The Vagabonds (32 page)

“You’re missing Jim?”

She shakes her head.

“I thought you said . . .”

“What I mean is everything,
everything’s
wrong, and I don’t want to talk till tomorrow, OK?”

“Or the day after tomorrow—just know you can tell me whatever you want to. Whenever you feel like it . . .”

“I will, I promise.” Claire stands unsteadily, lurching. “Only not yet, not tonight.”

Over coffee in the morning she does talk. Her reticence has disappeared and instead she’s voluble; she’s been waiting in the kitchen with the coffee percolating and skim milk in a jug already by the microwave. When Joanna appears Claire kisses her and heats the milk and, once the bell signals completion, pours them each a cup of coffee with Equal and milk as though the house were hers. She says, “I didn’t sleep at all, not worth the mentioning, but anyhow this morning I just feel so
rested,
so ready to get on with things and if you’re still willing to listen I do want to tell you, I haven’t told anyone else.”

Joanna nods. Her kitchen has been painted white, and the shelves are yellow, and she has positioned rosemary and pots of basil and oregano on the windowsill. She is wearing her new dressing gown, the scarlet silk from Italy, and the room that was so run-down fairly sparkles in the morning light; she kicks off her slippers and sits.

“This strange thing has been happening,” Claire says, “the strangest thing is happening, it feels like everything’s changed. And my true north was south. You make certain assumptions—or
I
did, anyhow—and the assumptions turn out to be wrong, one hundred and eighty degrees. It turns out that south was true north. You know about Mom and the money, of course—the way we thought we knew our grandmother, or knew
about
our grandmother, and there’d be no surprises, no family skeletons in that particular closet—and how we were exactly wrong, one hundred and eighty degrees . . .”

The sun is up and the tide is out and the mudflats look pink. Claire manages a half-laugh: “But you don’t know about Jim. I haven’t talked to anyone about it, not even Becky and Hannah, I just haven’t been able to tell them;
they
don’t know. And
you
mustn’t tell them, of course. But it develops, doesn’t it, that our family keeps secrets; we’re”—she spreads her hands—“silent as the grave. Or maybe the right word
is
‘closet’ for this particular skeleton, this thing I’ve been trying to hide. Conceal. Well, Jim was leaving, he had left, and who he left me for was somebody called Robin, and Robin is a man.”

Joanna peels an apple and then quarters it and offers half to Claire. Her sister’s face is loose, slack, worn, but there is something restored in it also: a mobility, an openness. Noisily she chews on her first slice of apple and then continues to talk.

“You live out here near Provincetown and maybe aren’t surprised by this; maybe half the people in Ann Arbor are—I can’t help it, I still think of them as—
queer,
gay, same-sex partners, whatever it is that we call them today, but this thing about my husband was a shock.
Is
a shock, Joanna, I still can’t get my mind around it, can’t believe . . . not that he was gay, of course, it doesn’t bother me by now, but that I never noticed and didn’t have a clue. It makes me so ashamed—not ashamed of him and Robin, I don’t mean that at all. But that I never noticed and was paying no attention; he’s dead, of course”—she snaps her fingers—“
pop,
he’s gone, he was driving south,
they
were driving south together and Jim sat in the passenger seat too long and had a pulmonary embolism, a
massive
one, and now I can’t apologize, can’t ask him to forgive me and I think maybe what bothers me most is how
final
it is, how completely it’s over.”

“Over?”

“History. Finished. Done.
Done.
”

“Are you certain?”

Claire nods. She drinks.

“Passata la commèdia. Finita la mùsica.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s something Li-li says. At the end of a performance all the actors are supposed to say, ‘The comedy’s over. The music is finished.’”

“Well, she’s right.”

Down by the harbor the flags flutter lightly, and there is a westering breeze. They sit in silent harmony and watch the sunlight play across the stand of locust trees and where the shadows fall.

“It’s very peaceful here,” says Claire. “I’m very glad I told you and it doesn’t sound so terrible.”

“No,” says Joanna, “it doesn’t; what’s terrible is Jim is dead, but not that he was gay.” The “PISS ON IRAQ” van drives past. “We don’t seem to do very well with our men.” She smiles at her sister. “Do we?”

“No. Or
by
them, either. And I suppose that’s true, was just as true about marriage, for Mom.”

“And Grandma, by the sound of it . . .”

“We really do know how to pick them,” says Claire.

“So here we are”—Joanna offers her last slice of apple—“the three of us alone again. David never married; you’re a widow; I’m divorced . . .”

“The Saperstone children,” says Claire.

They drink. “What have you done with your share of the money,” she asks, and Claire says, “I put it away for the girls. Jim was the one with the income, of course, and I need to make sure we can handle tuition and don’t
want
to sell the house. More coffee?” she inquires, pouring herself a second cup, and Joanna shakes her head and says, “No, one’s my limit, thanks.”

At lunchtime, David calls. He’s calling from Berkeley, back in the saddle and emptying his apartment and moving out, moving on. The trouble with Berkeley, he tells Joanna: it’s three thousand miles from the coast. She laughs. He says I’ve been thinking about it, been giving it a lot of thought, and what I’m going to do, I think, is move back to the cottage and try it on for size. If you two don’t object. Why should we, asks Joanna, and then Claire joins the conversation from the living room extension and says, of course we don’t object and it’s a good idea. Home is the place—what’s that Robert Frost line?—where when you have to come back finally they can’t throw you out . . .

I’ve been thinking about it a
lot,
he repeats. You know that old expression: there’s nothing certain except death and taxes? Well, inheritance is the third thing—it’s where death and taxes meet. It’s the crossroads, the conjunction of the two; it’s where that pair of certainties becomes a third because everyone goes through it and it isn’t a question of whether but when: death comes when it will come. So it doesn’t matter, really, if what we inherit is money or debt, a set of cats or cutlery or a portrait of Grandfather Aaron: what matters is the way we deal with what’s been left behind . . .

There is static on the phone. “I
hear
you,” says Joanna, and she knows by the creak of the wood on the floor that Claire has taken the rocker and is shifting her weight in the chair. I’ve been doing some research, he says. I looked them up, the Vagabonds, and they really did exist, they covered a whole lot of ground. It wasn’t only
our
year, I mean, 1916; they made a habit of it, those—what would you call them—excursions? and they racketed around the country playing hookey, being tramps.

“Some tramps,” says Claire, “with wagon trains and a dozen railroad cars and cooks.”

“‘Hallelujah, I’m a bum,’” says David, “right. But notice how they don’t call themselves bums, or tramps, or hobos—they were the
Vagabonds,
and thank you very much.

“So I wondered how often it happened—how many trips they took. And it turns out they traveled a lot. The year before they made Grandma’s—what would you call it?—
acquaintance,
they went to California and the Pan-Pacific Exposition. That was the start of it all. In 1918—the war was on and plans fell through and they skipped 1917—the four of them went south. Four carpetbaggers in the land of Dixie,” David says. “And next year they pretended they were Minutemen wandering around New England and the next year they visited Burroughs and played at being Rip van Winkle, in the country of Washington Irving, and by 1921 they roped the President in.”

“Which President?” Claire asks.

“Warren G. Harding,” he says. “By that time John Burroughs was finished; he had grown too old to travel and maybe already had died. So instead they included the women, and President Harding and his secretary joined up with the Vagabonds in Maryland. Then they skipped 1922 and by the next year Harding too was dead, and they sojourned—listen to me,” David says, “I
sound
like them, describing it; what kind of word is
sojourned?
—up in the U.P.”

“Where’s that?” Joanna asks.

“The Upper Peninsula,” he tells them, “the lumber camps in Michigan, and the mining towns. And by 1924, the final year, they went back to New England and visited with Calvin Coolidge in Vermont. By this time everybody’s old and the party’s winding down, but he’s their second President; not bad for a party of axe-wielding hobos in suits. What I’m trying to get at,” he says, “is how they celebrate those virtues they’re in the process of wrecking; they honor rural America and then light it up and pave it over and fill it with cars. With a neon sign for customers: ‘Ye olde
Dew Drop Inn.
’”

“I’m starting over,” says Joanna. “I’m an ex-inkeeper now.”

He knows that, David says. He thinks maybe inheritance has changed them all, and what’s so strange about this piece of history is it’s been there all along. I mean, he says, what’s new is that we
know
about it now.

“
Finita la commèdia,
” says Claire.

But David is up on the soapbox again and he speaks about their newfound wealth and altogether unexpected legacy from Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone and Thomas Edison, those anti-Semitic potentates and self-anointed Vagabonds. The ancient books and plays and fairy tales, he says, are
all
about inheritance, how when you come into what they used to call a competence you marry well, regaining thereby your rightful place which some foul duke has stolen. Or you gain through inbred virtue the fortune by society denied, the foul witch felled, the dark plot foiled, because every single one of the contrivances that structure all those stories have to do with maiden ladies, eligible bachelors, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Rumpelstiltskin and the rest: the undeserving rich, deserving poor. And what they have in common is how
young
the people were: the ones who wait till twenty-five in Austen are old maids, the ones who wait until thirty in Dickens are ridiculous, figures of fun.

The sisters laugh. Yet nowadays, David continues, we have to wait till we’re forty or fifty to come into inheritance, to get what our own parents leave, and it makes no difference, really, if it’s ten million dollars or a rocking chair. The stakes are not the same but the game is constant, isn’t it, the rules of the game when there’s more than one person apply to the family silver or silver mine alike; he’s rambling, he admits it, he’s tired and thick-tongued and talking too much, but Marx observes, remember, that a change in quantity brings qualitative change; if Harry and I, Joanna—he pauses—have an argument between us that’s a fight between two people, but if we have a hundred thousand men on either side it’s called a war. At any rate and in any case the actuarial tables, David repeats, have changed the problem of maturity beyond all recognition, what good does it do to hang around like characters in some timeworn farce until you die of boredom, waiting; we’re relatively young, the three of us, and Mom only made it to seventy-two; I’ll bet Wellfleet is
full
of sixty-year-old babies waiting for their folks to die and inheritance-ship to come in . . .

“OK,” says Joanna. “We hear you.”

“Say hello to everyone,” he finishes. “Li-li, of course.”

“OK.”

“The tax bite’s coming down, you know. The IRS will hit us up.”

“She provided for that,” says Joanna. “I checked with Beakes’s office; there’s been a set-aside.”

“We’ll call you tomorrow,” says Claire.

That afternoon there’s a cocktail party out on Bound Brook Island, and the sisters go. The season is beginning, the painters and investment bankers and psychiatrists from New York and Boston are starting to return to the Cape, and Joanna says we won’t stay long but you might find it amusing, a few of these people are fun. The whole place belongs to the National Seashore, but some of the houses are grandfathered in, and Bound Brook’s just the way it used to be, oh, twenty years ago—thirty, maybe forty years, and long before
I
got here. Grand
mothered
in, says Claire, in our case that’s what happened, and they laugh.

The road is barely passable—deep-rutted and soft where the rain failed to drain—and everyone arrives in Range Rovers and Toyota Land Cruisers and Jeeps. Joanna maneuvers her white Subaru through the sand and muck with some distaste, and she finds it remarkable that just two months ago she wouldn’t have noticed mud smears on a car or, if she noticed, have cared. She thinks about how much has changed, how strange it is to be the well-dressed sister, the one using makeup and perfume, and she checks herself out in the vanity mirror and offers her lipstick to Claire.

Their hosts are Neil and Mary Patterson, and the house is a series of boxes: cedar siding, wood shingles and glass. They walk up the curved flagstone path. Years ago, Joanna confesses, she had had a thing for Neil and, she admits, a thing
with
him, though all of that is over now and nothing she still dwells upon or thinks about too proudly. Mary was gone on a business trip, she was a buyer for Talbots, and one night in June Neil showed up on the porch of the Bay View Inn with a bottle of tequila and one thing led to another, and it lasted the whole summer of, when was it, ’95? You’re not shocked, are you, she asks Claire, and Claire says I don’t shock so easily now. It’s good to have a date for cocktails, isn’t it, Joanna says, someone to go to a party with, and she and her sister link arms.

Neil greets them. “The heavenly sisters.”

Joanna leans forward and kisses his cheek. “Thanks for inviting us. Having us.”