Friend of My Youth (24 page)

One time on this ship, the captain said, there were two sisters travelling together. This was on a different run, a few years ago, in the South Atlantic. The sisters looked twenty years apart in age, but that was only because one of them was very sick. She might not have been so much the elder—perhaps she was not the elder at all. Probably they were both in their thirties. Neither one was married. The one who was not sick was very beautiful.

“The most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life,” said the captain, speaking solemnly, as if describing a view or a building.

She was very beautiful, but she did not pay attention to anybody except her sister, who was laid up in the cabin with what was probably a heart condition. The other one used to go out at night and sit on the bench outside the window of their cabin. She might walk to the rail and back, but she never stirred far from the window. The captain supposed that she was staying within hearing distance, in case her sister needed her. (There was no medical person on board at that time.) He could see her sitting there when he went out for his late-night walk, but he pretended not to see her, because it seemed to him she didn’t want to be seen, or to have to say hello.

But there was a night when he was walking past and he heard her call to him. She called so softly he barely heard her. He went over to the bench, and she said, Captain, I’m sorry, my sister has just died.

I’m sorry, my sister has just died.

She led him into the cabin, and she was absolutely right. Her sister was lying on the bed next to the door. Her eyes were half open, she had just died.

“Things were in a bit of a mess, the way they sometimes are on such occasions,” the captain said. “And by the way she reacted to that I knew she hadn’t been in the cabin when it happened, she’d been outside.”

Neither the captain nor the woman said a word. They set to work together to get things cleaned up, and they washed the body off and straightened it out and closed the eyes. When they were finished, the captain asked whom he should notify. Nobody, the woman said. Nobody. There is nobody but the two of us, she said. Then will you have the body buried at sea, the captain asked her, and she said yes. Tomorrow, he said—tomorrow morning—and she said, Why do we have to wait, couldn’t we do it now?

Of course that was a good idea, though the captain wouldn’t have urged it on her himself. The less the other passengers, and even the crew, have to be aware of a death on board, the better. And it was hot weather, summer in the South Atlantic. They wrapped the body up in one of the sheets, and between them they put it out through the window, which was wide open for air. The dead sister was light—wasted. They carried her to the rail. Then the captain said that he would just go and get some rope and tie the body up in the sheet so that it wouldn’t fall out when they dropped it over. Couldn’t we use scarves, she said, and she ran back to the cabin and came out with an assortment of scarves and sashes, very pretty stuff. He bound the body up in the sheet with those and said that he would now go and get his book, to read the service for the dead. The woman laughed and said, What good is your book to you here? It’s too dark to read. He saw that she dreaded being left alone with the body. She was right, too, about its being too dark to read. He could have got a flashlight. He didn’t know whether he had even thought of that. He really did not want to leave her; he did not like the state she was in.

He asked her what he should say, then. Some prayers? Say whatever you like, she said, and he said the Lord’s
Prayer—he did not recall if she joined in—then something like, Lord Jesus Christ, in Thy name we commit this woman to the deep; have mercy on her soul. Something like that. They picked up the body and rolled it over the rail. It hardly made a splash.

She asked if that was all, and he told her yes. He would just have to fill out some papers and make up the death certificate. What did she die of, he asked. Was it a heart attack? He wondered what kind of spell he had been under not to have asked that before.

Oh, she said, I killed her.

“I knew it!” Jeanine cried. “I knew it was murder!”

The captain walked the woman back to the bench under the window of the cabin—all lit up now like Christmas—and asked her what she meant. She said she had been sitting here, where she was now, and she heard her sister call. She knew her sister was in trouble. She knew what it was—her sister needed an injection. She never moved. She tried to move—that is, she kept thinking of moving; she saw herself going into the cabin and getting out the needle, she saw herself doing that, but she wasn’t moving. She strained herself to do it but she didn’t. She sat like stone. She could no more move than you can move out of some danger’s way in a dream. She sat and listened until she knew that her sister was dead. Then the captain came and she called to him.

The captain told her that she had not killed her sister.

Wouldn’t her sister have died anyway, he said. Wouldn’t she have died very soon? If not tonight, very soon? Oh, yes, she said. Probably. Not probably, the captain said. Certainly. Not probably—certainly. He would put heart attack on the death certificate, and that would be all there was to it. So now you must calm down, he said. Now you know it will be all right.

He pronounced “calm” in the Scottish way, to rhyme with “lamb.”

Yes, the woman said, she knew that part of it would be all right. I’m not sorry, she said. But I think you have to remember what you have done.

“Then she went over to the rail,” the captain said, “and of course I went along with her, because I couldn’t be sure what she meant to do, and she sang a hymn. That was all. I guess it was her contribution to the service. She sang so you could hardly hear her, but the hymn was one I knew. I can’t recall it, but I knew it perfectly well.”

“Goodness and Mercy all my Life,” Averill sang then, lightly but surely, so that Jeanine squeezed her around the waist and exclaimed, “Well, Champagne Sally!”

The captain showed a moment’s surprise. Then he said, “I believe that may have been it.” He might have been relinquishing something—a corner of his story—to Averill. “That may have been it.”

Averill said, “That’s the only hymn I know.”

“But is that all?” Jeanine said. “There wasn’t any family fortune involved, or they weren’t both in love with the same man? No? I guess it wasn’t TV.”

The captain said no, it wasn’t TV.

Averill believed that she knew the rest of it. How could she help knowing? It was her story. She knew that after the woman sang the hymn, the captain took her hand off the rail. He held her hand to his mouth and kissed it. He kissed the back of it, then the palm-to-rhyme-with-lamb. Her hand that had lately done its service to the dead.

In some versions of the story, that was all he did, that was enough. In other versions, he was not so easily satisfied. Nor was she. She went with him inside, along the corridor into the lighted cabin, and there he made love to her on the very bed that according to him they had just stripped and cleaned, sending its occupant and one of its sheets to the bottom of the ocean. They landed on that bed because they couldn’t wait to get to the other bed under the window, they couldn’t wait to hurtle into the lovemaking that they kept up till daybreak and that would have to last them the rest of their lives.

Sometimes they turned the light off, sometimes they didn’t care.

The captain had told it as if the mother and daughter were sisters and he had transported the boat to the South Atlantic and he had left off the finale—as well as supplying various details of his own—but Averill believed that it was her story he had told. It was the story that she had been telling herself night after night on the deck, her perfectly secret story, delivered back to her. She had made it, and he had taken it and told it, safely.

Believing that such a thing could happen made her feel weightless and distinct and glowing, like a fish lit up in the water.

Bugs did not die that night. She died two weeks later, in the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh. She had managed to get that far, on the train.

Averill was not with her when she died. She was a couple of blocks away, eating a baked potato from a takeout shop.

Bugs made one of her last coherent remarks about the Royal Infirmary. She said, “Doesn’t it sound
Old World
?”

Averill, coming out to eat after having been in the hospital room all day, had been surprised to find that there was still so much light in the sky, and that so many lively, brightly dressed people were in the streets, speaking French and German, and probably lots of other languages that she couldn’t recognize. Every year at this time, the captain’s home town held a festival.

Averill brought Bugs’ body home on a plane, to a funeral with fine music, in Toronto. She found herself sitting beside another Canadian returning from Scotland—a young man who had played in a famous amateur golf tournament and had not done as well as he had expected. Failure and loss made these two kind to each other, and they were easily charmed by the other’s ignorance of the world of sport and of music. Since he lived in Toronto, it was easy for the young man to show up at the funeral.
In a short time he and Averill were married. After a while they were less kind and less charmed, and Averill began to think that she had chosen her husband chiefly because Bugs would have thought the choice preposterous. They were divorced.

But Averill met another man, a good deal older than herself, a high-school drama teacher and play director. His talent was more reliable than his good will—he had an offhand, unsettlingly flippant and ironical manner. He either charmed people or aroused their considerable dislike. He had tried to keep himself free of entanglements.

Averill’s pregnancy, however, persuaded them to marry. Both of them hoped for a daughter.

Averill never saw again, or heard from, any of the people who were on the boat.

Averill accepts the captain’s offering. She is absolved and fortunate. She glides like the spangled fish, inside her dark silk dress.

She and the captain bid each other good night. They touch hands ceremoniously. The skin of their hands is flickering in the touch.

I—
Deadeye Dick

They are in the dining room. The varnished floor is bare except for the rug in front of the china cabinet. There is not much furniture—a long table, some chairs, the piano, the china cabinet. On the inside of the windows, all the wooden shutters are closed. These shutters are painted a dull blue, a grayish blue. Some of the paint on them, and on the window frames, has flaked away. Some of it Joan has encouraged to flake away, using her fingernails.

This is a very hot day in Logan. The world beyond the shutters is swimming in white light; the distant trees and hills have turned transparent; dogs seek the vicinity of pumps and the puddles round the drinking fountains.

Some woman friend of their mother’s is there. Is it the schoolteacher Gussie Toll, or the station agent’s wife? Their mother’s friends are lively women, often transient—adrift and independent in attitude if not in fact.

*    *    *

On the table, under the fan, the two women have spread out cards and are telling their fortunes. They talk and laugh in a way that Joan finds tantalizing, conspiratorial. Morris is lying on the floor, writing in a notebook. He is writing down how many copies of
New Liberty
magazine he sold that week, and who has paid and who still owes money. He is a solid-looking boy of about fifteen, jovial but reserved, wearing glasses with one dark lens.

When Morris was four years old, he was roaming around in the long grass at the foot of the yard, near the creek, and he tripped over a rake that had been left lying there, prongs up. He tripped, he fell on the prongs, his brow and eyelid were badly cut and his eyeball was grazed. As long as Joan can remember—she was a baby when it happened—he has had a scar, and been blind in one eye, and worn glasses with a smoky lens.

A tramp left the rake there. So their mother said. She told the tramp she would give him a sandwich if he raked up the leaves under the walnut trees. She gave him the rake, and the next time she looked he was gone. He got tired of raking, she guessed, or he was mad at her for asking him to work first. She forgot to go and look for the rake. She had no man to help her with anything. Within a little more than half a year, she had to sustain these three things: Joan’s birth, the death of her husband in a car accident (he had been drinking, she believed, but he wasn’t drunk), and Morris’s falling on the rake.

She never took Morris to a Toronto doctor, a specialist, to have a better job done fixing up the scar or to get advice about the eye. She had no money. But couldn’t she have borrowed some (Joan, once she was grown up, wondered this), couldn’t she have gone to the Lions Club and asked them to help her, as they sometimes did help poor people in an emergency? No. No, she couldn’t. She did not believe that she and her children were poor in the way that people helped by the Lions Club were
poor. They lived in a large house. They were landlords, collecting rent from three small houses across the street. They still owned the lumberyard, though they were sometimes down to one employee. (Their mother liked to call herself Ma Fordyce, after a widow on a radio soap opera, Ma Perkins, who also owned a lumberyard.) They had not the leeway of people who were properly poor.