The Maytrees: A Novel Read online

  To drive her mental cylinders Lou climbed to and up Pilgrim Monument daily in every weather. Sometimes she entered fog. From the monument’s top she loosed Maytree like sand. She saw the sand drop onto roofs and yards. After only seven or eight weeks’ relinquishing Maytree, she saw the task would take practice, like anything else. She planned to work at it for a year, shedding every grain of claim. After seven months she had what she called “a grip on letting go.” When anything unwise arose in her henceforth, she attended to it by climbing the monument, at whose top she opened her palm.

  So she pulled her own stakes in the matter, stakes she herself pitched. That she could withdraw them was news. She could guy out Orion and spread him like a spinnaker, a chute to fly beyond her own self-love. If earth’s sky got confining, there were plenty more. Why did monks fast? They had to be half dead to do this? For if you knew a continent was there, you could find it again and again. Could she detach from Petie? Of course not, not now when he needed her. But in our culture parents released a child’s person like a balloon. Of course, they kept the love.

  It was then Lou began to wonder: If overcoming self-centeredness was the goal, then why were we born into a selfish stew? And who even studied this question? Would the Cairos know any books to bring her? For she meant to keep this cast of mind and renew it.

  Two decades later, as it happened, while she was washing around Deary’s deepest and most noisome bedsore, she asked herself: If she, Lou, had known how long her first half-inch beginning to let go would take—and how long her noticing and renouncing owning and her turning her habits, and beginning the slimmest self-mastery whose end was nowhere in sight—would she have begun? Would she have turned herself over like a row of salt hay? Tossed herself to loose her own chaff? It took her months to learn that she could get clean for more than a minute at a time. Consciously she looked out for resentment, self-cherishing, and envy. Over years she formed the habit of deflecting them before they dug in. But she lived through those years in any case, and now she lived from that steady ground she won. More distances opened as she opened. Not that town, national, and world life as it was going did not give her fits.

  Moreover, as bonus side effect, she got to do this—to dip terrycloth in a warm-water basin in sight of the sea, and wash Deary’s old skin, and irrigate her bedsores’ holes, and change the water and change the cloth and do it again. Plus, she now had a houseful. If having a houseful was a desideratum. She might have debated it—at this far-future point on Deary’s bed’s edge—if she had any time.

  AFTER HIS BONE KNIT, Petie became Pete, who pondered facts. What did sweet-eyed Deary, his former beach playmate, who drew him even when he was eleven and triggered his fancy and remorse, see in his shriveling, peeling father—who must be well over forty, with his knuckly hands too big for their wrists, his white hairs in his nose and ears, the wrinkles in front of his ears, and his notebooks fusty, and his jokes embarrassing, and the books he wrote so thin you could use them as shims? Surely Deary loved and was loved generally; she could take her pick. Why pick a man who kept saying a priori? Surely his father had aged beyond any passion save his old chore of amassing lore to take to his grave. Maybe Deary needed a live-in carpenter. That badly? He did good work.

  On his mother’s dresser and on the kitchen wall he saw his father in photographs she likely left up for his benefit: his father raising a striper by a gill; his father and himself in silhouette, rowing. He saw in the photographs his father’s tight shoulders, loose smile, long limbs, and eyes a stripe of shadow hid like the blindfold of a man about to be shot.

  A few winters ago he broke his leg at that frozen intersection. His father, holding him across his arms, had openly kissed his head and muttered something. His father, it turned out, knew he was running off with Deary the next morning.

  What gave adults the cheer to tolerate their hypocrisy? Even his mother praised generosity and hoarded; she preached industry and barely worked. Perhaps every generation passes to the next, to hand down to yet more children, an untouched trunk of virtues. The adults describe the trunk’s contents to the young and never open it.

  Pete no longer told his mother much. When he was ten he had ensured, kindly enough, that she stop instructing him. If she would only quit telling him it was cold when it was cold. At fifteen he gave her little time. She was probably struggling. When his father left, she had cut her hair. Outside he used to see her by the monument then, or on another of the seven hills, hatless and red-nosed from sun or frost. Once she abruptly and without antecedent said—He is the most noble and considerate man I ever met. Pete nodded, ducked, and kept moving, fast.

  Now in summers and falls Pete passed clear nights on a sleeping porch. If he woke, he saw Orion’s torso rise beyond Truro and climb. At dawn the hunter was all abroad and fading, like his memory of his father, like a dead man’s arising weak. He rolled on his belly; he bit a fingernail and turned west to Bonobos’ house. In classrooms he imagined real Orion—the Orion of the dunes’ black night, whose visible arms held visible weapons—as the hunter was crossing behind the hot sky invisible as an Apache.

  To what goal might a young man’s ambition run? He hoped to crew on a fishing boat and finally own a boat and catch and sell each fish in season. And privately—

  Walking to school one morning through sleet, he began tracking his alewife thoughts as a game. He learned he did not think. He witnessed ghost parts and motes on parade disappear. A girl named Marie several grades older; her smile; his spinster teacher who for all he knew was once the object of his father’s lascivious eyes; his damnable father who didn’t know even how to take care of his mother. These bits deployed before his gaze as football fans after the last kick swarm. Now he and others roamed the world feeding or vaccinating people, palpating mastitis in zebus. Crowds came, girls in saris, there they went. He had no idea this gabble reeled and garbled his head ever, let always.

  Quailing, he imagined aiming his mind as a knight aims his sword. Could anyone, has anyone ever tried to, master his own mind using only that mind as tool? Did his brain contain a pack of selves like Musketeers, each smaller and farther back and waving a sword? And what might such a stunt win, apart from peace of mind? What man his age wanted peace of mind? His agitation fueled his power. Right? But what kind of power did a man have when screaming meemies ruled his thoughts?

  For the next few years especially, and long after, Pete played at maneuvering his own ephemera like toy boats. Surely, he thought, it must be easier to drill a troop of baboons. Either the task was impossible or impossible for him.

  He failed to still his bilge. He could replace its slosh with only more slosh. Why was this basic control so almighty tough? Other people appeared to think. He easily persuaded his fingers to write. He could not get his brain to do anything. Was he crazy? In real life he never stole cars or slugged guys or raped girls—so how could these stale schools of resentment, these monotonous flappings of weed, how could these minnow filmstrips unman him? They were not wishes or instincts. They were floating junk the tide rocked. He was taking pains to watch his brain take out trash. Indifferently, those windrows buried and blinded him. Why attend this nonsense? Because his hope of mastering himself attracted him.

  How hard could it be? Someday he would appear before his awed father as a perfected human. A fisherman who fed hungry Africans. So perfect he never felt superior, even to his weak and contrite father. A youth’s thought no less idle than any windblown straw, it still stuck him like a dart.

  The following summers he grew; he set and pulled fish-nets all night from a wagging boat; he worked on himself. Winters in his solitudes he worked on himself. He had begun by remembering his father’s coveralls. One leg’s pocket held a wood carpenter’s rule that folded, foot by white foot, to make a ten-ply stack.

  PART TWO

  WITHIN TWO HOURS OF their crossing the Sagamore bridge, on a motel bed, Deary welcomed Maytree into her arms with gales of laughter that beaded on her gums. Then s
he slept palms together under her cheek like a charade for sleep.

  Maytree prized fidelity like everyone else. He looked at the motel’s knotty pine ceiling. Was he evil, and Deary evil? Who has not loved twice? More than twice? Who has never broken a heart? Should his first high-school sweetheart have stayed true to him as she grew on ahead? He saw her often. Jolly, she wrangled grandchildren.

  Surely he must have been, at thirty when he courted Lou, shallow. Nothing had ever vaulted him to such an elated pitch as his slow awareness these past weeks of good old Deary Hightoe, during a general glance he saw only peripherally—of her high-arched eyes’ across Cairos’ porch scorching the skin on the side of his face as a flatiron burns.

  He recognized that when, after two years, his infatuation with Lou dwindled, neither love nor happiness withdrew. Often he fell in love with her clarity or her eyelids afresh, and he whistled “Clancy Lowered the Boom.” After eight years or so, had he forgot to marvel at her depth of spirit their intimacy revealed? His lasting marriage mightily outweighed and banned the puny flirting and responding-to-flirting that topple others. He and Lou trusted; they confided. They made love with less urgency and more sustenance. Theirs was not a fire they rushed to douse, but one they fed slowly. They loved and reared Petie. They maintained the shack as a demented project. She listened to him; she always knew what he was talking about; she laughed. They loved and read good novels, good poetry. Had he stopped loving Lou? Not at all. His abiding heart-to-heart with her merely got outshouted.

  By equating fidelity with neither flirting nor responding to flirting, Maytree left a flank open. He never flirted with Deary. She never flirted with him. They fell in love, love unlooked-for. The same thing took place at least once before. Relieved, oblivious then, he read it in a book and copied it. “Try and realize”—Levin told Oblonsky—“that this is not love. I have been in love but this is not the same thing. It is not my feeling but some external power that has seized me…such happiness does not exist on earth.”

  Try and realize. Maytree admired Tolstoy’s giving Levin the truth to say and his making fun of it fondly.

  They rented on the Maine island they saw with Sooner Roy. Maytree repaired five of the twelve wood-framed houses on the island. Deary baked gingerbread in square pans and steamed for it a translucent lemon sauce. He saw her carry the gingerbread on heaped, waxed-paper-wrapped plates. She billowed through woods and fields all summer barefoot to give it to neighbors. She took turns with Maytree rowing ashore for food, gas, lumber, asphalt tile. They bathed in a clawfoot tub. Once while he knelt to dry her she asked, How many roofs could you do a year? He laughed. Her flesh dipped wherever he pressed—pure woman.

  —I’m not a roofer. Now your other side.

  —I’ll give your harness bells a shake, she said when it was his turn. He smelled her vapor. He noticed, not for the first time, that rowing had callused her palms.

  Increasingly he found her working over ruled books and newsprint tablets at their table, wielding a knife-sharpened pencil. She told him, surprised daily, that she liked keeping his business books. Business? he thought; I charge only materials and time. She told him that, short of burning cash, there was no more expensive way to light a room than burning candles. She bought three Aladdin lamps, and prophesied the week two years hence when the lamps would finish “paying for themselves”—a usage that always amused him. She replaced her torn filmy clothes first with shirts and dungarees, then with blouses and slacks.

  On the bed she curled under his arm. Of course, she told him, she missed Provincetown and its sky. Of course she would take Maytree home to die, or he would take her—promise? Maytree humored her. He tried not to think of Provincetown at all, not to remember Lou and Petie. Who would both hate him now. He had chosen his own disgrace. He would probably do it again.

  Maytree worked at building both on the island and off. Old Mainers had settled rivers and coves. These new people built on bare coasts and hilltops, as if they meant to heat with wind. He turned down most jobs, to save his mornings for poetry. On a September day Deary looked up from a ledger.

  —You could take up lobstering. Her baby face! She was older than him, let alone Lou; she sprang to her impulses like a child.

  —Lobstering? For a living? Sun heated his shirt and clavicle through the window.

  —For half a living. The other half is working on houses.

  —The other half is poetry, my love. We don’t need more money.

  Best not tell her how dramatically, if he got rich enough to learn lobstering and to start up, local lobstermen would discourage him.

  —How many roofs can this small island need? How many summer people’s screened porches? He bent his nose to her hair; its smell stirred him.

  —I thought you liked the island. Shall we move to the mainland?

  —Could we? To Camden? We can get our licenses.

  What? He kept forgetting she had a degree in architecture. By suppertime they were moving to Camden.

  Maine’s beauty was not of sky but of earth. Sunlight hit black spruces and died, or sprawled in fields. This cold forest stopped his eyes. Brown needles underfoot became his sand. He smelled black humus and rock like wet pipe.

  Their new house smelled of mildew and smoke from a long-ago house fire. Deary insisted they buy a respectable, meaning too-big, house. He heard everyone split and stack wood. Year-round he heard chain saws. They got their licenses.

  Maine, he found, had social classes. Educated people sat at dinner parties discussing the news and drinking—all of a sudden—wine. Only the children knew how to enjoy themselves. Enjoyment required, in his view, at the very least, easy people, a record player, or a drummer, or a piano player, or a deck of cards and chips, jokes or funny stories, or some sort of ball. And not before or after dinner, but alongside a big buffet. He granted his was a general failure to mature.

  Once Deary whispered from his lap, I miss being poor! And could they adopt a baby? He felt her lips and breath. He knew she was only keeping him abreast of her flitting thoughts. Yet he never knew—connaître, wissen—what she was in essence. On the Cape he had fancied her not quite of this world, Ariel asleep on sand. Or was she of this earth, earthy?

  SIX YEARS AFTER MAYTREE and Deary flew the coop, Lou and Cornelius were making a mess eating sea-clam chowder at her green kitchen table. Lou saw the sun spread like a gull for its landing on the sea. Cornelius had wandered in from the dunes for food and mail. Lou knew that five or six times a year, for these six years, his mail included a letter from Maytree. A new one came today. He read it and passed it across the table. Lou saw that Maytree had typed the letter and Deary appended a note, apparently written against a ruler, wishing everyone—everyone twice underlined—all best. Did they give architecture degrees to people who bubble-dotted their i’s? Like the others, this letter of Maytree’s was easygoing and reticent. To Lou, Maytree and Deary both had changed into old friends whose life together she followed with an affectionate interest almost like Cornelius’s. For years she had read his letters without turning a hair.

  It shamed him, Maytree wrote, to be a builder filling the coast. How many rooms could the new people actually need? —As many as they can pay for! Deary wrote in the margin. What wives would clean the houses? New people asked for many bedrooms because they truly believed their children and spouses and grandchildren and their own friends and their friends’ children would pass all their summers, if not all their free time, there with them, simultaneously. The empty bedrooms amounted to cargo cult, clearing airstrips to attract planes that never came.

  Lou liked reading Maytree’s letter in his familiar voice. That they were once, to put it mildly, intimate, belonged to the realm of far-fetched facts, like Io and Ganymede’s circling Jupiter. Lou pictured his freckled stick figure slap-dancing on a shake. Deary managed his business. How? Lou and Cornelius had to laugh.

  The next day she ordered Maytree’s new book from Wesleyan. When it came, she saw it was a long poem: b
oy-girl twin halves—Plato’s old thought. He set the twins in modern Greece. From his usual poetic line he had subtracted a foot. Perhaps the cold took his breath away.

  That November Lou began painting again. It was never too late to record the faces you love. She thought watercolor suited beginners. Pete’s frontal portrait looked like a beady-eyed fanatic or a police sketch. Next Lou painted Jane Cairo in profile, too-small hands holding Victory. Perhaps if she could draw. She burned her tries. People praised her humility because she so seldom spoke. They did not know her ambition: a show in town.

  One year she found a scheme and stuck with it the long balance of her life: foreground of disturbing beach, middle distance disturbing sea, and sky above, disturbing. Iced trash, tarnished waves, clouds like glyphs. Graywacke stones, dirty sea ice, stubby far plane. Waves of varying length, like words, and in parallel lines, like type, moved left to right on prevailing westerlies. So watching storm waves in the bay made her eyes move just as reading did, and seas looked like lines of italic type she tried to read. She painted Nekkar in Boötes (“ox driver”), and the elusive “loincloth.” She liked nocturnes. Vega was a blue dot that taught nothing. Scorpio reared over chalkline breakers. Hercules held his club fast over the roof gutter. Soon in Provincetown’s expanding glare Hercules would not have a club, or even arms.

  In thin oils she depicted clumsy beaches and clouds. Their foregrounds and middle grounds showed jetsam and wrack, stained waves, brown bottles, steamer shells, broken china, waxed paper, church keys, foil, nails sticking through in lumber, clamshells, tires, purses, shoes—only two or three objects on each canvas. With a sable brush she graphed each torn string of a crab trap against dirt pink sky. Color was local. It allowed an ocean like red marcelled hair. Everything was littoral. Sandpipers pecked child footprints in mud. Storm sea like a ripsaw blade, and clouds in a mumble nearing. She would no more scumble a cloud than kill a child.