Peter Geye - Safe from the Sea

Noah himself fell asleep soon. When he woke at midnight he put another blanket over his father and went into his bedroom. He awoke at five-thirty to check on his father again. During the night Olaf had moved from the chair back onto the couch. He slept peacefully now, his chest rising under the mound of blankets, a silent snore from his hang-jawed mouth.

It was another sunless, sooty morning. Noah went to the shed. He wanted to study the anchor. He wanted to be prepared for whatever he might do.

Noah inspected the bolts that fastened the first piece of tubing to the barrel. He saw that holes had already been drilled for the second. He finished sawing through the tubing and began to fasten it to the barrel. He worked for an hour, breaking midway to look in on his father. When he’d attached the last piece, he puzzled the chain through the contraption. It looked, as he stopped on the way out to inspect it one more time, like a torture device from some earlier century.

Finally his father was awake. He stood at the sink basin rinsing his empty mouth with a glass of water. He had dressed himself in wool pants and a sweater thin at the elbows. The clothes fairly hung on him.

“Some sleep,” Olaf said.

“I’d say.” Noah looked at his watch. It was almost eight o’clock. “How are you feeling?”

“I’ve had better mornings.”

“You want something to eat?”

“I don’t think I could eat.”

“How about more water? Could you drink? You should take these pills.”

Olaf consented. Rather than expecting his father to swallow the pills — some were the size of almonds — Noah ground them on the counter with a spoon and stirred them into the water. Even drinking looked difficult. When he’d finished Olaf let out a soft burp. He handed the glass to Noah and went to the chair, his walk across the room a feat unto itself.

Olaf pointed at the box on the coffee table. “I’ll be goddamned,” he said.

“I found those out in the shed. I hope it’s okay I brought them in.”

His father replied with a look of deep regret, or what Noah took for one. “At least it explains my sleep last night.” He sighed. “I always meant to bring them in. I knew it was a crime to leave them out in the shed.”

“They’re here now.”

Olaf agreed. “She was beautiful,” he whispered, his voice cottony with the memory.

“Always,” Noah said.

“She was the love of my life.”

These words startled Noah. Not because he was surprised at their meaning but because he’d never expected to hear his father say them. He’d always known it, he guessed. “She was mine, too, for a long time.”

Now Olaf smiled. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. When he laid his hands across his lap the smile disappeared. “What I did to her.” He shook his head. “She broke my heart, Noah.” The words were like something spoken years before.

“There were a lot of broken hearts back then.”

“There still are,” Olaf said, looking Noah square in the eyes. “But I guess it’s a small price to pay. Everyone pays it one way or another.”

“What do you mean?”

“A small price for the memories. Broken hearts or none, we all have them.”

Noah thought about that. “You know what scares me more than anything? That I’m going to end up an old man without Natalie. That I won’t have all the memories I want. Sometimes I don’t care about anything but making it to old age with her. I see folks in restaurants or walking down the street and I get terrified we’ll end up apart. It’s a terrible feeling.”

Olaf listened with a look of intense concentration. “You feel that way because you figure once you’ve made it to old age, the hard times will be behind you. You’ll have made it.” He paused. “I think I used to believe that, too, when your mother and I were young. But our lives changed. Those thoughts of mine changed. Hers, too, if she ever had them.”

“I know she did.”

This put another smile on the old man’s face. “The problem with your mother was she was too smart for her own good. She was so much smarter than me. It was impossible sometimes.”

“What do you mean?”

“I met that wife of yours. I suspect you know what I mean.”

Noah said, “I guess you’re right.”

“She got stuck with me, your mother.”

“I don’t think I believe that,” Noah said. He didn’t believe it at all, in fact. “She loved you.”

Olaf wedged himself up so his feet were flat on the floor. It was not an easy task. He took the afghan from behind the chair and spread it across his lap. “She may have learned to, but she was stuck with me to begin with. Your mother was pregnant when we got married. In the middle of her third month.”

“She was what?” Noah did the math in his head. It didn’t add up.

“She miscarried two weeks later. Gave him a name. Per Olaf. She wanted to bury what came out.”

“Per Olaf?”

“That’s what I wanted to name you.” Olaf scratched his neck beneath his beard. “I wanted to tell you when you were talking about Natalie. Figured it wasn’t the best time.”

“She named a miscarriage?” Noah had gotten lost in the memories of his and Nat’s own ill-fated pregnancies. That there was something like a history in the family was surprising to him.

“I was passing through the Soo when I found out about it. July 1958. I was never so confused in my life.”

“Why confused?”

“I thought maybe the end of the pregnancy meant the end of our marriage. Your mother was so damn pretty, so damn good, and I thought the only reason she’d settled down with me in the first place was because she got herself pregnant.”

“You got her pregnant.”

Olaf seemed almost to blush. “We met at a dance hall, of all the goddamn places. This was back when people still danced. She told me right off she didn’t want a sailor. I told her she should dance with someone else, then. But she didn’t. There was something underneath all that primness.”

“We’re talking about Mom.”

“Sure we are. We danced and danced. She smelled like rosewater, I remember. She always did. She had on a pink dress and a white sweater and with that blond hair it was like she had claim on half the purity in the world.” He shook his head. “But she knew what she was doing. It was unfair is all.”

“You were defenseless, huh?”

“Anyone would have been, that’s the truth. I would have bought anything she had to sell. But she wasn’t selling anything. That’s the thing. At the end of the night I walked her home. She still lived with her parents over on the west end, by Wade Stadium. Warm March evening. At the door she told me she didn’t want to get old before her time. Said that’s what sailors did to you.”

Olaf paused, clearly reveling in the memory of it all.

“Well, I know it didn’t end there. Something must have happened between then and, what, May? April?”

“We were already shipping that year. I had two days.”

“So?”

“So the next morning I’m walking back to my apartment from the diner on the corner and I get home and your mother is sitting on the stoop outside my building. I said, ‘I thought sailors were off limits.’ ”

“What did she say?”

“Said she changed her mind. Said she’d make an exception.”

“And she did.”

“The thing is I fell in love with her like a kid. Immediately. I was stupid in love with her. Your mother? I was practically an old man when we met and your mother was no spring chicken, not by the standards of those days. She fell in love with me, ended up with me anyway, because twenty-eight-year-old women weren’t single in Duluth back then.”

“I saw enough reason to the contrary to believe that. Mom loved you. Very much.”