Going Ashore (7 page)

LATE IN THE AFTERNOON
after Mrs. Boldescu’s funeral, her four children returned to the shop on St. Eulalie Street, in Montreal, where they had lived when they were growing up. Victor, the youngest, drove quickly ahead, leaving, like an unfriendly country, the trampled grass of the cemetery and the sorrowing marble angels. Several blocks behind came Marina and the two older boys, Carol and Georgie, side by side in the long black car that had been hired for the day. Emptied of flowers, it still enclosed a sickly smell of lilies and of Carol’s violet horseshoe, that had borne on a taffeta ribbon the words “Good Luck to You, Mama.”

These three sat in silence, collapsed against the prickling plush of the cushions. Marina was thankful that Victor had driven up from Bloomfield, New Jersey, in his own three-year-old Buick. It would have been too much at this moment to have shared the drive with his American wife, Peggy Ann, hearing her voice carried out on the hot city air as she exclaimed over the slummy landscape and congratulated her husband on his plucky triumph over environment. Glancing at Carol and Georgie, Marina decided they might not have cared. Their triumph had been of a different nature. They stared out of the car at brick façades, seemingly neither moved nor offended by the stunning ugliness of the streets that had held their childhood. Sometimes one of them sighed, the comfortable respiration of one who has wept.

Remembering the funeral, Marina bent her head and traced a seam of her black linen suit where the dye had taken badly. Her brothers had cried with such abandon that they had commended themselves forever to Father Patenaude and every neighborhood woman at church. “Those bad pennies,” Marina had heard Father Patenaude say. “Bad pennies they were, but they loved their mother. They did all of this, you know.”

By “all of this,” he meant the first-class funeral, the giant wreaths, the
large plot they had purchased
in perpetuum
, to which their father’s coffin, until now at rest in a less imposing cemetery, had been removed. There was space in the new plot for them all, including Victor’s wife, who would, Marina thought, be grateful to know that thanks to her brothers-in-law’s foresight her bones need not be turned out, for lack of burial space, until the Day of Judgment. A smaller tract, spattered with the delicate shadow of a weeping willow, had been set aside for Victor’s children. He was the only one of her brothers who had married, and his as-yet-unconceived offspring were doomed to early extinction if one considered the space reserved for their remains. Marina could only imagine the vision of small crosses, sleeping babies, and praying cherubs that had been painted for Carol and Georgie. At the same time, she wondered what Victor felt about his brothers’ prescience. His expression at the funeral had been one of controlled alarm, perhaps because of his wife, whose fidgetings and whisperings had disturbed even the rolling tide of Carol’s and Georgie’s grief. These two had stared hard at Peggy Ann on the edge of the grave, and Georgie had remarked that nothing worthy of life or death was likely to come out of that blond, skinny drink of water – which Marina took to be a reference to the babies’ plot.

The way they had been grouped at the funeral – Marina unwillingly pressed between her weeping brothers, Victor a little apart – had seemed to her prophetic. The strain of her mother’s long illness had made her superstitious. Visiting her mother at the hospital toward the end, she had seen an omen in every cloud, a message in a maple leaf that, on a treeless street, unexpectedly fell at her feet. Sometimes she felt that all of them had combined to kill their mother – Victor by behaving too well, the others by behaving badly, herself through the old-maidish asperity that had lately begun to creep through her conversation like an ink-stain. She had even blamed Father Patenaude, remembering, in her mother’s last moments, the cold comfort her mother had brought home from the confession box. Watching the final office of death, Marina waited for him to speak the words of reassurance her mother wanted; but nothing came, and Mrs. Boldescu was permitted to die without once being told that the mores of St. Eulalie Street and not her own inadequacies had permitted Victor’s
escape into a Protestant marriage, and Georgie’s and Carol’s being led away again and again by the police.

Marina had quarreled with Father Patenaude, right then and there in the hospital, where all the nurses could hear. The priest’s thin face had been pink with annoyance, and the embarrassment of Carol and Georgie caused them, later on, to press upon him a quite unnecessary check. His sins of omission – they had possibly been caused, she now realized, through nothing sterner than lack of imagination – were for God and not Marina to judge, Father Patenaude said.

Mrs. Boldescu had only by courtesy been attached to his flock. She belonged by birth and breeding to the Greek Catholic Church, that easy resting place between Byzantium and Rome. The Father was French-Canadian, with the peasant distrust of all his race for the exotic. Perhaps, Marina thought, he had detected her mother’s contempt for the pretty, pallid Western saints, each with his crown of electric lights. In the soaring exaltation of her self-reproach, Father Patenaude must have sensed the richness of past devotions, seen the bearded priest, the masculine saints, the gold walls glittering behind the spears of candlelight, the hanging ruby lamp swaying in the thick incense-laden air. Victor’s marriage had probably offended him most. Even Georgie and Carol, for all their cosmic indifference to the affairs of their sister and brother, had been offended.

However Mrs. Boldescu might deplore the deviation of her youngest son, she trusted his good business sense. It was to Victor that the shop had been left. Now, driving back to it for the final conference, Marina could not have said if Carol and Georgie minded. Their feelings toward each other as children had been so perfunctory that jealousy, then, would have struck any one of them as much too familiar to be comfortable. Of course, Carol and Georgie might have changed; meeting over their mother’s bed, after a separation of years, they had had no time to sift their memories, even had they chosen to do anything so out of character. Their greeting had been in the matter-of-fact tones of consanguinity, and Marina had retired at once to a flower-banked corner of the hospital room, so that her brothers might have scope and space for their emotions.

The two had scarcely glanced at her again. Pale and tired, graced with only the ghost of a racial bloom they had long disavowed and now failed
to recognize, Marina appeared to satisfy their image of a sister. To her, however, the first few moments had been webbed in strangeness, and she had watched her brothers as if they came from an alien land. They knelt by the bed, barred with the shadow of the hospital shade, their glossy, brilliantined heads bowed on clasped hands. Disliking their rings, their neckties, their easy tears, she remembered what had formed them, and saw behind her brothers a tunnel of moldering corridors, the gray and stifling walls of reformatories named for saints. Summoning this image, like a repeated apology, she was able to pardon the violet horseshoe, the scene of distracted remorse on the brink of the grave. Their strangeness vanished; boredom took its place. She remembered at last what her brothers were like – not the somber criminal of sociological texts, denied roller skates at a crucial age; still less the hero-villain of films; but simply men whose moments of megalomaniacal audacity were less depressing than their lack of common sense and taste. It was for their pleasure, she thought, that people manufactured ashtrays shaped like little outhouses, that curly-haired little girls in sailor suits were taught to tap-dance, and night-club singers gave voice to “Mother Machree” and “Eli, Eli.”

Still, she thought, neither of them would have married into apostasy like Victor, nor flustered poor Father Patenaude by listening to his sermons as if analyzing them for truth and intellectual content, as she herself did every week. The Father was horrified that the shop had been left to Victor instead of to them. “It might have been their redemption,” Marina had heard him say after the funeral, as she threaded her way out between the elaborate graves. “And they were so good to her; they loved their mother.”

Certainly, their periodic descents on St. Eulalie Street had been more impressive than Victor’s monthly check and letter, or Marina’s faithful presence at Sunday dinner. Carol and Georgie, awash in the warm sea of Mother’s Day, had left in their wake a refrigerator for the shop that could hold fifteen cases of beer, a radio inlaid with wood in a waterfall pattern, a silver brush and mirror with Old English initials, a shrine containing a Madonna with blue glass eyes, a pearl-and-diamond pin shaped like a daisy, a Persian lamb coat with summer storage prepaid for ten years, two porcelain lamps of shepherd and shepherdess persuasion, and finally the gift that for some reason appealed most strongly to Carol and Georgie – a sherry
decanter and ten tiny glasses, each of which sounded a note of gratifying purity when struck with a knife.

The coat, the pin, the shrine, and the brush and mirror had been left to Marina, who, luckily, bore the same initials. Carol and Georgie, awarded similar tokens, had been warm in their assurances that neither of them wanted the shop. No one, they said, was more suited to shopkeeping than Victor – a remark that offended Victor’s wife into speechlessness for half an hour.

She and Victor were standing on the sidewalk in front of the shop when the hired car drew up to the curb. Peggy Ann, when she saw them, made exaggerated gestures of melting away in the sun, and then incomprehensible ones of laying her head on a pillow, which drew an unflattering remark from Georgie.

“Home,” Carol said, evidently without sarcasm, looking up and down the shadeless chasm of brick, here and there enlivened by Pepsi-Cola signs. A few children, sticky with popsicles, examined the New Jersey license of Victor’s Buick and then the shining splendor of the rented limousine. Not recognizing it, they turned back to the Buick and then suddenly scattered into the street, where Georgie had thrown a handful of quarters. Some of the children, Marina’s pupils at a parochial school named for Saint Valerie the Martyr, glanced at her shyly.

“They look scared of you,” Georgie said. “What do you do, beat them?”

“I’d like to,” Marina said.

“I’m sure she doesn’t mean that,” Peggy Ann said, smiling.

A wide ribbon of crepe hung on the shop door, and green shades were pulled at door and window, bearing in shadow the semicircle of words on the glass, “Rumania Fancy Groceries,” and then in smaller letters, “Mrs. Maria Boldescu.”

“How many times did I get up on a ladder and wash that window!” Georgie said, as if the memory were enchanting.

“Victor, too?” said Peggy Ann. “I’ll bet he was an old lazy.”

No one replied, and Victor fitted the key into the padlock while Carol, restless, hummed and executed a little dance step. The smell of the shut-up store moved out to meet them. Carol, with a look of concern, went at
once to the cash register, but Marina had forestalled him. “I took it all out when Mama took sick,” she said.

“Good idea,” said Georgie, approving.

“You were awfully clever to think of everything,” Peggy Ann said. “Although it seems to me that, with crepe on the door and everything, no one would break in.” She stopped, as if she had uttered an indelicate thought, and went on rapidly, “Oh, Victor, do look! What a sweet little store. Look at all the salami and my goodness, all the beer! Cases and cases!”

“We bought Mama the beer license,” Carol said. He walked around, rattling change in his pocket.

“She must have been pleased,” said Peggy Ann. “Victor, look at all the things – all the tins of soup, and the spaghetti.”

Marina, parting the blue chintz curtains at the end of the counter, moved into the kitchen behind the shop. She lifted her hand and, without glancing up, caught the string of an overhead light. Two doors, varnished to simulate oak, led off to the bedrooms – the one she had shared with her mother, until, at twenty-three, she had overcome her mother’s objections to her having a place of her own, and the other room in which had slept, singly or together, the three boys. The kitchen window looked out on a fenced-in yard where Mrs. Boldescu had tried to grow vegetables and a few flowers, finally managing a tough and spiky grass. Marina opened the window and pushed back the shutters, admitting a shifting layer of soot. Weeds grew as high as the sill, and wild rhubarb, uncontrolled in this summer of illness, flourished along the fence. A breath of city air entered the room, and an old calendar bearing a picture of the shrine at St. Anne de Beaupré suddenly flapped on its pin. She straightened it, and then, from some remembered prudence, turned out the light.

Carol, who had come in behind her, glanced at the calendar and then at her. Then he said, “Now that we’re alone, tell me just one thing. Was that a nice funeral or wasn’t it?”

“It was charming,” she said. “It was nice that you and Georgie were both free for it at once.”

Carol laughed; evidently he expected this sour, womanly reprimand, and now that their mother was dead he would expect it still more from Marina. “You ought to get married,” he said.

“Thanks. The boys I grew up with were all so charming.” She sat down, tipping her chair against the wall in a way her mother had disliked. She and Carol were alone as they had seldom been in childhood, able now to take stock of each other. Twenty, fifteen years before they had avoided each other like uncongenial castaways, each pursuing some elusive path that led away from St. Eulalie Street. Considering the way they had lived, crowded as peas in a pod, their privacy, she now thought, must have been a powerful act of will. In the darkening room, she saw herself ironing her middy blouse, the only one she owned, a book propped insecurely on the ironing board. Georgie and Carol came and went like cats, and Victor shouted outside in a game of kick-the-can. Again, she did her homework under the overhead light while Georgie and Carol, shut in their room for punishment, climbed out the window and were fetched home by the police. At last, her memory alighted on one shining summer with both the older boys “away” (this was the only word Mrs. Boldescu had ever used) and Marina, afloat with happiness, saying to every customer in the shop, “I’m going to France; have you heard? I’m going to France.”