The Vagabonds (24 page)
“Have you ever noticed,” Robin asks, “the way ‘immortality’ and ‘immorality’ are spelled the same, or just about, and that’s because it suits the priests and nuns to a
t,
if you get my meaning, to add the
t
to ‘immorality’ and make it last forever? Behind the sacristy, in the confessional, wherever. You two weren’t Catholic, of course, you never attended parochial school, but for me it was an issue way back when.”
“Oh?”
“Because there’s a problem, isn’t there,” he continues, “about the souls that die without ever having been alive, and haven’t had the time to sin, the chance to be immoral if you follow what I’m saying, if you see what I’m trying to say . . .”
Now in the westering beam of the sun before she can restrain herself her eyes well up and overflow and her cheeks are wet. Robin offers the glass bowl of peanuts; she takes a handful, mute. She wants to tell him, wants to
yell
at him, his lover would have been alive if they hadn’t gone south in the little red car, if they hadn’t been overgrown children together and careless of everything, everyone,
her.
She’s crying, not loudly, making no noise but spilling tears nevertheless; she pulls out her handkerchief, pats at her cheeks but they will not dry.
“Your husband”—Robin clears his throat—“was a wonder- ful man.”
She looks at him. “Oh?”
“I don’t suppose I need to tell
you
that.”
“No.”
“He was trying hard to
find
himself.”
“He told me that,” says Claire.
“He was such a success, so, you know,
competent.
But he was trying something new.”
“Like fucking you,” she says. “Like dying down here at the back of beyond. Is that what you’re trying to say?”
But Robin is equable, unperturbed. “He said you had a mouth on you.”
“I’m sorry,” Claire offers. “It’s all so, so
strange.
”
“For me too, lady,” Robin says. “In case you don’t know. It isn’t what I’d planned on, not—”
“Another round?” asks Gretchen the waitress, and her companion nods.
In the silence that follows she pictures it: tomorrow they will go together to the funeral parlor in Bradenton, the place where Jim lies waiting, and though Claire cannot remember its name she knows she drove past it, arriving—the awning red, the building white stucco, with pillars—and there will be a man to greet them, solemn in his suit and tie. She and Robin will enter the office and sit in the two proffered chairs and handle the paperwork, deal with the fees, and although these postmortem regulations and interstate procedures are new to her the funeral director will of course be familiar with them, practiced at the transportation of a corpse by hearse or train or in this instance plane to what he calls the dear departed’s place of rest, the waiting plot, and choose the oak casket the man recommends, and sign four forms in triplicate, of which she keeps the pink second sheets, wanting only to be done with this, wanting only to be home again and not in this strange place but with her girls. How is it possible, she asks herself, that in one week she’s done this twice, that two times in a single week she will have visited a funeral home—one in New York, one in Florida—and never had done so before? Claire shuts her eyes. She opens them and the sun is extravagant: orange and crimson and purple above the horizon line, sinking, and Robin is watching her, staring, incurious, saying, “Welcome back.”
“Excuse me?”
He points to her replenished glass, his new Bloody Mary. “Back from wherever you’ve been . . .”
“I understand,” Claire manages, “it can’t be easy for you either.”
“In answer to your question, I am a lawyer, yes. I—we—could nail them if you want.”
“Who?”
“Manatee Memorial. For medical malpractice; they’d settle in a heartbeat, I can promise.”
“Heartbeat?”
“I didn’t mean that.” He shakes his head. “It might in fact take time, a year or two of offers, demands, counteroffers—some pretrial maneuvering under Florida civil procedures. We’d have to establish how he was admitted and treated and why and on whose recognizance he was released. But they’d choose to face a jury about as much as you or I would choose to face a firing squad; trust me on this one, OK?”
“OK,” she says. “Except I’m not certain I’m ready to sue.”
“Of course not. Neither am I.”
What is he proposing; what does he want? “I need to take Jim home,” she says. “I need to put his body on the plane.”
“Of course. Of course you do.”
And as though they have formed an alliance they sit, while the water withdraws and a breeze comes up and the sky darkens down, while another couple arrives on the deck and takes the table next to them and Gretchen appears once more smilingly; they raise and click their glasses and, at the same instant, drink. He speaks now without interruption about her husband’s final days, the sense he’d had that Jimmy was in more than
one
way on the road, was being a pilgrim, a
traveler,
and although he knows it does sound hokey that was how Jimmy described it: this voyage of discovery they’d embarked on together—except, alas, too late. I despise the word
existential,
says Robin, but that’s the word I want to use; it was
existential,
really, that’s what I’m trying to say. In the mild evening air and holding her third glass of wine Claire finds herself, if not in agreement, at least at newfound ease with this aging boy-man at her side. He uses the language her husband had used:
the journey, not arrival, matters; the caterpillar and the butterfly; the dream of an enabling self.
Oh spare me, spare me please, she thinks, but this time without rancor as he rambles on about the solace he has taken in the knowledge the dead man had been happy, searching, was being a beginner at the end. Therefore (and because, if she is honest, she has no alternative; she can’t just walk away or insult him again) Claire does remember the questions to ask:
where have I come from and where am I going and what am I doing while here? Tomorrow we collect a corpse, but what do we do with it then?
“Friends?” he inquires. He raises his glass.
“We have something in common, don’t we?”
“At least not enemies,” he says. “All right?”
“All right.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
They drink. Then Robin puts his hand upon her hand, surprising her, fingering the wedding ring; his touch is warm, annealing, and he lifts her wrist and together they point: three dolphins in the foam. Claire watches their shapes in the distance retreat. And now she is crying again.
1996
A
lice was sitting in the library and the library was cold. Outside, a robin pecked at suet and a squirrel worried at the canister of birdseed, trying to spill it and failing to do so and falling back down to the ground. It was January 10. She knew this from the calendar she’d
X
ed the day before. The illustration for the month showed frigates in a harbor: tall-masted ships with sails being raised and sailors hauling ropes. In the calendar the sky was blue and cloudless and the warehouses and chandleries that fronted on the harbor were steep-roofed and built out of brick. With her red pen, carefully, beginning at the top left-hand corner and drawing a line to the square’s bottom right, then repeating this procedure from the bottom left-hand corner and with a fine line rising to the apex of the right-hand edge, she eradicated January 9. As her father used to say, “Another day, another dolor”; it was eleven o’clock.
The light was weak. It illumined the framed photograph of her daughters being bridesmaids: Joanna ten years old, Claire six, and both of them wearing purple atrocities the bride had insisted on, smiling and holding bouquets. The colors in the photograph had faded over time; the purple looked half-pink. On the same wall—adjacent to her daughters but slightly lower and in black and white—hung a photograph of Aaron standing by his Model A, one foot on the running board, goggles in hand and so proud of himself you could
see
it: nobody had to say
Cheese.
She could not remember the name of the bride, or where the wedding had been held or why the girls were bridesmaids; she did remember the fuss Claire was making, complaining her saddle shoes pinched. “Oh, Mummy,” she wailed, “do I
have
to?” and Alice told her, “Yes.”
David was not in the picture, however; David was too young. Or possibly he had been involved in it also, off at the edge of the portrait, carrying the ring and being a part of the wedding processional but there was a cobweb, a filigree of fine white webbing at the lower left-hand corner of the gold-leafed frame she needed to stand up and wipe. That intricate webbing—the veins and cross-hatched glistening—engaged her for a moment, and Alice examined the mirroring glass to make certain it wasn’t a trick. What she was looking at, she knew, was what her eye would look like if she studied it instead: milky, fine-veined, blank. The clock on the mantel was ticking, its metronomic repetition loud: tok-
tik,
tok-
tik,
tok-
tik . . .
She would be hungry soon. She needed something to eat. She tried to remember, and could not, what she had eaten for breakfast, or whether indeed there
was
breakfast that morning, or if it soon would be served. There was the paper to read. There was the jigsaw puzzle by Renoir to finish—an outdoor celebration, Parisians dancing under lights; she had managed the café and part of the paving they danced on, but she was having trouble with the upper right-hand quadrant and those hats, those impossible hats. Instead she imagined a hard roll with butter, a boiled egg and Swiss cheese. She swallowed her orange juice, smacking her lips, and then she tasted it: breakfast in bed, and the waiter saying, “Thank you sir,” when George signed for the tip. He had a way with the waiters, of course, and certainly the waitresses, and everybody George encountered in every single restaurant thought he was the cat’s pajamas, the cat who ate the cream.
Except why would a cat wear pajamas; what sort of expression was that? And wasn’t it
licked
the cream,
swallowed
the cream; what sort of cat could be
eating
the cream and where was her breakfast and how soon was lunchtime and could she be bothered to go to the kitchen and eat? Oh, it was a mystery, and she shivered and covered herself with the brown mohair shawl and peered out the window at snow. For all the years her father traveled down to Florida she humored him, though she had never understood it, really, never saw the point of going south.
Who once flew south,
Alice said to the window, and thought about her father in his rocker on the porch. When he went to Sarasota, Aaron claimed, he did so partly for the weather and partly in order to visit his friends; when the first snow arrives it’s a pleasure, and then it stays around and is less of a pleasure: you’ll see.
But she had been too busy then, too much involved with the children—their music and tennis and horseback riding lessons, the
hours
she spent every day in the car—to pay attention to winter. In the dark of January 10, with all those ships being readied to sail (the harbormaster in his top hat, the merchant checking off supplies), she could not now concern herself with the bitter weather or whether the robin had suet;
Roberta,
Roberta Harrison, that was the name of the bride. She had married a Boothby, one of that pack of Boothby boys from Schuylerville, and unless she misremembered he died in Vietnam. They had barely had a honeymoon before Paul Boothby left to fight—so
that
was why the wedding had been planned in such a hurry,
that
explained the purple atrocities Claire and Joanna were wearing; he must have known beforehand he’d be on a tour of duty, and at least she wasn’t pregnant when her husband died. . . .
In the kitchen she could hear them; Hansel and Gretel:
tik
-tok. The Molly Maids were cleaning up, and they did so two mornings each week. They weren’t, of course, Hansel and Gretel but the girl did have a ponytail precisely the color of Gretel’s in that illustration Alice had been looking at in the book of fairy tales, the Brothers Grimm or was it Hans Christian Andersen, and wore if not a dirndl at least a dress that doubled as a cleaning smock, hiked up and tied beneath her breasts and wearing black tights like a dancer. “
Good
morning, Mrs. Saperstone. How are we doing today?” And then the girl inquired if there was anything special to do, any particular project or just the usual once-over in the bathrooms and kitchen and dusting the porcelain cats like you like.
The girl was not alone, of course; she came with a companion. She had brought a boy along, although not the same partner as last week’s—this Hansel was gangly and black-haired, the last had been stocky and brown. “Two for the price of one,” she said, “we’ll do you twice as fast.”
“
Do
me?”
“Mm-hm,” said the Molly Maid. “Right.”
Alice attempted to explain that speed was not the point today; she herself was in no rush. Rapidity takes second place in the pantheon of cleaning virtues, slow but steady wins the race. But the boy had plugged in and was using the Electrolux already and while Gretel mopped the bathroom and dusted the mantel’s collection of cats he roared across the living room and hallway and was no doubt dreaming of the next house where the owners were not home and they could go upstairs and strip off their clothes, not the sheets. . . .
She herself could understand. She too had been that way when young, so
urgent,
so
avid,
while she and George were courting, when he had been a real estate agent and they would try out the beds. They had nearly been caught once, remember, when that couple from Manhattan arrived ten minutes early and walked around the house and didn’t buy it anyhow but found them on the porch. In the first years of their marriage she and her husband were happy together; they had made each other happy, and now that she was sixty-four she wouldn’t deny it or choose to forget: we
all
have been Hansel and Gretel and going for walks in the woods. And taking a picnic and gorging ourselves on each other not food and spreading out the tablecloth to keep the grass stains off. Taking radishes and brandy and potato chips and beer and tipping the canoe on purpose except not for a swim.