Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

Two hundred years before, in this spot, a trading vessel bound for America had been making good time. It was a Sunday and the crew had been preparing to bring up the nets to see what they would have for dinner. The cook had his hands in a basin of grey washwater. And then a wave had appeared, a huge wave, alone on the surface of an otherwise still sea. Like an obedient dog, the ship had rolled over. Her crew had been underwater before they knew they were in danger. She had sunk slowly, air caught in the hold. The sea was featureless except for the mast, which stuck up like a knife-stab. The captain’s body came to rest on the foredeck. A hundred years later divers had found his bronze watch in a tangle of seaweeds. The steel hands were still set to the time of the wave: nineteen minutes before twelve.

The sloop floated above the distant bottom like a star.

By late afternoon they were crossing into waters Edgar had never sailed before. This was the part he had wanted. Out beyond. They were headed southeast at eight knots and the water peeled out from below them and the wind was strong and steady.

“How do you feel?” Edgar asked.

“I feel wobbly.”

“The sickness goes away after a while. We could swim. That helps.”

Edgar let the mainsail down and made it fast. The sloop slowed and slopped, rocking now instead of skimming.

With tethers to their waists, they dove overboard. The water was warm at the surface and cold just below, and they kicked hard against waves that had appeared small when they were aboard but now seemed big. Glory lost sight of Edgar and spun, looking for him in the vast blue. She thought: shark. She thought: dead. Her only hope without him was to send a distress signal and wait to be rescued. She realized that she should ask more questions about what to do in a series of what-ifs. She thought of being dragged from a rotting ship, half dead, even though it only would have taken a few hours for a rescue boat to find her. Edgar appeared beneath her and lifted her up; she kissed him on the salty mouth. They kicked together, ran to keep above the surface. They laughed hard, knowing this was the best it would get. It was never a mistake to swim.

Back aboard, they lay naked on deck and let the sun warm them. Glory rolled a joint and they passed it back and forth and then she lit a cigarette and Edgar took a drag. He didn’t like the taste but it felt good in his lungs, the heat. He coughed when he exhaled. The salt dried on their skin and shone. Cold to warm, wet to dry. “Bermuda,” Glory kept saying, trying to get used to it. Edgar drank beer, Glory said that word — everyone aboard had a way of making the time pass. The Ever Land slapped at the water, and the halyards clanged the mast. Such specific sounds and so few. Edgar thought that people would be different in a world with fewer sounds. When Glory touched him on the back of the neck he jerked away, wanting less rather than more. Finally, there was so little.

“Remember the night of the party when we met? Was that really your mother?” he asked.

“Oh, God. I think I’m so different from her and then there we were on the same vacation, trying to get drunk at the same party. I spend so much energy trying to be unlike my mother but then she responds by turning into me. It’s like she’s trying to prove to me that no matter what we do, we become the people we were always going to become.”

“Does that mean you were always meant to wear a fringe vest?” Edgar teased.

Glory laughed. “I’m sure she looked in the mirror twenty times before she left the house and felt great every time.”

“My parents are even more embarrassing than yours,” he said. “Mine are gluttons. They own everything a person could ever purchase.”

“Did they grow up with money?”

“No. Maybe that’s it. Maybe they’re trying to use it all before someone realizes the money doesn’t belong to them.”

The immigrants in Edgar’s family had crossed these same waters on a boat from Ireland, an old thing, the boards fat with seawater. The immigrant relatives had thought about waves as landward things, rolling onto the beach and rocks. That the whole ocean rolled was a surprise. Most of the earth was covered by water, and the water was in turmoil.

After three weeks at sea, four miles from the Cape Cod shore, from their promised home, and in the middle of the night, the ship had quietly and unceremoniously sunk. The passengers’ deaths were dreams they dreamed or dreams they woke into — by the time they understood that they were beneath there was no such thing as above.

The currents gathered the bodies and distributed them on a single beach along with driftwood. One woman and one man still had air in their lungs and their hearts had not stopped and the blood moved. They woke up slowly and coughed. They had never met but they already knew the story: God only needed one of each, but from them, a whole race could be carried forward.

The immigrants worked in carpentry. They moved from Hope Street to Prospect Street to Promise Street.

When Edgar’s father told the family story, the turning point was always exactly the same. Great-grandfather Joseph, Chicago, 1871. He was poor and his people had always been poor. He lived alone in a building that stood only because it seemed used to standing.

Joseph sold metal parts and pieces from a shop next to the dirty river. One morning he sat out back with a donut and coffee and watched the affected water pass when he spotted something upstream in the slow current. A hand? he thought. Wait, a hand? It was grey and dead, fingers curled softly, the glint of a ring. The river slinked. Joseph squinted and the hand got closer. He wanted it to transform into anything else. No, no, just an old shoe, just a piece of packaging. The closer it got, the more handlike it became. Joseph ran inside and pulled a long rod out. He held one end and reached.

He flipped the hand. The ring winked in the sun. A diamond. Joseph reached out, breath stopped, and he held the hand with a greasy rag. The ring did not come off easily. Joseph wiggled it back and forth, back and forth, but it stuck at the knuckle. By then, his heart had claimed the ring; the ring was already his.

Joseph spit on the ring finger and eased the sparkler over the knuckle. He threw the rag and the hand into the river. Joseph tried the ring on his pinky. Welcome, fortune , he thought. Come on now and love me. He turned to the side and threw up.

That night was hot and windy. His eyes began to burn. He smelled smoke. He coughed. Joseph’s lungs dragged him to the door.

One by one, the people of the city ran towards and then into the lake. The water was night-cold and it took Joseph’s breath away when he stumbled in. The wooden buildings, bright with fire, showed their skeletons before they fell.

Next to Joseph in the lake, there was a young woman.

“What comes after?” Joseph asked her.

The woman stared at the fire. She took Joseph’s hand. She was crying and she did not look at him. He did not ask her whom she had left behind and she did not ask him. Metal would replace wood. Huge factories would be built, trains clanking across the country, so much need for metal.

Joseph felt the ring in his pocket. Without asking, he broke the handhold, slipped the ring onto the woman’s finger.

—

Silver fish began to soar over Edgar and Glory, arcing across their view. “Flying fish,” Edgar said. The sea was putting on a good show. There were dozens of fish, silver as ice. Glory did not know such things were real. The fins on the fish were spread wide like wings and they seemed to be jumping for no reason except fun. When the sky was fishless, Glory sat up and found three bodies flopping on deck. “Dinner,” she said, and went below to get a bucket for the fish to swim in until it was time to eat them. Edgar loved her for seeing the beauty of the fish in midair and for seeing the food in the ones on deck. A woman walking naked across the deck of a ship with a bucket full of fish was the best thing a man could ever hope to see. The sun was strong and they sweated, adding their own salt to the seawater dried on their skin. They ate strawberries and drank freshwater that was still shade-cool.