Margreete's Harbor, page 3
Nan dropped a bit of scrambled egg on her sweater, dipped her napkin in her water glass, and dabbed at it. “Can’t take me anywhere…”
“It’s fine now.”
“Anyway, your mom told me yesterday you were coming back to live here.”
“I never told her that.”
“That’s what she thinks.”
“I don’t know. It’s complicated.”
“In other words, Harry doesn’t want to.”
“There’s a lot we’d both be leaving behind. He’s teaching at a really good junior high—I’ve never seen him this happy in a job. And I can’t even imagine leaving the trio. It would break my heart.”
Nan drove her down the peninsula, and Liddie waved goodbye to her from her mother’s porch. One of the steps needed mending, and from here she could see black on the siding outside the kitchen window where the glass had cracked.
“Mom?” She opened the door and heard the washing machine in its spin cycle. She stepped inside and shouted again. She found her mother with her hand on the washer, feeling the vibration of the machine. She wondered how long she’d been standing there. “Mom?” she said softly, not wanting to scare her.
Her mother jumped, and a smile of recognition softened her face. “Where have you been?”
Liddie wrapped her arms around her—she smelled as though she hadn’t taken a bath in a few days. “Are you okay?”
“Where have you been?”
“I just took the bus from Michigan. Nan drove me from Portland.”
“That’s nice. What took you so long?”
“You didn’t want me to come.”
“I did want you to come. Nan who?”
“You know Nan. My old friend.”
“That’s nice.”
“How’s your arm?”
“It’s fine.”
“Can I see it? Remember you got a burn on your arm?”
Her mother raised and lowered the sleeve of her sweater. “It’s fine.”
“What about the kitchen? Have they started work?”
“Oh, you don’t want to go in there. I get meals from the government now.”
“Lillian’s the one bringing food, right?”
“I thought it was the government behind that.”
“I don’t think so. It’s Lillian.” Liddie unpacked an electric kettle from her suitcase. “This is for you, Mom. So you can make coffee without the stove. The switch turns off automatically. I’ll put it upstairs in the bathroom. The water’s shut off down here, right?”
“Where have you been, anyway?”
She hugged her again. “It’s so good to see you, Mom. I missed you.”
* * *
That night, in the living room, Liddie said, “Harry and I have been talking about the kitchen. About what happened.”
“You don’t want to go in there.”
“That’s why I’m here, Mom. You could have died in that fire. It’s not safe for you to be here alone anymore.”
“I’m all right. I didn’t die.”
“You’re not all right.”
“I just said, I’m all right.”
“We could hire someone to live here with you, Mom, do the cooking, make sure you’re okay.”
“Who?”
“We’d have to find someone. But you couldn’t keep firing them the way you did before, when you broke your arm.”
“I don’t like strangers in the house. They open my drawers. Poke around.”
“If you don’t want someone here, you could move to a facility where they cook your meals.”
“I’m not staying with a bunch of old people.” She pushed herself up out of her chair and paced the floor. “You’d have to shoot me first.”
“Mom? Could you sit down?”
“I want to stand up.” She did a turn around the room and sat down on a round piano stool.
“What do you want to do, then?”
“Stay here. I already told you.”
“You just burned down the kitchen.”
“I didn’t mean to. Where’s Peter?”
“Peter’s in Mexico. I can’t reach him right now. Willard thinks something has to change.”
“Willard is an old busybody. Don’t listen to Willard. And I told you, I didn’t mean to start that fire. You don’t have to get all huffy.”
“I’m not huffy. What if you moved out to Michigan?”
“Without the ocean? I honestly don’t know how you stand it out there.”
They were quiet awhile, and Margreete got up and paced around the room again.
“How about some tea?” Liddie said.
“How about some gin rummy?”
Liddie laughed. “That’s a game.”
“I mean straight gin.”
She stayed another two days, took her mother out for dinner, talked to Lillian about continuing the food deliveries, met the contractors who’d promised to start on the kitchen the week before but hadn’t, and spoke with her brother Willard about her mother’s insurance company.
Over the phone with Harry, she told him her mother didn’t want a caretaker, didn’t want to move into an old-age home, and definitely wasn’t coming to Michigan.
“Did you ask her what she thought about us moving there?”
“I thought that was pretty much off the table.”
“It’s not.”
“You’d do that?”
“I think you should bring it up.”
“Our conversations aren’t exactly what you might think of as conversations. I tell her something has to change, and she wanders around the room, sits down, gets up again, and tells me what she won’t do.”
* * *
Her last full day there, Mrs. Powers, an old friend of her mother, arrived unexpectedly. Liddie offered her a cup of tea, excused herself for a moment, opened the door to the blackened kitchen, and found a box of Lipton tea in the pantry. Upstairs in the bathroom, she washed three cups and set them on the edge of the bathtub. She waited for the water to boil and thought of a day, long ago, when Mrs. Powers had come home from the hospital after gallstone surgery and Liddie’s mother had gone to visit her and brought Liddie along. Mrs. Powers was sitting up in bed in a strange state of exultation; beside her on her bedside table was her gallstone. She picked it up and held it out to them. The thing was whitish, about a half inch across, perfectly round except for a small indentation like a belly button. Later, Mrs. Powers took her gallstone to Goodman’s Jewelers and asked them to polish it and set it in silver.
Liddie brought the tea downstairs as Mrs. Powers was telling her mother about the minister of the Congregational church and how he’d left town under a cloud. She stayed two and a half hours, filled them with gossip, and finally left.
Liddie’s mother said, “I thought she’d never go.”
“She sure knows everyone’s business.”
“Everyone but her own. I wish I was never her friend. But once you start, you can’t stop.”
“Being a friend?”
“That’s right.”
That night, Liddie asked, “How would you feel if Harry and I and the kids moved here?”
“Not them. But you could come.”
“I could only come if everyone else came.”
“You can come, but not the others.”
“Mom, listen. You can’t stay here by yourself anymore.”
“I said you can come but not the others.”
“I won’t leave my family behind.”
“Why not?”
“Because I love them.”
“Fine, then.”
“Fine, what?”
“Fine, then. Let them come. But I’m not leaving this house.”
“It would have to be all of us.”
“Yes, all right. Just don’t talk to me about it anymore. And they can’t have my bedroom.”
5
Liddie arrived home, and that night Harry said, “There’s no real alternative, is there? Other than wrestle her kicking and screaming into a van and drop her off at an old persons’ home like a lost kitten.”
“You have such a way with words,” Liddie said.
“I can’t stomach the thought. You can’t, either. But we can make a life there, I guess. Can’t we?”
“Do you mean it?”
“I mean it.”
“She won’t be easy to live with.”
“Harder for you than me,” he said.
They told the kids the next day that they were going to move, that they’d be living with Grandmother Margreete. Bernie said he wouldn’t go, not for a million dollars. And then Eva said she wouldn’t, either, that she was scared of her grandmother.
“Oh,” said Harry, “so when the moving van comes, the two of you will stay right here and cook your own meals? Fred might as well stay, too, and you can feed him. We’ll leave your beds for you, and the stove and refrigerator.”
Eva started to cry, and Liddie hugged her and said, “Daddy’s just kidding, honey. We’re all going. No one’s going to get left behind. Not you, not Bernie, not Fred. And not Valentine.” She was speaking of the two-and-a-half-foot avocado tree that Liddie had grown from a pit when she and Harry were first together.
Harry’s school threw a going-away party for him. Their good friends next door said they wanted to have a party, too, but Liddie pleaded for them not to. She could barely hold herself together during the last concert she played with Ross and Claude, and she cried outright when her favorite cello student left for the last time. It felt as though she’d exploded the ground out from under her feet.
They hired a Mayflower moving van to take their goods from Michigan to Maine. Four men stampeded through the house, packing cardboard boxes, carrying furniture out to the truck parked in front. Fred lay in the dirt by the wheel, smiling ingratiatingly, his tail wagging with the hope of not being left behind, the brow of his black-and-white head wrinkled, as though he’d already been abandoned. He wandered in and out of the house in agitation, and when he found his dog dish gone from its usual place in the kitchen, his eyes filmed over with grief. Bernie, who’d given up his one-boy resistance campaign, called him outdoors, sat beside him on the curb, and put his arm around him.
Harry dug up a few of his favorite peonies in the backyard to take along. And that last day, he walked the perimeter of their small vegetable garden, saying goodbye to the vegetables they’d asked their friends to harvest before the new people moved in.
It was June of 1955. Harry had finished out the school year, and Liddie had played her final concerts and said goodbye, one by one, to her cello students. Liddie felt a low-grade, floating panic in her bones. It was hard to pinpoint—it was, well, everything, including the country. The United States had exploded two more atomic bombs at the Nevada test site. Test houses incinerated and collapsed, test mannequins melted into blackened, twisted heaps of plastic.
* * *
The moving van left in the evening, bulging with the contents of their lives. The family drove a short distance, long enough for Fred to fill the car with his gassy anxieties. Then they checked in to a Howard Johnson’s motel with its orange roof and cupola like a horse barn, and smuggled Fred into the bathroom with his food and water before going into the dining room for their own dinner. They sat at a Formica table on Naugahyde seats, grumpy and tired, except for Eva, who was excited about the plastic menu. Harry had pulled a muscle in his back that afternoon, moving the stove out from the wall to clean. Not until he was drinking a martini did he mention the pain.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” asked Liddie.
“What was the point?”
“Well, I expect we’re through the worst of it.”
“Not really. There’s unpacking. And work starts next week.”
Bernie looked up from the menu. “Where, Dad?”
“Bath Iron Works. They build warships.”
“Cool.”
“Not cool. It was the only job I could find this summer.” Harry gestured to the waitress for a second martini, while on her placemat Eva drew a picture of the Ann Arbor house they’d just left. She made herself and Bernie large, her mother and father smaller, and Fred sitting under a large tree—a tree Eva would always remember as her favorite, although there’d never been a tree there.
“I’m sorry,” Liddie said.
“What good does that do?” said Harry. “We’ve left now. And what are you sorry about—that you have a mother you care about?”
Bernie gulped his ice water. “You didn’t want to go, Dad? Why didn’t you say so?”
“Because it was inevitable,” said Harry. “Because this was the right thing to do. What do you want for dinner, kiddos? Hamburgers and french-fried potatoes?”
“And Coca-Cola,” said Bernie. They were not allowed to drink Coke. Liddie always said it would rot their teeth.
“All right,” she said. “Have whatever you want.”
“And ice cream for dessert?”
“Yes, whatever you want,” said Harry.
In the middle of the hamburgers, they heard singing through the wall. Jesus loves me, this I know. For the Bible tells me so.
The waitress told them there was a religious convention that weekend. The kids were next door while the parents prayed in the ballroom. I’m H-A-P-P-Y, oh, I’m H-A-P-P-Y, I know I am, I’m sure I am.
Liddie took another swallow of wine. “Brainwashing those poor kids.”
“What does that mean?” asked Bernie.
“Never mind.”
After dinner, Bernie threw up in the bathroom from too much fat and sugar and emotion and ice water. Fred stood next to him, wagging his tail and taking note of the additions to the toilet bowl. Eva cried that she missed Bobo, her bear, who’d been packed in a box by mistake and was God knows where, rumbling across Pennsylvania. Liddie finally got into bed with her and held her until they both slept.
The next morning, they climbed into their 1952 Plymouth station wagon—the Old Gray Mare—and made their way through Toledo and Cleveland and Erie. The backseat was divided down the middle: Bernie’s half, Eva’s half, Fred at their feet. Bernie scowled at Eva; Eva scowled back. He made faces, mocked her. “Mom, he’s doing it!” Eva kicked wildly and flailed her arms to get him to move his feet back on his side. He moved his foot an inch, moved it back. Their hate was pure, running clear as water. “Mom! Mom!” But their mother ignored them, looking straight through the front windshield at squashed bugs.
Harry wanted to take a detour through Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where his mother had been born. Liddie wanted to take the fastest route to Maine, straight through New York State. She saw it was important to Harry, though, and gave in. They arrived in Johnstown in the middle of the afternoon and checked into another Howard Johnson’s, which looked the same as the one before, and smuggled Fred into the bathroom. Harry sat down on one of the beds and turned to Liddie. “Thanks, honey, for humoring me. I know you didn’t want to come here.” Turning to Bernie, he said, “Do you know what happened in Johnstown back in 1889?”
“What?” asked Bernie.
“Please,” Liddie said. “You’ll give him bad dreams.”
“I want to know,” said Bernie.
“One of the worst floods in the history of the United States,” said Harry. “And do you know who was in it? My mother, and her mother and father.”
“What’s a flood?” asked Eva.
“I’ll take you out and show you. Then you’ll understand.”
“I’m not coming,” said Liddie. “I’ve got a headache.”
Years later, Eva would recall the chocolate ice cream cones her father had bought them that afternoon, hers dripping down her leg. And she would remember how scared she’d been, thinking she needed to get back to her mother, that the water could come rumbling down the mountainside at any moment.
Bernie would recall an old brick building with the white flood marks six or eight feet up the wall, way higher than he could reach. He would also remember the passion with which his father said that this disaster, which killed more than two thousand people, was not caused by an act of God but by greedy men. His father pointed to the mountains above Johnstown and said, “See up there? A bunch of rich men thought they’d have a fishing-and-hunting club up the mountain. People like Andrew Carnegie. They dammed up the river to make a lake, and even though a few people said the dam wasn’t strong enough, they didn’t pay any attention. At first the lake wasn’t that deep, but it got deeper and deeper, and still no one fixed the dam and still the rich guys weren’t worried, because what harm would come to them if it broke? They weren’t thinking of the people down below who worked their lives away, making steel and locomotives. One day, the rains came, and more rains and more rains, and the water went over the top and the dam burst, and four billion gallons of water rushed down that mountainside like a tidal wave, faster than a car can go.” He pointed upward, to the path the flood had taken. “There were no phones to warn the people, and there was no time for anyone to get out of the way. A few people ran to higher ground and escaped, but most everything was swept away. Horses, babies, houses, even a train. My mother, who you never met, was born in Johnstown in 1889, two months before the dam burst.”
“Did she get out of the way of the water?” asked Eva.
“If she hadn’t, honey, I wouldn’t be here, and you and Bernie wouldn’t be, either.”
“But children died?” said Eva.
“Yes.”
“My grandmother held on to the baby, and they went shooting down the river on a mattress and were saved. But my grandfather was working that day at the Cambria Iron Works, and he was swept away and never found.”
“I want Mommy,” Eva said.
“You scared her, Daddy.”
Harry grabbed his daughter’s hand. “You know,” he said with sudden cheerfulness, “all that happened a long time ago. There are rules about building dams now, not like the olden days. How about an ice cream cone for you two?” Both kids were crying when they came back to the motel, and Eva was still scared the next morning.
On the way out of Howard Johnson’s, Liddie said, “You might have spared them the gruesome details.” She pulled Fred away from a spot on the carpet out in the hallway, where his nose quivered. “Fred, get away from that.”
“It’s fine now.”
“Anyway, your mom told me yesterday you were coming back to live here.”
“I never told her that.”
“That’s what she thinks.”
“I don’t know. It’s complicated.”
“In other words, Harry doesn’t want to.”
“There’s a lot we’d both be leaving behind. He’s teaching at a really good junior high—I’ve never seen him this happy in a job. And I can’t even imagine leaving the trio. It would break my heart.”
Nan drove her down the peninsula, and Liddie waved goodbye to her from her mother’s porch. One of the steps needed mending, and from here she could see black on the siding outside the kitchen window where the glass had cracked.
“Mom?” She opened the door and heard the washing machine in its spin cycle. She stepped inside and shouted again. She found her mother with her hand on the washer, feeling the vibration of the machine. She wondered how long she’d been standing there. “Mom?” she said softly, not wanting to scare her.
Her mother jumped, and a smile of recognition softened her face. “Where have you been?”
Liddie wrapped her arms around her—she smelled as though she hadn’t taken a bath in a few days. “Are you okay?”
“Where have you been?”
“I just took the bus from Michigan. Nan drove me from Portland.”
“That’s nice. What took you so long?”
“You didn’t want me to come.”
“I did want you to come. Nan who?”
“You know Nan. My old friend.”
“That’s nice.”
“How’s your arm?”
“It’s fine.”
“Can I see it? Remember you got a burn on your arm?”
Her mother raised and lowered the sleeve of her sweater. “It’s fine.”
“What about the kitchen? Have they started work?”
“Oh, you don’t want to go in there. I get meals from the government now.”
“Lillian’s the one bringing food, right?”
“I thought it was the government behind that.”
“I don’t think so. It’s Lillian.” Liddie unpacked an electric kettle from her suitcase. “This is for you, Mom. So you can make coffee without the stove. The switch turns off automatically. I’ll put it upstairs in the bathroom. The water’s shut off down here, right?”
“Where have you been, anyway?”
She hugged her again. “It’s so good to see you, Mom. I missed you.”
* * *
That night, in the living room, Liddie said, “Harry and I have been talking about the kitchen. About what happened.”
“You don’t want to go in there.”
“That’s why I’m here, Mom. You could have died in that fire. It’s not safe for you to be here alone anymore.”
“I’m all right. I didn’t die.”
“You’re not all right.”
“I just said, I’m all right.”
“We could hire someone to live here with you, Mom, do the cooking, make sure you’re okay.”
“Who?”
“We’d have to find someone. But you couldn’t keep firing them the way you did before, when you broke your arm.”
“I don’t like strangers in the house. They open my drawers. Poke around.”
“If you don’t want someone here, you could move to a facility where they cook your meals.”
“I’m not staying with a bunch of old people.” She pushed herself up out of her chair and paced the floor. “You’d have to shoot me first.”
“Mom? Could you sit down?”
“I want to stand up.” She did a turn around the room and sat down on a round piano stool.
“What do you want to do, then?”
“Stay here. I already told you.”
“You just burned down the kitchen.”
“I didn’t mean to. Where’s Peter?”
“Peter’s in Mexico. I can’t reach him right now. Willard thinks something has to change.”
“Willard is an old busybody. Don’t listen to Willard. And I told you, I didn’t mean to start that fire. You don’t have to get all huffy.”
“I’m not huffy. What if you moved out to Michigan?”
“Without the ocean? I honestly don’t know how you stand it out there.”
They were quiet awhile, and Margreete got up and paced around the room again.
“How about some tea?” Liddie said.
“How about some gin rummy?”
Liddie laughed. “That’s a game.”
“I mean straight gin.”
She stayed another two days, took her mother out for dinner, talked to Lillian about continuing the food deliveries, met the contractors who’d promised to start on the kitchen the week before but hadn’t, and spoke with her brother Willard about her mother’s insurance company.
Over the phone with Harry, she told him her mother didn’t want a caretaker, didn’t want to move into an old-age home, and definitely wasn’t coming to Michigan.
“Did you ask her what she thought about us moving there?”
“I thought that was pretty much off the table.”
“It’s not.”
“You’d do that?”
“I think you should bring it up.”
“Our conversations aren’t exactly what you might think of as conversations. I tell her something has to change, and she wanders around the room, sits down, gets up again, and tells me what she won’t do.”
* * *
Her last full day there, Mrs. Powers, an old friend of her mother, arrived unexpectedly. Liddie offered her a cup of tea, excused herself for a moment, opened the door to the blackened kitchen, and found a box of Lipton tea in the pantry. Upstairs in the bathroom, she washed three cups and set them on the edge of the bathtub. She waited for the water to boil and thought of a day, long ago, when Mrs. Powers had come home from the hospital after gallstone surgery and Liddie’s mother had gone to visit her and brought Liddie along. Mrs. Powers was sitting up in bed in a strange state of exultation; beside her on her bedside table was her gallstone. She picked it up and held it out to them. The thing was whitish, about a half inch across, perfectly round except for a small indentation like a belly button. Later, Mrs. Powers took her gallstone to Goodman’s Jewelers and asked them to polish it and set it in silver.
Liddie brought the tea downstairs as Mrs. Powers was telling her mother about the minister of the Congregational church and how he’d left town under a cloud. She stayed two and a half hours, filled them with gossip, and finally left.
Liddie’s mother said, “I thought she’d never go.”
“She sure knows everyone’s business.”
“Everyone but her own. I wish I was never her friend. But once you start, you can’t stop.”
“Being a friend?”
“That’s right.”
That night, Liddie asked, “How would you feel if Harry and I and the kids moved here?”
“Not them. But you could come.”
“I could only come if everyone else came.”
“You can come, but not the others.”
“Mom, listen. You can’t stay here by yourself anymore.”
“I said you can come but not the others.”
“I won’t leave my family behind.”
“Why not?”
“Because I love them.”
“Fine, then.”
“Fine, what?”
“Fine, then. Let them come. But I’m not leaving this house.”
“It would have to be all of us.”
“Yes, all right. Just don’t talk to me about it anymore. And they can’t have my bedroom.”
5
Liddie arrived home, and that night Harry said, “There’s no real alternative, is there? Other than wrestle her kicking and screaming into a van and drop her off at an old persons’ home like a lost kitten.”
“You have such a way with words,” Liddie said.
“I can’t stomach the thought. You can’t, either. But we can make a life there, I guess. Can’t we?”
“Do you mean it?”
“I mean it.”
“She won’t be easy to live with.”
“Harder for you than me,” he said.
They told the kids the next day that they were going to move, that they’d be living with Grandmother Margreete. Bernie said he wouldn’t go, not for a million dollars. And then Eva said she wouldn’t, either, that she was scared of her grandmother.
“Oh,” said Harry, “so when the moving van comes, the two of you will stay right here and cook your own meals? Fred might as well stay, too, and you can feed him. We’ll leave your beds for you, and the stove and refrigerator.”
Eva started to cry, and Liddie hugged her and said, “Daddy’s just kidding, honey. We’re all going. No one’s going to get left behind. Not you, not Bernie, not Fred. And not Valentine.” She was speaking of the two-and-a-half-foot avocado tree that Liddie had grown from a pit when she and Harry were first together.
Harry’s school threw a going-away party for him. Their good friends next door said they wanted to have a party, too, but Liddie pleaded for them not to. She could barely hold herself together during the last concert she played with Ross and Claude, and she cried outright when her favorite cello student left for the last time. It felt as though she’d exploded the ground out from under her feet.
They hired a Mayflower moving van to take their goods from Michigan to Maine. Four men stampeded through the house, packing cardboard boxes, carrying furniture out to the truck parked in front. Fred lay in the dirt by the wheel, smiling ingratiatingly, his tail wagging with the hope of not being left behind, the brow of his black-and-white head wrinkled, as though he’d already been abandoned. He wandered in and out of the house in agitation, and when he found his dog dish gone from its usual place in the kitchen, his eyes filmed over with grief. Bernie, who’d given up his one-boy resistance campaign, called him outdoors, sat beside him on the curb, and put his arm around him.
Harry dug up a few of his favorite peonies in the backyard to take along. And that last day, he walked the perimeter of their small vegetable garden, saying goodbye to the vegetables they’d asked their friends to harvest before the new people moved in.
It was June of 1955. Harry had finished out the school year, and Liddie had played her final concerts and said goodbye, one by one, to her cello students. Liddie felt a low-grade, floating panic in her bones. It was hard to pinpoint—it was, well, everything, including the country. The United States had exploded two more atomic bombs at the Nevada test site. Test houses incinerated and collapsed, test mannequins melted into blackened, twisted heaps of plastic.
* * *
The moving van left in the evening, bulging with the contents of their lives. The family drove a short distance, long enough for Fred to fill the car with his gassy anxieties. Then they checked in to a Howard Johnson’s motel with its orange roof and cupola like a horse barn, and smuggled Fred into the bathroom with his food and water before going into the dining room for their own dinner. They sat at a Formica table on Naugahyde seats, grumpy and tired, except for Eva, who was excited about the plastic menu. Harry had pulled a muscle in his back that afternoon, moving the stove out from the wall to clean. Not until he was drinking a martini did he mention the pain.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” asked Liddie.
“What was the point?”
“Well, I expect we’re through the worst of it.”
“Not really. There’s unpacking. And work starts next week.”
Bernie looked up from the menu. “Where, Dad?”
“Bath Iron Works. They build warships.”
“Cool.”
“Not cool. It was the only job I could find this summer.” Harry gestured to the waitress for a second martini, while on her placemat Eva drew a picture of the Ann Arbor house they’d just left. She made herself and Bernie large, her mother and father smaller, and Fred sitting under a large tree—a tree Eva would always remember as her favorite, although there’d never been a tree there.
“I’m sorry,” Liddie said.
“What good does that do?” said Harry. “We’ve left now. And what are you sorry about—that you have a mother you care about?”
Bernie gulped his ice water. “You didn’t want to go, Dad? Why didn’t you say so?”
“Because it was inevitable,” said Harry. “Because this was the right thing to do. What do you want for dinner, kiddos? Hamburgers and french-fried potatoes?”
“And Coca-Cola,” said Bernie. They were not allowed to drink Coke. Liddie always said it would rot their teeth.
“All right,” she said. “Have whatever you want.”
“And ice cream for dessert?”
“Yes, whatever you want,” said Harry.
In the middle of the hamburgers, they heard singing through the wall. Jesus loves me, this I know. For the Bible tells me so.
The waitress told them there was a religious convention that weekend. The kids were next door while the parents prayed in the ballroom. I’m H-A-P-P-Y, oh, I’m H-A-P-P-Y, I know I am, I’m sure I am.
Liddie took another swallow of wine. “Brainwashing those poor kids.”
“What does that mean?” asked Bernie.
“Never mind.”
After dinner, Bernie threw up in the bathroom from too much fat and sugar and emotion and ice water. Fred stood next to him, wagging his tail and taking note of the additions to the toilet bowl. Eva cried that she missed Bobo, her bear, who’d been packed in a box by mistake and was God knows where, rumbling across Pennsylvania. Liddie finally got into bed with her and held her until they both slept.
The next morning, they climbed into their 1952 Plymouth station wagon—the Old Gray Mare—and made their way through Toledo and Cleveland and Erie. The backseat was divided down the middle: Bernie’s half, Eva’s half, Fred at their feet. Bernie scowled at Eva; Eva scowled back. He made faces, mocked her. “Mom, he’s doing it!” Eva kicked wildly and flailed her arms to get him to move his feet back on his side. He moved his foot an inch, moved it back. Their hate was pure, running clear as water. “Mom! Mom!” But their mother ignored them, looking straight through the front windshield at squashed bugs.
Harry wanted to take a detour through Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where his mother had been born. Liddie wanted to take the fastest route to Maine, straight through New York State. She saw it was important to Harry, though, and gave in. They arrived in Johnstown in the middle of the afternoon and checked into another Howard Johnson’s, which looked the same as the one before, and smuggled Fred into the bathroom. Harry sat down on one of the beds and turned to Liddie. “Thanks, honey, for humoring me. I know you didn’t want to come here.” Turning to Bernie, he said, “Do you know what happened in Johnstown back in 1889?”
“What?” asked Bernie.
“Please,” Liddie said. “You’ll give him bad dreams.”
“I want to know,” said Bernie.
“One of the worst floods in the history of the United States,” said Harry. “And do you know who was in it? My mother, and her mother and father.”
“What’s a flood?” asked Eva.
“I’ll take you out and show you. Then you’ll understand.”
“I’m not coming,” said Liddie. “I’ve got a headache.”
Years later, Eva would recall the chocolate ice cream cones her father had bought them that afternoon, hers dripping down her leg. And she would remember how scared she’d been, thinking she needed to get back to her mother, that the water could come rumbling down the mountainside at any moment.
Bernie would recall an old brick building with the white flood marks six or eight feet up the wall, way higher than he could reach. He would also remember the passion with which his father said that this disaster, which killed more than two thousand people, was not caused by an act of God but by greedy men. His father pointed to the mountains above Johnstown and said, “See up there? A bunch of rich men thought they’d have a fishing-and-hunting club up the mountain. People like Andrew Carnegie. They dammed up the river to make a lake, and even though a few people said the dam wasn’t strong enough, they didn’t pay any attention. At first the lake wasn’t that deep, but it got deeper and deeper, and still no one fixed the dam and still the rich guys weren’t worried, because what harm would come to them if it broke? They weren’t thinking of the people down below who worked their lives away, making steel and locomotives. One day, the rains came, and more rains and more rains, and the water went over the top and the dam burst, and four billion gallons of water rushed down that mountainside like a tidal wave, faster than a car can go.” He pointed upward, to the path the flood had taken. “There were no phones to warn the people, and there was no time for anyone to get out of the way. A few people ran to higher ground and escaped, but most everything was swept away. Horses, babies, houses, even a train. My mother, who you never met, was born in Johnstown in 1889, two months before the dam burst.”
“Did she get out of the way of the water?” asked Eva.
“If she hadn’t, honey, I wouldn’t be here, and you and Bernie wouldn’t be, either.”
“But children died?” said Eva.
“Yes.”
“My grandmother held on to the baby, and they went shooting down the river on a mattress and were saved. But my grandfather was working that day at the Cambria Iron Works, and he was swept away and never found.”
“I want Mommy,” Eva said.
“You scared her, Daddy.”
Harry grabbed his daughter’s hand. “You know,” he said with sudden cheerfulness, “all that happened a long time ago. There are rules about building dams now, not like the olden days. How about an ice cream cone for you two?” Both kids were crying when they came back to the motel, and Eva was still scared the next morning.
On the way out of Howard Johnson’s, Liddie said, “You might have spared them the gruesome details.” She pulled Fred away from a spot on the carpet out in the hallway, where his nose quivered. “Fred, get away from that.”
