Vigil for a Stranger (14 page)

When his unemployment runs out, Pierce gets a new job, in the hi-fi department at Sears. He talks himself into some kind of managerial position, and the pay is good. He buys us presents: the Van Gogh letters for me, a fancy pipe for Charlie. He gives his current girlfriend gold hoop earrings. Then he shows us what he has bought for himself: a .38 Smith & Wesson Special.

“You two must have been related,” I said to Orin. “The resemblance really is uncanny, especially combined with the coincidence of the names.”

“Separated at birth,” he said, with his Pierce grin. “The question is, which one of us was stolen away by the gypsies?”

When I showed him the snapshots, he said, “This is Pierce? This guy?” He shook his head slowly form side to side, frowning. “I just can't see it, Christine. I don't know what to say. This guy looks nothing like me.”

When he raised his eyes to my face, he looked exactly like Pierce.

Plover Island is a mile across, the largest and farthest from shore of a group of eight or ten stony outcroppings off the Maine coast near Camden. Several of them are uninhabitable—too tiny, too rocky, their very existence too precarious—but on some islands there are buildings, and on at least two there are elaborate modern houses, with generators and plumbing and expensive lawn furniture brought over from the mainland.

Plover Island has several cottages, widely spaced, and a rough wooden dock. My father's brother, Uncle Bill, built a primitive cabin there when he was a young man. He was a research chemist who lived outside Boston, and he spent summers on the island until he died. He and my father weren't very friendly. I think my father had been there only twice before he inherited the place. Bill was a lifelong bachelor. He didn't particularly like people, and he detested children. (Robbie and I were never invited to Maine.) But he died just after I graduated from college, and since he had no one else, he left the Plover Island place to us.

It's exciting to own a piece of an island, however rocky and insignificant, but it's hard for my parents to get away. In warm weather, the motel business is booming on Route 92. The four of us drive up there together only once—a weekend early in that first summer. My mother hates roughing it, the neglected cabin appalls her, and after one night in sleeping bags she and I get on the morning ferry. Robbie teases us, but Dad is angry. Mom and I check into a motel in Camden that has a whirlpool bath and beds with Magic Fingers. We go out for a lobster dinner, and my mother drinks a lot of wine. Her exhilaration frightens me a little—her delight in defying my father. The next day, while we wait for the ferry to bring them back, she and I go shopping. She buys a wickerwork purse decorated with shells, and a white cotton jersey with fishnet sleeves. She wants to buy me a t-shirt with a picture of a lobster on it but I decline, so she buys it for Robbie. We sit on a bench near the town dock waiting for them and eating pastel-colored salt water taffy. On the long, tense ride home I get carsick and throw everything up.

My parents keep talking about enlarging the cabin and making improvements, but for the moment my mother is glad to stay home, and at that time in my life I have better things to do than take vacations with my family.

But Robbie and my father fall in love with the place. They have spent most of Robbie's teenage years fighting—the usual arguments over music, curfew, car. It wasn't terrible, but it was bad enough; at its worst, Robbie moved out and lived with his friend Mark's family for a month. My father has never been the world's most amiable man, even on a good day. He has a few things in common with his brother Bill. But on the island a spell is cast over them both. They become what they have never been before: buddies. They fish, sit in the sun drinking beer, listen to staticy baseball on Robbie's portable radio, play endless games of frisbee and two-handed poker.

“You may not believe this, but Dad is actually not a bad guy,” is the way Robbie puts it to me. But for a brief, strange, wonderful period, the trips to Maine change my father's life.

“I've got my boy back,” he says to my mother after their first trip together. He has dropped Robbie off at Dartmouth and come home filthy, sunburned, sand in his hair, his clothes stinking of fish. “I was beginning to think I'd lost the kid for good,” he says. “But it's like old times. It's better than old times, because we really talked to each other. We really
listened
to each other, that was the amazing thing.”

My mother tells me about this conversation the day after Robbie's funeral—about Dad's fishy clothes, and how for days after he got home she would catch him grinning at nothing. “I don't know if I ever saw your father so happy before,” she says. “I didn't care if I ever set foot on that island again, but I have to admit I was a little jealous.”

But things get cool again between Dad and Robbie. Their arguments are predictable and inevitable, given the times, given their personalities, and no number of fishing trips can change things. They disagree about the war in Vietnam, about Nixon, about Robbie's ponytail, about the girl he brings briefly home on semester break that year. My mother is worried about Robbie; he is flunking chemistry, flunking German; he looks thin and unkempt; he is silent and withdrawn. When classes let out, he heads straight for Maine. He says he's spending the summer in the cabin, alone. He needs to think, to get his head straight. My father hates that expression, he hates all Robbie's trendy slang, and he makes fun of it mercilessly. “He'd get his head a lot straighter if he'd cut off some of that hair.” My father is also angry that Robbie won't be working—both of us have been encouraged to work since the days of baby-sitting and paper routes—but Robbie has a job during the school year in the dining hall at Dartmouth and makes plenty of money, so there's not a lot Dad can say. Robbie says he's going to write some poetry. Take some photographs. Get in touch with nature. Figure things out.

My mother worries all summer—that summer I'm home working in the motel and mourning Pierce. There isn't so much as a postcard from Robbie. One of my mother's fears is that he has some girl with him and he'll get her pregnant, but her greatest fear, the one that keeps her awake at night, is that he'll flunk out of school and be drafted. My father says, “
That
would put his head straight for him all right.” We watch the Democratic Convention on television, the riots, the police bashing long-haired boys like Robbie over the head, and my mother says, “I suppose I should be thankful he's safe up in Maine.”

His body isn't discovered until late in August. One of the islanders calls the Maine State Police, they notify the Jamesville police, and we get the news from Ralph Jarrett, whose wife taught both Robbie and me in third grade, and whose daughters worked at our motel as maids all through high school. Ralph rings the bell late one hot afternoon, refuses the lemonade my mother offers, and says, “I sure wish I didn't have to be the one to tell you people this.” His voice breaks. I'm standing in the middle of the kitchen. I push past Ralph and out the door, and head down to the pond where I watch the water-striders skim over its silver surface.

After the funeral, my mother goes through a period where she needs to talk about Robbie all the time, mostly reminiscences of his babyhood, his boyhood. I'm the one who has to listen to her, to cry with her at the kitchen table, passing the tissue box back and forth; it's one reason I leave home again and go back to live in New Haven. My father quits talking completely unless it's absolutely necessary, and he never speaks my brother's name again until that New Year's Eve when he calls James Robbie by mistake.

“If this were a movie, I would be the victim of a conspiracy. You and Alison Kaye would be in it together. Alison and her Filo-Fax would have been intentional—I was meant to see it, she sat down next to me deliberately. And the Mr. Pierce thing at the Frick was staged. And you knew me so well, you knew I'd pursue it.”

“I'm Pierce, and I staged my own death, and I've been biding my time all these years, cooking up this deal with Alison—and who else? The Mafia? The CIA? The PLO?”

“Sure. Why not? This is a movie.”

“And what's the point of it all?” he asked. The Pierce smile on his face. “What's behind this crazy scheme?”

We were in the Metro. I was wearing new clothes: a silk paisley skirt and a long-sleeved blouse with what the saleswoman called Cossack sleeves. I had spent a day prowling Macy's and the Hello Boutique and the new, cute little shops on Chapel Street, and I had come away with a dress, a couple of skirts, blouses, a tailored jacket, sheer pale stockings, and leather: honey-colored shoes with little heels, and a soft brown bag like a mailman's. I hadn't worn leather in years. James admired the clothes, and his only comment about my buying leather again was, “So who can be perfect in an imperfect world?”

I felt good dressed up, looking normal. I felt pretty. I smiled back at Orin and said, “You're probably involved in a plot to defraud me out of my fortune.”

“You don't have a fortune.”

“If this were a movie, I would.”

He did something he had never done: leaned across the table and kissed me.

I said, “I wish this were that movie, Pierce. I really do. I'd hand it over to you without a struggle.”

He said, “Christine.”

I said, “I'm sorry.”

I begin by plaiting what Mrs. Spooler calls a cookie server out of folded strips of newspaper, but she sees I have a knack for it and lets me go on to a simple splint basket of flat reed. Then I make a cheese basket and a series of potato baskets. I learn fancy splintwork, the Deerfield border, advanced coiling (lazy squaw, Peruvian coil) based on Native American techniques. I make ribbed melon baskets, which are tricky, and a large clothes hamper. My hands become raw from working with wet reed. Mrs. Spooler says no one in her experience with craft therapy has ever caught on so fast, or made so many baskets in such a short time.

The time doesn't seem short to me. I'm in the hospital for three months, and in that time I see Denis only once. Emile is divorcing me. He is taking Denis with him to France.
Lucy's Pup
, not yet published, has already been sold to publishers in England, France, West Germany, Sweden, Japan. Emile comes to see me, tells me he is taking Denis, tells me exactly why.

“Are you going to contest it?” he asks me.

I only look at him. “What do you think?” I know Denis is better off with him, though I can't believe Emile loves our son more than I do, or as much. I don't know whether to believe it or not when he tells me Denis doesn't ask for me.

That's all I say: “What do you think?”—wearily, from my chair by the window that looks out on the parking lot, the brown roofs of New Haven, the smoky blue sky over Long Island Sound. I cried all the time when we got back from Plover Island—that's partly why I'm here—and I still cry constantly, but I stop when Emile visits me. The sound of his voice, the things he accuses me of—all of this numbs me, gives me a kind of peace. He leaves, and his footsteps going away down the hall say to me that I have lost my son. I begin crying again.

Basket-weaving is such a cliché, such a joke, but I can't deny that it's both restful and involving. It soothes me better than any medication. Sometimes I think I shouldn't let myself be soothed, I should get help. Mrs. Spooler, Dr. Dalziel, Silvie—someone should know what Emile is doing. But there seems no point. I know that I don't deserve to have Denis. It's true that I'm unstable, I'm a bad mother, I'm good for nothing but sitting in a chair looking out the window, or making baskets. I have no idea what I'll do when I leave the hospital, or where I'll go. I have few friends, my parents aren't nearby, my husband has left me, my son is gone.

I think constantly of Denis. I also think of Pierce, and of the visitation from Robbie. For years I wondered, and now my mind has been set at rest. Pierce is blameless: he remains my perfect, my own Pierce. My son is gone, but I have drunk tea with my brother, and Pierce has been returned to me.

I weave the wet, flat reed into shapes that please me. I learn twining and make raffia baskets with covers that fit precisely. I make a series of Shaker baskets in graduated sizes. I stop the constant weeping that has accompanied everything I do. I can eat the wretched hospital food. I sleep better. When I get a copy of
Lucy's Pup
in the mail (with a printed card inside that says “Compliments of the Author”), all that's left to me is a distant, desperate wish that I had a child on my lap to read it to.

Hugh invited James and me out to his place for dinner one night. He said that he and Helga wanted our advice: they were thinking of moving in together, and they were scared stiff.

“You're our ideal couple,” Helga said to me on the phone. “Tell us how you do it.”

Helga was blonde and glamorous and a fund-raiser for one of the New Haven theaters; Hugh was a scruffy carpenter with a passion for stray cats. They seemed an unlikely couple—though perhaps no less odd than a watercolorist and an ex-accountant turned pizzateur.

“She'll have a hell of a commute,” James said as we drove up to Hugh's place. He had ten hilly acres in an area north and west of New Haven, miles from the nearest highway. “That's the only drawback that I can see.”

It was a Sunday night. When my train had gotten in the night before, I went straight to Jimmy Luigi's. My trips to New York were beginning to makes James uneasy: he was quiet and wary with me, and curious, though he wouldn't question me directly. While he ladled out sauce and sprinkled cheese, I told him in detail about George's reaction to my new group of slides. The truth was that I had talked briefly to George (who was interested but distant) from the phone booth at the Metro. With James, I made George into a joke. I exaggerated, I went too far. I could feel this happening, but I was unable to stop it. James looked at me oddly—I kept getting the feeling he was watching for me to slip up—though the only questions he asked me were practical ones about the possibilities for a show at the Aurora.