A Private State: Stories (15 page)

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''Even if they do, don't they deserve a line or two in a brochure?" Helen asked. "A brief mention during pinnaped update?"

"Yes," said Dr. Marquand. "Of course. We'll mention it this evening." He looked tired. They arrived at the cove where harbor seals were supposed to sun themselves, but the day had turned cloudy. The seals had gone.

On the way back to
Atlantis
, Dr. Marquand asked the man piloting their boat if he knew there was a village on Cedros.

"Sure," the man said, "the cook buys lobsters from them." Dr. Marquand glowered. Anne looked drawn as she rubbed her sun-glasses clean. Helen's feet were icy and she was relieved that they were heading back to tea and warm bunks.

Then they heard something behind them, shouts from the Donaldsons and Melissa. Mrs. Donaldson was yelling, gripping her tennis hat. Melissa was gesturing for everyone to sit down. For once, Helen thought Melissa was absolutely right. The waves were high.

There were suddenly four whales among them, two cows with calves, circling between the boats. Helen's pilot quieted his engine, maneuvering the craft toward the animals with the precision of a jeweler tipping a stone toward prongs. Helen leaned over the gunwale and saw a huge wavering shadow just below the surface and realized that the forty-foot length was alive, not just shadow, and that it was coming toward her and the boat, which, she was suddenly conscious, was made only of aluminum. It could be crumpled as easily as a can if something deft and sturdy like the fluke of a whale decided to tap it. Then the shadow broke the surface, and the broad nose of a grown whale tipped into the light, and Helen found herself staring into another huge, gray eye that blinked, took her in, and blinked again. With a bubbling sound coming from her blowhole, she went down again and Helen could not bear it.

The motor thrummed, the waves chopped against the side of

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the boat. The rubber soles of Dr. Marquand's shoes squeaked against the floor. His breath came hard and fast. Helen heard Melissa try to shout something at them but the wind was blowing too hard. They were on their own here with the whales. The mother surfaced again, now supporting her calf, scratched like her with the same loopy white calligraphy.

Dr. Marquand said, "She's asking us to touch the baby," and they all reached over the edge of the boat and planted their hands on the cool skin. The baby shut his eyes as if to feel their stroking fingers. The skin was so much softer than Helen thought it would be. She could almost dent it, as if it were the flesh of a cactus. And then her fingers felt a layer of something stiff just below the surface, the first sheet of blubber, not flabby but as hard as the tread of a tire. The baby opened his mouth and the shining filaments of his newborn's baleen caught the light. His mother, still submerged, shimmered below. And then they were gone, as abruptly as they'd appeared. Dr. Marquand stretched his hand out to where the animals had been.

Their pilot grinned. The Donaldsons were beaming, too; they also had a friendly encounter. But Melissa was nervous. This was unexpected. She started waving them back to
Atlantis
.

Then something else went awry. Dr. Marquand turned white. He tilted to starboard and Helen thought wildly for a moment that he was going to take a nap, but he kept falling and tumbled overboard. The boat pitched. Dr. Marquand landed facedown in the water, his legs slightly below the surface. His hat had flown from his head and bobbed on the crest of a wave. Helen launched herself toward him. She had to get to Dr. Marquand before he sank. The boat rocked wildly with the loss of two bodies.

The water sucked at her clothes, made her so heavy she thought she might go under, too. She grabbed him and her fingers brushed against the skin of his neck. His flesh was still warm, although as she tipped his face upward, she knew that wouldn't last for long. Her eyes blurred with salt, then cleared. Anne

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shouted, her mouth a sad, small
O
. The pilot tried to start the engine, which chugged and died.

Helen and Dr. Marquand floated further from the boat, although she was not concerned with that right now. Her teeth clattered and her arms trembled, but she wanted to smooth his white hair to his forehead before that long-armed man hoisted him up as if he were no more than a net of tuna. She churned her feet as she wove her arms through his. Most of all, she tried to keep his head out of the water. He would have hated to be seen like that.

He weighed so much. She paddled madly. She wasn't, she realized, equipped for long migrations or underwater birth. Helen was barely afloat. But as she cradled him, she felt the ring of her own pulse in her wrist. A plank of wood that could have come from an old pier floated past them. The engine caught. The boat moved toward them. Her lips against the cold shell of his ear, she told him if a baby were there, she would let it stay.

Page 98

Accidentals

Alice started work at the wawa street home two years ago, the same week Conradmuttering, tattered, and bonymoved there from Met State. Peering at Alice between wide feathers of stogie smoke, he announced he would refer to her only as the "Kennedy lesbian." Alice, neither Kennedy nor lesbian, smiled a plucky smile, waved away the smoke and thought, My God, what am I doing here? But staff members loved it, and the epithet was soon reduced to initials in the patient log, as in "Conrad ran through kitchen, shouting that the K.L. was in hot pursuit." Now, Alice liked the nickname. Conrad's wild, unsolvable strangeness had singled her out from the start.

Tonight, however, Alice wanted to demand something impossible, like a fragment of conversation, which meant it was time to retreat to the office. "Night, Conrad," she said, not even caring if she'd hit the counselor's goal, that elusive neutral tone. In answer, he ground out his fifth cigar of the evening and started to hum.

Once the door was shut, she switched the coffee brewer's setting to "full bodied and dark." A poster illustrating the Heimlich was stuck to a wall, but two of the corners had lost their tape and rolled up to cover crucial information. Alice clutched her throat in the International Choking Gesture and watched her reflection in the window of the office, a cozy spot on the first floor. The Wawa Street Home was a squat Victorian in West Philadelphia with

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gaps as frank as missing fingers in its gingerbread. Wondering how the Gesture had become International, Alice opened the log, ragged and bulky with years of observation. In spite of all that noticing, no one had ever found a succinct way to describe things as subtle as the flickers of mood that lighted Claude's face when he talked about his ex-wife. Instead, Alice focused on a list of times medications were taken, the pretty names of the drugs sounding like lovers in an Italian opera. Stellazine and Klonopin, the ill-starred pair, Haldol the tyrannical father. Ends of shifts could make Alice feel a little flighty.

Stanislaus swung into the room and suddenly things felt solid again. His fat bunch of keys glittered in the lamplight. He showed Alice a pair of loafers he'd just bought. Nigerian, serene, and cheerful, he held a second fulltime job at Stern's, as the shoe manager. Stanislaus's entries in the log contained more "things just fine" than one would think possible at a residence for chronics. But somehow it seemed plausible that with Stanislaus in charge, things were fine. For a while at least.

"How you doing?" he asked.

"Just fine," Alice said. She pulled on her rain slicker. No one believed her these days. Her father had died eight months ago. She had money now, though no one at Wawa knew how much. Since adolescence, Alice had cultivated a certain edgy jauntiness, incompatible with the idea of inheritance. Especially one large enough to earn an extra degree entitling her to lab coats and clipboards. Enough, even, to buy her own house and keep neighbors a large lawn away and still she was here, watching the loons.

Watching Stanislaus focus on his shift ritualshanging his jacket, slipping a pen in his shirt pocketAlice remembered arriving in Philadelphia from D.C. She'd just left her first job after college, as a paralegal for a trio of muted attorneys. Her father had found the position for her, and she'd felt guilty not being able to give a better reason for quitting than that she had terrible nightmares about being locked in the copy room with the partners.

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''Where will you go?" he asked, and she blurted, without knowing why, "Philadelphia." She'd always liked the city's long, soft name. It had felt wonderful, that hour and a half on the train going north, free and anxious, moving.

Fortunately, she'd liked the city, its grit and motley sprawl pleasing after the capital's strict geography. Sitting on the rim of a partly tiled fountain in Rittenhouse Square, circling want ads, Alice had let herself imagine working in everything from libraries to pet stores. Then she'd seen the notice for the halfway house. Flexible hours, it said. Supportive environment. The fountain sprinkled the newspaper, blurring the phone number, but after one wrong call, Alice got through to the Wawa. "The what?" her mother said when Alice called California to announce her new job. "Alice, how much money do you need?"

But her father, from his tidy office in New York, had listened to his daughter describe who sat where during group meeting and who could be trusted with matches. Alice's lack of experience worried the director at first, but everyone said she was a natural. "It sounds like you're enjoying yourself," her father said finally.

"Yes," Alice answered, surprised. "I am."

"That's important," he told her. "Don't underestimate pleasure." And while she would never have called her work pleasurable, it was still, even two years later, satisfying. Even so, Alice was not completely clear about why she stayed. It might have had something to do with knowing she'd become able to read the progress of craziness, as if it were a flight pattern, full of wobbly green blips on a screen. It might have been the work's scruffy honesty. It was something she could have talked about with her father, a subject they would have handled delicately, with bemusement.

Stanislaus put his shoes in a cubby and cocked his head, drawing Alice back to the office, the smell of burned coffee. "He's at it again," said Stanislaus. Alice cracked open the door. It was Conrad, chanting: "Lorenz, Pavlov, Conrad Brown, Leakey, and, perhaps, a few hundred others." Two weeks, at the outside. They

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should start angling for a room at the Institute now; beds were in short supply. "Ten days, four dollars," said Stanislaus. He fished a fedora from the file cabinet. The hat was the Loon Pool, in which everyone but the director participated. Vicky believed that with therapy, patience, and a judicious use of medication, mental illness Could Be Overcome. She was touching, really. Still, they kept the hat in the drawer.

"How can he know all the names of all the Nobel Prize physicists ever and then say he can't tell time?" Alice wondered aloud. Not only that. Conrad noticed the tiniest detailsa hem tacked up with safety pins, the changed level of a ketchup bottlebut wrote papers on the fact that China was a hoax.

"That man is crazier than a bug," said Stanislaus, who translated sometimes, Alice suspected, from idioms in his native Ibo, which seemed to have a richer range than English for describing unbalanced states of mind. A breeze that smelled of the Delaware blew through the screen. Her shift well over, Alice found herself about to pour a cup of coffee, when Stanislaus said, "Alice. Go home."

It was still light enough for Alice to walk back across the river. It was Philadelphia's most beautiful spring in years, as green and cool as unripe pears. The train station was newly gilded. The
Inquirer
was printing poems. Falcons, released to control vermin, were thriving: they nested on bridges and, when hungry, swept down to seize the fussy pigeons of Rittenhouse Square. Alice had seen a photo of it. A streak of gray speed that split a cloud of rock doves. It didn't seem fair to set the world's fastest bird against a pigeon. Walking past beds of hosta and stone lions, it was hard to believe that Philadelphia could foster such a predatory wildness.

Alice lived off the square in a brownstone, a home one of its inheritors had carved into ten oddly shaped apartments. Tonight, she lay on her sofa and stroked the patches where the brown velvet had been rubbed bald. It was a castoff of her father's and he

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