Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

—

For Glory, Cuba would have been ideal, revolution-wise. The island was shorthand for everything she believed in and she could almost picture Edgar wearing black, a beard coming along nicely, all worldly possessions relinquished. Glory would be tougher than most of the men and more serious. But she could tell Edgar was not as brave as she and so had eased down to Mexico. She did not realize that even this was too much to ask. To Glory, Edgar had said, “When we get there, we’ll drink tequila and dance on a deserted beach and be so far away from home,” though the story was a lie. He expected that Glory really could live without anything except good lingerie, and she would have happily died for a cause. Edgar believed in the same things, he did. He shared the fantasy about being tan and possessionless, though he had never lived without.

The thought of possessions brought the thought of Fern, sitting alone at the table, hating and worrying about Edgar. She did not know where he was. No one did. He decided that he would go up to the harbormaster and call the house one more time before he sailed so that his family did not think he was dead. Only in the dimmest, smallest corner of himself did Edgar realize that Fern might not be there when he came back. Guilt snaked through him again, a hot zag. But he thought about his book, the life he had lived while writing it. The person he had grown into. His mind. No, he thought. I should be worth more to my wife than the house and the furniture. She is the unfaithful one.

The actual course Edgar had charted was to Bermuda. Bermuda, where he had been six times with his parents. Alluring and easy and safe Bermuda. Famous for powder sand and crisp shorts, every lawn ready for a game of croquet. Bermuda, where he had sat at the waves’ edge at age ten, memorized the feel of the warm wash and the pale pink sand in his leg hair and the sound of his mother’s voice in the distance, pausing when she took a sip of cold wine. Edgar wanted that again for the same reason everyone did — it was beautiful and comfortable. He would order freshly grilled lobster. He imagined a little hotel that looked like nothing on the outside, looked local and regular but inside someone had thought about comforts and there would be a wedge of balcony with a view of the sea, and a good place for Glory to stretch out her fine legs. This was not the journey the pair had discussed. Glory’s ending included a darker-skinned overthrow of an unjust government, nothing to eat but beans and plantains, maybe a beer when it was earned. She would learn to sleep in a hammock with a gun across her belly. Glory could not sail, though, and Edgar was the one with the charts. It would occur to him only later that the woman who would have loved this trip most in the world was Fern. She would have loved the small quarters of the boat, the length of the day with nothing to do but talk and fish and eat and swim, the way it would feel to spot land finally, to come ashore, to shower and eat, their bodies still tossing in remembered waves.

He broke the news to Glory over spaghetti on deck, the boat still tied to the pilings, after he had tried the house again and let the phone ring ten times before hanging up. He explained, trying to convince himself as much as Glory, that Bermuda was a good stopover, partway. He explained the possibility that the island was at the brink of declaring independence from the British crown, though he had no actual reason to believe this. He said you never knew with these things, they could happen so quickly. One small incident and a new country could be born, a new flag flying glorious over the electric turquoise water. They might get lucky and be there for the moment itself, Edgar said, trying. He imagined his ideal scenario — a quiet revolution of a few thousand people on a beautiful island, the friendly natives celebrating with rum by sundown, the defeated colonizer setting sail for the homeshore with a hold full of lobsters and limes.

Glory said, “Huh.”

Edgar said, “Picture pirates. Picture a prison camp where unfaithful citizens were sent to starve until they pledged allegiance to the crown. Hurricanes are a constant risk.”

“Yes, I am still a little worried about that.” Of course she should have been worried. Of course this was not the time to embark in an easterly direction by pleasure boat with a crew of two.

Edgar had no reasonable response.

“We’ll be fine,” Glory said, for him. They needed this now. Their landward lives were already upturned and they could not go back, gently ask their families to play normal for six months while the jailbirds waited for better weather conditions.

The Ever Land rocked slightly, and Glory felt lopsided but not sick. There was no longer a solid world beneath them.

FERN HAD PUT gathers of daisies by the bed in preparation for her husband’s return from the cold north. She wrapped up the baby and set off for the bus station to wait. Outside it was early morning, dewy and anxious.

Fern did not know what she would say to her husband. What she would report from days of walking without purpose, of her slow evenings sitting at the window with a bowl of cooling soup, watching the insects take over the skies. She had cooked a certain number of eggs, thrown away the rotting vegetables, dug a hole for an oak seedling that she never planted. That her daughter did not seem like enough of an accomplishment would strike her as sad only later.

The strangest thing was when that mythic person, that impossible, imagined soul was supposed to step off of an oil-sweated, slack-muscled bus. Fern stood there, shoes on and dress pressed, the baby in white linen, and the bus pulled in and sighed, and the engine settled into a worried rumble. Boys in uniforms held their hats to their chests, stooped in the doorway and then unfurled. There they were: just bodies. The same size as when they left.

As Fern waited for her particular counterpart to emerge, she studied the other boys for scars on their necks. She imagined their wives and girlfriends undressing them for the first time, touring the hash marks of war, running their fingers over those oversmooth patches where feeling-skin had been erased. Those were just the physical reminders — what of the heart’s tissue?

And just like that, the last off the bus, Edgar stooped, stepped and stood up straight. His smile was a white heat. He put his bag down and scooped Fern up. That warm chest, that warm breath and she felt very small. “It’s you,” he said.

They knelt together at Ruth’s side, each of them taking one of her small fists. Edgar did not move or breathe. The moment was a sheet of ice, thin and perfect and Fern wanted badly not to crack it. “You are already so big,” he said to the baby he did not know.

“Isn’t she beautiful?”

A cricket landed on the baby’s chest, green and an inch long.

“Hello, Cricket,” he said. Edgar would never call his daughter anything else. Soon, neither would anyone.

The other couples began to retreat, arm in arm, hand in hand, to their cars. They rumbled home to lunches already prepared, to houses scrubbed for the occasion. These boys had survived the war; some of them would also survive coming home from it.

—

There had been a third phone call to the General, this one made while Edgar’s father drank a bottle and a half of champagne himself and watched the news — dozens of soldiers had died that day in a raid a few miles from the blue glare of the South China Sea. Behind the newscaster in the mud there was a hand and wrist, the familiar green cuff, but no arm was attached. Hugh had not been calling for another favor but to offer thanks for what his son had avoided. The General had a son who was studying business, who would soon graduate from college. He said this to Hugh and, again, they chatted a friendly circle. After they hung up, Hugh called his secretary and told her to schedule an interview with the young businessman and the General nominated Edgar for a medal of bravery. It had become a reflex, the doing of favors.