T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

It wasn’t all bad, though. The service at the Jubilation Non-Denominational Chapel, for all its solemnity, was a real inspiration to us all, a public demonstration of our solidarity and determination. Charles Contash himself flew in from a meeting with the Russian premier to give the eulogy, every man, woman and child in town turned out to pay their respects, and the cards and flowers poured in from all over the country. Even July Weeks turned up, despite his friction with the TJC, and we found common ground in our contempt for the reporters massed on the steps out front of the chapel. He stood tall that day, barring the door to anyone whose face he didn’t recognize, and I forgave him his curtains, for the afternoon at least.

If anything, the hurricane brought us together even more than little Ethan’s tragedy. I remember the sky taking on the deep purple-black hue of a bruise and the vanguard of the rain that lashed down in a fusillade of wind-whipped pellets and the winds that sucked the breath right out of your body. Sam and Ernesta Fills helped me board up the windows of my Casual Contempo, and together we helped Mark and Leonard and the Weekses with their places and then went looking to lend a hand wherever we could. And when the storm hit in all its intensity, just about everybody in town was bundled up safe and sound in the bastion of the movie palace, where the emergency generator allowed the TJC to lift the burden from our minds with a marathon showing of the Contash Corp’s most-beloved family films. Of course, we emerged to the devastation of what the National Weather Service was calling the single most destructive storm of the past century, and a good proportion of Jubilation had been reduced to rubble or swept away altogether. I was luckier than most. I lost the back wall that gives onto the kitchen, which in turn was knee-deep in roiling brown water and packed to the ceiling with wind-blown debris, and my wraparound porch was wrapped around the Weekses’ house, but on the plus side the offending race car and the boat were lifted right up into the sky and for all we know dropped somewhere over the Atlantic, and the Weekses’ curtains aren’t really an issue anymore.

As for myself, I’ve been rebuilding with the help of a low-interest loan secured through the Contash Corp, and I’ve begun, in a tentative way, to date Felicia, whose husband was one of the six fatalities we recorded once the storm had moved on. Beyond that, my committee work keeps me pretty busy, I’ve been keeping in touch with Vicki both by phone and e-mail, and every time I see Bruce chase a palmetto bug up the side of the new retaining wall, I just want to smile. And I do. I do smile. Sure, things could be better, but they could be worse too. I live in Jubilation. How bad can it be?

(2002)

She called and he was ready if not eager to sell, because he’d had certain reverses, the market gone sour, Ruth in bed with something nobody was prepared to call cancer, and his daughter, Charlene, waiting for his check in her dorm room with her unpacked trunk full of last year’s clothes and the grubby texts with the yellow scars of the USED stickers seared into their spines. “That’s right,” she said, her old lady’s voice like the creak of oarlocks out on the bay in the first breath of dawn, “Mrs. Rastrow, Alice Rastrow, and I used to know your mother when she was alive.” There was a sharp crackling jolt of static, as if an electrical storm were raging inside the wires, then her voice came back at him: “I never have put much confidence in realtors. Do you want to talk or not?”

“So go,” Ruth said. Her face had taken on the shine and color of the elephant-ear fungus that grew out of the sodden logs in the ravine at the foot of the park. “Don’t worry about me. Just go.”

“You know what she’s doing, don’t you?”

“I know what she’s doing.”

“I never wanted to sell the place. I wanted it for Charlene, for Charlene’s kids. To experience it the way I did, to have that, at least—” He saw the house then, a proud two-story assertion of will from the last century, four rooms down, four rooms up, the wood paintless now and worn to a weathered silver, the barn subsiding into its angles in a bed of lichen-smeared rock, the hedges gone to straw in the absence of human agency. And when was the last time—? Two summers ago? Three?

“It’s just a summer house.” She reached out a hand you could see right through and lifted the rimed water glass from the night table. He watched the hand tremble, fumble for the pills, and he looked away, out the window and down the row of townhouses and the slouching, copper-flagged maples. “Isn’t that the first thing to go when you—?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I guess it is.”

“I mean,” and she paused to draw the water down, gulp the pills, “it’s not as if we really need the place or anything.”

—

The water was choppy, the wind cold, and he sat in his car with the engine running and the heater on full as the ferry slammed at the seething white roil of the waves and the island separated itself from the far shore and began to fan out across the horizon. When the rain came up, first as a spatter that might have been nothing more than the spray thrown up by the bow and then as a moving scrim that isolated him behind the wheel, he thought of switching on the windshield wipers, but he didn’t. There was something about the opaque windows and the pitch of the deck tugging at the corners of the light that relaxed him — he could have been underwater, in a submarine, working his way along the bottom of the bay through the looming tangle of spars and timbers of the ships gone to wrack a hundred years ago. He laid his hand idly on the briefcase beside him. Inside were all the relevant papers he could think of: the deed, signed in his father’s ecstatic rolling hand, termite, electrical, water rights. But what did she care about termites, about water or dry rot? — she wasn’t going to live there. She wasn’t going to live anywhere but the white-washed stone cottage she was entombed in now, the one she’d been born in, and after that she had her place reserved in the cemetery beside her husband and two drowned children. She must have been eighty, he figured. Eighty, or close to it.

Ronald Rastrow — he was a violinist, or no, a violist — and his sister, Elyse. At night, in summer, above the thrum of the insects and the listless roll of the surf, you could hear his instrument tuned to some ancient sorrow and floating out across the water. He was twenty-two or — three, a student at Juilliard, and his sister must have been twenty or so. They went sailing under a full moon, rumors of a party onshore and Canadian whiskey and marijuana, the sea taut as a bedspread, a gentle breeze out of the east, and they never came back. He was twelve the summer it happened, and he used to thrill himself leaning out over the stern of the dinghy till the shadow of his head and shoulders made the sea transparent and the dense architecture of the bottom rushed up at him in a revulsion of disordered secrets. He remembered the police divers gathered in a dark clump at the end of the pier. Volunteers. Adults, kids in sailboats, Curtis Mayhew’s father in his fishing boat fitted out with a dragline, working up and down the bay as if he were plowing it for seed. It was a lobsterman who found them, both of them, tangled in his lines at the end of a long cold week that was like December in July.

He drove along the shore, past the saltbox cottages with their weathered shingles and the odd frame house that had acquired a new coat of paint, the trees stripped by the wind, nothing in the fields but pale dead stalks and the refulgent slabs of granite that bloomed in all seasons. There were a few new houses clustered around the village, leggy things, architecturally wise, but the gas station hadn’t changed or the post office/general store or Dorcas’ House of Clams ( Closed for the Season ). The woman behind the desk at The Seaside Rest ( Sep Units Avail by Day or Week ) took his money and handed him the key to the last cottage in a snaking string of them, though none of the intervening cottages seemed to be occupied. That struck him as a bit odd — she must have marked him down for a drug fiend or a prospective suicide — but it didn’t bother him, not really. She didn’t recognize him and he didn’t recognize her, because people change and places change and what once was will never be again. He entered the cottage like an acolyte taking possession of his cell, a cold little box of a room with a bed, night table and chair, no TV. He spent half an hour down on his knees worshipping the AC/heater unit, but could raise no more than the faintest stale exhalation out of it. At quarter of one he got back in the car and drove out to Mrs. Rastrow’s place.