Was I not him?
Were we not all cannibals dispensing with the defenseless, concerned only with our own survival?
“Is there anything you want to tell me?” he asked.
I considered this. I wanted to tell him that the fact that he didn’t eat people didn’t make him Mr. Wonderful, never had. That he’d never fooled my mother, nor me. But I felt sorry for him, strangely enough, so I kept this to myself.
“I’m going to be all right,” I said.
I did want to tell him that Boris was dead, for Ann’s sake. It would have been the generous thing to do, but also stupid. Generosity usually was. Ann would sell some large canvas in the next couple of months. She’d have to go out to the storage space in Williamsburg and by then Boris’s reek would be more than the cedar chest could handle. She might even figure it out on her own, the fire I’d lit that day to burn the manuscripts, the coincidence of his disappearance. Soon, no doubt, everyone would figure everything out, without my help.
“Dad,” I said. “I have to get going. Do you have any cash?”
“What?” he said.
“Do you have any cash?”
“Where are you going?”
I had decided to head to Canada, which was only six hours away. It was time to try my luck in a new country.
“Where are you going?” he repeated.
“I can’t tell you that,” I said.
My father looked suddenly old, tired beyond belief. His shoulders slumped and from where I was standing, looking down on his head, I could see that his hair had thinned and soon his scalp would be as visible as it had been when he was a baby. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. He had a couple of hundred dollars in there, and some smaller bills. He looked at the money, than back at me. He said, “You know I loved your mother.”
“I know, Dad.”
“You know I would have done anything to save her.”
“I know that.” I went to squat by him and placed my hands on his knees. “Don’t worry. Everything will work out.”
My father looked up at me, utterly defeated, and handed over the cash. He said, “Somehow I think I will never see you again.”
31
The night of the big snowstorm my father managed to call home before the lines went dead.
“I need you to be a big girl,” my father said to me. I was ten years old. “I’m going to have to spend the night in a hotel in Boston.” He gave me the phone number. “Now listen closely. You should get some wood, a lot, before it gets dark. There’s a good chance that you’ll lose power. You and your mother should sleep in the living room.”
“Yes, Dad,” I said.
“And most importantly, make sure she takes her medicine. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
My mother was napping on the couch. Her feet were pulled up under a wool blanket and her black hair spread over the pillow. Her skin was pale, translucent, and I could see her eyes twitching in a dream. Her lips pulled up for a moment over her teeth and her breathing quickened. For a moment I was stopped by her beauty. She looked like Snow White in her glass coffin, somehow alive but more dead. I had the pill and a glass of water for her to take it with. I’d stacked a pile of wood beside the fireplace but the power was still on, the house bright and humming with it.
“Mommy,” I said. And she woke up and smiled. “I have your medicine.”
She propped herself up on an elbow and took the pill. She looked at it. “These pills make me so sleepy,” she said. She leaned over to the potted palm and dug a small hole with her index finger into which she dropped the pill. She covered it over with soil then took the glass of water and poured into the pot. “Maybe it will grow into a big medicine tree,”she said. “This is our secret.”
Then she got up from the couch, wrapping the blanket around her shoulders like a shawl. My father never let her drink— he said it interacted badly with her pills—but she liked to drink and I remember her opening a bottle of wine. “What shall we do tonight?” she said. “Maybe there’s something inappropriate for you on TV.”
We started watching a movie, something I found quite dull—especially the bedroom scenes—but soon the power quit and I was saved.
“Now what?” she said.
“I’ll light a fire,” I replied.
We took the cushions off the couch and arranged some sort of pallet on the floor. I brought down comforters and pillows from upstairs. Outside, the wind howled and all the doors in our old house rattled in response. My mother and I sat on the cushions, warm and happy, staring into the fire. She was halfway through the bottle of wine.
“Katherine,” she said, placing her hand on my shoulder and then on my face and then on my hair, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I want to be you,” I said.
“Me? No. Be something better.”
I thought again. “I want to be famous.”
“For what?”
“Does it matter?” I asked with complete sincerity.
“I don’t know,” she responded.
“I suppose I will have to be successful.”
“Maybe not. I think success is overrated. Think of your father.”
And we laughed.
“Sometimes,” she said sadly, “you can be famous for being a magnificent failure.”
“Really?”
She nodded. The snow was drifting up against the house, two feet high against the back sliders. I could see it piling up on the windowsills, sealing us in. “Think of the Donner Party. Do you know of any of the other parties that made it across the Sierras with no problems?”
“No,” I said.
“We remember them because they didn’t make it. Only a few did. The rest died. And they’re famous.”
“I don’t want to die like that,” I said. “Maybe I could be one of the people who made it out. Who else is famous for failing?”
“Do you know who Franklin is?” she asked.
“Benjamin Franklin?”
“He was successful,” she said disparagingly. “I meant Sir John Franklin, the explorer. He was a magnificent failure. He died in the ice trying to find the Northwest Passage. He took all his men with him.”
“What’s the Northwest Passage?”
“Franklin was trying to find a way to get from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean by going north, rather than south around the bottom of South America. He was with two steamships. They disappeared into the ice and were only found ten years later, on King William Island.”
“Where’s that?”
“Up, up, up north. Somewhere between Greenland and Canada.”
“Tell me about Franklin.”
“Franklin’s first failure was in Canada. He had a plan to go up the Snare River and then down the Coppermine. He was going to find the western entrance of the Northwest Passage, but he really didn’t know what he was doing. He had voyageurs with him—mixed-blood French and Chippewa Indian— to hunt and navigate. And he had a surgeon to fix people. And some English to be English when they found the entrance to the Northwest Passage. It took him a long time. He went up the Snare River in birchbark canoes, then down the Coppermine. At times the canoes had to be carried. Summers were short and he kept getting stuck in the snow. Sometimes it was sixty degrees below zero. He mapped about three hundred miles of coastline, wanting to go further, but there wasn’t enough food to go on. At that point there wasn’t enough food to turn back either, but he had no choice. It was the middle of August when his group finally headed north again. There was snow. The voyageurs were sent on hunting parties, but they found little. One voyageur fell ill and had to be tended to. Franklin broke the party up into three groups. The doctor, two Englishmen, and another voyageur, Michel, stayed behind with the sick man. Franklin pushed on with the other men, then he divided that group into two. The fast people he sent ahead to get help while he walked on slowly with some others. But the third group, the one with the sick man…”