That night we drank, we ate, we danced one dance at the hotel, and came walking back along the beach, hand-holding, shoes in the spare hand, walking in the wet where the tide had run out.
We sat on the fiberglass deck of the canted sailboat and looked at the stars. “What can scare you,” she said, “when you squeak through, when you know how narrow the escape was, is all the crazy accidents and coincidences that got you to where you are. You let me out of a dark room. I’d have stayed in there thinking it was just as dark every where. Son of a gun! If you hadn’t found Gloria long ago and put her back together, if she hadn’t gotten a job at that place where Daddy was staying… It can drive you out of your mind. There were so many choices and you don’t know why, really, they went one way instead of another way. Even take something like Daddy not marrying Gretchen. It could have gone either way. Oh, how all the tongues would have flapped! But that wouldn’t have bothered him. He was too busy to care what people thought.”
I got up restlessly and walked about ten feet, sat on my heels, scooped up sand, and drifted it through my fingers.
Is something the matter?“
“I don’t know.”
“Travis, for a week at least you’ve been going off somewhere. I have to repeat things I say. May I say something?”
“Why not?”
“If you’re getting broody about this girl, don’t waste yourself. I love you and I always will, in a special and private and personal way that is sort of… off to one side of what the rest of my life is. going to be. One day this ends and I go back and I tear my painting all the way down to bedrock, and then I put it together again with some life and juice and fire in it, and I am going to look up and there is going to be some great guy there who wants the kind of life I want, and we are going to breed up some fat babies, and laugh a lot, and get old and say it was all great right up to the end.”
“I wasn’t worried about you turning into an albatross, kid. I’m worried about all the little things that didn’t fit right. That Gorba thing is over and it isn’t over. I got some answers. I got some salvage. I missed part of it. When you said that your father might have married Gretchen, I got a little resonance off that. Maybe she would have made him a good little wife. She got along with you and your brother. And she had her mama there to keep things to rights. Anna Ottlo had her widower employer in a great bind. But she worked out an alternate choice, the Kemmer boy. Why?”
“Well, wouldn’t you say it was just that sort of… humility of the Old-World German? Respect for the learned doctor?”
“But she was in the New World where things are not the same. And you always want a better deal for your kids than you got.”
“She was very harsh with Gretchen.”
“And damned indifferent to her own grandchildren. It doesn’t fit that… kind of hearty; hausfrau cook-up-a-storm image. Flour on the elbows, goodies in the oven, house clean as a whistle.”
“Maybe she knew Daddy would never stand still for it.”
“That’s not my image of him. I think he had quite a load of guilt out of pronging that girl-child while your mother was dying, and the pregnancy meant more guilt, and marriage would have cleared it all off the books.”
“Does it really make any difference?”
“With no life of her own really, except through your father, who was a damned busy man, and probably used the house the way other men use a residential club, you’d think Anna would want to be closer to her own daughter and the grandbabies.”
“Oh, I think she had something else going for her.”
“What do you mean?”
“I hadn’t thought of it in a long time. Roger was home from school on vacation. He went to some kind of a party and then he went to a place where people parked and smooched. When he left he turned his lights on too soon. That’s bad form. Lo and behold, they shone into a car and right on Anna. He didn’t see the man. The next day he tried to kid her about it. She took such a clout at him it scared him. He barely got his face out of the way. She had a grater in her hand and he told me it would have taken the hide and meat off right down to the bone. He said it scared her too. She cried and said it was because she was so insulted. She was a decent woman. She did not do things like that or go to such places. He told me he was positive it was Anna. But he didn’t try to argue,the point or kid her about it, not after that first time. She was very upset. We agreed that she’d probably been out there. It seemed pretty hilarious that she should have a boyfriend. I’m just telling this to show that… she could have had other emotional outlets. I know we weren’t one. She kept us warm, clean, and fed, and that was it.”
“She was apparently very fond of Gloria. But she didn’t tell Gloria that Gretchen and Gorba had made it legal, and she didn’t tell her that better relations had been established and that she was visiting the family almost every Sunday.”
“She was never one for talking about herself. I remember when we were studying World War II and the rise of National Socialism I tried to get her to tell me about Germany when Hitler took over before the war started and she just wouldn’t talk about it. She said it was too sad and terrible. She said that she and Gretchen had been in a camp, for a while and it was better to forget such things. Her husband and all her other relatives were dead and she wanted to forget it, not talk about it.”
So I dropped it, admired the stars. We stacked our clothes on the sailboat and went skinnydipping, and then went into the dark cottage and rinsed off the salt in a shared shower, and scrambled into the hasty bed.
As I was bobbling along in that dark current toward sleep Heidi walked her fingers along my chest and said, “Mister? You awake?”
“Oh, come on!”
“Don’t leap to conclusions, friend. You haven’t got the strength. I just remembered something. When we were helping get the house shaped up for Gloria to come back from the hospital, I was talking to Susan about the young kids, about relatives and so on. I asked about Freddy’s grandmother Kemmer in Florida arid if she’d let her know that her ex-daughter-in-law had died. And Susan said that Karl Kemmer’s mother had died back in nineteen sixty or sixty-one. So I said I was positive that was who Anna had gone to visit in Florida, her old friend. Susan said it must have been some other Kemmer. I was going to ask Gloria about it if she seemed up to that kind of talk, and then I forgot it completely until now.”
So I was awake. Awake a long time. She drifted off. She purred into my throat. Her arm twitched and she muttered something. When I made the decision, I fell asleep. I told her in the morning over second coffee. Her face fell, but she tried to whip up a gallant smile.“
“No, dear girl. Just because we check out of here doesn’t mean you’re going to get away just yet. I’ve got a shamefully neglected houseboat sitting up there in Fort Lauderdale, neglected mostly on account of you. You’re going to earn your keep. You’re going to learn how to chip and scrape and sand and paint, and when the Busted Flush looks brand-new, you can go back to Illinois.”
The smile became real. “I work cheap. Board and bed.”
“So okay. Start packing.”
“You know, you keep saying that.”
THIRTEEN
COMMUNICATION WAS far simpler back on the main land.
I phoned Glory from the lounge of the Flush on Sunday a little before noon. She sounded a little more like herself, but uncertain, subdued.
“But where are you, Trav?”
“Back aboard the Flush. Taking my ease. There’s a tall exhausted blonde puttering around in the background scouring the copper pots and muttering about mildew on the cabin curtains.”