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Chapter One
Something Important
Peter Ramsey was spending a few days with his brother, Mitch, in an old family cottage on the Rappahannock when he learned that his wife was sleeping with another man. He was in that place with that company because Mitch had called him early one morning and asked him to come, had told him that they had to get together, the two of them, and "dialogue." Peter had not seen him or heard from him directly in at least three years. "Aunt Eliza's cottage. Sometime in the next couple of days," Mitch had argued. "Just wait for me."
Peter hung up, and told Eileen what he had said. She had been running around the bedroom madly getting dressed for the day, but when she figured out who was making this call at dawn, she stopped and stood where she could listen. Peter whistled, as if nothing he'd ever heard made less sense than meeting Mitch at the cottage.
Eileen said, "He's your brother, after all," as if there had ever been a time in forty-two years that he had not known that.
"I've got work to do."
"Honestly, you can work there as well as here." It was true enough: Peter taught high school English and his single task for the summer was preparing a new course in the Russian novel. "The first time he calls you in years there must be something up."
Peter arrived at the cottage the next evening. The moist air inside surprised him, as if the mildew should have been finished with the place years ago and left it blanched and dry. It was a simple structure, an old herdsman's residence long since cut off from its farm, but there was a broad porch across the water side that looked out the creek toward the slow Rappahannock emptying into the Bay. When Peter thought of his great-aunt Eliza, he remembered her on this porch, only half sitting on the edge of a wicker settee. She was a maiden lady from Louisville, restless enough with her lot to have loved this modest, unassuming place. When he thought of her he remembered pins, cameo brooches, and antique pearls, because her dress was never complete until she had gathered a fistful of material across her fallen, sunken chest.
He slept soundly that night, soothed by the light clatter of tulip leaves outside his window, his cheek on Aunt Eliza's monogrammed pillowcase, English linen that smelled clean as a wheat field but still seemed slightly damp, as if a lover had been sleeping there. He was awakened around four by noises coming from the creek, a diesel engine gargling and a radio that seemed close enough to whisper to him. He looked out through the branches and saw the dark silhouette of a work boat stretched out across the break in the water elms and pines. The running lights drew an even green line on the black horizon. He could make out the waterman, standing at his helm, illuminated by the ochre dials of the control panel, and could almost smell the hot coffee, could feel the greasy dew on the canvas decking. The boat cut out of the sleep of the creek hollow and headed toward the river's open water, leaving behind the strains of exhaust and country music.
In the morning he dragged a brocaded chair and a marble-topped table out onto the porch and set up the books and notes he was using to put together his new seminar. An exuberant rush of concentration soon gave way to the distractions of air fragrant with the raw life of low tide, and the distant sounds of men working the outdoors. About ten he heard the hum of an approaching vehicle, and was almost disappointed to think it must be Mitch, on time, but it was a coarse sound and it turned out to be a farmer on a tractor come to mow the field between the house and creek. Peter could not imagine by what arrangement the farmer did this. Perhaps it was a courtesy or a contract that had outlived Aunt Eliza, but if the farmer did it for pay, it was certain that he did not get his money from Mitch. Who, wondered Peter, having once done business with Mitch, would ever trust him again?
Peter worked into the middle of the afternoon, stopping only a few times to look at his watch and speculate whether Mitch would arrive at all. As the sun began to fall upriver, he left his desk and walked the expanse to the water. In his childhood he had passed days on this shoreline, making villages of twigs and grass. He could not remember how Mitch spent his time at Aunt Eliza's. He wondered, not for the first time, whether one of them was adopted, or whether at least they did not share the hopeless, ill man that both of them had called Dad. Growing up, Mitch had looked and acted and in fact played linebacker on their Country Day football team; Peter was thin and tall, with dark curly hair, gawky as a boy and still slightly insubstantial. But then he heard a shout from the house, and it was a voice so familiar, so much a part of him, that it seemed to come not through his ears but through his blood.
"Hey, asshole."
Mitch was standing a few yards into the field, framed between the two arching tulip trees. He was rounder now, and he appeared an unhealthy and unnatural pink in the afternoon light. He was wearing a baggy pair of red Bermudas that hung off his gut; everything about him seemed heavy--the fabric of his extra-large polo shirt, which hung like chain mail, the pair of thick sunglasses swinging on a cord around his neck. Peter crossed the field, eyes down at the clumps of fresh-cut hay; he waved once halfway.
"You made it," said Peter, putting out his hand. To his dismay, he saw that Mitch was raising both of his bulky arms.
"Gotta give the little brother a hug," said Mitch, explaining the awkward closing of bodies that took place.
Peter took a step back. "You made it," he said again, this time making it plain that he was referring to all the times in the past when Mitch had not.
Mitch paid no attention to the churlish tone. "Some business came up at the last minute. I'm just glad you're here, old boy."
"So what's up?" asked Peter. "I hope nothing bad."
Mitch might have begun to answer, but at that moment Peter heard a rustling by the edge of the house, and looked up to see a woman walking toward him with a wide smile on her face. She had a large pair of sunglasses perched on her blond head, and her white canvas sailor pants were so tight he could see the perfect outline of her blue underpants. Her aging skin showed the result of too many days on the beach. He did not have to ask Mitch who she was; over the years he had brought dozens of girlfriends and women into the most private family moments, starting back in their teens the time a photographer was hired to take candids of Aunt Eliza's eightieth. When the proofs came back, even Mitch couldn't remember the name of the eager, tactless face that seemed to appear in every scene.
" This is Margaret," said Mitch, and Peter knew the accent was covering lies he had told her: My brother can't wait to meet you; Mother said to give you her best . Peter did not want to hurt her feelings, so he smiled weakly and began to walk around to the front of the cottage as if there were some business he had to attend to. The grille of a car came into view, and it was a big fancy Volvo. Mitch always had a new car, even when it sounded as if he were living at a Y somewhere; he was the first person Peter had ever heard of who leased a car, and to this day Peter considered leasing to be one more strategy for living beyond one's means. But the car was not the worst of it, because as Peter rounded the corner the next thing he saw was a boat on a trailer, a small day sailer with a mast slung on a cradle overhanging the car.
"This boat," he yelled at Mitch, who had followed him. "Where the hell did you get this boat?"
"Hey," he said. "I rented it from some marina up the road." He tried to humor Peter. "We can't be here without a boat ."
Aunt Eliza never had a boat; they never sailed there. "I thought you were in trouble or something. I've been here waiting and you show up with a girlfriend and a goddamned boat."
Mitch didn't know what to do. They hadn't squared off like this since they used to play Ping-Pong; they kept score, sort of, but the real object was to hit the other guy with the ball and hurt him. Peter watched his brother visibly searching for--and failing to find--any plausible reason that he should be attacked in this way. Mitch had a gift for appearing victimized; it was always his final card, and so often it worked. It was working, finally, on Peter, because he looked away and his eye landed again on the boat, such an innocently cheerful sight and shape, like a picnic basket. A slight breeze rattled through the leaves above, an invitation to sail. He could suddenly picture Mitch driving up here with Margaret, rolling absently through farmlands and through the old church-and-theater towns of the Tidewater. They begin to pick up strands of the river, and "WHOA," yells Mitch, surprising Margaret. "A BOAT!" he says, and they loop around the divided highway and back toward a boatyard, and there is no lack of trailer hitch or money or sailing experience in Mitch's mind to compete with the image of genteel summer weekday sailing at Aunt Eliza's. It's only after he and Margaret have resumed the road that he admits to himself, as he has denied to the boat owner so successfully, that he is a beginner in a sailboat, a novice, but a great liar.
Peter shook his head and reached out to give the boat a tap. "Asshole," he said. He helped Mitch and Margaret unpack the car; she worked purposefully and seemed uninterested in the brotherly contentions. Peter nosed through the grocery bags that Mitch had brought, and he found all the familiar brands and foods--brothers, no matter what, shared the same table--but Mitch as always had bought the large size, the family size, and three of everything, as if a good time could be built on several pounds of solid white tunafish in spring water. Peter remembered Mitch in their teenage years, shopping for a weekend ski trip or camping trip. He could see him proceeding up and down the supermarket aisles, his cart a wide maw: Load it up; no sense in doing without; hey, it's vacation . Mitch would pay for it all; his wallet had always seemed fat and heavy. But after the show in the supermarket the thick wallet would not reappear during that weekend in the mountains or at the beach, and when Peter made the last silent tally of expenses, it was clear that food had been the least of them.
Peter finished putting the food away, popped a beer, and went out to the porch. He heard Mitch and Margaret before he saw them, way out on the piney point stretching into the river. A tour of the sights, especially out to the point, was part of the arrival at Aunt Eliza's. In the days after the battle of Fredericksburg, the people on the neck had gone out there to count swollen blue and gray bodies floating into the Bay. There were all sorts of stories: a deserter, naked of allegiance, swimming for home; two brothers, in rival uniforms, washed up in rigid embrace. Peter could hear Mitch telling her these ridiculous tales, and as nothing else, they charmed him, Aunt Eliza's private store of American history. By the time Mitch and Margaret reappeared at the bottom of the field Peter had drunk three beers, and as he stood for their approach he could feel the thinning and softening of his blood.
"We were scouting out a place to launch the boat," said Mitch, after he had showered, put on a Hawaiian shirt, and settled into a chair beside Peter. He pointed toward a spot at the lower corner of the field. "Easy," he announced, and took a very long drink of beer, belching slightly at the end. He gave his mouth a stagey wipe with the back of his hand, and then motioned out over the water toward the low band of the opposite bank, a world apart, an hour away by car. "Best sight in the world," he said, as if he owned everything he saw.
Peter turned and apologized for yelling at him.
"No problem," said Mitch.
Peter knew it would be no problem with Mitch; forgiveness was easy for him, something to be encouraged all around. "I mean I really want to apologize to Margaret. I didn't mean she was unwelcome. I just didn't expect her."
"So I gathered," said Mitch. "How's Eileen?"
Peter was surprised and slightly irritated to hear Mitch use her name. "She's fine," he answered quickly. "You haven't seen her in years," he added.
"I was hoping she'd come."
"Mitch, you didn't exactly present this as a family reunion. You said it was important." From behind him, in the kitchen, he could hear Margaret hunting through the unfamiliar cabinets.
"So how's business," he said. For many years this was the one question that he was afraid, or simply embarrassed, to ask. He watched as Mitch made a stylized show of pulling out his wallet, selecting a business card, and handing it over. Peter read it, and it was as anonymous, as unrevealing, as a forged passport. "BSR Associates," it said. The address was Orlando; the last time he knew, Mitch was in Dallas. "What does BSR Associates do?" he asked.
"Oh. The usual mix. Waste management and financial services."
They both fell silent, and Peter watched the woodboring wasps disappearing into the porch rail. A fat woodchuck down by the water made a waddling dash to the trees, and Mitch brought the shape of a rifle to his shoulder and squeezed off a round. The long, flat call of a blue heron stretched across the creek, which was slowly becoming amber in the low western light.
"We need crabs," said Mitch suddenly. "I told Margaret we'd get a bushel." He pronounced it "boo-shul," like the watermen, like, in fact, Aunt Eliza, who picked up occasional Tidewater pronunciations and took pleasure in using them back in Louisville.
"How 'bout another beer?" Peter asked, getting up.
Mitch didn't answer, but simply heaved his empty can out onto the grass and then held one hand forward for a cold one. "This is freedom," he said.
Peter found Margaret in the kitchen standing on a chair, peering back into the recesses of a top shelf. He could see the taut muscles stretching through her calves and up into the full skirt of a purple cotton sundress. When she saw him she gave up and smiled; she wasn't very pretty--petite women with upturned noses like Margaret don't seem to age all that well--but she was radiant with health and good will.
"I wanted to say I'm sorry," he said. "I was being childish and rude."
She climbed down from her chair and gave him a generously open smile. She began breaking lettuce into a china bowl, and Peter leaned back as if they would now have a chance to begin over, but they were instantly interrupted by Mitch bellowing from the porch. "Driiiink."
They looked at each other and smiled again, and Peter saw Mitch behind her expression, good old dumb, affable Mitch; he knew instantly that she loved that man as anyone must love another, from the inside out. He did not know anything about them, how long they had been together, where she lived, but it seemed to Peter that he was past asking any of this sort of background question; they were in-laws now, supportive in-laws, admitting the fact of family failings but without prying too far into the details. Margaret would fight someone who judged Mitch too harshly--Peter could see that; she'd fight Mitch's brother, if it ever came to it--but she'd rather simply be in a place where nobody was expected to be perfect. Peter winked and went to the refrigerator. They went back out to the porch together and they all sat in a line in the oddly matched assemblage of furniture, with Margaret in the middle.
The evening that settled on them was soft and sweet; the river and Bay were dead calm. It was not most people's idea of a vacation spot; instead of the slap of seawater heavy with minerals, the Chesapeake offered a flaccid, tepid flow, a mild brackishness dotted with jellyfish. Not most people's idea of fun, but good enough for Aunt Eliza, thought Peter; good enough for me.
Mitch pointed to the spot he had earlier designated for launching the boat. "That's where we're going to launch her," he said.
"So you had announced," said Peter, with some sarcasm in his voice, but Mitch had always lived beyond the reach of sarcasm anyway. Peter was getting drunk, and he had started to feel a rush of pleasure at being here with Mitch and Margaret, and without Eileen. It had begun to feel like vacations never felt anymore, release into some new world. It was ten-thirty by the time they sat down to eat at the broad mahogany table jammed into the small Victorian parlor. They opened a bottle of white wine that no one needed, and with the first sip Peter knew he had stepped over the line. Margaret's eyes were starting to look tired and very much over forty, maybe even fifty, and Mitch was nodding off like the uncle at Christmas dinner. Peter hadn't been drunk like this in years, and by God, it seemed it was different at middle age, far less fun and much too mortal. He looked around the room, at Margaret and Mitch, at Aunt Eliza's things, at his own hands, smelled the char of burned chicken and the foul film of beer on his breath, and it all began to feel rather arbitrary, as if there were no past after all, and as if he could, and maybe should, let go any time he liked.
He woke in the morning after a fitful night, going to the bathroom a few times and then, on schedule, waking for the waterman as he passed them by. It was the ringing of the telephone that finally got him up, and he staggered downstairs in his boxer shorts. He was surprised to see Margaret, already dressed, holding the receiver out to him. It was Eileen.
"Who was that?"
"Margaret," he said. "A friend of Mitch's."
"What's going on there? Has Mitch spoken to you?"
"What do you mean? We've been talking."
There was a pause, a long pause, and Peter could think of absolutely nothing to say, so he waited for her.
"I thought Mitch had something to tell you."
"I don't know." It was the honest answer. "Don't cross-examine me," he added quickly. Margaret had graciously left the room to give him some privacy, but he knew he could still be heard all over the house. "I'm sure I'll get a chance to talk to Mitch this morning."
"It sounds like a house party," said Eileen.
"I guess it does," he said, but even as hungover as he felt, he was glad to be one of the guests.
"So you won't be home tonight?"
"Probably not," he said, with the vague feeling that she had been checking on him as if she did not trust him with Mitch. "No. I won't be," he added definitively, and they hung up.
He looked around the kitchen and could see that he was not only the last one up, but that the others had eaten big meals, eggs and scrapple, English muffins. Outside, from down at the water, he heard the clank of metal and the sound of voices, and he opened the screen door to look out. Mitch had backed his boat and Volvo deep into the cattails and seemed to be trying to get the boat ready. Peter gazed up into the treetops and there wasn't a breath of wind; the morning was so slack it hung in front of his eyes in sheets of powdery haze. He figured he might well throw up yet, but instead of standing there waiting for it, he put on his jeans and stumbled across the field.
"Did you get his license plate?" called Mitch; the old jokes of their father's still seemed satisfactory to him.
"Shit," said Peter.
"No. It's `she-it.'" He turned to Margaret. "Peter never learned how to swear. You can tell right away he doesn't mean it."
Mitch had backed the Volvo as far as possible into the shore grasses; the trailer had come to a jolting stop against the hidden remains of a concrete seawall. The lens of one of the taillights lay shattered, a brilliant red mistake on the marshy floor. Mitch was standing waist deep in the grass alongside the boat, holding a handful of ropes and apparently trying to thread one of them the length of the mast. It would be difficult, even if he knew what he was doing, but there would have been no time to wait for instruction when he rented the boat, just a "Sure. Sure. Do you take plastic?" Mitch's boat. It was starting to get touching. And because of that, it seemed suddenly to matter, mattered enough for Peter to swallow back the last heave of his stomach and wade into the tangle. Once they mastered the rigging they turned their attention to the hull, and soon discovered that as compact as the boat looked, and as preferable as fiberglass was to wood, it took all their combined strength to slide it off the trailer. It came to a stop, foundering on the seawall. They assembled a selection of levers from the orderly line of driftwood snaking through the dense cordgrass, but they could do little but peel off spirals of fiberglass on the sharp edges of the concrete.
"Try to take the weight off your end," said Mitch. Peter was only able to rock the boat some more; the sound was becoming the worst part of the project, the chewing and scraping that resonated from the hull like a massive sounding board. Mitch leaned back for another of his frequent rests. "Wait," he said. "Gotta pace yourself."
"Let's just put it back on the trailer," said Peter.
Mitch looked at him with a great round show of amiable disbelief.
"It's not as if we ever sailed anyway."
"We always had a boat," said Mitch. The smile was gone, but now he was using the instructional tone of the older brother, the one who remembers better because he was there first. "It's family tradition."
One year, maybe, the Fergusons next door took them all for several excursions in their Chris-Craft, and the hunters who rented Aunt Eliza's duck rights let them use their aluminum duck boat for several years running, but that was it. "Come off it, Mitch."
"You always were a disagreeable little twerp," said Mitch, smiling broadly again.
Peter heard that familiar tone of voice, and helplessly he was back to when they were sixteen and twelve, and Mitch was calling him a disagreeable little twerp, and he was taking it with a cocky forced smile because he was unsure whether Mitch meant it or whether it was true. From then on, that was the way Mitch talked to him, as if they could only go that far together, as if they were frozen into their teenage years, as if they could never be real friends because they knew each other too well too young.
He stood back to look once more at their plight, and this time when they put their shoulders on it--screw the fiberglass--Peter exploded. After five minutes of increasingly unfocused shoving the boat was unmoved. The rotund curve, the acrid smell of it, the absurd benches in the cockpit; he now truly hated the whole thing, especially after he had lost control and had kept shoving alone long after Mitch started to yell "Hold it, hold it!"
"What about some lunch?" It was Margaret's voice. Peter had forgotten entirely about her; he wondered how long she had been watching. He stood panting for a minute or two.
"Fine. Hell with it," he said, and walked off toward the cottage, the low mumble of their voices slowly getting lost in the high sounds of summer and the swish of his slashing strides through the cut hay.
He was on the porch when he heard Mitch start up the Volvo, and he looked in time to see the wheels racing and clods of spongy soil being splattered against the boat hull, which now looked comical, a cartoon drawing of a shipwreck. The wheels caught finally and Mitch bounced out of the shore grass, his bulky body seeming to fill the entire glass area as he was launched by the hummocks. He turned left to follow the road back up the neck without stopping.
"I'm sorry," Peter called out to Margaret once again, as she walked up. "All I've done since you got here is apologize," he said.
She sat beside him on the top step. "I guess the two of you don't get to be alone together very much," she said.
No one who knew anything at all about the two of them would make such a comment. Peter's first impulse was to protest that it was so rare that it had never, since they were adults, happened at all. "Sure. Well, anyway, I'm sorry."
"Mitchell has been planning this trip for weeks," she stated. She was not above making him squirm a little. "I was afraid he wouldn't come without me," she added. "You know. He gets distracted." She gave the quickest nod in the direction he had driven.
Once again, Peter saw the meeting between them built upon what Aunt Eliza, with the greatest love, used to call Mitch's ways. "Why did he come? What's this all about?"
"You'll have to ask him."
"How is his business? Do you know?" He tried not to sound ironic.
"I think it's going very well. His partner was once a garbageman. I mean that literally. But this waste management thing is really going well."
They sat quietly for a moment and listened to the powerful buzzing of the locusts and the sounds of work that carried all the way from the waterman's boat far out in the river mouth.
"It's beautiful here," she said. "I took a wonderful walk around the shoreline. All those coves and points must have been fun for a child. I always envied people like you. I think I still do."
"Why?" Peter leaned toward her a little.
"With a big family. And all this history." She motioned out over the lawn, and up the creek toward the Rappahannock.
"It was just Aunt Eliza," he blurted out. "She bought this place to get away from Louisville and then invented a family to go with it."
"It's funny about you Southerners," she said. "Someone says family to you and you assume they mean generations. Family to me can happen in a single night."
"You didn't have any kind of a family life?"
"Not like you. Not like you and Mitchell. He has told me so much about all your adventures."
Peter had been taken by surprise before by information that came back to him from Mitch, events that they had supposedly shared but were absolute news to him, or were just a dimly perceptible skeleton for anecdotes that were utter fiction. "Like what?" he asked.
"Oh," she said carefully, "he told me he knocked your two front teeth out when you were five, with a frozen Snickers bar. Can that be true?" She brought both hands to her mouth and paused. "And I love the story about that night in Paris when the two of you and some friends split up and kept on stealing each other's cars. Mitch says he never laughed as hard as when he caught you at dawn carrying the driver's seat of his Renault across the square in front of Notre Dame. It really is a funny picture."
"Yes," said Peter. It was one of his own favorite memories
(Continues...)
Copyright © 1999 Christopher Tilghman. All rights reserved.
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