The Maytrees: A Novel Page 4

  Until the daily party dropped in they were reading on beach towels and leaning against the basement. The chairs were for visitors. Lou realized years ago that the sight of her reading impelled Maytree to try to drag her into his reading. She always went back to her book without a word.

  —If you were a prehistoric Aleut—

  —What?

  —If you were a prehistoric Aleut and your wife or husband died, your people braced your joints for grief. That is, they lashed hide bindings around your knees, ankles, elbows, shoulders, and hips. You could still move, barely, as if swaddled. Otherwise, the Aleuts said, in your grief you would go to pieces just as the skeleton would go to pieces. You would fall apart.

  He watched her close her book on a finger and train on him a look. He knew she hated his interrupting her reading.

  —But the troubadours, she said. They made up romantic love.

  —Where did you learn that?

  —In college. And she added, Maybe only the husbands fall apart. The men.

  What made her say that? What of life had she seen? Had not her mother fallen apart when her father left?

  —Anyway, she said, prehistoric means only: before those people wrote. They could have learned to understand sealers’ or whalers’ love songs, long after the troubadours.

  Maytree well knew peoples had managed swoons of their own devising having never heard of Europe. Archaeologists find love poetry in unopened pyramids. She was unreasonable. That he could fix.

  —Until you have a baby, her mother had said, you don’t know what love is! Her mother volunteered this on the day of Lou’s one and only wedding. —Oh, Lou wanted to say, go soak your head. After Lou brought forth Petie, she at once recalled her mother’s words, forgave, and endorsed them. That her mother was so often right no longer irked her. As she would never irk Petie, now joyful in her arms. He sucked her nose. Later his pointy fingers made faces with her face. She never put him down. She must feel his skin on her, feel his cranium in her arm’s crook, his belly on her belly, and smell his breath, his scalp, etc., etc. He obviously felt the same way. They were pieces of each other foully parted. When they had to separate, she took ever-deeper breaths as if air had no use. Her sternum and her ventral torso and arms ached. Maytree had some horseshoe magnets in the kitchen. She gave each a wrench to hold.

  She and Petie laughed to flout fate by smashing together, thigmotropic. Or they met staring forehead to forehead, then twisted and laughed.

  Lou saw that she had hitherto wasted her life. When he was six months old, she asked Maytree, Can we have more?

  —Sure, he said. More what?

  When he was fifteen months old, Petie could say “anemometer” and “horseshoe crab.” Sometimes he sang to the sand, Hyannis, Hyannis.

  —Hold him while you can, Reevadare Weaver told Lou in her smoky voice. In the history of the world, Lou suspected no one had ever asked Reevadare for advice. She perceived others’ needs so keenly she anticipated them every time. What an odd thing to say: anemometer.

  At four Petie took to yelling at the heavenly bodies: —Hey, orbs! Wait for me! or, Orbs…listen to this! A genius, Lou thought; he commanded constellations. Clearly a poet. —A tyrant, Maytree said. —They are all tyrants, Deary said. His milk teeth separated neatly, like unripe corn on the ear. More children were evidently not in store for them. A sore spot, but she knew she could never love another so much.

  Maytree and Lou were learning night skies together and trying to teach Petie. Star-watchings-with-child were now a moral imperative. They had read in Wolf-Children and Feral Man about Caspar Hauser, locked from birth in a low German attic he later called a hole or cage. His captor taught him to talk, fed him, and removed his waste. He played with a wooden horse. When he was a big seventeen his captor took him outdoors for the first time and abandoned him at a Nuremberg intersection. The groping boy carried CASPAR HAUSER written on paper. Bright and curious, he could scarcely use or understand fast speech. After a newspaper fuss (the criminal was never found), a benefactor adopted him and helped him adapt. He never complained of his captor’s treatment but once, early. Then he wept to see for the first time—in the city!—those scattered thousand stars he realized everyone else on earth had been able to see all along. “His astonishment and transport surpassed all description.” Caspar said that the man ought to “be locked up for a few days,” for withholding the sight of the stars. It was the only indignation at his captivity he ever showed.

  The first thing Lou and Maytree learned about sky-watching was to lie down. Since town’s light blanked skies, they watched from the dunes. Friends joined them. Once they settled down on the beach at sunset Lou saw terns nock their spines to bowstrings between their crossbow wings. At the last second the terns looked, cocked one wing, and smacked. A bluefish boil blackened the water. If she looked away, the bluefish sounded like popping corn. Geography laid their position bare. Overhead clouds cracked the last light like crude.

  From deep water Lou saw a seal head appear. Deary stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled. The seal perked and, without diving or moving its eyes from Deary, came inshore to her feet in lappets of foam. The creature came to Deary without stirring the water. It rolled in surf, dark and half on sand. Its nose touched Deary’s painted toes. She had conjured a seal. She talked to it. As they quit the beach the seal searched all around, even up in the sky. It was Deary’s pure heart—why should not a seal love it as they all did?

  “A silkie,” Cornelius said of Deary.

  In darkness they watched Venus, fastidious, track the downed sun. Alterf, the glance. Diphda, second frog. —Do you feel a fool for trying to learn what the Stone Age people already knew? Maytree did not. Lou saw the Milky Way’s two bands merge over the sea. There, scoopings of stars made an oval where suns mixed it up in a spree. And that—that oval—was the galaxy’s core. But—how do we know?

  —We’re complex jellies, Cornelius said. One animal among many. Well, the others didn’t know jack, and scientists knew a lot. Lou watched stars bang their burning knuckles on the dome.

  Now between his parents outside the shack on a blanket, Petie raised his head. He unfurled an arm and placed a boneless hand on his father’s forearm. He had shed that clouds-of-glory, that leaving-of-fairies glaze by which newborn people keep parents in thrall till other charms appear. Like his mother, he did not say much. His eyes gleamed dark beneath low brows, and everything struck him as funny.

  His parents murmured, a sound unnamed like foghorn or wind. Above him the shack’s pitcher pump’s handle, a shape like a hungry monster’s neck, loomed. He looked at the stars around it. He felt cold sand at the back of his head. His mother covered him with her sweater.

  He knew their name: stars. They rustled in place in the black sky. Unrelated to him, they made as much sense as most things, and more than some, for their harmlessness and calm. Of which he instantly tired, for nothing changed or required him. For a second on the blanket between his parents and watching stars, Petie knew he was alive.

  Lou took a part-time job at Jen and Barrie’s art gallery. She could read there, and stare at action paintings. She saw no reason to subject Petie to the austerities she and Maytree enjoyed exchanging for free time. Maytree must not give up his mornings writing poetry, and from her wages, baby got a new pair of shoes.

  At six Petie with his friends made lemonade from ants and sold it on wharves. A scallop-edged new front tooth just cleared gum. His other, deciduous, teeth were the size of graph-paper squares. He could not yet build a fire; he could build a smoke. Cornelius called Petie “Spotey-Otey.”

  At eight Petie wrote for school, “Mice are a small creature who come in.” In rain Maytree helped Petie carve whistles and daggers. One May three blizzards dropped eight feet of snow. When school let out Deary played with a two-year-old and a child, and carried around a baby or two, while she kept an eye on Petie. With Deary, with the Cairos from New York and Cornelius from the dunes, Lou and Maytree sat outside the b
asement doors on the beach during a southerly. They watched Petie and the neighbor Bonobos boys race up the beach and dare incoming waves like pipers. Overhead skies loosened.

  Lou and Maytree saw their marriage as unique. Of course they rarely fought; she rarely spoke. They both knew love itself as an epistemological tool. As if mechanical, a halyard, love drew up something new that raised an everlasting flap and sped. How? Why?

  On holidays, ancient Greeks reddened the marble face of Jupiter with cinnabar. Maytree celebrated Thanksgivings by beginning work on a book. He wrote book-length poems. Three of his books, at four stressed syllables a line, took three years apiece to write. Others split like mica books.

  Maytree hoped to inspire his Boston publishers to tout those books widely by showing up unannounced. As if they were idle. He was riding the bus back from such a surprise visit when he thought of a new book-length poem to start this Thanksgiving. Boston or New York embodies our condition in one aspect: We are strangers among millions living in cubes like Anasazi in a world we fashioned. And Provincetown shows, by contrast, that we live on a strand between sea and sky. Here are protoplasmic, peeled people in wind against crystal skies. Our soft tissues are outside, like unearthed and drying worms’. The people in cities are like Mexican jumping beans, like larvae in tequila bottles, soft bits in hard boxes. And so forth. The length to which we as people go to hide our nakedness by blocking sky!

  There was a fatal problem. There always is. Provincetown people too, and all people worldwide who could swing it, were also bare tissues living under roofs. An honest way through, all but changing the whole idea, would be a set of interleaved narratives, Boston people and desert villagers. He would stress only certain aspects. Dwellers. And!—or, but! If he moved adobe dwellings from Arizona to Mexico, he could use holi, holi, huqui, huqui, to Mayans the sound of grinding corn on a metate. The words would console him for losing Anasazi, a word he had just learned from the Globe. Some year, somehow, he would work into some poem rini, rini, manju, manju, the sound of bullock-cart axle in Hindi.

  So he added his playful bits to the world perceived. How much better to heal and prevent disease; feed and inoculate and teach kids; provide sturdy breeds of animals and seeds! But poetry seemed to be his task, and the long poem his form as it had been Edwin Arlington Robinson’s. Quarterlies and reviews, like some anthologies, printed his short lyrics. He endorsed Edwin Arlington Robinson’s view that anthologies preserve poems by pickling their corpses. Always omitting Robinson’s real, long work that future readers would never know, anthologists forever reprinted “Richard Cory” who went out and put a bullet through his head, and no wonder.

  Petie at eleven surfcast the backshore for bluefish crashing bait, and in the fall for stripers. He freed a wing-hooked cormorant that slashed his throat. His mother fed his many friends ship’s biscuit and honey. They overturned outhouses on Halloween. He met the fleet every night. He jigged squid by lantern light and leaned on pilings on piers. He had an old dory and often kept it running, afloat, or both.

  His fondness for humans did not extend to girls, who were less interesting than frogs, and noisier. Girls had no skills but clustering and jacks—a ball game they played sitting down. Girls had no higher wish than to get old enough to wear makeup. He owned rocks he respected more. From afar, very far, he studied one high-school girl.

  Winter in calm air Pilgrim Lake froze. When it froze without snowing, everyone skated. One night Lou and Maytree skated arm-in-arm on black ice in half a gale. The lake lay in the expanse between dunes and highway. Others from town brought wood for a bonfire from which sparks joined stars. The two warmed each other on an iced marsh-grass hummock by the fire. They watched Petie dash among his friends. Now she saw bigger boys at one end of the lake jumping barrels. She watched Petie join them. Not tall, he was sturdy. When he jumped a laid-down barrel and skated away, the boys added another barrel. He cleared those two side-by-side, so they added another. Petie had been a marvel all along. By the time the boys quit, each had smashed up gloriously at least twice. When they landed, they slid on ice until stopped by the foot of a dune. These were the boys she used to watch Maytree coach at football.

  Lou turned to Maytree and saw his firelit pupils deepen to hers. He was letting her in, as always, and holding her there. His skin glowed; she slipped from a mitten to warm his cold cheek with her palm. For three days it had blown 30 knots from the west. He put his arm around her, and she leaned her face near his face so she could hear him in wind. She tilted and felt his jaw move before he kissed her forehead.

  …If I don’t talk about your hair, your lips, your eyes,

  still your face that I keep inside my soul,

  the sound of your voice that I keep inside my brain,

  the days of September rising in my dreams,

  give shape and color to my words, my sentences,

  whatever theme I touch, whatever thought I utter.

  He pressed her close to say part of the poem in her ear. She touched her forehead to his. How absurd that brains could not embrace, although she favored the present arrangement.

  They walked all the way home. She longed for the life she already possessed, a life large as clouds’. Mightily, as she had these three days, she opposed the wind’s push. Her coat pressed her back; cold blew through her wool slacks. All at once, as they walked still in the open, the wind died. Someone shut a valve? Her stance nearly toppled her; he caught her. Her ears pricked. The silence unnerved her. The air’s emptiness felt like Maytree beside her had died. They looked at each other. —I feel like I’ve lost consciousness, he said, hoarse. He was in his early forties. His face was open. He seemed not to have noticed that consciousness in him was a wind.

  The next morning, as Maytree’s skull pinched off arterial flow to her arm, she told him—she grew talkative at such times—that when her mother left for New York, she had asked her how she could leave Provincetown. —What do you like better in New York? —You’ll laugh, her mother said. —No I won’t. —All right: It’s the light. Lou had laughed. She loved the silver light in New York canyons too.

  And where was Lou’s father? No one knew. In Marblehead, when she was a tall and bookish twelve her mother asked her one night to set the table for two. Her father often missed dinner. She and her mother sat to chilled consommé madrilène, roast potatoes, and lamb. Beyond the dining room windows, Marblehead harbor grayed. The sea floated a red oval: a cloud reflecting the sun now down. Her lovely mother’s composure broke. She covered her face and left. Lou ate in silence and eyed the cold water. The next day her father missed breakfast.

  At middle school a day later her friend Phoebe told her, You didn’t know?—that her father had left town with her eponymous aunt Lou, her mother’s sister. Of her tall father she retained several small memories and one big one. He loved her; they loved each other. She stood behind his chair and smelled his hair. She never saw him again, or heard from him. Someone said he married her aunt Lou and was spending the summer in Rough and Ready, California. Her mother’s face hardened and stuck. She never spoke of the man. Lou knew then that her mother was tallying her father’s faults and perfidies. She did not know then that polishing this grudge would be her mother’s lone project for the balance of her life. Lou was in college when her mother moved to the West Village and gave her the house on Cape Cod Bay.

  Sometimes now Lou searched old albums to test her proposition that nothing so compels a woman as the boyhood of the man she loves. She saw a snapshot of boy Maytree in cap and knickers dwarfed by his cross-eyed father on a wharf. In the prints, Maytree’s cap’s shadow blacked most of his face. Here again he crouched on the beach, as at a starting block, between his hairy mother and his visibly half-dead grandmother, in a wind harsh with that present’s brine. In those prints she saw unease in the boy, as if he had been scanning the offing for the man.

  No, it was she who sought for the man in the child. She could not find him, so the boy seemed to her lost in a deafening wind.
The boy seemed—wonderfully—to need her without knowing it. But he did not, not yet. Perhaps, she asked later, he never did?

  PART ONE

  THAT WINTER THE CROWD on the frozen corner parted for Lou, saying, He’s okay, it’s all right. She saw Petie across Maytree’s arms; his legs dangled. She saw Maytree’s bent head and his bombardier jacket’s fleece. He was passing his chin back and forth across Petie’s forehead. —Just a hurt foot, someone said. No one fools a mother. Fractures to both legs, probably pelvis, possibly back: quadriplegic. With one hand Petie held his right leg. His eyes lodged back just beneath his shed-roof browbone as Maytree’s did. Maytree’s pale eyes were lights glimpsed in a cave; Petie’s eyes were themselves caves. When he saw her, he smiled and turned his head away. —It’s all right, Lou said. Maytree rubbed his cheek against Petie’s forehead.

  Lou reached for Petie and saw Maytree secure his knees as he started to hand him over. Petie jerked and said, Yipes. No use moving him. She felt his cold pea jacket. She saw he was not going to cry.

  Lou stroked Petie and sought Maytree’s eyes. He looked up the street and said that a Zevar brother had examined Petie, guessed a simple fracture, and drove to fetch local Dr. New.

  How could any mother let her child ride a bicycle? Petie lodged in the lobing sheepskin elbow of Maytree’s bombardier jacket. Possibly in shock, he lifted his head and waved at friends.

  —Where is the driver? Maytree bit his lips. She knew he would not curse in public. —They chased him on bikes. Someone had moved Petie’s mashed bike to the road’s edge. Petie often, as even now, seemed to be running for governor. At this intersection, face square and white, he hollered and joked and grabbed hands.