Of Song and Water (23 page)

“If I leave, they'll forget I was here.”

“You don't get it, do you? You've been trying to be black for as long as I've known you, but you still don't get it. It's easy for you. It's easy to
say
they'll forget. You get to play both sides of the street. I don't.”

Unable to look at Brian, he turned and dragged himself out of the kitchen.

“And don't walk out,” said Brian. “You're the best when it comes to walking. You played the guitar. You were in love with a great woman. But then you split for something better. It's easy for you to move. You can go anywhere. It's just that wherever you go, nothing stays whole.”

He rubbed his left hand and straightened a pile of magazines. “You want me to leave?”

“I told you. Go if you want to. But don't go because it's difficult for me.”

“I could talk to the landlord,” he said. “I could canvas the building, leave a few notes of my own.”

Brian shook his head. “What in the hell are you saying?”

“I'm saying I could help.”

Brian threw up his hands. “I see. If you can't be black, then you'll be the savior – is that it? Listen, I don't need saving.”

 

HE SITS in the auditorium thinking about redemption. He wants to tell Brian that being part of the trio was more than an act of ego or pride, more than usurpation or theft. It came from a bottomless need, a yearning to be someone other – someone that didn't look, act, or feel like himself. Why should he be lumped together with his grandfather and father? To be seen like them – or understood like them – was anathema to him. And now the thing he finds frightening, the thing driving his bitterness, is the possibility of being judged like them, of facing reparations, a day of reckoning that will hold him accountable for the lives and money they stole. He can't deny that one man took up cruelty and the other indifference or that both were selfish, possessed by a singular vision, so much so that everyone around them was made to live in the margins. But redemption, he thinks, isn't the answer. The important thing is to show the world a face of his own – a face not inscribed by history.

He's come late to this understanding, though not so late, he thinks, as to his knowledge of the family crime. Had he known the truth and so the entire scope of his character, he might've explained, to Brian or to anyone else, his desire – his need – to be someone other. But he'd been deprived of the full story. He had to wait until his father's boat, salvaged from Cape Hurd, offered up its unquiet ghost.

He towed it back to Michigan, set it on a cradle, and opened its compartments to the light. In the cabin, he discovered books and charts, a photograph of the old house in Saginaw; when he pulled the stuff from hiding, an envelope slipped out, fluttering through the air like a falling bird. He might have thrown it in the trash except that the envelope bore his father's name in a heavy and
formal script, an immediately recognizable hand. Knowing it to be from his grandfather, from the pirate Havelock Moore, he raised the flap and removed the letter. He unfolded two sheets of water-stained paper.
To my dear son, Dorian
, it began.

It should've been simple, he thinks. A suicide note should offer a reason, a profession of love, an appeal for mercy. But the letter caught him off guard. Rather than providing comfort, it made a confession, a declaration of guilt. It spoke of winter in old Detroit, an alley in Rivertown, and a landlord with a slit at the base of his skull.

It was the business of war that taught me the method
, wrote Havelock.
And the business of war is godless. They make it that way, despite their encomiums and prayers, so that soldiers can kill without sin. Being young, I believed them. I took them at their word.

He remembers squinting in the semigloom of the cabin, his eyes drawn several times to the date at the top of the letter,
June 22, 1968
, the day of his grandfather's death.

Havelock explained that a world without God was conducive to the business of war, to the pursuits of power and wealth.
But after the War
, he wrote,
after survival and success, after marriage and a child, I found myself betrayed. I wasn't allowed a godless world. Someone had called for a restoration. Someone had resurrected God and guilt and eternal damnation.

It could've ended right there, he thinks, picturing the letter tucked away in the top drawer of his dresser. He saw it today looking for a tie clasp – the one Heather gave him for his birthday. He never intended to memorize the letter, but somehow the words stay with him. In the last lines, just above the signature, Havelock wrote:
God ruins our happiness like a harvester ruins the mouse's nest. He is arbitrary. He has no sense of proportion.

HE FEELS a tap on his shoulder. A father with a camera squeezes by and takes a picture of his son, a cherubic boy who snatches a diploma from the hand of Principal Trip. It'll be Heather's turn before long.

He loosens his tie. He wishes he could turn and find Jen standing beside him. He'd like to see her moving through the aisles and taking photographs, recording the day's key moments.

“Heather Maureen Moore” rings through the auditorium, and he watches his daughter stand and walk gracefully across the stage. She shakes the hand of Principal Trip and accepts her diploma with a smile. She looks down at her mother and then at him – her proud father. He snaps a picture.

Now she has her ticket, he thinks. She'll stay out late tonight, despite Maureen's curfew and my advice, and when she finally comes home she'll no longer feel the weight of our demands. She'll pull the big suitcase and the duffel bag out of her closet and begin planning her move, deciding what she'll need and what she won't be taking. She'll quit the Lighthouse Diner and visit Humbug once or twice before she leaves. At first, she'll call all the time, but then, with homework and new friends, she'll wait for a Sunday afternoon or evening. Finally, the weekends will be too full, and she'll call once a month, usually late at night, laughing or holding back tears.

He turns to walk up the aisle. He glances at Maureen. She clutches the thick arm of the man on her left and smiles and dabs at the tears running down her cheeks, her face glowing with contentment. He pauses for a moment, hoping that she'll notice him, but she seems oblivious to the people around her. Gazing up at the stage, she gives the impression of being softer somehow, less defensive. She looks the same as she did on Grosse Ile, on the day they met walking the dogs, when her boredom with music felt to him like a breath of fresh air.

At the start, she was patient and loving, but his habits and disposition wore her down, particularly those things that were careless, even reckless, and that
fell, he believed, within the province of an artist's life. When he went back on the road, she urged him not to go. When he came home and women from faraway cities called in the middle of the night, she pretended to be asleep. When he left the water running and the kitchen sink overflowed, damaging the countertop and the cabinetry below, she reset the tile and refinished the wood doors without complaining. When she found a small stash of pornographic films, she feigned interest. When he misplaced the car, his wallet, and then his keys, she left the front door open. And when a teenage girl wanted private lessons and came to the house in the middle of winter wearing a tiny plaid skirt and a bikini top, Maureen slammed the door and saved him from jail. In these ways, he used up whatever patience she had. He used it up so completely that going home with broken hands seemed presumptuous, utterly ridiculous, a burden he couldn't ask her to bear.

The assistant principal reads another name, and several guys in the audience break into applause. They keep it going, whistling and cheering, while a young woman with a movie star face struts across the stage. She turns and waves and the boys fire up their enthusiasm.

Back at his seat, he takes off his jacket. All morning he's been uncomfortably warm, a condition that he can't explain given the weather. Heather, of course, appears cool and relaxed, entirely comfortable, even though she's been under the lights for more than an hour. He thinks of women, at least those in his life, as remarkably composed, more resilient when subjected to pressure, whether gradual or sudden. Some have a high tolerance for pain. Others can hear the snapping of a bone without flinching.

He wipes his forehead with his sleeve and thinks about the weekend stretching out before him, the reception later this evening at the old house – Maureen's house – and then Sunday, a day of work at Humbug followed by cooking and eating alone. He hopes the dry Canadian air sticks around through the start of the week. High humidity makes it difficult to breathe.

HE KNEW that the bartender would crank up the air as the Green Mill filled with people. He wiped the sweat from his temple and felt happy to be in a darkened room, not only because the last three days had been humid but also because Jen, a worshipper of heat, oblivious to the ovenlike atmosphere of the apartment, had ignored his fuming and his threats and reset the thermostat whenever he turned the other way.

Brian and Tom were already in back and he was tuning again, dissatisfied with the new strings he'd put on the day before. As a purist, he'd been resisting the lure of an electronic tuner, but lately his ears weren't working and the frustration made him wonder if he shouldn't give in.

When he sat down, he thought he saw someone familiar out of the corner of his eye, but when he scanned the crowd there was no one he recognized, and so he busied himself with the tuning, though the feeling stayed with him, as if a person he knew were watching from a shadowy corner. A few minutes later, feeling entirely ill at ease, he got up, looked around, and stumbled, catching himself at the edge of the stage, staggered by the figure of Otis sitting alone in one of the small booths against the wall.

“My God, Otis,” he said, rushing over and shaking the man's hand until Otis told him to sit down. “What are you doing here? You never leave Port Austin.”

Otis centered his drink on the small white napkin. “I decided to make an exception.” He gave the impression of a man sitting in church, rather calm, almost solemn, with one arm held tightly against his side. “I don't hear anything. I don't get any news. What's a man to do?”

“I'm sorry. Jen always asks about you. We talk about coming to Port Austin.”

“You do? You only brought her around once. I can't remember what she looks like.”

“She's gorgeous.”

“That's good,” said Otis.

“So how long are you in town? Where are you staying?”

“Slow down,” said Otis, shaking his head. “I see you're still in a hurry. Let's get through the first set, shall we?”

He flagged the waitress and glanced at Otis's black jacket and white button-down shirt, an outfit that was too nice for the Mill and too heavy for the weather. “Another for my friend,” he said. “And I'll have a vodka on the rocks.”

The waitress walked away and Otis watched her go. He shivered. “I gotta get out more.”

“You okay?”

“It's chilly in here,” said Otis, sitting perfectly still.

Suddenly, as if the bartender had turned up the lights, he saw that Otis's face was drawn, thinner than he remembered, and the shoulders seemed less substantial, pinched or crumbling, beneath the fine tailored coat. He lowered his voice and said, “It's not the chill, is it?”

Otis sipped his drink with measured dignity and then set the glass down on the napkin. “I've come to hear you play. That's all.”

“What's bothering you?” he said.

A man walked up to the table. “You're Otis Young, aren't you? If I'm not imposing too much, would you mind signing an autograph?”

Otis winced and wrote his name on a scrap of paper and kept his other arm pressed against his side.

“Thank you,” said the man. He bowed and walked away.

“C'mon, Otis. What's the story?”

“All right,” he said, sitting flawlessly upright with one hand resting on the table. “This is my last wish. Will you grant me my last wish?”

Later, somewhere in the first set, trying to play for Otis, wanting more than anything to do him justice, he felt himself losing control, filling up with the
grief of time passing, of long summers and tired dreams, a flood of memory, hope, and desire rising in him until the song and his playing became prayer, a tribute to the man who'd given him meaning, who'd shown him the possibility, if only in brief flashes, of a rare and elemental sound that could live forever against time, and so he played without thinking or knowing and finally looked up, the lights low and the room drained of color, and saw that Otis was composed and seemingly without pain, his body leaning toward the music.

 

AFTER the applause, the soloist leaves the stage and some of the graduates use the moment to shift in their chairs and take a deep breath. Then Principal Trip returns to the podium. “Now we'll hear from the chorus,” he says.

A group of seniors comes forward and members of the sophomore and junior classes join them on the stage. The director looks like a descendant of Ichabod Crane and bows deeply before turning to the singers. Snapping his fingers, he counts off a quick tempo, and the kids leap into a song, a spiritual, a celebration of deliverance and freedom. In a flash, the auditorium feels like church.

Fanning himself with a program, he listens to the voices and imagines a preacher rising above the chorus, the students in their purple gowns – bathed in bright light – waiting for redemption.

“I'd say kids these days could use more religion.” He wishes the words weren't so fresh in his mind. His landlord had made the remark when she saw prints of Heather's senior portrait – wallet size to 8” x 10” – spread out on the kitchen table. As a committed overseer, she'd come by before work and caught him in his bathrobe making coffee.