It was a subject he’d avoided. Strenuously. Assiduously. Even, it seemed to her, fearfully. Yes, he assured her, he wanted her to have his child. Yes, he wanted to live out on the river for a while, fishing, crabbing, doing odd jobs around the marina to pick up the little he needed to get by — a dollar here and there for used paperbacks, a carton of eggs, the occasional soft drink. And yes, he loved her (though the question really didn’t have any meaning, did it?). But she was another man’s wife and things were fine the way they were. Besides, he couldn’t see the future at all. Not yet, anyway, not yet.
But now it was out in the open and there was no turning back: she was going to leave Depeyster for him. “I could live here on the boat with you,” she went on, staring at the floor, the words coming in a spate, “and we could go upriver and dock at Manitou or Garrison or Cold Spring. Or maybe on the other side of the river — at Highland Falls or Middle Hope. I have some money, my own money, a trust fund my mother’s father set up for me when I was a girl, and I’ve never touched it, you know, thinking that someday—” but she couldn’t go on, because now, suddenly, unconsciously, she was looking into his face.
And his face was terrible. No longer the face of the stoic who could have posed for the frieze on the back of a nickel, nor even of the strange charismatic man who’d led her across the threshold of the bright little room at the Hiawatha Motel or taught her to slip through the woods like the ghost of a deer, it was the face of the raider, the avenger, the face beneath the raised tomahawk. He sat up. Shoved himself violently from the bunk and stooped over her, his back, shoulders, neck melding with the dark low rafters. “I don’t want you,” he said. “I don’t want your half-breed bastard, or your quarter-breed either.”
His face was in hers. She could smell the fish on his breath, the sweat dried in the armpit of his shirt. “Destroyer,” he hissed. “Usurper. She-wolf. Charity Lady.” He pursed his lips, almost as if he were about to kiss her, and held her with his fierce unstinting gaze. “I spit on you.”
The next morning, the Kitchawank was gone.
Depeyster’s voice—“Joanna! Joanna, get that, will you?”—came to her as if from another dimension, as if she were trying to conduct her life on the cold floor of the river and the current drove all the words down. “Joanna!”
It was the door. Children were at the door — she could see them through the window — dressed as witches, ghosts, imps, Indian braves, Indian princesses. A jack-o’-lantern leered from the corner, where her husband, who couldn’t have loved the tradition more were he a child himself, had set out a bowl of candy corn and Hershey’s Kisses. Numbly she rose from the chair, fought the tug of the current, and fumbled to open the door. Their voices piped around her, swallowed her up, and their ugly little paws clutched at the contents of the bowl she’d somehow managed to lift from the table and prop against the swell of her belly. Then they were gone and she was struggling up-stream to sink ponderously into the waiting chair.
“Joanna? Sweetheart?”
She turned in the direction of his voice, and there he was, in silk hose and knee breeches, in a square-skirted coat with stupendous brass buttons, in buckled shoes and sugarloaf hat. “How do I look?” he said, adjusting the brim of his hat in the mirror over the mantelpiece.
How did he look? He looked like a refugee from one of Rembrandt’s group portraits, like a colonist, a pioneer, like the patroon who’d wrested the place from the Indians. He looked, down to the smallest detail, exactly as he looked each year for LeClerc Outhouse’s Halloween party. There was one year, a long time back, when he was still young and adventurous, that he’d dressed as Pieter Stuyvesant, pegleg and all, but ever after he’d been the patroon. After all, he told her, why fool with perfection? “You look fine,” she said, the words trailing from her mouth as if encapsulated in the little bubbles they used in the funny papers.
She was turning away, already falling back into the depths, when he surprised her. Awakened her. Crossed the room to resuscitate her, to lift her, fathom by fathom, from the depths. It began with the percussive release of a cork, and the touch of a cold long-stemmed glass. “A toast,” he proposed, and he was right there at her side, his voice as clear as if it were only air that separated them after all.
She looked up at him, numb, stiff as a corpse, all the weight of all those tons of water pressing down on her, and fought to lift her glass. “A toast,” she repeated.
He was beaming, grinning, crossing his eyes and licking his lips with the sheer crazy joy of it, and he bent to take her free hand and hold it till he had her full and undivided attention. When he spoke, he dropped his voice to parody the deep unctuous tones of Wendell Abercrombie, the Episcopalian minister. “To the memory of Peletiah Crane,” he said, holding his glass aloft as if it were a chalice.
So deep down was she, it took her a moment before she understood. “You mean, he’s … he’s dead?”
“Yes, yes, yes!” he crowed, and she thought he was going to kick up his heels and caper around the room like a goat. “Tonight. This afternoon. Just after dark.”
She couldn’t help herself. She looked at his face, his costume, the empty glass in his hand, and felt herself coming up for air. She didn’t stop to think about the propriety of it — this sudden joy at the news of the death of a fellow creature — because something was happening to her face, something that hadn’t happened in so long it was a novelty: she was smiling. There she was, giving back the joy and triumph on her husband’s face, her dimples showing, the light rising in her eyes.
“Marguerite just called,” he added, and then, in his excitement, he was down on his knees before her, sweeping off the antique hat and pressing his cheek to the bulge of her stomach. “Joanna, Joanna,” he murmured, “I can’t tell you how much this means to me, the baby, the property, the whole beautiful thing that’s happening to us. …” Under the circumstances, it was the most natural thing in the world to do, and she wasn’t even aware she was doing it: she took his face in her hands, held him to her, and bent to touch her lips to the crown of his head.
They finished the champagne. He sat at her feet, rocking back and forth over his glass, all the while chattering on about breeds and temperaments, about saddles, riding clothes and whether she thought they’d be able to find a good part-time groom and maybe a riding teacher too — for the boy, he meant. He was so ebullient, so full of the moment, not even Mardi could dampen his mood. She paraded down the hallway in her kitten costume (half a dozen mascara whiskers, a tail of twisted pipe cleaners and a leather corset so low-cut in front and pinched in the rear she couldn’t have worn it to the beach), and Joanna watched her pause at the front door, begging for a confrontation, but Dipe wouldn’t have it. He turned away as if he didn’t recognize her and went on with what he was saying even as the door slammed behind him. “Listen, Joanna,” he said, “I know this isn’t really your cup of tea and I know you’ve passed on it the last couple of years, but do you think you might want to come with me tonight?” And before she could answer, before she could think, he was running on, as if to forestall her objections: “You don’t even have to change if you don’t want to — you can go like this, like Pocahontas, like an Indian princess, and to hell with them. Your outfit’ll go great with this,” he laughed, plucking at the collar of the museum piece he was wearing.
It was then that she finally caught her breath, then that she felt herself shaking it off once and for all, coming up, up, till she broke free and filled her lungs to surfeit with the sweet, light, superabundant air. “No,” she said, her voice soft, yet steady, “I think I’ll change.”