A Dove of the East (6 page)

“A little bald man was yelling at five or six blacks. He was fierce. He cursed them. He abused them. He called them names and gave them precise instructions.

“I ran up to him and took him by the shoulders. He smelled of oil, or perhaps it was from the sea, or a truck fueling outside. I said, ‘My wife is dying. Give me Christmas tree lights, the kind that bubble, and maybe she will be better.'

“He thought I was crazy. He thought I was a madman, especially since I was red and soaking wet and trembling all over. ‘Christmas tree lights?' he said. ‘All right, how many?' ‘Just one set,' I said, ‘one set. Please hurry.'

“He gave me a strange look and then called his men together. ‘You see this boy,' he said, ‘his wife is dying, so he needs the kind of lights that bubble, model three, you know, who's gonna get them for him?' They laughed. The whole warehouse was steaming, cold, and dark. Shreds of red packing on the floor made the place look like a battlefield where many men had been slaughtered. The oil smoke was choking. Someone must have been clearing a chimney nearby. One finally spoke. ‘I'll get them,' he said, ‘I know where they are.' He was a thin black man. He looked like he was dying himself, from the labor, from the cold, and he ran to a freight elevator. In a minute he was back, smiling and graceful as he ran. He gave me the lights. He said, ‘Take off man.' The bald-headed man said, ‘Wait, don't you believe in paying?' But the other man said, ‘Take off!' and threw his arm violently outward, toward the door. ‘You don't got time, go!' and I left, running.”

Biferman and Harold reached the edge of the park where Biferman was to go one way and Harold the other. They stood in the field still under the stars which in the clear air of blackest night were violent in their cool sparkling. Biferman went on, in the cold wind, as red as he had been in the sleet of that January.

“It took me so long to get home, but when I did I ran all the way from the subway to the Rosens'. I was planning a party. When we were engaged she had worn a dress of black velvet, and when we drank champagne I took her into the hall and we stood by the tricycles, kissing. A little boy came out of another apartment and gasped. Katrin' laughed although she was concerned that he was so worried.

“I was planning as I ran, a get-well party, even though I had always been afraid of parties. It would be so joyous—to have such a party.

“Rosen was not yet home from the store. I unpacked the lights and tiptoed into Katrina's room. It was so quiet. I could hear the wind outside but I did not notice the sound of her breathing. I had already plugged in the lights when I realized she was not breathing. I clipped them to a white curtain, one by one, until they were strung out gaily in a chain. There were about twenty of them, a deluxe set. I knew she was not breathing. My plan was to let the lights warm up and start to bubble before I awakened her. I could not hear her breathing, but I pretended that I could, for a long time, until the lights were warm. And when they started to bubble and they cast a beautiful warm light and I could feel the heat from them, a red glow on my face, I said through my tears, ‘Katrina...' and she did not answer. ‘Katrina,' I said, ‘Katrina my love ... Katrin'?...I brought you the lights.' She did not answer.”

Biferman looked up, his eyes closed, and said quietly, “Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my bride.”

M
ICHAEL HAD
been to London, and Paris too. Suzanna had no solid idea of what these places were like. Casco Bay had surrounded every instant of her life with its mists or its waves, or its storms that brought the angry Atlantic almost to the door of her house, which she locked at night if Michael were still out at sea. Suzanna had the most beautiful face in all of Maine, perhaps in all the world. It was a clear face which seemed to make its own light; its features were light and did not seem to depend on each other. When Michael first saw her he imagined she might be easily capable of walking through walls, so fresh and energetic was her manner. “She is sunlight,” he said.

She loved the Bible, “because it is beautiful,” she said, and she read it every morning. She dreamed of the places Michael had been, imagining herself a captains wife, or perhaps a contemporary princess of Russia, one whose life went from peak to peak, operatically encountering dozens of carpeted stairs lined with mirrors as she ran to the high heat and noise of a ballroom. How many times had she been carried by imagination from the beach to an open carriage. The horses were white and perfectly clean, the path straight and arched by French trees. Musicians were everywhere in the park, playing Brahms by bronze fountains that splashed in the day and would splash in the dark. Bright colored leopards and lions in zoos paced gracefully in front of her, and by her side was Michael with his strong face, somehow as a European, dressed and looking as if an artist had painted him, which was how she thought all Europeans were.

Suzanna was Mrs. Ashely, something that for the several years of its existence had never ceased to surprise her. She wondered if she ever would or could feel like her mother, who was purely Mrs. Tyler, and seemed to have been always the wife of Suzannas father, Suzannas mother, and the mother of Suzannas brothers. At church when Tom had come back from whaling and said, “Suzanna Tyler,” Michael said with great authority and delight,
“Suzanna Ashely,”
and Tom, who had always been in love with her, turned very red and rotated back in his pew. The preacher preached to all the brown eyes focused on him like a diagram in optics. If the eyes had had half Suzannas radiance the preacher would have burned. She had always been special and strange.

Michael was once a thin boy who wore gold-rimmed glasses and loved books. He was best with boats, always managed to catch more fish than could his friends, and he spent so much time in the dunes and the pines reading or walking or feeling October, that when he came into town it was as if he had come back from the sea. People asked him questions, and he told them stories full of lies that were true.

After graduation Suzanna had become a teacher of little children, and Michael had gone into the navy, for he changed. He began to hate Three Mile Harbor, and he brooded all day in the woods or at work lifting heavy barrels at the wharf. As his face began to take shape and become less boyish, he wished for new scenery and a place to answer or drown his questions, so he left on a frigate from Portland, and went around the world. In his youth he touched the shores of Egypt and Arabia, marched into Peking, tried to fake familiarity on his first trip to Paris, loved Rome, spent more hours than required on his watch straddling the bowsprit looking at the Wedgwood-colored clouds and sky.

After a year he began to think of Suzanna, and found that he could not stop thinking about her, nor did he want to. Every city, every stretch of sea, every special storm, strange sailor, oddly draped dwarf, beautiful bridge, or full and luxuriant tropical tree he saw, was captured in his mind as a present for her. He talked to her on lookout as the ship pitched in a gray sea. He closed his eyes and kissed her as the spray wet the forecastle. His greatest fear was that when he came home she would be taken.

He kept a journal, and despite the fact of his delinquency, “March 21, 1900 ... December 22, 1900,” wrote some good things. He wanted to tell her about the beaches of Alexandria, “which are bordered by poppies and sea-lakes, and clean, bright, white, blue, and washed by the winds of Africa from the west. Thousands of years of man cannot spoil even the thin rim of this place”; of Athens and the Acropolis, “Yesterday I was at the Acropolis, and although it is very beautiful and affords a beautiful view, I was much disappointed. They are only buildings, and stone, and stone is akin to dust which is everywhere and too much. I am done with antiquities, suspicious of dreams; Suzanna is my only relevance.”

Late on a winter night when the snow quieted Three Mile Harbor and put out the street lights, when it edged beautifully on the merchants tin and wooden signs, when it hissed into chimneys, Michael came dressed in black (with a broader face than he had had when he left) to the store and sail loft, where they hardly recognized him. Tom strained in the yellow gas light. “Michael?” Michael had an important question. Then he ran through the snow all the miles to Suzanna's house, where much out of breath he came into a warm room. There were two bright fires, and they burned strongly, heating the air until Suzannas cheeks were vermilion, as were Michael's from the touch of the snow. Her parents bustled about and gently maneuvered Michael into a chair. The gas lamps were yellow and singing, the window black and frosted, and Suzannas eyes were blasting back at Michael the heat of a forge. They looked directly at each other.

He saw that things were not the same, but better, that she was a woman and better than a girl, and then for the first time, before they had said a word, he realized that he had changed and become a man. Without once consulting his journal, Michael told Suzanna all that had happened to him, and evidently he told it well. They were married.

 

W
HEN THE
President arose that day and glanced at the sky through a window in the White House, he sent for his favorite artist, and told him to duplicate the blue of the sky on all the medals, banners, and plumes of the army and the navy. The artist said quite flatly that it was impossible.

Suzanna Tyler Ashely stood by a wooden table next to their water pump. She was wearing a new white linen apron, starched, dazzling, and large, and she was opening clams, buckets of them. An autumn day without a cloud, the wind and the sea were fierce. After cutting the mud-colored back muscle she pushed the knife into the shell and worked it around until the two halves separated and her pink fingers were wet. She put the meat in a bowl and the juice in a bottle. Occasionally she would drink from a particularly well formed shell, holding it to her lips, bending her eyes to see the absolute white pearly cup; the wind was so wild it made little waves and bubbles in the liquid before she drank it. It washed in the shell like a small sea, and the shell was the color of her apron which was the color of the clouds and the whitecaps on the sea, which was blue like the sky and her eyes. She felt in her dreaming a power; she felt as if she were conjuring the wind.

Several months past when they were traveling to Boston they had argued on the way. Michael in a rage stopped the horses, tied the reins, and jumped off the wagon, leaving it and her by the side of the road. She looked straight ahead and pridefully refused to watch him or turn. A group of sailors came down the road, crowded into a wagon, drunk, rowdy. As they neared she wanted to run to Michael, for they had seen her golden hair from afar and all eyes were centered upon her. As a compromise, she took out a mirror and moved it until she saw the comforting image of Michael leaning against a tree, looking with great wisdom at the group of sailors (for he was an alumnus of their life and older) and with great love at her, for he loved what she had done with the mirror.

Michael was getting lobsters from his traps; doing it made him feel like a sorcerer. She could see him in the tiny green boat with the white sail he raised when he moved from float to float. Had he known the wind would rise as it had he would not have gone out, for the fishermen of Three Mile Harbor were like lobsters who are clever enough to get out of the coil; they had to shoot between two sides of a jetty over a bar, and negotiate a thin channel funnel. There had been deaths there.

Suzanna felt as if she, and he, and the century itself, were on the verge of a discovery. She dreamed always of the remote and thought it one reason why Michael loved her so. Beneath her white and gold New England face were thoughts that went deep into the tropics and skirted jungles full of richer, darker colors, colors of fast and intense life. This woman sat in church and, taking the rhythm from the organ, put herself in Africa, or Turkestan, or Palestine, or any place with a name like candy, fruit, or the Bible. Her father and her father's father had been missionaries; they were ministers in Salem and saw the sea as a natural road for what they believed. As Salem merchants traded spices and brass from and to Zanzibar, so they preached. Her brother and she had been born in Africa; she did not remember it, he did. She had been her father's daughter after he returned from the brighter parts of his life. When a little girl, she had grown among stories and artifacts from Africa and China, where her grandfather had been.

Michael began to run with the wind, which from where he floated high on the waves shot directly to shore, even though on the beach it was confused and blew his wife's skirts and apron in all directions in imitation of a real tempest. Despite the wind and waves this run would be easier than most because he did not have to tack. He could head straight for the inlet, building up speed, until he passed it with a breath of quick relief. He felt confident, as he had while traveling. When he traveled he was not knit to his possessions and made an implement to maneuver them. When in other parts of the world he felt light and comfortable, as a good man would doing something good and easy. He dreamed of traveling with Suzanna; he knew she wanted to see what he had seen, and when he had seen it he had wished for her to be by him. Without reasons it was really quite simple. He loved her and wanted to go places with her. His boat, beautifully made by his cousins who put double seams and double caulk to satisfy him, gained speed and seemed to nose itself to target. He felt always when running the inlet, or shooting the bar as the older men called it, that he knew himself, that he and the boat had something in common, a solidarity on the waves.

She finished opening the clams and went to stand by the inlet, breathing more deeply as the wind forced itself into her body. Michael was coming in. She was frightened and happy. They were married in the spring and they first made love in late April, so that the month had been always in her eyes. That night when the window was opened and she could see the stars through it, they heard the small streams and rivulets from the melting snow. Now her hands were harder and she cursed easily, and often making love had nothing whatsoever to do with the stars or the brooks, but only the bed and the heat they raised, so that even ten minutes after in the deep of quiet they were not dry and they glistened. She wished that she would not spend the rest of her life trying to get the slight flamboyance one must have when nineteen, that Michael had in the navy when he spent time finding the round world, that she had not had. He was older and had a time when he had stretched and felt free, a time between the times of a child and a man when he used his eyes so as to tire his entire body, a time when he got drunk in Spain and awoke in Sicily. As a woman she could never do the same; the most she could do was to dream, and she did, and sometimes (although she tried to shoo the thought away and get it out of her mind) she wished she were rid of him.