Margreete's Harbor, page 23
“I suggest you install a monitor to sit in my classroom to see whether I continue to make incendiary remarks.”
“That sort of sarcasm is not appropriate, either.”
“All right, Frank, I’ll let you know my decision by the end of the week.”
Frank looked at him. “What decision?”
“Whether I can continue to teach under those circumstances.”
“I’d like to think that you can make those adjustments. It’s not every day that a teacher of your caliber comes along.”
Harry disliked this man so intensely, it hurt. He stood, wished Frank a good day, and walked down the hall to his classroom. On his way home, Zorba the Greek came to him, answering a question about whether he was married. Am I not a man? And is not a man stupid? I’m a man … so I married. Wife, children, house … everything … the full catastrophe. Zorba pronounced full like fool.
Was he, Harry, a fool? No more than any other man. Was he a coward? Less than some men. Was his life a catastrophe? Maybe. But he wouldn’t regret his family. The house, yes, with its clogged gutters and tipping-over porch.
One thing was clear enough: He wasn’t going to make it through the school year, not even to Christmas. He couldn’t change his stripes any better than Frank’s ugly necktie could.
45
SPRING 1966
Gretchen watched her mother take two socks off a big pile of clean laundry in her bedroom, put them together toe to toe, roll them up, and turn one cuff down to make a ball. “I’m almost ten years old,” she said.
“I know,” said her mother. “I was there when you were born.”
“Soon I’ll be a double-digit girl.”
“How about that?” It was the voice her mother used when she wasn’t really here. It was friendly and pleasant and didn’t mean anything.
Gretchen lifted one of her shirts off the pile and wrapped it around her neck.
“Just leave it,” said her mother.
“Do you know the saddest sound in the world?” Gretchen asked.
“No. What?”
“Mr. Wootton’s mama cow looking for her baby.” Across the field, Mr. Wootton had put the mother cow in one field with the other cows and the baby in the barn.
“It’s time for bed,” said her mother. “Don’t dillydally now. And don’t forget to brush your teeth.”
Gretchen went to her room and took off her socks and shoes. Her father told her the cow and calf were separated because that’s what had to happen. Mr. Wootton’s cows produced milk for him to sell. But if he let the baby drink all the milk, then he wouldn’t have any milk to sell from that cow. Gretchen told him that she wasn’t going to drink any more milk if she was taking it from babies. But her father said, no, when the baby cow was ready, then the farmer took the mother away and kept the milk.
But that wasn’t right. This baby wasn’t ready, and the mother was crying in the field. She took off her pants and underpants and shirt, lifted her nightgown off the hook, put it on, and went into the bathroom to brush her teeth. She sat on the toilet and listened to the cow, and she brushed her teeth but not really, just chewed on the bristles the way she wasn’t supposed to.
When she got into bed, the cow was still crying. She was crying, too, and her mother came to say good night and said, “The mama will forget about her baby in a few days, and then it will be all right. Cows aren’t like people.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do. Now, go to sleep.”
“I can’t.”
“Please, Gretchen, I have other things on my mind.”
“What?”
“Your father is going for a job interview tomorrow, and I need to iron his shirt.”
“The cow is more important.”
“That’s enough.”
“Do you think he’ll get the job?”
“I don’t know.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
“He’ll have to keep looking.”
“And we won’t have enough money?”
“That’s right. Go to sleep now, honey.” She kissed her on the cheek, smoothed her hair, and turned out the light. The cow kept bellowing. Gretchen got out of bed and got the flashlight from the bureau and turned it on under the covers so she could read the book about Lassie to make her feel better, but the book was as sad as the cow. She kept reading after her parents went to bed. The cow went quiet, and then she started again. Gretchen thought of the baby in the barn, all by itself in the dark. She thought of all the creatures in the darkness, the baby rabbits in their tunnels snuggled together, the footprints of mice she’d seen in the snow and the track between the footprints where the tail had dragged. Every small creature in the world needed its parents.
Jeremy, her friend at school, would know what to say. He’d been her friend since second grade, when she’d had to find a partner for a science project. She and Jeremy chose each other, and they did a project on the luna moth because Gretchen had found one clinging to the shed door one morning with its pale-green wings and its pretend eyes and streaming tail. It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. Jeremy had a picture of a night-blooming cereus, which they put in their project next to the moth. Their teacher, Mr. Daniels, said the flower didn’t have anything to do with the luna moth, but they said, yes, it did, because they were both beautiful. “Beautiful and fleeting,” said Jeremy, and Mr. Daniels left them alone. Jeremy had the right words for everything.
She could hear her grandmother coming, because when she walked, she put her hand on the wallpaper to feel her way in the dark, and her hand made a kind of dry sound. Just before Gretchen’s room, the wallpaper was loose and the sound was different, and then Gretchen knew she’d be stepping through the doorway.
Gretchen shone the flashlight on her grandmother’s face next to her in bed, and she went blinky; her face was so close, Gretchen could see the white whiskers growing on her chin. She told her about the mother and baby cow and asked whether she could help her open Mr. Wootton’s barn door and let the baby out. “No, not now,” her grandmother said.
But then she got out of bed and took the flashlight. Gretchen called to her, but she kept going. She went down the stairs and Fred’s toenails click-clicked after her. In the kitchen, Margreete stood at the door, rattling the knob. “Open the goddamn door.”
Gretchen found the keys in her mother’s purse, opened the door, and followed her grandmother out, with Fred close behind.
* * *
Margreete sat on the porch steps. “Get away, dog,” she said. “You’re bothering me.” The moon was bright, almost like day. The face in it was her mother’s.
When her mother died, Margreete had found her sitting in her favorite wingback chair, leaning with her head against one of the wings and her mouth open as though death had surprised her before she’d had time to wipe her glasses and gather herself. Her coffee was spilled on the floor, and the cup had rolled under the table. It was July, and the raspberries were bright on the bushes, and her mother’s newly washed clothes were on the clothesline, moving in the wind as though they were alive.
“Grandma, did you forget about the cow?”
“No. Yes.”
“I’m too little to go by myself. And you’re too old to go by yourself. Stand up, Grandma.”
“All right, all right, don’t hurry me. I’m coming, I’m coming.”
46
Bernie stood at the base of the apple tree and told Gretchen if she came down he’d take her to Bath for a special treat as soon as their mother came back with the car.
“I don’t want to go to Bath.”
“Gretchen, sometimes you just have to accept the world the way it is. She’s not our cow. And Mr. Wootton can’t have you reorganizing his cows. Come on, Gretchen. Come on down. Your hands are getting all cold and red and chapped.”
She began to cry. “I’m not coming down.”
“You know, there are things I feel like protesting, too.”
“Like what?”
“Lots of things. But you have to choose your battles. Come on down.”
“No.”
“Mom will be back soon with Grandma. She’ll be mad if she finds you up here. She’ll be mad at me, too.”
“I don’t care.”
Bernie looked up into the branches again. The tight buds were swelling. Before long, the red-winged blackbirds would be singing. Today, though, the cold stung. Gretchen was wearing her rubber boots and winter coat, and her nose was running. In the wind, her brown hair lifted out from under her hat and swept across her face. She reached for a higher branch.
“Stop it, Gretchen. You’ll get hurt. It’s going to get dark soon. Come on down now. Idealism can go too far. Do you know what idealism is?”
“Yes … What?”
“Dad is an idealist—at least, he used to be. Now he’s just unemployed.”
“Do you like Dad?”
“I guess.” That wasn’t really the truth, but he couldn’t say what was in his head. Last week, the day after St. Patrick’s Day, he and Noah had driven to Bath to get supplies for Noah’s Bark. They stopped off in a coffee shop on the way home and and saw his father locked in conversation with the nurse his dad had said he didn’t remember. His father was so engrossed, he didn’t see them. Not only was he an idealist, he was a liar. Now Bernie couldn’t even look at him. It was tempting to blow the whistle on him, but his mother had enough stress in her life, holding everything together while his father looked half-heartedly for work, or gathered seaweed to sell and came home smelling like a seal, or wrote articles to radical magazines and leftist rags like Ramparts. The other night, Bernie had met him on the stairs, and his father shoved a sheaf of papers toward him and said, “You might want to have a look at this. I’ve just finished a two-part series on the classist roots of the Vietnam War.” Bernie said he was busy and left his father standing with the pages in his hand. It was awkward, very awkward, and, he had to admit, sad.
He looked up into the tree again at Gretchen. “You’re cold, aren’t you.”
“Yes.”
“Want me to get your mittens for you? And some hot cocoa?”
Bernie disappeared into the house and heated up milk on the stove and stirred in cocoa and poured it into a cup for her. Fred was lying by the woodstove, and the end of his tail wagged when he saw Bernie. Eva’s piano music was coming from the other room. Bernie warmed Gretchen’s red mittens in the oven for a couple of minutes and went outside with them and the mug of cocoa. The sky was going dark.
“You have to come down farther. I can’t reach that high.”
“You’re going to grab me.”
He hadn’t thought of that. He set the cocoa down on the ground. “Come on, Gretchen. I warmed your mittens in the oven. They’re nice and toasty for you.”
She turned around, facing the trunk of the tree, and slithered down to a lower branch.
“I can’t reach up that high.”
“Yes, you can.”
“No, I can’t.”
“You’re going to get me.”
“I won’t.”
She came down farther, reached for her mittens, and he grabbed her hand and yanked her out of the tree, raking her leg against the bark on the way down. She turned into a wild animal, biting and hitting and scratching. “You lied! You lied!” He held her tight and carried her into the house and straddled her on the floor and held her hands over her head. He didn’t know what else to do, except maybe lock her in the bathroom.
“Gretchen, calm down, you were freezing up there.”
“You’re not my brother!” She kicked and screamed and threw her head from side to side.
The piano stopped and Eva came into the kitchen. “What are you doing?”
“She was in the tree and wouldn’t come down.”
“Let her go.”
“She’ll go up the tree again.”
“What happened to her leg?”
“She scraped it on the bark.”
Gretchen sobbed, “He promised, he promised!” And then all at once, she gave up and grew still. Eva got a basin of water, and they washed her leg and dried it.
Soon after, Bernie heard a car come into the driveway, then his grandmother’s and mother’s voices. His mother was angry when she learned what had happened. “She could have fallen out of the tree and gotten another concussion.” She turned to Margreete. “And, Mom, you encouraged her last night. You opened the barn door and let the calf out.”
“When did I do that?”
“Last night. And some of the cows got out, too.”
“Well, I never…”
Bernie looked at his grandmother pulling at the sleeve of her sweater, her mind as smooth as a boiled egg. “Sit down on the stool, Grandma,” he said. She stretched a foot out in front of her, and he helped her take off her shoes and socks. Like old turtles, her feet were, cracked and ancient.
His mother came out of the mudroom and told Bernie that she had to be able to depend upon him.
“I was doing my homework. How was I supposed to know she’d go up a tree and decide to stay up there? I didn’t know she’d do that. I had to pull her down. It could have happened with you here, too. It just happened to be me. And what about Dad? I’ve got homework, but he’s not even working, and he stays away all day pretending to be looking for a job and writing those articles no one reads.” He’d said too much already, and he saw by his mother’s face that he’d hit the mark and needed to shut up.
His mother put her hand over her throat and left without saying a word. “Gretchen?” she called. “I need to speak with you.” There was no answer.
47
The car puttered down the peninsula, and for the first time, Harry noted the signs of spring that he’d been too depressed to see until now. Nearly five months he’d been looking for a job. For his most recent try at bringing in some money, he’d teamed up with a guy named Clarence Dexter, who, he discovered, excelled at guaranteed-to-fail entrepreneurial schemes. Harry had already been out three times with Clarence, collecting kelp at the turn of the tide, stuffing the long, slimy ribbons into canvas bags—four hundred to five hundred pounds a tide—hauling them back to Clarence’s place in a rattletrap pickup, and hanging each ribbon with clothespins on special wooden frames Clarence had built and Harry had paid for. Harry had also paid for two pairs of chest-high rubber boots, a set for each of them. The idea was to dry the kelp, package it up, and send it to a health-food outlet in Massachusetts, which would pay them ten dollars a pound for it. Four hundred pounds wet equaled forty pounds dry. The fly in the ointment was quality: The distributor would not buy spotted seaweed. Rain blemished the product, or else the fog rotted it before it could dry. They’d been out three times, and their failures were three for three.
But today! Today was the day he was offered a job to organize Bowdoin’s historical archives and to research the college’s early years, from 1794 through the beginning of the First World War. It was a full-time job with decent pay and benefits. If all went well, he was likely to be offered a permanent position as college historian, a position that hadn’t been created yet but was in the works. He liked his new supervisor at the college, a Miss Braxton. No nonsense, no dazzle, but a spunky sense of humor. When he’d asked her how long she’d been there, she told him since sometime before the Boer War. Not the funniest thing he’d ever heard, but still. He imagined they’d get along fine, and unlike the principal he’d left behind, she didn’t wear ugly neckties.
He now saw the classroom as an environment that had encouraged the toxic, hectoring side of him. What a relief to put that behind him and to hold his head up again. Liddie still spoke to him, but her anger had been building over the months, in direct relation to their bank account bottoming out. His job-hunting necktie had been feeling like a noose around his neck for weeks. He loosened it and flopped it down on the seat beside him. Only yesterday, he had been Nowhere Man, like in the song. Harry had noticed that his son had been avoiding him. Not that he could blame him.
He turned on the radio, and there were the Beach Boys, singing Bar bar bar bar Barbar Ann. He liked this stupid song, and he knew it would be in his head now for the rest of the day.
He parked the car next to the house, still humming, and walked in. “Honey, I’m home!” like some dimwit on a sitcom. The whole house seemed to be saying, So what, except Fred, who grabbed his empty dog dish in his mouth and brought it to him.
Harry got the bag of kibble and filled the bowl and went to the bottom of the stairs.
“Hello? Anybody home?”
“We’ve got a problem,” said Liddie.
At the top of the stairs, he found Liddie sitting on the floor outside Gretchen’s bedroom door. “It’s that cow,” she told him. “Gretchen’s not eating, and she’s not coming out until the mama and baby are reunited. Mr. Wootton separated them again, and the mama is crying.”
“And you said?”
“I told her to come out and have some dinner and we’d talk about it. That went nowhere.”
“Gretchen!” he said. “Unlock the door. Do I have to break the door down?”
“Well, that’s effective,” said Liddie.
“And you’re not being all that helpful, either.”
“It’s your DNA that we’re dealing with here.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Who’s the protestor in this family? How do you think she learned this?”
“C’mon, honey. What about the TV? People are protesting all over the goddamn country. I just walked into the house. All I wanted to do was bring you some good news.”
“What kind of good news?”
“Forget it.”
“Tell me now.”
“I don’t feel like it,” he said.
“The job?”
He turned and went into the bedroom, threw down the tie, took off his suit jacket and good pants, put on a flannel shirt and his favorite old khakis, and went downstairs.
Margreete was in the kitchen, eating Ritz crackers out of a box. “Hungry?” he asked.
