The Violet Hour: A Novel (38 page)

Ahead of her, Abe walked purposefully in his shorts and New Balances, planting his foot with each step, and visibly swinging his arms. Elizabeth knew she was lucky to have such healthy parents: her father was still pretty strong, with bronze, toned calves, and rarely had a physical complaint. Her hero, the dashing sailor, who all her friends had loved. Nevertheless, he was slower than he used to be, and less certain of his movements. He bent forward at the waist as he walked, looking almost old. After a few turns, he paused at a clearing and looked back, waiting for Elizabeth to join him.

“What’s wrong?” Elizabeth asked.

“Just making sure you’re still with me,” he said, his face shiny, his breath audible and quick.

“All right then, onward.”

Abe gulped and gestured that Elizabeth should go first, so they switched places, daughter leading father up the slope. She doubled her pace, almost daring him to keep up. He could do this; it was hardly
a hike. She began counting her strides, feeling the stretch of muscle in her hamstrings. The land continued to rise, and soon she could just make out through the trees the blithe light of open space below. Impulsively, she picked up a large stick and began tapping the foliage in time to her count. As the end of the trail approached, she passed more people: bikers in spandex, couples with infants strapped to their chests. Without straining, she could hear the sound of rushing water ahead. The muddy path and trees gave way to a crest of forbidding white stone and then suddenly, at step 822 since she’d overtaken her dad, they were standing together at the edge of a river, looking out across a series of cacophonous rapids several meters below.

“Don’t even think about diving into this,” Abe said.

Elizabeth pointed to a nearby sign:
DANGER. Deadly Current, Slippery Rocks. Even Wading Can Kill. No Wading. No Swimming.
“I think that just about covers it, don’t you?”

“Also no diving,” he repeated. He appeared to be only half-kidding. Who was he to talk?

They sat together on a riven chunk of rock and watched the water catapult itself along the gorge. Abe fished the pamphlet from his pocket and read her a few details. In the mile stretch where they were sitting, the river dropped eighty feet. There’d been a canal here once, with five locks. They’d had to blast gunpowder into the stone.

“Built by slaves, of course,” he said.

They looked out over the chalky crags at the green shore of Maryland, which sprang like a sudden eden on the other side of the moon.

“Well, here we are in Virginia,” he said.

“Now I see. Feel like home?”

He shook his head. “Nah. Gotta get way beyond the Beltway for that.” She’d seen his grandmother’s home only once, on a visit they’d taken to Richmond when she was a girl. They’d driven down the shaded street lined with saltbox houses and come to a rolling stop in front of one that had a red-capped garden gnome out front. “Of course, that wasn’t here then,” he’d said, and they’d rolled on. He hadn’t even wanted to ring the bell.

“You want to hear a story?” he asked her. He’d rolled up the pamphlet and was holding it now like a remote that would trigger some hidden screen.

“Sure,” she said.

“All right, then. Here goes . . .” She crouched forward over her knees, straining to separate his voice from the interference of the falls. “This is a Finland story. Your mother’s great-grandfather—Howard’s grandfather—was a fisherman there.”

“Hold on,” she said. These were not the first lines she’d expected. She’d expected something random about Virginia. “Is this a real story? Like, should I make myself more comfortable?”

“Whatever you want.”

“Yeah, let me just . . .” She searched the rock for the most natural place to recline, as though there might be a spot that was somehow softer than the rest. Finding none, she finally wedged herself into a grooved recess that resembled a row of tall, tough books.

“So, now,” he went on, once she’d signaled that she was ready. “Except for the time he spent at sea, Teemu had lived in the same town his entire life. He married his wife—your great-great-grandmother—when he was about twenty, and had eight children, including Howard’s mom. Seven of them lived to be adults.”

Already she felt the need to fidget. She arched and cracked her back, wiggled her shoulder blades against the knobby stone, felt a tumorous bulge just under her neck—and found herself longing for her childhood bed, to be tucked into the cotton printed sheets that read
sleep
in dense wavy lines, like some kind of magic command.

The memory sprang out from her, just like that. Like a rubber band she’d forgotten she was wearing until it suddenly gave way in her hair. She hurried to retrieve it. There were books on her bedside table and a soothing fog that hugged the window, blocking everything outside their house. Her father sat by her bed on a stool, with an open book in his hands.

“You used to tell me stories all the time!” she blurted.

“Sure . . .” He seemed not quite to grasp her meaning.

“Every night before I went to sleep.” She couldn’t believe she’d forgotten. She’d been stuffing her brain with pharmacology and histology. Invisible things that supported life but had nothing to do with living. “We read books together first, and then at some point you just started telling me stories.”

He squinted, allowing her adult guise to morph into that of his eagerly listening little girl. It was too painful to see her very often, this pigtailed child he hadn’t yet ruined, but here she was practically forcing it on him, and he found himself unable to resist. “That’s true,” he said. “I did. Did I bore you?”

“Oh my god,” she sputtered, “I loved it!”

“Because you took over eventually. I thought maybe you’d gotten sick of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“When you were in middle school, probably. I’d pop my head in at the end of the day and you always had a million stories to tell. About your friends, about what you were reading.” He’d loved her narratives. They were high-spirited and rambling and packed with information: a pulsing internet of back links that only a parent could follow. But they’d also made him a little sad. From the day she was born and he’d first held her serious little head in his palm, he’d been responsible for her every comfort—her every entertainment, too. If it was hanging a colored mobile when she was still a slug at the bottom of her crib, if it was reading to her fluttering eyelids at night, if it was racing with her latched to his back down the beach, he was there. Or there when he could be. But suddenly she had entertainments of her own, stories he could never have invented. Just another of the many signs that she was fast outgrowing his care.

“Well, I haven’t read anything in ages,” she said. “Unfortunately.” She’d underestimated him. Her father, who seemed to want to forget everything, actually had some memories stored close. “So I guess it’s your turn again.”

He scanned her face as if it held a sentence he wanted to go back to, to make sure he’d read it right. “I’m warning you, I’m a little rusty.”

She swatted the air. “Who cares?”

“I should go on?”

She nodded vigorously.

“So, all right, where was I . . . ?” He turned toward her, creating a little room between them that all but muted the traffic of the falls. He looked at her, tucked away in her crevice once again, received her thumbs-up, took a plentiful breath, and began.

“Okay, your great-great-grandfather. Apparently, he was a pretty aggressive drunk. You know the type: loud, not violent, but a little scary?”

Elizabeth pictured a man with Howard’s face in brownish nineteenth-century garb, sitting at a table covered with jugs and fish bones, a busty woman on his knee.

“Anyway, on the whole, he was happy and well liked. So one day, he gets himself into a card game with a couple of gangsters. Or I don’t know: maybe they were just rich men who didn’t mind sitting down with a fisherman at the pub. It doesn’t really matter. The point is, Teemu’s betting actual currency with these guys. All in good fun, of course, but he thinks he has a chance to walk away with a lot of money. I mean a lot. His opponents keep betting on bad hands, and he keeps collecting.

“He’s generally an easygoing guy, patient. But he also knows luck when he finds it. The night rolls on, and Teemu keeps drinking. And winning. He basically thinks his luck is never going to run out.

“It’s unclear what happened next, but there was probably an insult of some kind. Maybe someone accused him of cheating. Regardless, tempers flared, and before it was all over, Teemu had stabbed one of the men in the chest.”

“Seriously,” Elizabeth said, “he
stabbed
someone? With what? Was it an accident?”

Abe shrugged. “He was a fisherman. They all carried knives. Anyway, somehow he slipped away and hid himself in the woods, living on scraps, until he learned that the man he’d stabbed had died. He was a murderer now, and an outlaw. So he smuggled himself onto a cart
bound for Helsinki, where he booked passage on a ship to England, presumably with the cash he’d won in that game.

“People in town had been aware of his situation—some of them must have helped him escape—and word got back to his wife, Anya, that he’d made it to Helsinki and beyond. But Teemu himself never wrote, and days turned into weeks, which turned into months, which turned into years, and by then it was pretty clear that he was never coming back. She had to have been pretty angry, but she came to accept what had happened and went on with her life. She still had a family to raise.

“When her oldest son, Lukas, came of age, he decided to track his father down. Opportunity was disappearing in their town anyway, the richest fisheries having drifted to other waters. England was the place to be, or failing that, America.

“He kept her informed of his travels, sending telegrams from all over the English-speaking world: London, Bristol, Newfoundland, New York. She was about fifty when she got word that Lukas was in San Francisco and had seen a man who looked exactly like his father on the wharf.

“Of course, she had questions. Had Lukas seen Teemu, or just a man who looked like Teemu? Had they spoken? Was it him? How in the world could he write to her so casually?

“ ‘But was it him?’ she finally wrote.”

“Yes, was it?” Elizabeth broke in.

Abe nodded, pressing his lips together. “Still a fisherman after all those years. So now she had a choice to make: stay near her children, who were grown, and let them take care of her in her old age? Or say to hell with it, she still had time, and track her husband down? I guess you know where this is going.

“When she finally made it to San Francisco, Lukas got her a bed in the house where he boarded. You have to picture her there: lying awake that first night, distracted with thoughts of Teemu’s face, so near again after all those years. Of course, it would look different, and he would
be
different, so she would just have to try to content herself
with the knowledge that he was still the man she’d once known. If, that is, he wanted to build a life with her again. Lukas had assured her he’d be glad to see her, but what then? Back to their old life—or so long and thanks again for stopping by? She was risking her whole future on an assumption that the past was not really past.

“Finally, she worked up the courage to go down to the wharf. Teemu’s boat was late that day, but she didn’t mind. She’d waited often enough in Finland, sometimes accompanied by a daughter who’d baked bread or a son who’d just learned to walk. In San Francisco, she was alone and uncertain, with nothing to offer but herself. She’d waited some fifteen years; she could wait a few hours more.”

Abe paused. Beneath them the water applauded raucously down the gorge.

Elizabeth’s heart was pounding. She felt heady and almost deaf, like at a party. “So—what? Did he show up?”

He jerked at the sound of her voice and their eyes met. “More of their children eventually followed them to the States. Howard’s mom, et cetera. They lived together until they died.”

She let the clatter of water fill her ears for a moment as she tried to sort out what he’d just said. The story had completely enrapt her, made her proud of her ancestors for living it, of her father for telling it so well. She’d felt her history like a palace inside her, felt herself multiply and disappear in its long, mirrored halls.

“That’s a true story?”

“Well,” he ran his hand over the top of his hair. “I embellished a little. But the basic outline is true. Knife fight, disappearing husband, San Francisco, the son and wife who tracked him down.”

“Does Mom know it?”

“Of course. She’s the one who told it to me, long ago. For obvious reasons, I’ve been thinking about it again.”

A woman and child came toward them now, hoping to share their waterside perch, but stopped when the mother sensed the seriousness of their conversation. She placed her hands on the boy’s shoulders as though he were a shopping cart and expertly steered him away. He
wore a red T-shirt that was covered front and back with white outlines of famous Washington landmarks: the Capitol, the Smithsonian, the White House, the Pentagon.

“So, wait, do any of their descendants still live in San Francisco? Do I have relatives there I’ve never met?”

Abe frowned, considering this. “I don’t know. Probably. I don’t think your mom was ever in touch with any of them. But she does have roots there.”

Elizabeth pulled at the dried skin on the tip of her ear. “What must that woman have been thinking, tracking him down halfway around the world like that.” She let a flake fall from her fingertips and vanish into the rock. “How devoted was
she
?”

Abe regarded her through a squint. “I guess she probably was. What I wish I understood is how they had that conversation. What did she say to him? It’s almost impossible to imagine.”

“I can imagine,” Elizabeth said.

He shook his head. “I guess that’s just one of my limits.”

He was, she had to remember, a literal person. Good at doctoring, bad at messes. He loved his boat, was decisive in restaurants. He mistrusted, above all, people who thought they knew more than him. She clung to his arm, pressed herself against his leg. She wanted to comfort him, help him remember his strength. “You imagined all the rest of it, didn’t you? You talked to Mom . . .”