Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach

They didn’t arrest me. I continued with my job and put some money away; some nights I would go to a bar and listen to a baseball game on the radio. My father got smaller and smaller until he was smaller than I. That was what I couldn’t stand, that he was smaller than I. He read the newspapers over and over about congressional committees and counterfeit confessions, nothing but committees and confessions. “Something’s wrong,” he said in confusion, shaking his head, “it’s different.” Forget the papers, I said. One night I tried to wake him and could not; I called the doctor. I sat with him two days and at the end of the second day he woke, desperate eyes in his small white face searching the ceiling. Pop, I called to him. “Something’s wrong,” he whispered. “It’s different.” Pop, I said. He dug his fingers into my arm and lunged for his last breath. “My God,” he cried, “where did my dreams go?”

In the autumn of 1951 a small dark American who styled himself John Lake arrived in the seaport of Penzance on the far southwestern tip of England. This was a time when the tide of GIs that had flooded the island during the second world war had long since ebbed; the summer flux of tourists was gone as well. After disembarking Lake made his way up past the civic promenade and took a room at the Blue Plate Inn on the northern edge of town. A Mrs. Easton ran the inn. For two pounds a week Lake received room and board. In defiance of a proud national reputation for disastrous cuisine, Mrs. Easton cooked well enough. After several weeks Lake applied for a job loading crates down at the docks; it was a position for which he was singularly without qualification. The man in shipping explained this to the American with quiet tact. At a year or two shy of forty, Lake was rather old for such a job when he had never done any physical work in his life; he was also overeducated, something the man in shipping could deduce without knowing anything of Lake at all. Eventually Lake found himself attending to the company books. He had dreaded this inevitability, wanting nothing to do with numbers; but the numbers found him.

Mrs. Easton’s daughter Anne Bradshaw came to the inn each day to work in the kitchen. She lived on the other side of town, which in the case of Penzance meant a twenty-minute walk, in a small cottage with her own seven-year-old daughter. She had moved into the cottage twelve years before as a girl of nineteen, with her husband, Thomas Bradshaw from London, who had met her while vacationing on the coast. The husband did not come back from the war. Now Anne earned money cooking for her mother and running errands for people in town. Several times in the passing years she had considered selling the cottage, but she clung to those things of an earlier life which she still could hold onto. It was odd to be barely thirty years old and to have had an “earlier” life, but in many ways this was true of England in general and the Old World it belonged to. Anne had dusky yellow hair and a weary generous smile, and she noticed the new American in town on the stairs of the inn as she was leaving to take some weekly groceries up the road to the only other American left in the area, an old man who lived out on the moors.

Lake had a good view of this road from his window, which was on the third floor of the inn and looked out to the north and the expanse that stretched from Land’s End on the left to the Bodmin moor a couple of hours in the distance to the right. At first he thought he would rather have a view of the sea, on the other side of the building. But the guest room downstairs had such a view, and after a week or two he became drawn to the desolation of the moors, their chrome light dribbling over the heath. In the flash of the storms the land disappeared altogether, leaving the window a square of rain. After a couple of months of walking the coastline Lake exhausted his attraction to the bay and the ships and the castle of St. Michael’s Mount; but the moors, which on the face of them offered much less to see, never bored him. It’s true that for a long time he went out into them to listen; the wild brush and hidden ponds seethed with their own life and, he might have thought, their own sound. It’s true that he thought he might hear some kind of music there. When he didn’t he thought he was disappointed, until he realized that what he mistook for disappointment was immense relief. That he loathed himself for such a surrender seemed a small price to pay.

As I understand it, my great-grandfather and — grandmother came here once, about a year before Victoria became queen. My great-grandfather, Edwin Lake, was married to another woman. My great-grandmother, Jane Shear, was the daughter of a peddler. The affair between the two lasted three minutes and took place in the alley behind a sweat shop off King’s Road, and it wasn’t nearly enough for her; she pursued him as he vacationed with his family in Southampton and, the story goes, was walking up the street to his hotel one morning when he saw her through the dining room window. He set down his tea, patted his mouth with his napkin, and excused himself from breakfast; his wife asked if he felt well. Quite well, he told her. He explained he would return in a few moments. He walked from the dining room, out the back door of the hotel, and to the train station. He took a train to Exeter. By now of course he knew everything was over, he had already passed the point of no return. He had made the mistake of toying with a girl who did not understand that passion was a country where there were definite borders. She did not see the borders; she crossed borders as though crossing an empty avenue at midnight. In Exeter he contemplated his ruin for several days until Jane Shear showed up there as well; then he took another train. This time he crossed the Tamar River from Devon into Cornwall; he crossed, then, into the final no-man’s-land of the Old World, he went as far as the Old World could go. She followed without a second thought. I have had the miserable misfortune, my great-grandfather thought ruefully to himself, to make love to a woman who will pursue her passion to the edge of her world and perhaps beyond. At Land’s End he jumped into the sea. She might well have followed except that while her passion was such as to transcend borders and worlds, her maternal instinct was not; she watched pregnantly from the rocks of Land’s End and turned around, going back to London where she bore a son, giving him the name of his father. The son in turn would go to America and bear three sons, Bart, Dirk, and Jack Mick, names that were in spirit rather the antithesis of Edwin. Thus my great-grandfather and great-grandmother lived in a country they each called passion but which was in fact two different countries; each crossed into the country of the other without knowing it. When they did not honor each other’s borders, they believed each other to have committed treason; for each, treason was the same crime by a different law.

Lake had casually noticed Anne many times before he saw the similarity with Leigh in appearance. In fact the Englishwoman seemed almost softer to him, though he decided later it was the person who was softer rather than the face. As he watched her wandering up toward the inn through the streets of the town that tumbled back down the hillside, the wind of the bay lifted her hair in a way that the wind off Lake Michigan would lift the hair of a judge’s daughter. On the other hand, Leigh was now of so long ago he couldn’t completely trust the memory this new woman resembled. In every other way Anne was utterly different. Sometimes Lake could barely hear her when she spoke to him, and she flushed slightly and looked anxious around the corners of her smile. Her heart was different, bound in a tourniquet and fighting to live.