Beyond Deserving (19 page)

“Geneva won't know it until you tell her,” she tells Katie briskly. “So tell her some other time. When this is over, when the divorce is over. You know she'll never ask what's going on.” None of my business, that is Geneva's anthem, but then Ursula's mother says that too.

“If Fish doesn't show today, she'll want to know why, won't she?” Katie says this lightly.

Ursula sighs. “Geneva told me she used to cook supper, stick it in the oven, and forget about it. I supposed then she meant she never knew when to count on Fisher men. She doesn't expect much from Fish, does she? Who does?”

“Where's Juliette?”

“She dances Saturday mornings.” Ursula catches herself before she sighs again. “They're rehearsing, getting ready for the dances in the park that start next month. You'll come? I'll remind you. Juliette couldn't possibly disappoint that little French pimp who directs them.” Ursula bites her lip. She picks up a big roaster, now filled with ice and spinach tarts. It takes a moment for her to get her balance, with the roaster held up against her chest. Katie chooses that moment to catch her eye.

“I don't know what else to do, Ursie. I don't know how else to get myself together.”

Was it the boyfriend? Or has Katie read something? Joined a group? Has she just run out of patience?

Ursula gestures with her head, back over her shoulder, at the pans on the counter. “Grab something, Katie. Say cheerful things to all the fogeys. Let's get this show on the road.”

“WHO is going to eat all this!” Geneva says loudly as they start laying it out. People drift their way and take up the little white paper plates with primroses at the edges. Geneva bends over ingloriously, going in her purse beneath the table to get her camera. “Say cheese,” she says to everyone when she straightens up. Her camera has a cheap little flash that will give everyone orange eyes. They should have given her a decent little auto-flash for a gift, Ursula thinks with a pang. She thought the reception was gift enough, but it isn't really tangible. There aren't any favors.

Geneva begins to move around, to get all the shots she wants. It seems more like a party with her in motion. She makes the musicians stop playing and pose, their bows on their instruments. They do as she bids. They are polite kids, and they are splitting fifteen dollars an hour.

26

Ursula didn't meet the Fishers until right before she and Michael married. First, she and Michael and Fish were living in a rooming house near Portland State, and the Fishers lived way east, on the river. The young people went all the way to Troutdale to swim, many hot spring Sundays, but only Michael went the few extra miles to see his folks. Before Fish went off for basic training, he and his father took a three-day hiking trip in bad weather. Later, when Michael and Ursula started living together, Michael went out there about twice a month, but he never suggested that Ursula go, and she wouldn't ask. When they decided to get married, he said, “I guess you'll have to meet them.” She had not realized they were the reason he had come back from Peace Corps training, and not her. It was something Geneva said that set that straight; she said she had always been able to count on Michael to be there in a crisis. She said, “Don't parents need their son as much as those Africans do?” When Ursula, who had been prepared to wait out the two years, asked Michael if his mother actually wrote him during training and asked him to come home, he said she had. She said she already had one son in a godforsaken place; the Peace Corps could find someone else.

The first meeting between Ursula and the Fishers was stiff, and didn't last long. From after the wedding until Carter was born, Ursula only saw them two more times, at their house, and not in the dumps she and Michael had rented. Once they had Carter, she felt more obligated to act like family. Her own father had come for a visit, and ended up making the down payment on a house for them, and her mother came with wonderful, practical gifts. Geneva Fisher gave Ursula boxes of detergent and a rattle for the baby. She said Carter was a funny first name. (Gulsvig wasn't?!)

Ursula was relieved when the Fishers moved to the southern part of the state, even when Michael spent weeks of his summer down there helping his dad build a house. She didn't see them again until she moved, too, reluctantly, because of them. Fish and Katie had been moving around, and when they finally rented a ramshackle old house not far from Ursula and Michael, she was glad. Later they bought a house eight miles out of town, cheap because it was in disrepair, with a tangled, overgrown yard.

The summer the children were five and eight, Ursula talked Michael into taking them to Disneyland. Disneyland was dumb, but it was something all the kids their kids knew had experienced. Maybe it was important to see it for yourself. Wasn't it what every foreign dignitary wanted to see? And dying children? At first Michael thought she was kidding. When she insisted that she was serious, he gave in rather easily. He admitted that they had never gone anywhere together as a family, except camping at the beach a couple of times. Ursula said they ought to be making memories, the four of them. Everyone likes to be able to look back later. She was glad she had childhood trips to Washington, D.C., Montreal, and Barbados to recall (all before her parents split, all unmarred by discord of any kind). She could hardly believe this was coming out of her mouth; she kept waiting for Michael to interrupt her. When he did not, she was disappointed. She had hoped he would challenge her and that would cause them to talk about “what really matters.” They had passed a year in which it seemed they discussed only their own schedules, menus, problems with cars and the oil heater, the kids' colds, and, always, the vagaries of Fish and Gully. Michael did not argue. He chewed on his moustache and said he guessed they could afford it. He didn't act martyred. Certainly he loved his children, and he enjoyed time spent with them. In fact he spent far more time than most fathers, and more time, increasingly, than Ursula. He was a man who did what needed to be done, as long as he saw what it was or had it pointed out to him. Though Ursula thought he was critical of the children in ways she was not, the kids were actually easier and more agreeable with him than with her.

The Disneyland trip went well enough, despite a mix of searing heat and several gusty rainstorms. The children whined by midafternoon, and they spent too much money, mostly on food, but it
was
fun to ride a boat through a fake game park, to see a thousand dolls decked out in ethnic costumes, to walk the clean streets and watch cartoon characters six feet tall waddle and prance, making the children giggle. As they were packing up the morning they left, Ursula said to Michael, by way of expressing her gratitude, “Once was enough, wasn't it?” Michael gave her arm a squeeze and said, “Once was fine, Ursula.”

On the way home they stopped in a town on the coast north of Los Angeles. A festival was in progress. Streets had been blocked off with colored ropes and streamers, and people were moving about in a great mass, laughing and eating and jostling one another pleasantly. As soon as they moved away from one group of musicians, they heard another. There were jugglers and clowns. The Fishers stopped at a food stand under a bright purple and gold canopy, and ate saté on sticks. The kids were entranced and good-tempered, the sky was clear, and a nice breeze was coming in from the sea.

They saw a group in Elizabethan costume dancing in the center of a main intersection. The ladies put their hands to their waists and then, lightly, put their hands on the men's arms. They lifted their skirts to circle and kick up their feet, and they moved their heads so that their hair swirled like ribbons. The Fishers watched them for a quarter of an hour. The group stopped to rest. A violinist and flutist moved in to play for a while, and Michael said, “We had better get back on the road if we want to get home tomorrow.” When they looked around for the children, they did not see Juliette. Ursula was so suddenly and fiercely frightened she almost threw up, but Michael said, “Look, she's over there with the dancers.”

A woman with curly red hair was showing Juliette how to raise her foot daintily, toe pointed down, and give it a shake. Juliette caught on right away, her bottom lip tucked under her teeth in concentration. At five she was a charmer, with a cascade of wavy hair to the middle of the back, and a bold way of looking at people. Onlookers had gathered around, and were giving her encouraging hoots and spatters of applause, which she was relishing. When Michael stepped in and said they really did have to go, she said, “But Daddy, they're going to dance now, and I must be here for it.” She was quite serious, not fussy at all, and Michael and Ursula only had to exchange a look to agree to wait for another set of dancing.

In the car, Juliette was still excited, but sleepy, too, and Ursula was afraid the two states would mix badly, make her cranky, and she would incite Carter, who had fallen asleep as soon as he settled in the seat, but Juliette simply said, “I'm going to be a dancer when I grow up. I am too.” Then she lay down and slept, so quickly that Michael and Ursula burst into laughter, and embraced.

The incident with the dancers thrilled Ursula, not only because it was surprising and pleasant, and not because she saw a quality in Juliette she had not yet recognized—the ability to make people love her because she was performing for them—but because she realized that a host of things were suggested, having to do with the future, and she thought, Now Michael will talk to me about them. What will become of the children? What will become of us? These were his children, their lives an extension of his own. And, on a smaller scale, they had had a good time, and it was worth remembering. They hadn't bickered much, hadn't frayed as a family under the stress of Disneyland. And she and Michael had been so close in that moment in the car, brought together by their pleasure in their children. She imagined herself saying to him, “Wasn't that sweet of the redhaired dancer to show Juliette some steps?” She imagined them mock-fussing over what they had liked best at Disneyland, and the children crying out, “When can we go somewhere again?” (Maybe Washington, D.C.—the Smithsonian, the Lincoln Memorial?) She imagined Michael saying how proud he was of the kids. All of that would have been so much, more than enough; she could not imagine Michael talking about himself.

As it turned out, the weeks that followed were so jammed with tension and pain, and with hard work and the management of so many unpleasant details, the trip was never even mentioned between Ursula and Michael again. It would be almost a year before Ursula remembered to develop the pictures she had taken.

When they reached home, they found Katie there. She jumped up as they came in the door and helped them unload. Ursula asked immediately if something was wrong. She assumed Fish was in trouble. It wasn't quite sunset, maybe eight o'clock on a July evening, and Michael had been driving all day. Ursula thought Katie inconsiderate to be there like this, waiting with some sort of bad news that could probably wait. There never was much Michael could do about Fish anyway, though he had put up bail more than once for DUI and reckless driving charges, or gone to fetch him when some old truck broke down. Damn him, let him walk. Ursula remembered later that that was what she thought as soon as she saw Katie. It was a bend in the road in her thinking. Let him walk. They should have taken that as a precept long ago.

What Katie did say was that Michael and Ursula had to go out to the Fishers right away, and that she would stay with the kids. Michael said, so calmly Ursula felt like shaking him, “So what's happened, then?” (Later Ursula asked him, “Didn't you think one of them died? Weren't you
worried
?” Michael was baffled. “Why would I start worrying and asking questions, when she was standing there in front of me, about to tell me what I needed to know?”) In the space of half a minute, Ursula had already considered a dozen possibilities, none of them close to the actual circumstances, though all of them close enough in character. There was trouble. Katie gave the kids hugs and sent them up to dress for bed. When they were out of the room she told Michael that his parents' house had burned down. She added quickly that nobody was hurt. The house was gone.

As Michael and Ursula drove into River Cove, they passed an ambulance on its way into Medford. The ambulance, they would learn, was taking Gully away to the hospital for the night, and after that—though they wouldn't know this for several days—to the state hospital, for months. He had been down by the river, drinking and fishing, and when he had returned to find the house engulfed in flames, he had gone berserk, even though the firemen tried to tell him nobody was inside. He seemed to have lost his sense of time—the year, his own age. He kept saying it was his fault, and what would happen to the kids? Where are the kids? he kept asking. Geneva had been at the library, and it was this scene—the house blackened, the flames dying down, the mess of the firefighting everywhere, and Gully babbling and wringing his hands as he stomped around—this she found when she returned. As soon as Gully saw her he began to scream hysterically. He thought Evelyn was inside the house. The men had to restrain him from scrabbling in the mess. The fire marshal told Geneva that these things happened to people in a crisis sometimes. “Not with most men, I bet,” Geneva said when she relayed the fireman's words to Michael. The fire marshal shook Gully and made him sit down in a truck. He sent a neighbor to call for an ambulance. When it came, Gully fought and had to be restrained.

Geneva went to stay with Michael and Ursula. Her sons cleaned up from the fire. Fish came through that time. He worked day after day until dark, until he was black with soot. Michael helped Geneva pick out a mobile home to put on the lot after the house was cleared, instead of rebuilding. They didn't need much room. Geneva didn't need the burden of a house to keep, and they would save some money. There was enough money left over from the insurance to put into CD's, to draw interest for a small income. Geneva stabbed at bravery, saying for once she could choose what she wanted instead of taking what she got. She missed Gully terribly, and was afraid of what they were doing to him. Michael went up to see his father, but talked Geneva (it wasn't difficult) into staying behind. Gully didn't want her to see him or the hospital, once he could think about it. Geneva talked for weeks on end, manic. That was when Ursula learned some of the family history. She kept telling Geneva that things would be better now. Geneva said she had prayed for something to happen to make Gully—her voice ran out, she couldn't say what she wanted, but only cry. Katie and Ursula helped her go through the burned photograph albums and boxes of artifacts from her whole married life, salvaging a very small portion of them. There was a fireproof box, which Ursula supposed held important papers, but which turned out to hold old greeting cards and mementoes. Geneva wept copiously when she saw it was saved. “I'd have chosen that above all else,” she said. Well, hadn't she known that when she put it in a metal box? Ursula didn't see the value of the items, but she didn't look closely, or ask questions. She was glad something was salvaged for Geneva.