The Moon Pinnace Read online

  They climbed the long hills where the old highway followed the side of the Cascom River valley, then swooped down into the rich warm air along plowed fields and young hay, then climbed again past woods up toward the sky. She had never flown in an airplane but it must be like this to rise and descend with only the steady effort of the motor moving you.

  The column of his back was hers to hold on to as she wished, with her hands on the muscles above his ribs, with her arms full around him and her breasts against his back, or with her hands at his waist. She was constrained not to hold him as firmly as she might have liked, and she was not sure of the reasons for that constraint Nice girls didn’t do certain things. They were always passive and gentle. She didn’t remember having been told this, so she must have gotten it out of the air somehow. And of course he must believe the same thing and wouldn’t like her to be too forward in the matter of grabbing him. He’d want her to be a nice, sedate, decorous pet. She wondered. Already she sensed a fairly basic difference between them. He was more self-conscious and less candid than she was. He was a little finicky about things like bathrooms and shutting doors and not farting out loud and all that. He was a little decorous himself. How careful he had been not to touch her in indecorous places; she could map his rules for his lips and his hands.

  She was a little guilty about this analysis because it seemed a betrayal of her deepest feelings about John Hearne, that he was strong and wise and kind. Nobody was perfect, but she didn’t want to be anywhere but with him, no matter what he did. This was obviously foolish, if not insane. He was surrounded by a goldish yellowy haze, as if a brighter sun shone on him than on everything else. That might be love.

  But suppose he despised her and was secretly laughing at her? No, she wasn’t that dumb. She did have some power over him. He did think she was a special person. She thought she was a special person too, but she didn’t know how he could have found that out, because what evidence of it could he have seen?

  They came up over Follansbee Hill and there was Cascom Lake below them, the little town of Cascom at its foot. The long green descent made her think of brakes—he seemed to let the machine go too fast, too long, but then they did slow down and they were on the lake road. After a mile or so they turned, blue glimpses through tall pines, onto a dirt road where they went slowly and twistily over the cracks and bulges caused by winter frost.

  The cabin, on a foundation of large boulders, was gray-shingled, wide because of its screened porches, cool and dim under the pines. Over the door was a carved wooden sign:

  CASCOMHAVEN

  1918

  Another dark cabin could be seen down the shore. This was the shaded, western, rocky side of the lake; the few sandy beaches and the public beaches were on the south and east sides. She had never visited this part of the shore with its private cabins set far apart on private land.

  Inside, the cabin smelled of damp cloth and mildew. They opened all the shutters, windows and doors. The furniture was plain, old-fashioned, and didn’t match. The inside of the cabin was more like the inside of her house than his. Few of the dishes, cups and glasses matched, and she supposed that what ended up here were the survivors of accidents, the old bridge lamps that were slightly bent or out of fashion, the Morris chairs, the rickety metal beds. This would be primitive living for his family, put up with for a weekend for the sake of the cool lake air.

  They went beneath the cabin among the boulders and ledge that it was built upon. There, in the cellary twilight, beside the brick base column of the fireplace, he lifted the wooden well cover and they looked down into the silent, imprisoned water, the outlines of their curious heads looking up at them from that cool dungeon. He connected the plumbing, which had been drained for the winter, beginning with the connections to the well and the electric pump with its big flywheel and belt. She handed him wrenches and putty knives of goo for the threads. When the water was on, all traps sealed, they cleaned the kitchen counters and cabinets of mouse droppings, cleaned out a nest the size of a basketball, which she was relieved to find empty of white-footed mice, from below the sink. Another they found in a bureau drawer in one bedroom, and another was floating in the just-filled toilet reservoir.

  She swept pine needles from the sills and steps while he crawled along the porch roof and threw them by handfuls out of the gutters. She vacuumed the rugs and floors with the upright Hoover while he let the dock back down into the water upon its chains and pulleys, replaced some shingles on the tool-shed roof and swept the longest porch with a wide push broom. They were busy, efficient at their domestic chores. It was hard work but useful, visible work, the kind she enjoyed, and she was happy.

  The canoe was stored on the crossties in the tool shed. He stood on a stepladder and got it started and she guided one end of it as it slid down and became heavier than it looked. She was proud of her strength as they carried it, one on each end, down to the dock, where he examined it carefully, sighting down its keel, then turning it over so he could run his hands lovingly over its varnished ribs and gunwales and green canvas.

  “This is a great little boat,” he said, “but it suffered while I was away. One winter they just shoved it halfway under the porch. That’s where I found it. Can you imagine that?”

  “While you were in the Army,” she said. Sometimes he seemed more her age, because he looked so young, but then she’d remember that he had been in the Army for more than two years.

  “While I was gallantly defending our country they let my beautiful canoe crack and rot. I had to scrape it down to the wood and do it over. The only thing is, it’s not my canoe. It is, as the Sylvesters would say, ‘the Sylvester canoe,’ just as Cascomhaven is ‘the Sylvester camp.’ ”

  “Your stepfather’s.”

  “Not just his. His brother’s, his sister’s, his mother’s, his uncle’s, and on and on. He just gets to pay the taxes and piss and moan. But that’s another story.”

  They secured the canoe upside down on what he called its summer rack, with a rope over it to keep the wind from taking it.

  “There,” he said. “We’re grimy but we’re done. You are a good housecleaner, and I thank you. The Sylvesters thank you. I don’t know why I’m talking like this. You want to try the water? I’ll get some soap.”

  She got their bathing suits and towels from the motorcycle’s saddlebags and went into the cabin to change, wondering if she could make herself go into the cold lake. He was on one knee looking up into the fireplace and working the damper. Soot sifted down on his arm.

  “I can see daylight,” he said. “Maybe a fire would feel good after, if we’re still alive.”

  She changed in the bathroom. Her bathing cap had turned sticky over the winter and she’d decided not to bother getting another, so she’d have wet hair and look like a fuzzy-wuzzy or a drowned rat—she could take her pick. There was a cracked full-length mirror on the back of the door, so you looked at yourself from the toilet, which was disconcerting at first glance. Her bathing suit was the official light blue one-piece Cascom Manor lifeguard suit with her Red Cross Senior Lifesaver patch sewn on the front. She had a more frivolous two-piece suit with lace around the skirt, but had decided, for reasons she could not logically explain, to take this one. Whatever the reasons, they had to do with impressing John Hearne.

  He examined the Red Cross patch. “Save me!” he said. “God, you look good. Do you know that?”

  “If you say so, but I’m pale as a fish.”

  “I mean it. I’m serious,” he said.

  They went down the steps to the dock. Even though the sun was bright, she was chilly already because it was the first time of the year in a bathing suit and because of the northwest wind that always seemed to sweep down from Cascom Mountain and smear the lake with whitecaps. He grinned like an idiot and fell over backwards into the water, screamed as he climbed back out and then soaped himself furiously. “It’ll take your breath! It’s not fit for human occupancy!” When he was lathered all over, includ
ing all over his shorts and his head, he dove in and she dove in beside him. She was numb immediately. The water was like frozen metal and seemed to stick her muscles together. She thought of bare iron in winter that you should never touch with your skin. She got back to the dock, pulled herself out and rolled over onto the boards. He’d beat her out of the water.

  “Soap?” he said. “Or would you prefer not to have to get stunned again?”

  “No, I’ll do it if you get a fire going.” The soap was like a piece of stone, but she finally got some lather up and rubbed it over what he’d called “grime.” This must be love, she thought, or I wouldn’t murder myself like this. This water was not the kind you got used to in any way. She dove in again and made herself rinse by twirling her body violently under the surface before crawling out again. Her joints were slow; her blood seemed to have slowed.

  He was standing by the beginning fire in a wool bathrobe, and he had a terry-cloth robe for her. “My step-aunt’s, but she’ll never know. Take your wet suit off if you want and put it on.”

  She hesitated, and he said quickly, “I don’t want to embarrass you or worry you, you know. Do what you want, Dory. Okay?”

  She took off her suit in the bathroom and came back feeling airy and naked under the white terry cloth, her towel in a turban around her head. “Suppose your step-aunt found us here like this,” she said. The fire was too young to give much heat yet, but they stood formally in front of it.

  “Nobody just drops in here. Let me tell you that the whole Sylvester family suffers from a kind of constipation of the impulses. Visits to this place are governed by a nervous, nauseating protocol in which no surprises are allowed. All schedules are published two weeks in advance.”

  She couldn’t help but admire the clever words, though that tone, in anyone, had never sounded very pleasant to her. The fire grew and the bricks heated—tingly radiant heat against her ankles and calves and the feeling that she had nothing at all on under the skirt of the robe. She sat down carefully on the chintz-covered couch in front of the fire and he sat down on it too, at what he must have thought a proper distance away from her but not all the way at the other end. He was going to touch her and kiss her soon. A kettle whistled from the kitchen and he went to it and came back with two mugs of hot chocolate. “No milk, but it’s sweet and hot.”

  They sipped their hot chocolate and looked at the fire.

  He said, “I also found half a bottle of gin someone left here by mistake. I was going to offer you some but my theory is that your lips are more or less innocent of that sort of poison.”

  “I’ve had some,” she said, defensive about her inexperience.

  “Did you like it?”

  “It was in grape juice and it was just sort of sweet. It didn’t make me drunk or anything. Maybe I felt a little dizzy, but not much. I had some Beverwyck ale after the junior prom last year. It was bitter but I think I could get to like that.”

  “Come to think of it, it’s illegal to ply a maiden of your years with alcohol.”

  Now he was bragging that he was twenty-one and not a minor. She said, “How does it feel to be twenty-one?”

  He saw her point and laughed. She saw admiration in his laugh, and again she felt that melting, that dangerous pride in his admiring her. Surely he was going to touch her and kiss her soon. She wanted to urge him to get on with it, but she had no vocabulary or meaningful gestures that might with proper indirection signal her willingness. Limited willingness, because she didn’t want, or was afraid, or thought it might harm her in his regard, to go too far. It was the unthinkable that she was actually thinking about when she thought “too far.” But it seemed the more he approved of her, the more hesitant he became, and his energy went all into words. Or else he didn’t want to pet her anymore—how could she know anything for certain? The danger was that he was becoming too important. She could feel the others, friends and relations, fading, losing their power.

  “You’re seventeen?”

  “I’ll be eighteen in September.” That sounded, she thought, a little less reprehensible.

  “High school isn’t out yet, is it? How come you’re not in school?”

  She’d been wondering if he would ask this, because there was a warm little prideful thing she had been keeping to herself, waiting for it to be printed in The Leah Free Press, or for an opportunity to tell him, to have to tell him, about it. “I’ve got a pass for today and tomorrow because I’m giving the valedictory.”

  “Lord,” he said, “I’ve been coming to the conclusion that you’re smart, but are you the smartest one in your class?”

  “I don’t think so. I just did all my homework.”

  “You would. Yes, I can see that. And you’re supposed to be writing your speech? And you’ve written it already, no doubt.”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Oh, honor, loyalty, honesty, kindness—the usual stuff.”

  “Actually, that doesn’t sound too usual. Where’s patriotism, for instance? Or good old simpleminded faith?”

  “Well, I’ve sort of based it on Montaigne, and he’s not too strong on those.”

  “I’ll be damned. I’d like to read it.”

  “I’d be embarrassed. It’s really the usual kind of thing. I looked over some of the ones they’ve kept in the office and they all give good advice and good wishes and a fond farewell. You know.” Maybe she ought to write it over, differently, with more irony in it. When she wrote it she hadn’t thought of him ever reading it. She hadn’t thought of him at all, because she wrote it before he slid down the teeter-totter.

  “Maybe I’ll go to graduation and listen to you give your speech.”

  “Oh, no! Don’t do that! I’d be too nervous!”

  “Why should I make you nervous? Who the hell am I to make you nervous?”

  She would not answer that; she’d already told him that she loved him.

  He leaned over and took her by the shoulders. “Stop being nervous!” he said.

  It was all right to wrestle playfully, pretending, even with considerable force, to get revenge upon him for teasing her. The result was of course inevitable and he had her pinned and lay on top of her, or mostly on top of her. She had never felt such kindly weight, or the quality of that weight as it slowly changed, as they stopped wrestling, to a force it was no longer part of a game to resist. She thought of the word “swoon” as she lay still. She thought of the wrong way she had once taken the saying “a needle in a haystack”—not the hopelessness of finding the needle so much as the danger of finding that impaling steel in the yielding hay, where you wouldn’t expect it.

  Time hazed and she melted into such honey there was a brief thought that the robe or the couch must be dampened by her, but along with the hazing of thought and time in this limbo of balanced forces was another part of her mind that knew just how far he was going. He was about to break his own rules, and as though she were emerging from a thick dream, streaming slow syrupy ropes of pleasure, she said, “Don’t.”

  She would have allowed him to go ahead but he heard her and stopped. It was like turning off an engine. They both sat up, embarrassed by their clarity of mind. She covered herself.

  “Well,” he said, “that was close.” He covered himself too, but she had seen his penis for a startling moment. It was thick, reddish gold, absolutely vertical and enormous, much longer than she’d had any idea a penis could be. Its very size made her realize how she’d just escaped a kind of cataclysmic change in which she would have been stretched huge as a grown woman.

  But he had stopped at one word from her, and she was so grateful she loved him even more, so that she was suddenly shy. She ran to the bathroom to change into her clothes.

  6

  When he came in his mother was in the kitchen stirring a pitcher of martinis. Her name was Martha and she was forty-two. Her husband, Amos Sylvester, was also forty-two. She was blond, “petite,” and people said she was pretty. She wore yello
w dresses more often than any other color, and she liked shiny red shoes. She liked perfume too, and you could smell her across the room. Amos Sylvester was a tall, thin man with a totally aberrant potbelly which didn’t seem to belong to him, as though he were taking it somewhere to leave it. He was in the living room reading the paper and making loud crackles as he slammed the pages shut and snapped them out flat. Occasionally he spoke to no one, saying, “Assholes,” “Shitheads,” and the like.

  His mother stopped stirring the martinis, a dramatic gesture, and looked at him, her expression an arch command for intimacy, implying palship and collusion. “So you were at the lake,” she said.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “You were observed heading in that direction with little Dory Perkins on the back seat of your motorcycle. Hmm.” Her eyebrows stayed up.

  “That’s right,” he said. His balls ached and he wanted to get to his room.

  “Well, Johnny Hearne, I hope you aren’t leaving any ‘tracks’ behind you. I mean, little Dory Perkins. Really.”

  “No tracks,” he said, and went up the back stairs to his room, where he opened his clothes, lay on his bed with a handful of Kleenex, envisioned the dear sweet presence of Dory, entered his vision by her dark gate and, his hand become her, came. For that nerve-ruptured moment Dory was supreme, but then began a slow diminution.

  A childhood warning, or joke, was that semen was gray matter—literally your brains—but it was just the opposite; what flushed out took with it recklessness and left the brain prudent and analytical. There was a sense of loss and at the same time relief at that loss, because it was the loss of madness. He mopped his fluids from his chest: careful maintenance, the odor of boiled egg and vague regret.

  He did not know who or what he was except in minor ways, and here was this young girl, a virgin about to begin her adult life, over whom he had been given incomprehensible power. What about the intensity of her emotions? What about her honesty, which could stun him? He liked her, but the sex, the “love”—those things made him insane, and they would again, he knew. Right now Dory Perkins was all complicated by family, by embarrassing, clinging technicalities, by the inhibitions and taboos of childhood and adolescence—such as the very fact that she was a girl. Did he want to have to “own” that funny little face, to walk forever tied to that other? He would lose the freedom which, after the tyrannies of childhood, school and Army, he had hardly yet sampled.