Читать книгу Cost - Roxana Robinson - Страница 8

“I think I'll walk down to the cove,” Edward announced.

They had finished lunch and were watching the afternoon light slant across the meadow. Edward stood, though he could not completely straighten. He was bent slightly at the hip, the joint stalled.

“Are you sure?” Julia asked. The path to the cove was uneven, the shoreline studded with sinkholes. Her father seemed both fragile and reckless.

“Yes.” Edward took a step toward the edge of the porch, his legs apart for balance, his arms wide like outriggers.

“I'll come with you.” Julia took his arm.

Edward shook off her hand. “I don't need help,” he said. “This isn't Mount Everest.” Did he look so fragile?

“Maybe I'll come, too,” Katharine said.

“Mother, I don't think this is a good idea for you,” Julia said.

“Maybe not, but it'll be fun,” Katharine said cheerily.

Julia turned: her mother was up, too, smiling, leaning on her cane.

“I wish you wouldn't, either of you,” Julia said, anxious.

Edward tottered toward the steps without answering.

“It's slippery and uneven, Daddy,” Julia said. “I can't help both of you at once.”

“I don't need help,” Edward repeated. He turned sideways to go down the steps, and at the bottom he started jerkily down the slope.

“I haven't been in a meadow for years,” Katharine said happily. She started forward, her hip rising and twisting.

“I really don't want you both to go down,” Julia said helplessly.

As she spoke she felt the words dissolve into the breezy emptiness of the afternoon. What right did she have to tell her parents what to do? She wasn't in charge of their lives. And neither of them even answered.

Katharine swayed toward the steps. Edward, bent over, headed down toward the cove.

“I'll come with you,” Julia said, giving up.

Why shouldn't they go down to the cove? This light, this view, the glittering air was why they were here. The light was beginning to redden toward sunset, flooding the landscape with carmine, as though beauty itself were a color. Her parents had nothing like this in Haver-ford, in their complex of big brick buildings, sidewalks, parking lots, Norway maples. Whatever lay ahead for them would be worse. Right now they should have the blowing pink grass, the shimmering blue water.

Edward moved steadily along, not looking back. He stepped carefully, feeling the ground as it sloped away. His feet were heavy and he had to lift them like objects. At the bottom of the meadow, the wind picked up, catching the water, and the surface began to fracture with tiny lapping waves, each catching the glinting light. Edward opened his mouth, to breathe more easily. He could feel this in his chest. He liked the struggle, the challenge, the salt breeze.

In college he had been a cross-country runner, and this, now, reminded him of that—the bright air, the openness and distance. During fall training, he used to run on a dirt road through the woods, scarlet leaves in great clouds overhead, the steady soft thudding of his feet. He remembered the exhilaration at being abroad in the country silence, drawing the cold air into his chest, his legs moving smoothly beneath him. The hushing sound of the leaves. He'd felt part of something large and golden and glowing.

Senior year, that was how he'd felt—as though he were running to meet the world. He couldn't wait for it: everything lay ahead. He remembered feeling certain of himself, and of how to do things. Feeling so capable physically: of running lightly and smoothly, the pleasure of springing off with each step against the dirt road. He'd felt he could run forever through that golden air, the hushing sound of the leaves.

Now, again, he was moving across the landscape, and again it was exhilarating, though this time he was only trying to stumble across an uneven meadow, his goal merely yards ahead, the irregular shoreline of this little cove. He was only struggling to stay ahead of his athletic, acerbic daughter. Still it was exhilarating.

He liked the challenge, and he liked knowing that here was his own hidden world at work: the neural pathways functioning, millions upon millions of axons flooding his system with signals, neurotransmitters galvanizing his muscles, the whole microscopic kingdom of circuitry working at unimaginable speed, coordinating everything—visual images, muscular memory, gyroscopic feats of balance, the control of temperature and breath and heartbeat, with the limbic system playing its mysterious harmonies on the emotions—here it was, the great neurological symphony, performed by the vast orchestral system of the body. Here was the world as we experience it through ourselves.

Edward paused in his headlong surge, negotiating a sudden dark opening in the meadow, a sinkhole, where the ground had been worn away underneath by the tides.

He didn't mind Julia's bossiness. He was actually rather proud of it, it gave him a feeling of kinship. He and Julia shared something, a stiff-necked, stubborn resistance to the world. He admired her refusal to submit, to placate. He admired it, though he wished it were not directed at him.

Katharine called him contentious, though this was not how Edward saw himself. He saw himself as helpful, offering assistance, trying to correct things. Other people were usually wrong, he found. He simply wanted to get things done, move forward. And he liked authority, liked being in charge: at the hospital he'd been head of neurosurgery for years. He'd always been in charge, it came naturally to him.

Later, the others had come to resent him, and there had been an uprising. It was painful, he didn't like thinking of it. They'd maneuvered him out of the department in a contemptible and underhanded way. They'd claimed he was losing his competence, that his eyesight was failing, his hands losing dexterity. Later, that had been true, but not then. They were wrong, Newt Preston, Lou Rosenberg, and the others. He remembered looking around the table and seeing the faces, all turned toward him. Newt Preston's peculiar expression—intent, contained—as he waited for Edward to understand. Edward's neck still swelled at the memory of that meeting. The door of the conference room had been partly open, and someone in a green dress stood just beyond it. His secretary, waiting: even she had known.

The blue water now stretched before him, Edward had reached the shoreline. He stood still, feeling the salt air in his chest. Down here, it was all different, the perspective low, the water vast and dominant. Along the far shore of the cove was a wall of firs, dense and dark. A motorboat, moored to a bright buoy, rocked on the running tide. To the right, around the point, was open water, the ocean. The swelling water pleated itself endlessly, glinting.

Satisfaction rose in him at the sight of the scarlet light, the golden water. He'd wanted to arrive first, unaided, and he had. He could hear his own breathing, deep and strong. He folded his arms on his chest. The wind blew against his bare head. He felt the spaciousness of the red-gold air, the soft lapping of the water against the ragged shore. Something rose in his throat, as though the spaciousness were entering him.

His life lay stretched behind him like a path, reaching neatly, like his shadow, exactly to his feet. Ahead of him lay the shifting blue water, cold and radiant.

“Almost there.” He heard Julia behind him. “You're doing great, Mum.”

“Just let me take it slowly,” said Katharine. “You know I used to run up Mount Washington, with my brothers.”

“We know that,” Julia said. “We know you raced them.”

“‘And won, she said modestly,’” added Katharine.

She moved carefully, poking with the tip of her cane among the grasses. She leaned forward, one arm linked in Julia's. She took a slow step, Julia taking a half-step beside her.

“Great!” Julia said again. “We're here.”

The three of them stood together at the shoreline. Katharine felt the sea breeze against her face. “Lovely.” She turned her head, looking at the red sunset light, the running of the tide.

Katharine thought of Mount Washington and her brothers. She remembered climbing the rocky part, near the summit, the empty sky beyond the peak. Being out of breath, and her oldest brother behind her, laughing, pretending he couldn't keep up with her. She'd been the youngest and the only girl, much petted by her brothers, by the whole family.

Julia pointed across the cove. “Great blue heron,” she said. “Do you see it?”

“Lovely,” Katharine said, peering. She couldn't make it out, but she knew how it looked, those long, skinny, lordly legs, the coiled serpentine neck, the needlelike beak. The slow, meditative steps.

It was her father who'd taught her to know the birds. She remembered him taking her hand, walking across a field, early spring. He crouched down quietly to point out a bird's nest on the ground.

“Kill deer,” he said in a low voice, and Katharine looked into his face, confused. She'd been young, four or five. “A killdeer's nest,” he said, and then she understood: it was a name.

There was the neat clutch of tiny speckled eggs nestled in a shallow concavity in the furrow. The eggs, flecked with the same colors and patterns as the broken stubble, were nearly impossible to see, coming magically into focus only once you understood how to look. Nearby, the frantic mother ran back and forth, dragging her wing as if it were broken, crying her own name over and over, trying to lure them away from the eggs.

“We must leave,” her father said quietly, in her ear. “We're causing the mother distress.” He was almost whispering. Katharine had tiptoed out of the field, her hand still in her father's. She'd turned her head, discreetly, so as not to cause more distress, watching the tiny mother bird skimming along the furrows, her narrow legs flickering as she ran.

Now Julia spoke. “I love this view. It's one reason we bought the house.”

“It's a good view,” Edward said, not as though he were agreeing but as though he were pronouncing her correct.

“Do you remember my father?” Katharine asked Julia. Had they just been talking about him?

“A bit,” Julia said. “He wore a waistcoat and gold-rimmed glasses. He took silver dollars out of my nose.”

“Silver dollars? Out of your nose?” Katharine repeated. “It was a magic trick. I kept the dollars for years. I still have some, in a little wooden box.”

“Can that motorboat get out of here at low tide?” asked Edward.

“He knows every rock on this coast,” Julia said. “He grew up here.”

“Who is it?” Edward asked.

“Dan Ellsworth,” Julia said.

“He a neighbor?” Edward asked.

“The local contractor,” said Julia. “He built a house up the cove last year. He's a nice guy. He came over when I arrived this summer and offered any help I might need.”

“Nice for you to have a neighbor,” Katharine said. “I worry about you, all alone here.”

“I'm all right,” Julia said.

Though it was true she was alone. Last week, slicing cheese, she'd cut her finger. The bright blood had startled her. She'd thought of the Plath poem: What a thrill! My thumb instead of an onion. Something something … then all that red plush. It was a shock that her body could do something so dangerous, gush with such arterial splendor. Dizzied by the sight, she'd been oddly slow to react. It had taken her long moments to remember what to do: hold the finger beneath cold running water, find something to bind it. There was no one to help her, she'd understood suddenly: she was alone now with her body. It was her task to protect it.

“Do you ever think of living here full-time?” asked Edward. “When you retire?”

“Oh, that's too far off to think of. And I don't even have tenure yet, I may have nothing to retire from,” she said cheerfully. “I may have to go on working my whole life.”

Julia had thought vaguely about her future, but only vaguely, and only up to a certain point. Everything was meant to get better, wasn't it? That was how you planned your life, looking ahead, toward improvement. It was easy to imagine yourself older: white-haired, spry, entertainingly outspoken, freed from convention. But not really old— incapacitated, mind gone, body failing, unable to care for yourself. How were you to plan for that? No one wanted to reach that place.

She didn't want to, and she didn't want her parents to, either. She wanted them to be no older than they were here, right now, on this sunset point of land, the three of them watching the reddening, waning light as it flooded across the liquid surge of the tide.

“Just don't put us in a nursing home,” Katharine said, out of nowhere.

Turning back, Julia saw a man standing on the porch. He raised his arm, calling against the wind and stepping down into the meadow.

“Who is it?” Katharine asked.

What she feared was not recognizing someone she knew. Worse, someone in her own family. Would it come to that? How long would it go on, this slow tide eating at the edges of her mind? She felt the deep shame of illness, the need for secrecy; she wanted no one to know. “I can't see against the sun,” she said.

“It's Stevo!” Julia said, her face alight. “He must have gotten a ride from the bus station.”

Steven headed down the path toward them, his strides loose and long, his face ruddy and gilded in the setting sun. The others began the trek back, Edward shuffling determinedly in the lead, Katharine and Julia following, arm in arm. It's a procession, Julia thought. The elders, greeting the young monarch. She wondered if Steven saw himself as the future of the family.

Walking down through the meadow toward them, Steven was struck by the sight of his grandparents in the wide landscape. They seemed suddenly small and insubstantial against the billowing grass, the moving blue water. All three were smiling at him, irradiated by the raking light. His grandparents seemed suddenly, shockingly, old: Edward's pale face lined and papery, Katharine's thin hair blowing in wisps. And his mother's face, polished by the setting sun, looked worn—was she becoming old, too?

They met in the middle of the field; around them the long grass was blown in smooth flattening swaths by the evening wind. Steven leaned over to hug them. He was taller than his father, he was taller than everyone else in the family, and Julia liked this. Julia thought it proper that Steven should be so tall. She thought he should have whatever he wanted.

“You're back,” Julia said.

“Hey, Ma,” Steven said, putting his arms around her.

She hugged him, clasping his young man's body, strange and familiar. She patted his sweatered back: it was odd how much the body meant, how it reassured. And how odd—wonderful—to feel your son taller and stronger than you; to understand, in your own body, that he had passed beyond you in certain ways, that he was carrying himself forward into the world without your help. It was reassuring, too: this body would protect yours, care for it.

“Let me look at you,” she said, standing back. “Have you changed into a West Coaster?” The question was only a pretext to hold him longer, to gaze into the beloved face. What she wanted was to eat him whole. “No,” she announced, “you still seem like Stevo.”

Steven waited, smiling, allowing himself to be hugged, gazed at, discussed. Adored. As a teenager, her embraces had embarrassed him and he'd resisted them, but after the divorce things changed. He became patient and indulgent, protective of his mother.

One night, up here, he'd wakened to hear Julia walking around in the room she had shared with his father. The house was silent—it was very late—and in that absence of sound the creak of the floorboards seemed loud. It was strange to think of his mother waking up alone in that double bed; he wondered what she was doing, in the middle of the night. His mother, in her worn white nightgown—was she getting a blanket? Was she cold? Steven lay in his own bed, listening. He could not hear separate footsteps, only the creak of the floorboards. Was she lonely? What was she thinking? When it was quiet again, he went on listening, imagining her alone in the room.

After that it was not possible to think of his mother as oppressive, her embrace intrusive. After that he thought of her as alone, vulnerable.

Now Steven moved close to Katharine and put his arm out for her, taking Julia's place.

“Why, thank you,” Katharine said demurely. “I may be a little slow now, but I hope you know I climbed Mount Washington when I was younger.”

“I know that,” Steven said. “Katharine ‘The Goat’Treadwell.” Wasn't that what you were called?”

Katharine laughed with him, confused. The Goat?

He slowed his steps to match hers as they all made their way back through the blowing grass to the house. The sky was now wild, streaming with sunset.

Supper was in the dining room, where the wide floorboards had once been painted deep blue, but were worn in places down to bare wood. Against one wall stood a heavy mahogany sideboard, holding a white ironstone pitcher filled with daisies. Against another wall was an ancient daybed, beneath a faded Currier & Ives print of the celebrated trotter Lucy. In a corner, on a rickety spool-legged table, was the only telephone in the house.

They carried in plates and sat down around the battered drop-leaf table.

“Well, Steven,” said Edward, unfolding his napkin. “Tell us what you've been doing.”

Steven told them about Seattle—the forest, the project, the loggers. When he began to describe the confrontation, Julia put down her fork.

“You chained yourself to a tree, in front of loggers with chain saws?” Julia asked. “You never told me that.”

“No,” said Steven, “I thought it more prudent not to.” He grinned at her. “It wasn't ‘in front of chain saws.’They weren't going to cut us in two.”

“Goodness!” Katharine said. “It sounds pretty dangerous.” She wasn't sure she understood this, why Steven had chained himself to a tree, if that was what he had done, and chained the saw there, too?

“It does sound dangerous,” Julia said sternly.

“It wasn't,” said Steven. “We weren't at risk. These were loggers, not gangsters. Everyone was very rational and calm.”

“And what happened?”

But Steven would not tell them the rest, about the spitting, his pathetic epiphany, his moment of communion with the logger who despised him. The battered work boots, the muddy truck. The saliva, high on his cheek, warm from the logger's mouth. Instead of fading, the memory had actually become worse in retrospect, more disturbing.

“Nothing much,” Steven answered. “The loggers got an injunction against us for trespassing. They came back with the police, and we had to stop. But we achieved something, we established a moral position. The papers wrote it up. We struck a small blow for the environment. The weird thing, though, was the loggers thought we were trying to grow marijuana.”

“Marijuana?” Katharine looked from face to face. “While you were against the trees?” Marijuana wasn't something you could tie yourself to, was it? Things had gotten completely muddled.

“Marijuana,” Steven said to her. “You know what marijuana is, Grandma.” He mimed smoking a joint, sucking in his cheeks, inhaling loudly. She smiled uncertainly. To Julia he said, “They had the idea that that was our real reason for protesting. We wanted to grow pot back in the woods.”

“Completely bizarre,” said Julia. She couldn't, actually, think of this at all—the chain saws, the huge trees, Steven bound and helpless.

Edward shook his head. “Sounds like a damn fool scheme to me,” he announced.

Steven looked at his grandfather. “Not everyone agreed with it as a plan,” he said mildly.

“I'm glad to hear it.” Edward shook his head again. “It sounds pretty silly.”

Steven lifted his glass and drank.

“Daddy, don't jump on Steven,” Julia told him. “There isn't only one solution for a problem. There are different approaches, you know.”

“But not different sensible ones,” Edward said. “Most problems have only one sensible solution.” He leaned back in his chair. “You can tear down the chimney and lower the grand piano through the hole in the roof, but the sensible plan is to carry it in through the front door.” Edward was enjoying himself. He liked helping younger people, having intellectual discussions with them, offering guidance.

“That's not a useful comparison.” Julia could feel her father settling in for an argument.

“All I'm doing is telling the truth,” Edward said. “Steven doesn't mind my telling him the truth. You don't mind, do you, Steve?”

“That's like asking me if I've stopped beating my wife.” Steven smiled good-naturedly at his grandfather. “It sounds like you're asking, ‘Do I mind or not mind your telling me that I'm wrong?’”

“What are you saying?” Edward asked, frowning.

“It's the premise I disagree with—your premise is that I'm wrong. Whether I mind being told it is another matter.”

“Now hold on.” Edward raised his forefinger. “I'm talking about facts. Chaining yourselves to trees that are about to be cut down is a cockamamie scheme: you know that.”

“So was Gandhi's plan a cockamamie scheme,” Steven said. “Sometimes unorthodox methods work better than conventional ones. You know it's true in science. Coming up with cockamamie schemes is the way scientists often make discoveries. You did experimental work, didn't you, Grandpa?”

“The experimental work I did was not reckless and haphazard,” Edward said reprovingly. “What I did was based on clinical research.”

“But still, it was experimental, you were taking risks,” Steven said.

“Experiments in medicine are done responsibly, with great care,” Edward said, looking thunderous.

“May I be allowed to speak?” Katharine asked demurely. She looked around with an expectant smile.

Everyone turned to her.

“When I was the president of the Debating Society at Miss Hall's School, we had rules about this.” Her tone was amused and selfdeprecating. “You didn't just argue back and forth. You stated your position, and then your opponent stated theirs. Then you each gave a rebuttal, and then it was over. And I was the president,” she added, cocking her head, mirthful.

“Yes, and I'm sure you were a very good president,” Edward said, “for one so small.”

Delighted, Katharine bunched her napkin and threw it at him; it fluttered to the floor. “Take that,” she said spiritedly.

Julia was silent, refusing to smile at the high jinks. She could feel heat in her face: her father infuriated her. He let nothing go by. He had to correct the world. And why were her parents acting like this? They had never done this while Julia was growing up. They had rarely shown affection; it was considered inappropriate to display it. At school there had been a sort of unofficial rule: No PDA, public display of affection. You kept your feelings to yourself. All this jocular sentimentality was new, and oddly discomfiting. It was embarrassing, watching her elderly parents flirt. Besides, those were the rules the family had lived by, now flouted. Were the years of restraint and discretion now to be dismissed, casually and completely? What other codes were about to be interdicted?

But maybe this was how it was, growing old. They were nearly ninety—maybe discretion had been merely a phase. It wasn't for her to say how her parents should act toward each other. But it was strange to see them like this, as though they'd become unmoored from their own characters, as though they now were drifting, aimlessly, somewhere else.

Julia glanced protectively at Steven, bent over his plate. She hoped he didn't feel attacked by his contentious grandfather, hoped he didn't feel offended or sorry he'd come. When Steven was a teenager he'd been moody, retreating often into silence and distance, resisting his parents, whatever they offered. It had been hard to know what might set him off, what it was they were doing wrong. Everything, it seemed sometimes.

But now Steven seemed unconcerned, and Edward seemed to have forgotten the argument, flirting with his wife. Right now Julia missed Wendell, who had liked her parents, even her outrageous father. Wendell had teased Edward, flirted with Katharine, and made everyone laugh.

Suddenly Julia missed her sister, too. It was odd to miss her here, since Harriet rarely came to Maine. But Julia wished she were here right now, sitting across the table, rolling her eyes at their father's comments and taking Julia's side. She missed their old alliance, the sister of her childhood. Though that was long ago. It had been years since Harriet had taken Julia's side.

Steven glanced up at her, and Julia smiled and shook her head slightly, to show Steven that he shouldn't mind his grandfather. Steven smiled back. He was older now, twenty-four, past the tumultuous stretch of adolescence. He had become calm and reliable. She could trust him now—couldn't she?—not to take offense, to judge his grandparents. Or her. His family were who they were, and he seemed old enough to accept them. It was a relief, this change.

It was she, Julia realized, who was having trouble with her parents: they were starting to seem like strangers. So old and frail. Watching them now, she was struck by the difference between these people and the parents she'd always known, the people who'd been in charge of her life.

On Sunday mornings her father used to get up first and make breakfast for everyone. He walked around in the kitchen in his pajamas and plaid bathrobe, singing from South Pacific in his high, sweet tenor. “Some Enchanted Evening,” he sang, “Bali Ha'i.” Sometimes he made scrambled eggs, sometimes pancakes or waffles, fancy treats. He stood at the stove in his bathrobe and slippers, singing. And her mother, Julia remembered her gardening, kneeling among the flowerbeds, the basket of tools beside her, a pile of weeds on the lawn. Looking up at Julia and smiling with pleasure: “Look at these white iris!”

Those people were gone. Her father was now barely able to walk, her mother was struggling to follow the conversation. Her parents were drifting away, locked in a losing struggle with their bodies, their minds. The tide was going out.