The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (42 page)

So how did they meet? Dottie asked.

Well, he said, pausing to sip his martini, did I ever tell you your grandmother was
the organist for St. Paul’s, the big cathedral in the center of Pittsburgh? Hired
by the bishop, who adored her, as did everybody who ever met her. Every other morning
but Sunday you’d find her over on the east side at St. Nicholas’s, the Croatian church.
All the Roman Catholic Croats from the old country understood each other in a way
other people would never understand. After what they’d been through, they understood
the Communists and the
mujos
better than anybody. And after the war Pop worked in the mines as a union organizer.
You’d never know it from looking at him—he was one tough bastard. If he smelled Red
on you, run for the hills. He’d crack your head in a minute. He took the Cold War
very personally. As did your grandmother. As do we all. Beware the Bear, or it will
eat you.

His elbows on his knees, her father drifted into silence, staring down at the glass
in his hands, until finally, well supplied throughout her childhood with her father’s
ideology but underfed on ancestors, she said
And?

Pittsburgh, he said, as though he had forgotten the story he had begun. Great place
to grow up. Muscular, self-confident, visionary. I had what would have to go down
in the books as a wonderful childhood. The classic edition—delivered newspapers on
my bike, had a home away from home at the movie theater. The three Ps—picnics, polka,
pinochle—at the Knights of Columbus hall. The wedding parties at the Croatian Club—man,
you would have loved those! Me and my pals went to the CYO dances. I was an altar
boy and proud of it. Call me a mackerel eater and I would sock you right in the nose.
I sang in the boy’s choir—and not just because my mother was the director. Fished
and camped and hunted with Pop up in the mountains, joined the Cub Scouts and the
NRA and then the Boy Scouts. After the war, Korea, McCarthy, when it became apparent
yet again that the union and the mine owners were of the same mind about the resurgent
Communist threat, they thought, correctly, it would be in their best interest to cozy
up to Pop and the other district leaders, and so they began to invite him out to Mellon’s
Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier—the Mellon brothers were famous bankers, you know—to
play golf and talk business and share the common ground of their patriotism. Pop would
take me to caddy, and by the time I was in high school at St. George’s I was one of
the top caddies at the club, the boy all the Ivy-League educated executives, all the
presidents and operators of the companies, wanted carrying their bags on weekends.
If Pop wasn’t playing, I’d hitchhike out to Ligonier myself. I knew the links. They
loved me, and when I learned the game and started kicking their ass, taking their
money and dating their daughters, they loved me even more. There’s a lesson there,
Dot, if you can see it. Generation to generation. By their example, those men showed
me what it meant to be a true American. Not just on the Fourth of July. Every fucking
day of your God-given life.

She could hear this all night, sponging up the spill of details from his hidden past,
which, by extension, was her hidden past, its dormancy throughout her life a vague
frustration, but the cadence of his voice had begun to swing and pull and slide and
she watched him empty the shaker’s contents into his glass, waiting with undue patience
for the last drops to emerge, and worried out loud if it might be bad for him.
Dad, martinis with antibiotics . . . is that a good idea?

Rule number one, honey, he said. Never admonish a man on vacation that he is drinking
too much.

She listened carefully for what was not there, the slightest hint of anger or irritation
in his tone, and said, Fine with me, and, already tipsy, went below to mix her third
rum and Coke.

Rule number two, her father said as she climbed back into the cockpit. Sacrosanct.
Thou shalt not vomit belowdecks.

I know that, she said. Is there a rule number three?

Ah, he said, feigning deep consideration. Rule number three takes us to a much different
place. Rule number three: Dedicate your life to something larger than yourself or
you will never be fulfilled and you will never be happy and you will never be worth
a damn to anybody.

Do you think that was Mom’s problem? she said innocently.

Your mother, he said. She certainly didn’t like the rules. I have to say, for almost
twenty years, ever since you kids were born, your mother never gave me a day of happiness.

Wow, she whispered.

You are my brilliant, beautiful daughter, he said, gesturing toward her with his drink,
sloshing vodka on her bare feet. I want to ask your permission to ask you something
very, very serious.

Okay, she said, watching his head begin to droop in increments. Permission granted.

Rule number three, he said.

Have a cause to live for.

Live
and
die, he said, revived with a sloppy gush of exuberance, and his head snapped upright.
Correct, beautiful. Live
and
die. Rule number three.

We’ve done rule number three.

Correct. Rule number four. The oath of secrecy. Thou shalt not tell. Ever.

Tell what?

Tell anybody.

Tell them what?

Vows are sacred. And, in my case, legally binding. Between us, okay, but that’s as
far as it can ever go. Classified.

Okay.

Promise.

I promise.

Very well. Excellent. Otherwise, you know
. . .

I promise. Stop worrying. I know how to keep my mouth shut.

You are my beautiful, courageous daughter, he said, the words tiptoeing from his mouth.
You are of an age. You have reached the age.

For what? she asked warily.

You have a grave responsibility, an imperative
. . .
praying for peace is not enough. You have to take risks. Act.

I know that, Daddy.

Okay
. . .
right. How do you know that?

Because I’m your daughter. Because of the way we live. Because, I guess, of what you
do.

Ah, he said. Exactly. That’s what I mean. You’re old enough now to know what it is
I do.

I know what you do, she said with a confidence that was not unwarranted. Like so many
others in the diaspora of Golden Ghettos spread across the globe, she was a member
of a family that existed in proximity to the headlines, tonight’s dinner table conversations
more often than not the morning’s breaking news. In her father’s office, prominently
displayed, was a photograph of him shaking hands with the president (not Carter—anybody
but Carter, who once described Cold War warriors like her father as
paranoid
) and another of her young father laughing with a team of Green Berets at their outpost
in the Vietnamese highlands. The list of family encounters with VIPs was impressively
and tiresomely endless, especially considering that, after pleasantries or cocktails
or dinner, she and her mother and brother were frequently asked to leave the room.
Counterterrorism—she was aware, vaguely, that the official focus resided there, floating
atop an unabashed hatred for the Soviet Union and its proxies. Her dad had a boss,
a guy named Dick, who answered to someone who answered to a presidential envoy named
Bremer, whose boss was the president himself. Somewhere embedded in the program were
the ambassadors and the secretaries of state
. . .
mostly, she got the sense, on the sidelines, official parents you maneuvered around,
hid things from, interacted with only on a need-to-know basis, which meant almost
never.

You work for the government, she said. Special assistant to the ambassador (which
was how she had been instructed to answer the question,
What does your father do?
).

Correct. Yes and no. And what is it I do?

Stop the Communists, I guess, from taking over the world.

Grind them to dust.

And you’re winning. We are.

I think you should understand something about the world we find ourselves in, he said.
Until Armageddon. One war moves aside only to make room for another. Until the Day
of Judgment, I should say. Peel back Communism and the
mujos
await. Okay, okay, he said, waving off an imaginary rebuttal. That point is contested,
but hey, if you liked the Stalinists, you are going to love the Salafis.
Badda bing
. Hey, how ’bout that Islamic bomb!
Badda bang
.

Dad, she said, you’re lighting the wrong end of your cigarette.

The fuck, baby.

Here. Let me light it for you.

I would hope to find you receptive. Simple matter. Good and evil.

I’m not sure I’m getting this.

Let me ask you a hypothetical. Can I ask you a hypothetical? If you had the opportunity,
you’d help me out, right?

If I had the opportunity? Sure.

So you’d help.

Just say the word, she said, humoring him. This was the second time her father had
seemed to solicit her participation in something shadowy and she still had no premonitory
sense of what he wanted from her.

You are at the age, he said, struggling to his feet, and she held her breath, waiting
for her father to fall, while he managed the steps down to the cabin to sprawl unconscious
on his bunk.

She awoke in the middle of the night to a stream of terrible gibberish coming from
him in a language she did not understand and tried without success to rouse him from
his nightmare and comfort the trembles of his fever. She awoke again sometime later
to an overpowering gagging stink infusing the cabin and wrapped her pillow over her
face and tried not to breathe through her nose. In the morning she found herself alone
and went on deck to discover her father hunched in the water off the stern, his body
orbited by minnow clouds of tarry shit.

Good morning, sunshine! he called out in a wretched attempt at cheer. Having a little
episode here.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The morning seemed to contain an implicit lassitude, without energy or desire, but
even the fuse of her enthusiasm
failed to ignite her father’s spirit.
Come on!
Dottie encouraged him, singing Madonna lyrics into an invisible microphone, dancing
on the bow with campy provocation to no avail, her vitality diffused into an inert
atmosphere. The seabirds themselves refused to fly.

Listless, her father cleaned himself and his soiled bunk, had a spartan breakfast
of coffee and bread, then held hands with Dottie as they prayed silently together
to God, Saint Christopher, and Saint Nicholas for safe passage and with particular
attention to Stella Maris, the Star of the Sea, and he recited out loud the
Sub Tuum Praesidium—We flee to your protection, O Holy Mother of God.

The spread of the sky was yellowed and creased like old parchment, the sun blotted
into an edgeless ochre smear. She had never before heard about the
lodos,
a southwest wind fabled for its virulence, born out of the Sea of Marmara in the
last months of summer and known to gather in its gust-blown skirts plum-colored clusters
of malignant squalls. Her father knew of the
lodos
and its fearsome reputation among sailors, yet motored south out of the cove anyway,
the mainsail hauled optimistically into an eerie humid calm. Once past the island
he had given her a compass heading and retired, spending the morning belowdecks, inhaling
naswar,
opiated Afghani snuff, to ease the assault of his double-barreled malady, an uncharacteristic
bout of depression added to the dysenteric churn in his gut. Later in the morning
the wind strengthened and shifted head-on and when she sensed the change in weather
she called for him, then shouted out for help, but he did not come.

The seas began to stand up higher than she would have thought possible, and then out
of the swells a thick dark monster with a sudsy crest butted against the bow, washing
the deck with warm blue water, and she could feel the boat buck and shudder and pause
beneath her feet, a slow second’s sensation of backwardness before gravity returned
and the vessel dived into the trough, a motion that seemed to catapult her father
into the cockpit, grabbing her shoulders to steady himself.

All right, he said, ordering his daughter to keep the boat pointed straight into the
wind. Then she watched his off-balance performance as he slackened the mainsheet from
its cleat to reef the sail, scrambling ape-like on all fours beneath the furious dragon
wing of slapping fabric, tying square knots down the length of the boom, and then
told her, as if he were suggesting something mildly interesting, to try falling off
twenty degrees to port and he let the boom scythe out and, once secured, the
Sea Nymph
heeled over confidently into angry water, rocketing at a diagonal through the bludgeoning
waves
.

The breeze has picked up, hasn’t it, he said, the assertion, like his expression,
a bit daft and lordly, standing with her, shin-deep in the cockpit, water boiling
through the scuppers. She stood in combat with the wheel as her strength and confidence
returned, the boat a great-hearted warhorse splitting the advancing ranks.

Sorry I screamed, she said.

Listen, he said, sitting down on the deck with his legs in the cockpit’s well, and
then he quizzed her—What if he wasn’t here? What would she have done?—and nodded with
lethargic agreement at her answers, embellishing them with advice. As he spoke, she
stared in dismay at twin lines of brown slime draining from his nostrils, imagining
for a second the harrowing possibility that her father was discharging shit from every
orifice, and she said with great concern,
Dad?
There’s this stuff coming out of your nose,
and he told her about the
naswar
and its medicinal benefit but did not try to reassure her that all was well.

Last night, he attempted to explain, his head swaying morosely with the pitch of the
boat
.
Talking about Pittsburgh
. . .
honest to God, it made me miss my mother terribly
.

He told her he didn’t mean to put her in a bad position and she said, Stop thinking
that, okay? I love this. But her arms had grown tired, her bladder ached, she was
thirsty, and he told her to hold on a few minutes longer and he would take over for
the afternoon watch.

He disappeared below and cut the engine and returned with her grandmother’s ivory
rosary draped around his neck, a notebook and pen and a handheld device he identified
as a GPS, something new from the military, a hookup to outer space, and with blank,
hunched indifference to the moment, keyed sequences and copied down coordinates like
a deskbound bookkeeper and staggered back below to consult the navigational chart.
The promised minutes grew to twenty and then he finally came back on deck
and relieved her at the wheel, adding an afterthought as she clambered below, the
disheartening news that the head was out of order, use a bucket.

Once inside the cabin, however, a claustrophobic stench of confinement immediately
magnified the faint sensation of queasiness she had been feeling for the past hour
and she buckled over with nausea, instinctively lurched for the head, and vomited
bananas and cereal into the vile soupy clog of her father’s excrement. When she tried
to pump the bowl clean, the toilet flushed upward with a surge of seawater, spewing
out its abomination onto her ankles and feet, a horror to which she contributed a
fresh pint of vomit, her convulsion so violent that she pissed her swimsuit. She made
a mindless dash to her bunk only to discover that lying down made everything worse
and she puked a spoonful of yellow bile onto her pillow and curled into the slope
of the hull, her cheek pressed against the thunder of the wood, the misery she felt
organic and elemental and enslaving, the boat’s heaving stitch her body’s own, her
cowlike moaning syncopated with the cymbal crash of cooking pots in their cabinets.
Immobilized, she closed her eyes, suspended in vertigo, and thought the only thought
possible under the circumstance, that dying would be better than this.

She lay folded in, hugging herself like a mummy buried in a jar, her sentience wrecked,
unaware of the passing hours and her father’s headlong race for the distant shore.
Then she felt her consciousness summoned, water splashing in her face, sputtering
in agony for her father to stop, yet when she opened her eyes her father was not there.
When she made herself sit up her feet dropped into a slosh of floorboards and books,
their wet pages waving underwater like anemones. Her confusion evolved to fear but
nothing like the petrifying fear she experienced after wading aft on rubbery legs
to the cabin steps and hauling herself out of the flood halfway into the roar above,
deafening and all-engulfing, her father struggling at the helm with blazing eyes and
the euphoric look of a deranged prophet. The
Sea Nymph
exploded through mountainous seas as the heart of the storm, still a mile away, bore
down on them off the starboard bow, a bloated twisting octopus that consumed the sky,
evil purpled tentacles whipping forward, dragging behind a curtain of white rain seamed
with incandescent bolts of lightning.

She clung to the handrails of the open hatch and hollered until she broke the suicidal
focus of her father’s charge into battle. Daddy, there’s water down here, she yelled
and he shouted out instructions, his attention swinging between her and the onslaught
of the storm, telling her to go back down, start the engine, turn on the bilge pump,
put on a life jacket, strap into a safety harness, tie herself to a secure line, get
back pronto, and help him drop the sail. She did these things in a seasick frenzy
and as she began to climb out of the hold she felt the concussion of an ear-splitting
crack of light, the hair on her skin standing, and received a vision—an incandescent
matrix, at its intersection her crucified father surrounded by a pale nimbus—that
burned on and then off in an instant.

Then the
Sea Nymph
was absorbed into a whipping malevolence, her deck listing steeply to port, its gunnel
submerged, the boom like a crusader’s broadsword hacking the waves, and she screamed
into the din, believing the boat was about to roll over. The blinding rain came then
like a firehose in her face and she heard her father’s unearthly grunting and his
command,
Hold on, Goddamn it, Dottie, hold on,
and she felt herself in a void being spun and torn, her father bellowing inside a
noise as loud as jet engines, and she shrank into herself and breathed a stinging
spray into her lungs and after an eternity felt the boat right itself in obdurate,
infinitesimal increments and there was the solace of her father’s voice again, reciting
Hail Mary, full of grace
with lunatic serenity. She opened her eyes and raised her head to a universe of wonders
in their wake, the octopus transformed to a dark green toad, urinating a waterspout
as it sat tucked beneath an archway of rainbows, the rain turned to transparent wet
moths, soft lustrous kisses, and the sun dialing up and down like stage lights. She
dared to step higher on the hatch ladder and looked forward across a deck littered
with sparrows, dead or weather-beaten, and a shoreline to the west, jagged with majestic
summits toward which the
Sea Nymph
rocked bravely ahead, sinking.

Daddy,
she said to her father, who was sagged into the wheel, clasping his rosary. Her voice
was tremulous and rainwater ran down her cheeks with her tears.
I saw you glowing blue.

The
Sea Nymph
slogged toward the darkening coast, the land’s center receding as its sides tightened
to expose the expansive horseshoe of a bay, a montage of shadows and sunlight. For
too long now her father thrashed about belowdecks waist-deep in the rising water,
failing repeatedly to plug the breach where the toilet’s outlet had been installed,
the bilge pump malfunctioning as the batteries submerged although the engine puttered
on, Dottie on deck trying her best to keep the boat steady, the
Nymph
wanting to wallow every time she nudged the wheel in the direction of the headlands.
Deeper into the emptiness of the huge bay, she heard the engine gag and die and the
dense, awful hush that replaced its reassurance.

Her father pushed a red dry bag out through the hatch stuffed with what he could recover
of their personal belongings and she heard him on the radio, calmly pronouncing Mayday,
switching channels—
no one’s there,
she thought,
or it’s broken,
listening to her father’s steadfast repetitions of longitude and latitude. Afterward
she heard him slip Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances into the cassette player and he came on
deck, grease-streaked and smiling weakly, and said, It seems we’re missing cocktail
hour.

At least put on a life jacket, she said, and felt her faith refreshed when he muttered
another joke—What, and stand accused of pessimism?—but made an effort to find a vest
and strap into it.

He scanned the water and studied the ring of coastline, nearby but still miles off,
encouraged by their shoreward drift and the twinkling of lights to the southwest,
which he guessed to be the town of Bandirma, near the base of the isthmus linking
the ancient island of Arctoneus with the mainland. He thought they might just be lucky
enough to bob along into an anchorage, and he sat on the edge of the cockpit’s well,
then lay back, staring at the sky. What about firing a flare? she asked and he said
impassively, almost in a whisper,
Patience
.

By twilight, though, the waves lapped over the stern, bathing the underside of her
father still sprawled on his back, his unnatural complacency almost like an abandonment
to Dottie. The gunnels now sat perilously low in the water, and she strained her eyes
searching the littoral where she predicted they would wash up, able to distinguish
nothing useful in her survey, and when she asked for the binoculars he did not respond.
In the dusk she observed something new, a bulbous fist of blackness, like a bull’s
head rearing above the ridge of the peninsula off the starboard bow, thunderbolts
spiked from its nostrils, and a moment later a lazy fat wave of colorless water swelled
across the deck, pouring down through the hatchway and lifting her father awake from
his open-eyed dream to prop on his elbows and declare resolutely,
I’m sorry, Kitten, time to go.

She watched, momentarily stupefied as he sat upright to fasten the dry bag to his
ankle. The thought of crying seemed welcome and true and necessary, but it was only
an idea, not a feeling. Trust was what she most felt, linking hands with her father
as they stepped without fanfare into the sea, nothing dramatic about it, like exiting
a bus when it had pulled up at your stop, and then, ascending back to the surface
in a ticklish flue of bubbles, what she most felt, and felt deliriously, was an imperishable
sense of the life within her. The game, their game, had been reissued, her father
no longer its author, she imagined, but another player on the board.