Lady (15 page)

Until only a few years before that night at Hermitage Island, the boats continued plying the river, and we saw them frequently. It was the sons and grandsons of the old ship captains who piloted them, but then, one by one, they'd disappeared, and now there were none left.

"You went all the way to New York on one?" Harry asked Lady, and she smiled and shook her head.

"No, darling, not all the way. Only half, I should say."

"How come?" Harry persisted.

"We -- just never got there, that's all." She dismissed the subject with a small wafting gesture, then tied her scarf and let the ends flutter in the breeze. "And now the boats are all gone."

"Progress," muttered Jesse, picking one last chicken bone clean.

"I'm afraid so. People want speed today. Trains and planes, but I miss those steamers."

"But the future's in aviation," Blue said. Like the rest of us, Blue was a bug on flying, and though it was sometimes said that lighter-than-air craft like the new
Hindenburg
zeppelin the Germans had built would be the great thing, our own
Akron
had crashed, and Blue said it would be wings that would win the air.

"Look at Lindbergh, look at Wiley Post -- he took the
Winnie Mae
around the world in seven days. Seven
days
! And that
GeeBee
the Granville brothers designed, that's the most dangerous racing plane ever flown, but she beat every record at the Cleveland Air Race. Planes like that can outfly any gasbag built. And those new flying boats -- what I wouldn't give to fly a China Clipper! That baby's going to make history, see if it doesn't With planes like that, America could win any war that comes."

There always seemed to be talk of war these days. The Germans had twice repudiated the Versailles Treaty, once by the reintroduction of conscription and the beginnings of a new army, and again by the occupation of the Saar. Everyone laughed at the League of Nations, because they had turned their backs on what was happening with the Japanese in Manchuria, and the threats Mussolini was making against Ethiopia. Along with our Indian and baseball bubble-gum cards, there was now a new series depicting The Horrors of War. Still -- a real war? We'd had one all too recently. We had our father's helmet and pistol to prove it.

Blue stretched out his long legs and crossed his arms over his stomach. "If there is a war, America'll be in it, one way or another. And I'm going to fight, you bet."

"I'm going to join the Navy," I loudly boasted.

"That so?" Jesse darted an appraising look at me. "A good life, a sailor's."

"Jesse's father is a sailor," Lady said, but Jesse shook his head.

"No more a sailor, Missus." He looked around at us. "Daddy's near ninety -- he doesn't do much of anything now. But once upon a time he sailed practically the world wide. He's been to Los Angeles."

"Yeah? Where else?" Jack Harrelson asked.

"Hong Kong. Russia. Montevideo. He sailed in the four-masted ships, before there was steam or engines. Had to quit, though."

"How come?"

"He got him an addled pate, went stupidy. Derrick caught him in the head and they put a steel plate in. But his balance was gone -- can't sail without balance." He gave me another look. "You ever read Bowditch's?"

"No, sir."

"You'll never be a sailor worth his salt without Bowditch's. That's the sailor's bible. Tells you everything about sailing, tying knots, rigging, navigation."

We all knew Jesse to be a reader. He had an amazing book collection: one by one they'd appear around the kitchen, a shoelace or a gum wrapper marking his place. He seemed to read everything, history, biography, mythology, philosophy, religion, even medical books from time to time. If the truth were known, he was probably one of the best-educated men in Pequot Landing, and we often speculated on why he'd settled for being a butler.

"We've got the finest ocean in the world," Jesse went on, "our Caribbean Ocean, no finer sailing or fishing anywhere." He loved the softness of the air, he said, the bright sun and the sunsets, the birds flying, fish that leaped for yards across the water or took your line for miles. And he spoke of the life of island fisher folk, where everyone sat down to table together and sang and then got up and danced, drank, and sat down and ate some more.

I thought Jesse must be a lot like his father. Though Jesse had lived in Pequot Landing longer than any of us could remember, still he was never native to it, never really got used to it and I always had the feeling that not only did he view our New England extremes of temperature with dissatisfaction, but viewed with equal dissatisfaction our small-town puritan ethics and folkways, as if our often narrow viewpoints were distasteful to him.

"Lordy," he said, with a woeful shake of his head, "hereabouts folks burned witches, isn't that so, Missus?"

"Indeed, yes, Jesse. Think of poor Mercy Higham." Mercy Higham was our local witch who'd been denounced as a demon-fancier because she could stick a needle in her finger without drawing blood. "But," Lady continued, "it's the part of the New England ethic which, even after centuries, still hangs on. Look at poor Elsie Thatcher -- you boys are too young to remember her -- she worked at River House, and was drummed out of town."

"Why?" Phil Harrelson asked.

"She was requested by some of the town ladies and gentlemen to depart elsewhere. The committee serving notice on Elsie was headed by P.J. and Spouse -- the Spragues."

What had Elsie Thatcher done? we wanted to know.

Elsie, to her sorrow, had borne a child out of wedlock. Elsie was a sinner. Elsie could no longer draw lager at River House. Elsie could no longer live in Pequot Landing.

"She ought to have gone to Holiday Lake," I said.

"What ever do you mean?" Lady asked in surprise.

"You know -- the roller coaster? Lily Marini?" I thought everybody knew. One of the Knobb Street Marinis hung out with the boys on the depot platform at night, and when she was going to have a baby she went to Holiday Lake and rode the roller coaster backward and she didn't have the baby. "But it took five rides," I added.

"Oh, Ignatz, you're making that up." Lady laughed and laughed. "But we're very Old Testament in our thinking," she continued. "From Abraham to Selectman Standish, we are guilt-ridden and fearful of impropriety. Narrow lives make for narrow minds. Or perhaps it's the other way around? But one day it may change."

"Change how?" Harry wanted to know.

"Well, today our population is around five thousand in the town. But it will grow, what with the new highway, and the factories being built There will be more houses -- little houses, you may be sure, but the people living in them won't necessarily be of English stock, or Protestant, or even white. They may have other ideas than the 5:10-ers have. Did you know there's only one Jewish family in town? The Rosens?"

We didn't know much about the Rosens, except that their son George was a good student, and his sister Anne was one of the prettiest girls around. But we did know that because they were Jewish, and went to temple in Hartford, like Catholics they were somehow "different"

"And," Lady continued, "one day, when the farms are gone, and the streets are laid out, and the little houses are built, these new people will be the ones Mr. Welles will want to sell his horseradish to. One day we may even have a mayor and a town council, and one of the Marinis could be on it"

A mayor and a town council! That was unthinkable; Pequot Landing had always been, and always would be, run by the public voting at Town Meeting. As for the Marinis, it was hard to think of any of them ever attaining a position of importance in the town.

The Marini farm was down at the end of the Green, almost across from Colonel Blatchley's house. Papa and Mama Marini were Tuscany peasants who'd come to America with little more than their clothes, steerage all the way from Genoa, and not speaking the language. Now Mr. Marini had a prosperous farm and owned land, and a large family -- there were Marinis all over the place, it seemed. His brothers had immigrated as well, one to the grape country near San Francisco, and another lived with his family up on Knobb Street -- they were considered poor relations, and two of the girls were often out back of the schoolyard, trading looks with the fellows. But our Marinis, the ones on the Green, were industrious, friendly people. Johnny, the oldest boy, worked hard for his father, and Teresa -- scrawny and shy, like Ag, only darker -- was always in the kitchen helping her mother. You couldn't walk by the house without getting a whiff of something good cooking. In addition to truck farming, Mr. Marini sold greenhouse plants, and his front yard was crowded with a display of stone birdbaths, brownies sitting on mushrooms, little animals, benches, and other garden ornaments.

But enterprising as they were, good, upstanding people, still the Marinis were only farmers, and Italians, and Catholics -- they wouldn't go far in Pequot Landing.

Continuing the conversation, Lady said, "Blue wants to fly, Woody wants to sail, how about the others?" Jack Harrelson said he wanted to go to Harvard and study law, as his father had. His brother Phil wanted to be an architect, and design buildings like they had in Radio City, or like the Empire State Building, or even bigger ones. Lew said he might like to be a basketball coach -- he didn't care at what school, as long as it was not in Pequot Landing. Harry wanted to go to MIT and study mechanical engineering. Well, Lady said, maybe he could team up with Phil. That left Rabbit, who'd played dumb most of the evening.

"How about you, Harold," Lady asked, "what do you want to be?" He blinked behind his glasses in his usual perplexity, scratched himself, and finally came up with the astounding information that he wanted to be a veterinarian. I suppressed a laugh, thinking it funny that he wanted to take care of animals, after how he'd treated Colonel Blatchley's prize hares. And, what was funnier, he wanted to set up business right here in Pequot.

"The way I figure it, this is about as nice a town as you could hope to find. It ain't city, but it's close enough. And Mrs. Harleigh's right -- it's going to grow, and people are going to do things. And they'll have families, and families ought to have dogs and cats and things, and I'd like to take care of them. You can always find a doctor if you have to, but when a dog gets runned over, who's around to put it back together?"

He said it so soberly and so earnestly, you couldn't doubt him, but of all of us who spoke that night, I think he was the only one who was content to stay in Pequot when he could as easily go elsewhere.

Then Lady, in her gently inquiring way, asked questions about Rabbit's mother and how she was getting on at Middlehaven. I could tell that he didn't like talking about it, but it didn't look as if she was ever going to get out of the reformatory. She couldn't keep her temper, and the matrons had a lot of difficulty with her. As for Dora, part of her trouble had something to do with her ear canals, and that was why she wasn't right in the head.

Lady seemed to be paying particular attention to the recital of these woes, and when she reached and tousled Rabbit's hair I felt the Green-Eyed Monster rising in me again. That dumb-silent Rabbit Hornaday, he knew how to get the attention all right. All you needed was a dippy sister, a mother in the hoosegow, and dreams of living on Knobb Street and having a pet shop.

But it was as this subject of getting away ended that we learned why Nonnie was singing again. Lady told us. In September our sister was going away to college, to the Norwich Normal School. I glanced at Lew and Harry, wondering where Ma had managed to come up with Nonnie's tuition, but however it was to be arranged, I was happy that Nonnie was finally going to realize her dream of becoming a teacher.

Lady sat up and hugged Honey to her, pointing her moist muzzle at the sky. "Look, Honey -- see how bright the moon is!" Honey cocked her head, seeming to agree with her mistress. It was a spectacular sight all right. Having risen high over the trees, the moon was making a path across the water, big silvery pieces floating in the black, and adding to the magical spirit of the night. "It looks like one of the gazing-globes Mr. Marini sells. Wouldn't one look pretty in the garden?"

"Mrs. Pierson has one," Harry pointed out.

"So she has," Lady agreed. "Well, I can't have Lilah Pierson thinking I'm keeping up with the Joneses, Papa Marini will have to find us something else. Jesse, Elthea's going to be wondering where we are if we don't start back." She smiled around the circle, then rose. "It's been a gorgeous night, boys. Thank you for letting us share it with you. Can someone put the hamper in the boat?"

While Lew took the hamper, I helped her into the skiff where she sat in the stern with Honey. Jesse put the oars in the locks, then struck out with a forceful stroke. The skiff seemed to hang in the darkness, with only the white of his shirt and of Lady's blouse and face briefly visible. Then they too became shadows, became only voices as they spoke.

"Thanks for the food," we shouted, and her merry laugh floated back to us as she said she had enjoyed it more than we.

Later, Blue left, the fire dwindled, we talked some more, then went to the huts and bedded down. Lying in my sleeping roll, I looked up at the moon at its zenith. It seemed there had never been so many stars in the sky as on that night, and they looked warm and close and comforting. I thought about Blue, wondering if he would ever really do what he wanted to do, if there would be a war and he would go to fight, or if he'd end up stuck in Pequot Landing, driving the Pilgrim Market truck, and stopping to swap jokes with the boys at the Noble Patriot. A hundred-horsepowered boy in a one-horsepowered town, trying to make an honest dollar in a day when, as Blue had pointed out, a dollar wasn't easy to come by.

Not that we were really aware of the Depression, and the fact that people elsewhere were suffering through hard times. At home there was always food enough on our table, and even if it was shepherd's pie or goulash or slumgullion, it was both filling and tasty, and to stretch the budget even further Ma could make the best cheese souffle. If we had roasts only on Sundays, with the leftovers curried on Mondays, no one complained. We knew of something called the NRA -- there were Blue Eagle stickers everywhere, in the barbershop, the drugstore, on people's windows, even at our front door, an emblem of the period -- and if the banks had closed in '32 they opened again soon enough, not that we had money in any of them. Since like almost everybody else in the whole town, we were Republicans, nobody in our house ever bothered to tune in to Mr. Roosevelt's fireside chats, but had we cared to, we could have listened to the radio blasting from next door at Gert Flagler's. She was a rabid Democrat. If we didn't have a surfeit of wardrobe, we had enough, though Aggie and I suffered from hand-me-downs.