The Moon Pinnace Read online

  “I must have been crazy,” he said.

  “I could have told you but I didn’t care,” she said. They were both in awe of their madness.

  “If you get pregnant we’ll get married,” he said.

  “I’ll never marry anybody but you,” she said, which gave him a deep but invisible convulsion of pity.

  9

  Her mother was quite aware that her life had changed. The long days with John Hearne hadn’t gone unnoticed. They were doing the dishes, Dory rinsing and stacking the chipped white plates, her mother’s hands red from the graying dishwater. Her mother said, “You better invite him to supper.”

  “To supper? Why?” She thought he wouldn’t like to come to supper; she knew he wouldn’t like it.

  “Because it’s a good idea. We ought to meet him.”

  “But he’s just Johnny Hearne. You know him all right.”

  “I don’t think he’s just Johnny Hearne no more.”

  Since Dory was not given to lying she couldn’t deny any part of what her mother meant. They had argued and fought in their lives, but she couldn’t remember a time when they had misunderstood each other. She was not about to say, “What do you mean by that?” as Debbie would have.

  At thirty-six, her mother had a few strands of gray in her hair, though her skin was pale and smooth, with a hard look to it, and she was too thin. She’d always been thin and busy, always going after a task or two, and maybe one more after that, she had to finish before she could sit down. Dory took after her in the matter of finishing things, while Debbie, who was bigger and stronger-looking than either of them, became weak from boredom at any job, and dawdled, not caring if it was ever done or not. Most of the time Dory and her mother didn’t bother to ask Debbie for help, because it wasn’t worth having her in the way of their purposeful hands.

  Dory wouldn’t lie to her mother, but she never made any confessions to her—not that she’d ever had any serious ones to make, until now. She was the daughter who never caused trouble, who, having given her word, came home on time, who got mostly A’s in school, whose periods never made her slightly insane, as Debbie’s did. She had heard her mother say to her Aunt Phyllis, “Doris never give me a lick of trouble.” But she wondered if she was dutiful in part just to avoid trouble, sort of ducking everything that came along. Debbie never avoided any emotional confrontation, not even the horrendous ones, the screaming back and forth and the stupid, sarcastic rejoinders. “Don’t get your water hot!” Debbie would yell at her mother across the table, her red mouth coiling and ugly with what seemed to be genuine hatred. Debbie would do odd, slobbish things, like drinking tea out of the teapot and leaving an obvious red smudge of lipstick around the white spout. Dory could understand the impulse to drink the tea out of the spout, but she couldn’t understand not wiping the lipstick off afterwards.

  Her mother said, without looking up from the dishpan, “I hope you know what you’re doing, Doris.”

  There was no answer to that, so she made none. Her mother said,

  “He’s older than you, he’s a vet, he’s been overseas, he’s a college boy. He’s probably…”

  Her mother stopped there. This time she wasn’t sure what he’d probably, so she said, “Probably what, Ma?”

  “Been around plenty of women, is what I mean. What do you do out there at the Sylvesters’ cabin all day long?”

  “We go sailing and swimming and we talk.”

  Her mother didn’t want to ask the real question directly. Maybe she didn’t really want to know the answer to it, or she didn’t want to put her honest daughter on the spot. “I always been able to trust you,” she said. “I always thought Johnny Hearne was a good boy, but he ain’t a boy no more, and you’re not old for your age. I’d like to know more about his intentions, is all.”

  “Pa’s nine years older than you.”

  “I was nineteen when we commenced stepping out, however, not seventeen. Even so, you know we had to get married. When the preacher said, ‘Will you take this man?’ you was already on the way. You invite him for supper tomorrow.”

  “I really don’t want to. It isn’t necessary, Ma, really!”

  “It’s ‘necessary.’ ”

  “Oh, Ma!”

  Finally she promised to ask him. Even as she conceded she didn’t think she could do it.

  “Why don’t you do it right now. Call him up.”

  “I’ve never called him up.”

  “There’s a first time for everything.”

  So she did. Mrs. Sylvester answered the phone and said, “Oh, is this Dory? Dory Perkins! He’s in his room. Just a sec and I’ll get him for you, dear.”

  She already knew he was in his room because his light was on. What she read in his mother’s voice was probably all in her own head, but she cringed at it. She must look up “patronize” in her new dictionary and make sure how it was pronounced.

  John Hearne said, “Dory? Before you say anything you ought to know that my mother’s still on the phone downstairs.” There was a giggle and a click. “She’s probably still on the line,” he said.

  “Meet me at the teeter-totter, okay?” she said.

  “Okay,” he said in a rough voice, imitating a tough guy.

  The sky had clouded over, a heavy seamless vault over the town. It was only eight o’clock but the light was dusky, grass and leaves going gray, the arborvitae black columns. She wanted to move into his arms, now that they could put their hands on each other anywhere they liked, but someone might be watching.

  “What’s up?” he said. “Your father cleaning his shotgun?”

  “It’s my mother. She practically forced me to ask you to supper tomorrow.”

  “Hmm.” The mosquitoes were singing. He stepped forward and pressed one against her forehead, then picked it off and flicked the tiny mess away.

  “I know you don’t want to come.”

  “Why shouldn’t I want to?”

  “Don’t lie, Johnny.”

  “You never lie, do you, Dory? As long as we’re naming each other, I’ll admit, Doris Ella Perkins, that though I have nothing against your mother and father whatsoever, the prospect of being evaluated as stud, as it were, gives me one pure, cold grue. But I’ll come.”

  “Around five-thirty.”

  “Black tie, Doris?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Oh. ‘Shut up.’ I see, Doris.”

  “You’re just nervous, so you can’t be serious.”

  “You’re getting to know me pretty well, Perkins.”

  She was still embarrassed about asking him to give a command performance. “My mother won’t give you the evil eye, don’t worry. She likes you.”

  “But she doesn’t trust me, which shows that she’s an intelligent woman.”

  “She thinks because you’re older and a veteran and all, you’ve probably had a million women already.”

  “She’s close—give or take a hundred thousand.”

  “Have you?”

  “Only you, my sweet. I came to you pure as the driven snow…”

  “Shut up, Johnny.” When she was about to cry her face felt all pasty. She didn’t like his flippancy and never had, but she wanted him anyway. It was just that it all seemed useless, something that could never come to a conclusion. All those frivolous, mannered little wisecracks. She’d rather have him in her, groaning.

  He came up to her. “Hey,” he said, his thumbs on her tears.

  Oh, his voice was tender enough. He could be sincere. When he was sincere he turned warm and wise. His strength and kindness filled her.

  But she felt that way one minute and resentful the next. She was a prisoner of these terrible shifts, these crack-the-whips. It depended upon his specific gravity, which changed constantly. He was real and less real, moment to moment. She felt like screaming, and abruptly left him and went into her house and up to her room. As she passed her family in the living room, the radio issuing the goopy, artificially sweet voice of Eden Abhe, her vagina fe
lt used, heated by a mild irritation. They said nothing; with the probable exception of her father, they knew the reason for her moodiness.

  She took off her clothes and lay on her bed as the dark fell. Distant heat lightning flickered soundlessly, printing her window on her eyes. When she moved her eyes the window’s gray-white panes and black sash moved too as that ghost vision faded and another came, so that she saw two windows, and then another. The storm was to the west, and would come over Leah.

  She accepted as inevitable her summer at Cascom Manor and his journey to California. Her summer would be hard work and fairly predictable, but his would be dangerous unto death—at least the going: he would sell his motorcycle out there and come back some other way, he said. She didn’t understand the alien quality in him that looked forward to all that risk and discomfort, and she wasn’t sure that he’d come back at all; he had the GI Bill and could go to college anywhere he chose.

  So be it. One didn’t scream at the inevitable, even if it had been the reason for her tears, the self-pitying child inside her sniveling in resentment for having been his…vessel. Her life had been all right until he had decided to use her for a week or so to while away the time until his check came and he could escape from her. She knew; she could read every jog of his mind. It was just that she couldn’t control those quivers of hesitation and resolve.

  In her own body a baby might be forming. That was what she was for, why she had breasts and organs and the opening that he fit, so there was no mystery about that and no reason why it shouldn’t happen to her. She couldn’t remember exactly when she’d had her period. There had been no reason to keep track of it, back in that other age when her best friend was Cynthia Fuller. Now she seemed to have no friends, just a lover, though he never used the word “love.” Instead he would kiss her all over and tell her that she had a perfect body, that she was “edible,” that her elbows were beautiful. Always it went beyond seriousness into self-mockery, where her heart would not follow.

  Once she asked him why he had to go to California. He said he wanted to see his country. On the way he wanted to stop and see the town where he was born.

  “But you grew up in Leah,” she said.

  “Leah!” he said. “Well, no, there are worse places, I guess. But I was born in Winota, Minnesota. That was another life. I had a father…”

  She began to understand that his reasons weren’t all frivolous. “Do you remember him?”

  “Yes. I was five when I left there. I was in kindergarten. I remember a lot.”

  “Is he still there?”

  “When last heard from he was somewhere in southern California—according to my mother.”

  “Are you going to try to find him?”

  “No. Anyway, it would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

  She thought of her own interpretation of that saying. “If you knew where he was, would you look him up?”

  “I don’t know. I wouldn’t know what to say to him. What would I call him—Daddy? I’m a man now. I’m a veteran—even if I was in combat only three days. I’ll be twenty-two in October and I don’t need a father.”

  His statistics didn’t seem to convince him. She wanted to comfort him, so she slid her arms around him and hugged him. He said, “I do think you’re beautiful. You think you’re homely, but you’re not.” He said that seriously.

  Oh, she didn’t know what to believe.

  She couldn’t believe she’d been asleep, but the air in her room was wild, her curtains and shade snapping and coiling, the storm assaulting the town in a nearly continuous flash and boom. She went to close her window and the floor and windowsill were already wet, the water cool but slimy-feeling because it was where it shouldn’t be.

  She dreamed he was thirteen and his father was whipping him with a dog leash while he danced in a corner crying, “Daddy! Daddy!” The cry turned into a tapping on her window and she woke, confused for a moment as cry and tapping separated from each other.

  He knelt on the woodshed roof.

  10

  He and Dory spent the day apart, each getting things ready for their summer occupations. He did a lot of experimenting in how to lash his possessions on his motorcycle. As his journey neared it became more and more implausible, and as five-thirty approached his invitation to supper at the Perkins’s felt more and more like an invitation to a shotgun wedding. Her mother was a formidable woman; although she’d always been pleasant enough to him, he’d seen her wrath exercised on others, especially on Debbie, whom he’d once seen whipped home, raised welts on her legs, her mother wielding a leather dog leash. Not that Debbie hadn’t been expressly guilty.

  He’d always said hello to Dory’s father on the streets of Leah. The poor man had to nod and smile and say hello a thousand times a day as he made his appointed rounds, his bulging leather haversack hanging on one shoulder and then the other. He was a hunter, and long guns leaned in the dining-room corners. How he felt about John Hearne and his daughter, John didn’t know. What name for him might come into her father’s mind—fellow, boyfriend, suitor, sweetheart, son of a bitch? It was strange that he knew so little about a man so familiar to him.

  The time came when he would have to cross the backyards and appear at their door. Front door, or kitchen door? He had decided to wear chinos and a clean dress shirt, no tie. He had decided to shave carefully in order to look as young as possible.

  “Don’t you look nice and clean,” his mother said as she stirred the nightly martinis. “And you’re having dinner with your girlfriend’s family.”

  She meant collusion again, that Dory Perkins was a minor amusement and his visit to her house something like slumming. He felt a lurch of resentment against this attitude but said nothing. It was true that the Perkins’s house was odd and interesting to him, and therefore he was tainted with the superiority of a cultural observer, but he didn’t despise it the way he did the matched sets, the color codings, the displayed fabrics and the generally self-conscious decor of this house. The Perkins’s house was full of accreted junk, but each piece was either functional or a memento.

  “Are you two getting serious?” his mother asked lightly.

  “I’m heading west tomorrow,” he said.

  “And I don’t know why!” She turned quickly, so that her pleated dress would bell.

  “Wanderlust,” he said.

  “But it’s so dangerous on that motorcycle!”

  “Where’s my drink?” Amos called from the living room.

  “I’ll take it easy,” John said.

  The kitchen door or the front door? The kitchen door he’d entered as a child, for errand or Kool-Aid, and might make his visit seem less formal, but he had been summoned by a mother’s decree, and that meant the front door, probably. He didn’t want to begin this ordeal by startling anyone. No one’s arms covered with flour, or doughy hands. He went around on the cinder driveway, past the prewar Chevrolet, to the front door, which he was about to knock upon when Debbie opened it.

  “Hi,” he said.

  Debbie was grinning, and had been grinning; it didn’t seem a response to him but to some earlier event. Maybe the earlier event was what had happened at Cascomhaven a few days ago, or maybe it was the circumstance of his being male and Dory female and all the libidinous implications of that. Or her father had made Dory confess everything and was about to confront him with two alternatives—jail or a wedding.

  “Come in, Mr. Hearne,” Debbie said. She stood aside to let him enter the small vestibule. The door wouldn’t open all the way because of all the winter coats and mackinaws on pegs and the boots and overshoes on the floor below them, so he squeezed past her, his arm having to brush against a large breast bound in slippery aquamarine rayon. Debbie was almost as tall as he was, the sort of girl who had always been large, matronly even in grade school, and who in class plays was always someone’s mother or aunt. She was noisy, sarcastic, subject to moods, a smoker, her inappropriate remarks causing boys to pick on her a
nd think of names to call her. “Boobers,” he had heard, was one of them. For all her emotional zigzags, her unfunny humor and her pride in borrowed jargon, he’d never thought her mean; but she was the sort of person you were more sympathetic toward when not in her presence. It was hard to believe that Dory, with her grave dignity and grace, was related to her at all.

  He preceded Debbie into the small living room, where Mr. Perkins turned off the radio and stood up to shake his hand. “Sit yourself, John,” he said. “Debbie, get us a ale. You like ale?”

  “Sure,” John said, and Mr. Perkins nodded once to Debbie, who still grinned and seemed pleased to wait on them.

  Most of the room was taken up with furniture. He chose the overstuffed chair that matched the davenport, while Mr. Perkins went back to what was evidently his Morris chair, for handy to it were a wooden pipe rack and a humidor of tobacco. Small tables filled up all extra wall space, each covered with a crocheted doily, framed photographs of people, ashtrays, figurines, candlesticks without candles, ceramic match dispensers, glass-based table lamps with colored shades and on one table an enormous green glazed bullfrog. The photograph of honor, on top of the Motorola radio, was Dory’s graduation picture in a folding gold frame. Her hand-tinted cheeks and lips looked like flower petals; her smile was so broad and joyful it went beyond mere cheerfulness and raised the question of what, at that moment, had so pleased her. He’d never seen such an unalloyed expression on her face. Again, art tried to widen the separation of her dark eyes, the rotogravure-brown tints not succeeding any better than her makeup for the prom, which he suspected in that case to have been applied by Debbie.

  “Nice photo,” Mr. Perkins said, glancing at John through fingers that filled and tamped tobacco into his pipe. He was a bony, angular man who gave the impression of great wiry strength. He’d changed out of his uniform into green pants and a white shirt, but still wore his regulation thick black ankle-high shoes that in spite of their high gloss were bent and squat from use. His legs seemed bowed from all his walking, and his long face wrinkled from all the smiles the townspeople demanded in return for their greetings. It must have been a chore, that constant exchange of mild affection.