenty years’ silence? It made no sense. A father’s shame, fearing his son’s censure? Pete had no idea. He knew how a parent falls wild for a child. Nothing could breach his intimacy with their own amazing baby, gleeful, passionate Manny. No one who adored you like that could ever hate you. Pete’s once wanting to stone his father with beach cobbles had dropped from his mind, and so had the memory of all his internal work just to bear the thought of him.

Later that night he climbed Camden’s Main Street again with his kit. The sidewalk under trees was like a cave. In twenty years he had never once imagined—in the little time imagining takes—that his father loved him all along. His father had waited for him to figure out it was his, Pete’s, move. But Pete’s movement was all internal. He never let his father know.

When had scruples not hobbled or wrecked love or affection? He could have won Marie Koday several years earlier, years in which he so cautiously refrained even from saying hello that she finally had to kiss him. She met the boat and kissed him. His blood bolted and his town cap dropped. Their
life began. Scrupulously not rattling his father’s presumed privacy or indifference, he had wasted more stupid years.

Deary tried to show him down their polished hall. She looked like summer people—gold bracelet, earrings, tailored skirt, lipstick. He remembered her tatterdemalion. Still striking, she was newly a limping matron. A bit far between, the curls at her crown. Her eyebrows barely traced their ruts. Deary’s eye area, he guessed, opened a vertical third of her face. Good looks at any age required only big eyes under high brows.

She was sixty-seven. Maytree helped her show Pete down the hall. —Remember, Deary said. She winked across his father’s potbelly no bigger than a chowder bowl. Promise me. When I die I want to go out like a gypsy queen. Big smile, great false teeth. Burn my carriage with me inside it, she said. In Provincetown.

—You bet, Pete said. Consider it remembered. Burn in carriage, Provincetown.

—Where are you keeping your carriage these days?

—He’s humoring me!

—Actually, Maytree said, I am. At the kitchen sink later he told Pete that two years ago he had tricked Deary into letting the town’s tall white-haired physician, whom Maytree now referred to as Dr. Eminent, check her. Speaking to Maytree, Dr. Eminent implied that everything was all in Deary’s dimply head, likely because she never had a baby. —Find another doctor, Pete had said.

—They’re all quacks! Deary squeaked from the porch. The cure is lost in a jungle! Her hearing was excellent.

Pete stayed four days in Camden, shoulders on walls (his friends called him Eileen), while the boatyard waited for parts. During breakfast daily, a broad-hipped, plaid-clad young woman named Sarah Smither let herself in. Maytree had already told Pete that Sarah’s Irish-immigrant parents had so many children that he and Deary privately called the offspring, collectively, Smithereens. Sarah joined them in the dining room. His father said Sarah looked after things. Later Sarah filled a thermos jug with coffee, helped Deary to her office, and put away dishes within earshot of Deary’s bronze handbell.

The first full day, he saw his father and Deary were partners. —I’ve come up in the world, Deary said. —Isn’t that the point? Recently she sited a house on a once-wooded lakeshore. She drew plans and elevations to the last spec. Her architectural weeks on this project were ending if clients approved. Maytree and men would stick-build the house, roof it, and dry it in. Deary got permits. Before her vitality waned, she had risen early to chase forestry crews, haulers, suppliers, the furnace installer, plumbers, electricians, the insulation people, the plasterer, and the stonemason. She had accounted, billed, and paid.

Near Deary at the oak kitchen table, Pete peeled the potatoes she washed. She told him old Provincetown stories in her familiar, if aerated, high voice. He picked up potatoes she dropped. He wished she knew his childhood less and his manhood more. But how? He could have let them know him, any time.

—Marie Koday? She spent all one summer upside down with her head in the water, walking on her hands. Adorable child. Was she not considerably older than you?

—Not now.

Deary wanted to play spit, double Canfield, and slapjack. She insisted he grab hard and slap fast. She lost her breath. Her hands whirred and her rings clobbered. She laughed. Evenings after coffee, Maytree rubbed her shoulders. She kept her chin raised, as Pete had noticed in Boston that only beautiful women do. His father cleaned up.

—Are you writing poetry?

—Maybe over next winter. They say Georges Bank is over-fished—that right?

—They have never been there.

—So you fish the Gulf of Maine?

—Sometimes. We keep an eye on both cod stocks.

Deary double-shuffled. Ventrally, her hands were yellow except between the bones, where they were blue. He never imagined coming here to slap her around.

Here in his father’s Camden house, Pete had his own head. Its window looked into what his father told him was a maple. Thinly in the maple he saw his own mirrored face that boughs scratched. He missed Marie.

“What we have together,” Pete and Marie called it to themselves, for want of a single noun. While both sets of parents, when very young, had coupled for certain once, or in Marie’s parents’ unthinkable case thrice, those parents’ matter-of-fact ways, like everyone else’s, showed they never suspected,
and must be shielded from, the secret and unearthly properties of what we have together. A good man like his father—he always heard his father was once a good man—could go bad and run off?

Obviously his father and mother never had anything together. But what about his father and Deary, twenty years ago? His father would have been forty-four then: twelve years older than Pete now, but of course much older inside, as befits a parent. At that age, couples patted the remains of each other’s hands on porches. Deary was even older now than Marie’s coal-tar-dyed mother who still plunked herself on the old man’s knees after ice cream. Grotesque, all of it.

The maple outside and his own face showed equally in the window. As a boy, Pete noticed that old people like Reevadare Weaver and Cornelius Blue could horrifyingly persist in oldness for decade after decade, no end in sight, without shame. Old people were those who lacked will to leave, or tact to know, when their party was over. At thirty-two he had begun the rocketry recalibration of what constitutes old people—whose merry ranks he did not plan, in any case, to join. Drowning at sea was a likely option. Better, when the time came, was shooting himself. This was America.

Once a day either Pete or his father wondered why they waited so long. —Men! Deary said, but she had not contacted him, either. Still, no use wasting time regretting time they’d already lost. That now he made his father happy with a few words—come see your grandson—shamed Pete for once begrudging them.

On their final morning when
Marie
would launch again, Pete watched fog pool up the street. A sprucey scarf of fog entered with Sarah Smither. Her eyeglasses’ frames were plaid.

—I like the fog, Deary said, except when it catches in trees.

—You like the fog, Sarah replied, except when it catches in trees.

Sarah was studying clinical psychology. Maytree told Pete he wondered whether to strangle her or give her a cracker. He gave her a raise. What would they do when her school started? On the stone steps the men pounded each other’s shoulders. Deary tried to squeeze Pete, wept brightly, and said, Don’t be a stranger. Again his gaze met his father’s over her head.