The Vagabonds (30 page)

To start with, he works in pastel. He sketches the landscape he sees from the window: the locust trees, the back of a restaurant down by the pier, the far glimpse of shoreline and beach. He spends an hour at it a day, then two, then four until Joanna says, “What are you
doing
and when can I
see
it,” and he says, “It isn’t any good. Not yet.” The color-field feels saccharine, or leached away; he doesn’t want, he tells himself, to be doing Christmas cards or ads for the chamber of commerce, and when he tries to work in oil the canvas defeats him, resistant. What he’s after and has not attained is a way of rendering, the representation of a scene that moves beyond technique . . .

Therefore he draws. He uses charcoal and pencil and ink and fills a sketch pad with the stuff of memory: a rocking chair, a kitchen sink, a paddock with horses and man in straw hat, the jade plant by Adrienne’s hot tub. He works rapidly and without consulting models or old photographs, and his wrist and hand begin to feel more flexible. He has always had the gift of imitation, of accurate proportion, and it is no challenge to sketch apples or acorns or ladies reclining; he gets perspective right. What’s hard for him is attitude, a way of looking at the world that renders it original and not derivative. This is much more difficult, he knows, than accurate shading and volume or those pastels he had been working on in Berkeley: the water and the offshore rocks he complained about back in Bolinas, a false equivalence between sound waves and waves.

From a photograph his sister owns, David draws their grandfather: a pair of eyes, a fringe of hair. He draws a carving knife and fork and the turkey from Pederson’s farm. He draws their mother on the table with a sheet pulled up beneath her chin and her thin nose and sunken cheeks and the mortician’s apparatus: needles and a jar of adult tinting cream. He draws—it takes up the whole of a page—his left hand. He draws his own penis, a series of buttocks, then breasts. At the end of two hard weeks of work he looks at what he accomplished, and it fails to please him but does not embarrass him either. When Joanna asks again, he says, “All right, fine, come on up,” and jokes about inviting her into the room; it was never off-limits before.

“I suppose that’s true,” she says, “except it should have been, maybe. These are very good.”

He closes the sketch pad. “Not yet.”

The will is still in probate and is being registered; it’s a formality, the lawyer assures them on the phone, and likely to be finished by month’s end. The filing does take time. Meanwhile, they follow Beakes’s advice and liquidate the trust, dividing it in three equal parts—“Like Gaul,” says David, “like Caesar’s France”—and selling off the stock. When the transaction is complete and the money has been transferred to the Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank, they celebrate with the best dinner they can buy. They purchase caviar and oysters and lobsters and champagne; Leah joins them for the celebration, and when they have eaten the shellfish she extracts the remaining scraps of flesh and gristle for the cat. At ten o’clock she goes upstairs and David and Joanna settle in the living room and share a second bottle of champagne.

“I bet they thought there’s some mistake,” she tells her brother, smiling. “I bet when they saw that deposit they double-checked for fraud.”

“Fraud?”

“Or maybe just—what was that Monopoly card?—‘Bank Error in Your Favor.’ ‘Get Out of Jail Free.’”

“Something like that,” David says.

They click their glasses and drink. “
Salud y amor y pesetas,
” Joanna pronounces, and he says I was remembering you in the kitchen, that day we got the phone call, when you were practicing Spanish with Claire; what was the word, “
compuesta?
”

She nods. “‘Made up, no woman is ugly.’ What an amazing sexist he was . . .”

“Who? Your Spanish teacher?”

“Right, Mr. ‘
Mucha Muchacha
’ Hernandez.”

“Did you ever forgive him?”

“Who?”

“Dad.”

She shakes her head.

“He left us high and dry,” says David. “Didn’t he?”

“Mom never got over it, really. And I don’t think I have, either.”

“It was promise, not delivery. It was always what would happen next . . .”

“
No hay mujer fea,
” Joanna repeats, and they drink.

“I’ve lived my life by that proposition,” he says, a little ruefully, and his sister laughs. I think I always knew, he says, there would be
something
coming; Mom was always saying, wasn’t she,
expect the unexpected.
Some part of him, David continues, had known for
years
that she was being secretive, as was her mother before her, lord knows, a woman of whom we know nothing; is there a gene for secrecy, he wonders, some DNA routing for silence? He settles his weight in the couch. “I thought that kind of behavior was for Protestants, I thought it was the WASP but not the Jewish way of being buttoned up . . .”

“Are you glad you didn’t marry? Or had—God help you—kids?”

“You don’t mean that, the last part.”

“No.”

“Mostly I’m surprised,” he says. “And that I’m, somehow, thirty-five. Mostly it seems accidental.”

She drinks.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” he says.

“What? Marriage? Children?”

“Family.”

They talk about how Jim collapsed and wish they knew how to help Claire. They talk about their mother’s secret or, David says, not so much a secret as a trust fund they’d not known about, although it develops their mother had known and—for reasons of her own, perhaps, a waiting till the time was ripe—had simply failed to disclose. He has never cared much about money. He wanted to buy what he wanted to buy and travel when and where he wished, but his tastes are not expensive and he made enough from pickup work to pay the rent. He asks Joanna if she’d been surprised, and she says, “You bet.”

“I don’t think
I
was, really, I think maybe it’s why I never really felt I
had
to work—you understand, run the corporate race, climb the corporate ladder—I think I knew we had some sort of safety net. Something to catch me when I fall. Fell . . .”

“It’s late,” his sister says.

“You go on up. You need some sleep.”

“And you do too . . .”

He smiles. “I’ll sit here just a little longer.”

“OK.” She stands and bends to where he sits and kisses the top of his head: “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

“I haven’t heard that in, in, how long . . . ?”

“Years.
Centuries.
Night, night.”

Joanna climbs the stairs. He thinks of their mother: the telephone ringing, the dishes to wash, and then he shuts his eyes:

David is ten or eleven years old. He is sitting with his mother in the theater in New York. Alice takes him every summer; it is her chance, she tells him, to be alone for a weekend—well, not alone, she’s always happy for his company—and to get out of Saratoga at the height of tourist season, since in Manhattan you don’t notice or it’s always tourist season, which amounts to the same thing. She makes him come to Shakespeare, and in order to sweeten the pill—that’s what she calls it, “sweeten the pill”—a musical of his own choosing, whatever he feels like, she says.

This afternoon they’re watching
Henry IV, Part I.
He remembers the fat man, John Falstaff, and how he holds his belt and rolls his belly and how the audience laughs. Alice is wearing her pink silk suit, and he himself has on a tie and blazer, and the usher who leads them to their seats and offers them a
Playbill
says, “What a little gentleman.” There is a drumroll and fanfaronade. A fanfaronade, says his mother, is a fancy word for “fanfare” and he wonders if she means “fanfare” or “-fair” and what it would mean to be foul. Fair or foul is where a fly ball lands, or a grounder on the third-base line, and it’s how you describe the weather but not a fanfaronade.

Why should he remember this, he asks himself, why sitting in his sister’s house a quarter of a century later should he find himself inside a hot dark theater and using his
Playbill
as fan? What do “fanfare” and “fanfaronade” have to do with the death of his mother—and was he ten or eleven years old and therefore how long had his father been dead and, pondering irrelevance, the byways and blocked paths of neurons firing in his head recites, of a sudden, a line from the play he has not remembered in years:

“I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” Glendower says, and witty Harry Percy counters, “Why, so can I, or so can any man, but will they come when you do call for them?”

The great Welsh magician grows angry. He huffs and puffs and promises to blow the whole English house down. Then Hotspur and he come to grudging agreement and make a grudging alliance, and it doesn’t matter anyhow because Prince Hal destroys them all and grows up to be Henry V. Then David and his mother eat at a restaurant called L’Escargot, a French restaurant near the theater, and she tells him slow but steady wins the race. You’ll learn to like garlic, she says. I myself like snails in garlic butter very much, but they take some getting used to. It’s an acquired habit, darling, don’t feel you have to rush.

Which has been his slow but steady; what race is it he runs? He understands that when he left he did so with a vengeance, not taking any prisoners and burning all the bridges and dropping out of touch. When you travel you take yourself with you, just like the snail its shell. David remembers a time in Provence when he and his friends—Yves, Jacques, Colette and a woman whose name he cannot remember, Eliane, Helene?—were preparing snails, and how Jacques explained you have to leave them in a bowl of meal, cornmeal or oatmeal for two days so they befoul themselves replacing what they have already eaten with the grains and then you must wash them very carefully and clean them of each trace of slime and then,
voilà,
the garlic and butter and a good fresh crusty bread is suitable for eating anywhere. “Anywhere,” said David, it’s “anywhere” not “anywheres,” and Jacques who did not like to be corrected shrugged his shoulders, saying,
En tout cas. Néanmoins.

So he had learned the proper way to clean a snail and, later, cockles and mussels and periwinkles, and he carried his snail plates and serving implements—the small pronged fork, the double-bladed gripping spoon—from house to house for years. White wine and escargots have lured full many a maid to his side, and he is grateful for the sweet processional of those who shared his table, then bed. But no companion in his life has made him forget his dead mother, and when he thinks of Adrienne or those who came before he thinks of them without regret: the champion Mr. Dance-Away, the expert at departure . . .

This has to stop. He has to start his adult life and not in thrall. He asks himself what he would do in Saratoga Springs and if it would make sense to call their old house home. His mother had hoped so, said Joseph Beakes, but David has his doubts. If she had wanted him to live with her, she would have asked directly; if Alice had wanted to leave him the cottage she would have written it down. Tonight when he was working in the kitchen—prying open the shells of the oysters and slicing the boiled steaming lobsters in half—his mother was a presence in the room. But
palpable
? he asks himself, and the answer is immediate: yes, yes.
Benign?
he asks himself, and knows the answer and does not avoid it: benign.

In the morning he goes for a run. He jogs up Sunset Hill and then down the road to Duck Harbor; a Volvo and an old red truck are parked in the paved parking lot, and David rests and stretches, doing knee bends by the fence. The sun is bright and the wind has ceased and, stretching, breathing, he closes his eyes.

A man and a large black dog emerge from the dunes; the man leans on a walking stick and the dog is tired, clearly, after his romp on the beach. He pants; his fur is matted from the water and wet sand. They make their way toward the pickup truck and, passing, the man smiles and nods at David where he stands. “Long way from home. Want a ride?”

This is a joke, David sees. He shakes his head. “That dog a Newfie?”

“Half and half. His mother was. His dad is anybody’s guess.”

They talk about the height of the snowdrifts and how late this winter has lasted. The dog scrambles into the cab of the truck and lies down, patient, heaving. When they have exhausted the subject of weather, the man opens the truck door and climbs in and, letting the engine idle, says, “You’re not from these parts, are you?”

“No.”

“Barclay. Paul Barclay.” He reaches through the driver’s window and offers his left hand.

“David. David Saperstone.”

“Take care of yourself,” says Paul Barclay, and throws the truck in gear and rumbles off.

At the Bay View Inn the mail includes their mother’s ashes in a box. Joanna has unwrapped the canister, and it sits on the living room table: dark purple plastic with a seal reading “B&B & C” and a small medallion on a chain. The medallion has raised lettering:

Alice Freedman Saperstone, 1931-2003.

His sister lights a cigarette. “Well, here it is.”

“What did Becker call it, ‘The Closet of Memories’?” He lifts the canister. “It’s very light.”

“Yes, isn’t it? Powder and bone. Let’s scatter it.”

He looks at her. “Right now?”

Joanna nods. “Right goddam immediately, brother.”

She has been crying, he sees. She fingers the container and, with her left hand, taps the cigarette against a yellow ashtray. “I want Mom in the house,” she says. “But not this part of her, OK?”

“Don’t you want Leah to join us?”

“No. I need to do this
before
she gets home. With full military honors, but not so she’s a part of it; she’s been spooked enough already and doesn’t need to watch . . .”

In his room he peels off his damp clothes and dresses in the jacket and black tie he’d worn when flying east. Joanna too has changed for the occasion, and when he comes back down again she stands at the foot of the stairs wearing black, a skirt and shawl he has not seen, and with her hair clipped back. She takes his hand. “Thank you for doing this, David.”