The Almanac Branch (4 page)

“That's a pretty dumb reason to lose your arm.”

“You're right. And as often as not they can't do it, and mope around for the rest of their lives with a stub for an arm. It all has to do with ideals, rather than goals. You set a goal, you get there, or you don't. If you don't, you move on to the next goal. You set for yourself an ideal, you set yourself up for frustration. There's nothing like idealism to send somebody down the path of foolish risk. You should remember that.” Faw, I still contend, was a man of goals who tried to veer Berg away from precisely what he's become—a man of fool-hearted idealism.

After Munich came West Berlin, and after that South America and the Philippines to make arrangements for importing folkloric art—baskets, fabrics, bows and arrows, masks. His gewgaws kept him moving. Distribution, and the knowledge that it worked best through personal contact, through a physical being who shows up every now and then to check out how things are going, was the element in Geiger that seemed to be paramount in its prosperity; that, and the conventional buy-low sell-dear equation, which was very much a part of Geiger's philosophy, modified perhaps to buy-for-nearly-nothing sell-low.

These were the reasons we so seldom saw my father. He would never let someone else do something that he could do better, was rather bad at delegation of responsibility, but supremely good at showing others how to do something efficiently. I don't know, to this day, how he kept up the pace of these sorties.

“Things to do on the beach in winter,” I wrote in my big round script, for the rain turned into sleet and the winds shifted toward the south that month when we were all trying to find our way in the new surroundings, and brought down a chill from Canada, forcing us out into its gales of romantic and ominous clouds, ironically, by pushing us indoors at first, toward each other, where things were even less comfortable.

“Things to do on the beach in winter.

“Wonder why the tide pools don't freeze. Look at the dead fish and junk that's been washed up after the big storm. Skip stones. Listen to the foghorn. Listen to the buoy bells clang. Pop seaweed bulbs under foot. Admire the shagbirds and gulls who don't shiver in the snow that is coming down to sit on the water. Notice how the sand feels like cement under your rubber boots when you walk the shore. See no sailboats. Set bonfires out on Pomps point. Roast marshmallows and melt down the chocolate bars to put between graham crackers to make S'mores. Fly a Chinese dragon kite and lose it when the string breaks. Watch it drift and drift away until it drops like a snowflake, into the waves. Not get sunburns. Get windburns. Be freezing your heiny off but not want to go home. Be talked to by your mother for being cold but not wanting to obey her and go home. Sulk. Be sent home. Go home. Sulk. Be in pain from the windburn. Have a windburn vision at dinner. Think about the dragon, how brave it was fluttering down into the icy whitecaps. Wonder where it was now. In Connecticut, in Africa? Does paper float, do dragons float? Think about whether you should have written a message on it in case it drifted to a foreign shore, like they do when they put messages in bottles.

“Wonder when Faw is coming home.”

Mostly, stay away from the beach in the winter and, yes, often wonder when Father was coming home.

Then, wintry spring gave way to real spring. The light that reigns in memory of that first island year was the morning light, which was sometimes one color, sometimes another, but often was the color, out on the water, of my favorite ice cream—butter brickie—as the sun grew wider and wider and lulled over the scrub (whence Scrub Farm) pine dunes, or was swept under a clean sheet of squall cloud, or dotted by sails and noisy, fearless gulls.

Mother seemed to settle in, and I began to wonder whether my initial interpretation of how she acted in the kitchen on the first afternoon was wrong. I'd been tired, she had been tired. Maybe, I thought, I got it all wrong, because now she seemed to like the thought of taking us children down to the water. She would even slip out of her sun dress and have her cream-brown suit with the ruffled skirt on underneath and get out into it with us, being buoyed up in the swells with me in her arms, or Desmond, though Desmond didn't like to do that when Berg was around because he was getting too old to put up with that kind of mothering. She was so pale she was the same color as the sand, and the sun had not much effect on her. Her arms would get a little rosy, and her forehead would freckle. She had the same figure as Berg, almost. It was hard to believe she'd had three children, she seemed so much like a young girl, or boy, herself.

But, wishful thinker, I would come to know that I'd not been wrong. Not in the last analysis. There must have been enough going on, at least to interest me, that her actual pulling away from us, or else just simply her daily absences, went, I should be ashamed to admit—especially in light of my earlier intuition—unnoticed. Faw's absences, too, while noted, were so much part and parcel of our existence that we became accustomed to his not being there. That we were becoming well-loved orphans seemed not to register in our waking lives; if anyone had asked us, we would all have agreed at the time that our parents were good parents, adored us, were affectionate and, yes, attentive within the limits of their outside interests. Even Berg would not have abided the term “orphan” as descriptive of us Brush children, though it could be said that, in the last analysis, he may have suffered the most from these deprivations.

Day to day life on an island is usually a chronicle of boredom punctuated by moments of great pleasure, or pain—what soldiers report being in war is like. But we children were not so easily bored as your usual shipwrecked mariners, whom we saw in television movies, fitfully asleep amid piles of coconuts they'd chopped in half with their big cutlasses, now and then staring up into the merciless Caribbean sun and dreaming up mirages of home, seeing oases surrounded by palm trees and dancing girls offering papayas to the mad who'd failed to find fresh spring water and had begun to drink the standing ocean brine in the mangroves, which as everyone knows makes sailors crazy as monkeys.

When the men who were working on the house came, there was at the farm a sense of progress, and shaping, and building. We were each, in our own ways, I think, caught up in it, though Berg was as ever distant, and Mother was less interested in the details than I, and Desmond. There is no sound I had ever heard that was more poignantly powerful than the great, beautiful bass note made by a floor sander—it was a thousand of those Tibetan monks who can sing a chord of three notes at the same time all chanting the deepest tones in their collective register, and had the same richness and spirituality. To watch them tear down a wall, it was to me magisterial. There was hardly anything they did, these builders, that I wasn't enamored of. Four, five, on a special day even six of them at the house, working together, playing on a portable plastic radio country music or rock, sometimes working hard, sometimes lazing, digging into their paper sack lunches at noon, young, old, such different personalities. They asked me questions and I answered.

They asked, “Grace, would you bring a glass of water?” And I would run with such excitement to fulfill that important request. They asked, “Grace, would you go find your mother?”“What do you need?” I might answer. “Don't need anything, just I have a question for your mother about a problem here we better talk to her before we go ahead.”

“You can ask me,” I would try, but they smiled and lit their cigarettes, and shifted back and forth in their large, reputable workmen's bodies, which I beheld with the same awe I might a lion, or locomotive.

The pantry floor was spongy and one man—a boy, really—had got down into the crawl space under the house, with his pocket lighter, cursing about how silted up it was under there, and it turned out the joists (all these new words) and beams supporting the subfloor were rotted. His voice, tiny, rose up through the stone-hard maple saying, “Footing's all dry-rotted to hell too.”

“What does that mean?” I asked, still resisting going to get Mother, proud to be so favored by the men that they had no fear of using words like “hell” in my presence. Ernest pulled a mock-long frown. “Well, we got to rip this here floor up is what, we got to pour a new footing, scab in some pressure-treated along whatever beams there are down there that are any good yet, level her up, insulate, knock in a new subfloor, and floor it out, don't know why they ever built out on Ram, just too exposed to the elements for a building to stay of a piece.”“Well,” I said, “whatever you think,” which drove Ernest and the others into laughter hoarse from cigarettes. I knew, as he smiled his appeasing smile of broken teeth and crow's feet, that he wanted to be able to say something like, Yes, all right, Grace, you're the boss, but had to say instead, “You had better get your mother.”

They were obliged to go to her because I wasn't grown up yet, but I was aware that she didn't really want to hear about problems with the house and in the end all she said was what I had said, “Go ahead, I don't care.”

I, of course, cared desperately, from my more humble vantage of having to listen from behind her skirt.

She added, on her way out, “If Grace gets in your way just chase her off.”

“She's no problem,” he answered without hesitation; I suppose it is fair to say that fifty-sixty-year-old Ernest Dresser was my first love besides Desmond—whom I loved more than anyone, and about whom I will have things to say—and, of course, my father. Ernest wore the same clothes every day, brown plaid faded shirt, blue jeans faded also, with a work belt of thick, worn leather from which his tools dangled, and the heaviest, gunbluing-black boots I have ever seen. What girl could resist a gentleman who carried his hammer from room to room with that kind of tender, ingenuous authority?

And when Ernest and the others finished the pantry floor and put down new pine trim along the baseboard and crown molding to match, the room looked so good to me—that is, so stable and solid. “Came out better than it had any right to,” was what he said about every project he finished at Scrub Farm. I knew that whatever he touched would last for hundreds of years, would be standing long after we all were gone. I was sorry when they finished and were ready to go to their next job. I kept trying to find other things wrong with the house that required their attention, and actually did manage to stretch their stay another few days by discovering that a section of rain gutter outside my window needed to be refastened, where the branch of the cherry tree had knocked against it during storms. They wound up pulling off the entire green-copper length along that side of the house, and replacing it with new aluminum, which looked much uglier.

But then, one day, quite abruptly it felt like to me, the carpenters were gone, and I had to turn my attentions elsewhere.

Besides Ernest, I became attached to Djuna Cobbetts. She had a ruddy brow, and bluestone eyes, and a benign oval face sheathed in whorly gray hair, which was always pulled back into a tight bun. Short and softly rectangular, Djuna moved into the carriage house at the end of the drive, surrounded by ruined crab apples and bayberries. Whenever Berg took off over the dunes with Desmond to fight with driftwood swords, or hunt fiddler crabs and darting tiny fish that were trapped in tide pools in the rocks, she would be my companion.

Ernest knew Djuna and they enjoyed an easy friendship, the kind of friendship I surmised was the best that could be had, one which carried over the course of a lifetime, one which when I saw how they acted toward each other—with the most natural affection—I knew I would want for myself. Djuna, as it turned out, I saw more than Mother. And Ernest, for those several months, more than Faw. By autumn, I'd begun to think of them as if they were married, as if they were surrogate parents. And through the school year, through winter, even through that awkward, desolate string of weeks that come between winter and spring, when all the trees are still nude, and the causeway stones are wrapped in ice, I always hoped Ernest might have to come by to fix something.

That anniversary at Scrub Farm, when the ocean mellowed from its grays into brash, deep blues, was a silent, uncelebrated affair. My diversions eliminated, all that wonderful swirl of activity fell into an unwanted, unwonted calm. It was as if the focus had suddenly been turned again on the family, and the spell of carpentering and restoration was broken and we had to begin making the choices ourselves of what to do with our lives next. In my father's perpetual and mother's increasing absence, Djuna and Desmond became half of my discourse, and the great magic console, the television that sat in the corner of the library, became the other half.

Should I feel embarrassed to admit to such an addiction? Well, insofar as the television does not finally submit to discourse, as such, or dialogue, but simply states its piece, and allows for no rebuttal or objection, relies on its own beauties to bring the viewer back and back again into its sphere of influence, I suppose I should be ashamed of my relation with and eventual dependence upon it. It was and always will be a nasty device, a drug, a disease. You accept the box, or you turn it off. And I, understanding all this even then, accepted it, indeed I embraced it like a friend. It was like a genie's lamp to me, I rubbed its abundant blank glass belly (Faw told me that's what made it work, and though I think Berg knew the better of it, they allowed me to make a fool of myself every time I turned it on, by rubbing it with my palm in circles), pushed in a button, stood back, and waited, until soon enough there would come over its creative face another world, a world we never had back in the city—because we didn't own a television then—a world more funny, more miraculous, and often more engaging than our own.

Outside, the wind whistled across the white sun, seeming to bemoan Faw's absence, and the absence of my brothers, who had biked over to the ferry to fish eels, or porgies, and it whistled for my mother, who was off somewhere; and I understood that nothing made me feel warmer or more peaceful than to sit, cross-legged like the Red Men did in Westerns, and stare.