Ariel's Crossing (8 page)

This routine was toppled one night as she stood in the stacks of the Strand. She was poring over a volume of Stieglitz nudes of the youthful Georgia O’Keeffe. Torsos, thighs, breasts, those sinuous hands and sharp black eyes of the painter were caught in silverprints cropped so tightly that they seemed about to burst from the page. Absorbed by these images, Ariel didn’t hear him the first time he said, “She looks like you, her face, that is …”—David Moore’s gawky pickup line they would both laugh about later.

Over the months that followed, it would occur to Jessica that her daughter was ironically behaving like some jilted lover on the rebound, an impression she didn’t share with Ariel at the time. To every other watching eye she was simply a young woman who had fallen in love with someone who seemed equally in love with her. They went to the Cloisters, strolled hand in hand through the knot gardens adjacent, and kissed beneath the flowering trees. They admired the unicorn in captivity, woven into voluminous tapestry, and looked at the griffin and kissed some more, and at the gargoyles and kissed again. And like the espaliered quinces trained by the monastery gardeners to grow in intertwining patterns, they lay in each other’s arms on Ariel’s bed. She had never explored a man’s body with such abandon. From her mouth came words and from her throat noises she’d never uttered before. Outrageously, she painted his initials on her forehead with her menstrual blood. What began in bed might end up on the floor or in another room, she couldn’t remember how.

They boarded the Circle Line like a couple of giddy tourists and rode the boat around the island. They went out dancing at night, throwing their arms over their heads and whooping under strobe lights that illuminated others crowded against them on all sides as the sound system blew bass beats that walloped their very bones. After David proposed they visit the botanic gardens—calling her Friday afternoon at work, while fellow commodities brokers shouted strings of numbers in the background—Ariel made lunch for them the next morning, and off they went to Park Slope. Another Saturday, after a softball game in Sheep Meadow, they walked up to Columbia where Ariel showed him her old dorm window. At the Chelsea flea market they discovered two treasures, a church-shaped birdhouse and an ornate bamboo birdcage whose door was broken. Ariel bought David the birdhouse, joking that he could use a little religion, and he got her the cage, saying it would serve as a symbol their love should always be free.

A year to the day after their first encounter, he showed up at her door holding aloft a cardboard box with airholes in its side, and in his other hand a bottle of champagne. “Happy anniversary,” he said, as Ariel peeked inside and saw two brown-and-white zebra finches. “Songbirds for your empty pagoda.”

It was a sweet gesture, she knew, but one that had the weird effect of making her feel wary. Notwithstanding her unease, she smiled and thanked him, uncorked the champagne after fixing the door with wire and settling the finches in their new home. Then, as ever, though serenaded from behind the bamboo spindles instead of by the usual music of the city, they took each other to bed, and her faint sense of odd misgiving vanished.

That Ariel didn’t get pregnant, with all the love they made that second spring into summer and autumn and during the holidays beyond, was something of a miracle. Their craving for each other, having bordered on the obsessive, slowly calmed. But even when the affair waned toward more tepid registers, they sometimes left themselves open to the possibility of an accident. None chanced to happen. Which was fine, especially with David, who’d made it clear—despite his having forgotten the birdcage was meant to be left empty, its door broken—that family life was not for him.

So how much more miraculous was it that now, with three years gone by and their surfeit passion not extinguished but oddly abstracted, Ariel faced this improbable crisis of motherhood? No, absolutely not. It wouldn’t be fair to either of them. So she felt when she first suspected something was wrong. She’d missed her period and blamed it on nerves, the moon, anything that came to mind. But her nausea, though mild, elicited real fear. A home pregnancy test showed positive. But that couldn’t be right. She tried another company’s product which gave her the same reading. When her gynecologist confirmed the earlier results, the news put Ariel back onto the sidewalks of Gramercy Park, in a haze matched only by the stifling late July morning itself.

When had it happened? She remembered as she walked around the gated gardens. After the worst argument they’d ever had, over whether to go to this party or that, something of no inherent consequence, which ended with apologetic sex, in the midnight wake of which he’d quietly left. They’d patched up their problem over the phone, but David called less often than ever in the weeks that followed. There was no denying they’d hit a bleak stretch. That what had arisen with such unexpected passion, then floated along for unquestioning years, now seemed to be dwindling with equally unexpected quickness.

Whether because of this downward spiral or independent of it, Ariel found herself ambling through midsummer days with a wintry heart. Even before she learned that she was pregnant, a disconnectedness settled over her. No manuscript stirred her lately. Her once-treasured morning walk seemed longer than ever. Her notebooks slept in the desk. Sunday dinners in Chelsea became a bit of a drudge. The phone seldom rang, maybe because she failed to return most calls left on her machine. She allowed herself to be dragged out to dinner by two girlfriends who showed up unannounced, then coaxed on to see some action movie with futuristic gunships flying through exploding air and fiery fusillades ad infinitum. Yet companionship and entertainment didn’t provide even a temporary cure. Grateful though she was for her friends’ concern, she couldn’t wait to get back home and lock the door. It was as if some emotional law of thermodynamics were dispelling her will to feel. Aware this was gnawing at the edges of everything she’d ever loved, she nevertheless seemed unable to stop it. What was wrong?

The possible answer occurred to her that day of confirmation. She left Gramercy, pace quickening all the way. Having climbed the steps of her walk-up two at a time, she turned the key in the lock with a quaking hand. She pulled a chair into her book closet and climbed up to retrieve the dusty box in which Kip’s banished gifts had languished for these past three years.

Her old Dodge Dart was parked on the street a block away. She carried the finches in their cage down the hall and gave them to her surprised, elated neighbor who had always coveted the little birds. She threw together some clothes, locked her windows and doors, and left for the funky, cherished family farmhouse upstate. It was the only place in the world where Ariel could truly be by herself. And as the Palisades loomed north above the Hudson while she drove across the George Washington Bridge, she thought if ever solitude might serve her well it was now. Hadn’t her childhood hero Thoreau, that other David, chosen seclusion over social engagement? What about solitary Emily Dickinson, loner Coleridge?

Wind on her face felt good. The long slow burn of delaying the inevitable had flared into a wildfire of wanting to know who Kip was. Banishment tripped toward an embrace of needing to fill in the vast rift of willful ignorance. David himself had long ago urged her to do this. “You’re never going to be a whole person until you meet him,” he’d argued.

“My wholeness or lack of it has nothing to do with Kip Calder,” was her response. She could almost hear the faltering in her voice from this present vantage.

“You know how when somebody loses a leg, they say they still have feeling in it? Whether you want to admit it or not, you must have feelings for him.”

“I never had the leg to begin with, and I don’t see the point of trying to walk on it now.”

She remembered his shrug. “My analogy may be off,” he persisted, “but I still think you need to connect with the man, if only once.”

Why hadn’t she listened? she thought as she turned off the quick-way and drove through broad hilly farmlands muggy with summer steam. Would that he were always so insightful. The David who had suggested she meet her birth father was the best David, a man she realized she lost months ago. If only it were that David rather than this disaffected one whom she would have to face in her present predicament. She who didn’t feel she had anything to say to anyone. Who wrote that to achieve greatness all one had to do was learn to sit in a room and be quiet? Some French philosopher who wouldn’t want his name invoked.

Maybe the bias wasn’t so aberrant. Perhaps the most gregarious among us are quietly dying to be left alone. So she thought as she pulled into the dirt drive that led to the isolated white clapboard farmhouse, set in the middle of green grass edged by daisy fleabane and wild basil, by ferns and the sheltering forest beyond. She cut the engine, climbed out, walked down to the pond ringed by cattails and the bald stalks of irises she’d planted with her own hands long ago, now spent. Shedding her clothes and shoes, she walked into the water which received her in all its own fecundity as the maple and ash trees and black cherries waved, in greeting or farewell or merely because the wind rustled their branches. Yes, the time had come to address Kip Calder.

The Carpenter household of Mary’s youth was not locally famous for its sanity. To wit, people never asked her father why so many years after the war a black flag still hung in all seasons from the pole in front of his house. They didn’t ask because they knew why it was there. Black flag of remembrance, to honor those missing in action and prisoners of war. Mary’s mother often wished Russell would make the gesture of removing it, if only because she believed he might find it therapeutic. The countries themselves had reached diplomatic and economic accords, and Vietnam, she’d heard on the news, had allowed American officials to help identify what servicemen’s remains could be found and repatriated, though those remains were but corpseless dogtags in some instances. She dared not suggest that if these countries, which had so hated each other that they’d decided to go to war in the first place, could now see their way clear to making peace, wouldn’t Russell be smart to try to do the same? He’d tell her she didn’t know what she was talking about. Tell her she didn’t know what it was like to lose three brothers in the same year in the same war. Perry at Khe Sahn. Nick somewhere north that spring, as their parents had been informed, succumbing by all accounts courageously under monsoon rains in a filthy prison. Clifford who had come home in body only.

Russell himself had been a frustrated 4-F patriot grounded at home because some military doctor pronounced him unfit for duty on account of his arrhythmia. —Irregular heartbeat, for godsakes. It’s what’s in a man’s heart makes him a good soldier, not whether it beats like some freaking clock. You want a clock? Go to a clockmaker. Yet given his brothers’ fates, the wonder was why Russ still regretted that he never got the chance to fight.

Perry—Bravo Company, 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion—was among the first to go down in the stunning barrage of shelling that caught the marines off guard in an infamous moment of bad timing, February 1968. Overseeing the building of bunkers out of sandbags for recon, he took some searing shrapnel along with half of his men who didn’t return home alive, either. Perry at least had some story attached to his death. The words
Khe Sahn
were, like the term
Tet Offensive,
recognizable to many condolent neighbors, who learned them from battlefield reports that flooded family rooms in endless nightly cathode streams the first months of that pivotal, luckless year.

Nick’s death was probably worse, as deaths went. Slower, and frustratingly mysterious. Nick had no such story. His remains were not released, and the intelligence regarding his demise from
natural causes while held as prisoner of war
was sketchy. Not having an official story was like not having lived or died.

Unlike Perry and mad Cliff, poor Nick was never repatriated, and this bothered Mary’s father more than anything under God’s sun. Russell loved his brothers, however conjecturally and distantly and even hatefully, and so, as Russ answered whenever he was asked, he would continue to display that POW/MIA flag against the day when the government—theirs, ours, anybody’s—could attach a believable story to the capture, internment, and death of his middle brother. Their mother and father had died without knowing. It seemed a reasonable goal.

Russell and Rebecca Carpenter’s children grew up with the flag flying beside their front door, and to them it was as much a part of the architecture of the house as its windows, battenboard facades, and tin roof. Mary’s uncles were still, in different ways, missing in action, was what it meant. Over in the cemetery, two had their names, dates, and
In Memoriam
carved into marble tablets, but only one was there in the ground. Since neither Mary nor her siblings could remember which of their dad’s brothers had been killed in action and which died a prisoner of war, Veterans Day was always a kind of roulette game. When the kids were made to dress up and go to the cemetery to lay at each grave an annual wreath of red carnations, they would whisper, —Which grave’s got the maggot food, which one’s empty? To Mary and Jimmy, and to the twins, Johnny and Rose, those chiseled names were as interchangeable as bicycle tires, though they’d heard narrated their uncles’ battle fates on many occasions. The children knew, as did their mother, never to betray their perplexity nor raise the matter of the black flag in their father’s presence. Perry and Nick were grudgingly sacred.

Russell’s esteem, what some might call his obsession, was, as the Carpenter kids got older, an unwelcome theme at school. Wisecracks were made about Jimmy and Johnny’s nutzo pop who was stuck in the past. —Get over yourself. The Civil War is
done
already, Battle of the Bulge is so yesterday. Dead as croak. One Halloween, a local prankster from Washington Elementary took it upon himself to steal the flag, which Russell replaced within the week.

During dinner once, after Jimmy had taken a ribbing at school about the flag, he tested his adolescent grit against his father’s mettle, saying as nonchalantly as he could manage, —Hey, I heard something good today.