No Promises

Theron

"I can't be responsible for the weather," said Theron.

"Nobody's asking you to be."

"I wish it understood that I have consulted four forecasts."

"I know. You printed them."

"They are in agreement. Wind southwest at eight to twelve knots. Seas one foot. A seventy-five percent chance of sun, which in Narragansett Bay is a rate of success I consider indecently high." He glanced at the sky through the windshield. "If it rains I shall take it as a personal failure."

"It's not going to rain."

"You do not know that."

"I know you," said Dess, from the passenger seat. "You'd have the rain moved."

He opened his mouth to protest and found, to his annoyance, that she was right.

It was the last Saturday in August. They were crossing the Newport Bridge at nine in the morning in the old green Volvo that had belonged to Mrs. Ferreira's late brother and which Dess had, after a month of grim negotiation, accepted as a loan. The windows were down. The wind came in off the water carrying salt and tar and the sour sweet smell of low tide. Below them the whole of the bay lay open, blue and glittering, scattered with sails; and on the back seat, in a rear-facing carrier the size of a bread box and a hat with a crooked stitch, Calder Wexcombe Rourke, who was eleven weeks old and had views, was explaining in a long, rolling, indignant monologue why he found the bridge a disappointment.

"Ba," said Cal.

"I agree."

"Ba. Ba. Ba."

"He has a case," said Dess.

"He has a very good case. It is an extremely long bridge and nothing has happened on it."

"He wants a boat."

"He is eleven weeks old."

"He's a Wexcombe. It's in the blood." She twisted round and pushed a finger into the carrier. "Right, bud? You want a boat?"

"Ba," said Cal, with finality.

Theron kept his eyes on the road.

He found that he was gripping the wheel rather harder than was necessary. His left hand, he saw, was perfectly still. It had been still since they left Ives Street. It had been still, he realized, for most of the summer, whenever she was in the car; and he had stopped, somewhere in July, bothering to wonder why.

She asked, he thought. Last Sunday. In the kitchen. She said, "Take me to Newport. Show me the boat." And I said "Which?" And she said, "All of them."

She said, "I want to see the part of you that's not afraid."

It was the most alarming sentence he had ever heard.

…

Halcyon, at ten in the morning, was a house with all its windows open.

He had never seen that. In thirty-six years he had known it in every season and every weather, in winter shutters and summer awnings, with the great carved door barred against visitors and the long walks raked clean of footprints. He had known it as a fortress; as a mausoleum; as a hushed and glittering stage on which a man in a gray suit presided. And now, as the Volvo rolled up the oyster-shell drive between the clipped hedges, he saw that every sash on the south front had been thrown up, and lace curtains were stirring in the breeze, and on the broad white steps, in a straw hat the size of a cartwheel, with her stick planted before her like a flagstaff, stood his mother, directing three men in overalls who were carrying a wardrobe out of the front door.

"Mother."

"Don't speak. I'm busy."

"What are you doing?"

"Clearing the house." She pointed with the stick. "That's Hale's. That's Hale's. Those are Hale's bookcases. I have never liked them. They have doors on them. A book should be able to see out." She raised her voice. "Mr. Dunphy! Not the wardrobe! The wardrobe goes to the Salvation Army! The desk goes to the dump!"

"The desk, ma'am?"

"It is a very bad desk."

"It's a Chippendale, ma'am."

"It is a very bad Chippendale. Put it behind the stable." She turned. Her eyes, under the brim, were bright as a bird's, and her face had the faintly pink and breathless look of a woman who has been up since five and has not enjoyed herself so much in forty years. "Odessa. My dear. How is he? Give him here. I have been waiting."

Dess climbed out of the car, unclipped the carrier, and carried the baby up the steps. Constance took him. She did it as she did everything now, a little stiffly, with the careful air of one performing a ritual she has only lately learned, and held him against her shoulder in the cartwheel hat. "Hello, Calder," she said, in a small steady voice. "I am your grandmother. I have been told I'm very old. I am not at all sure that's true."

Cal considered her gravely.

He put out a hand and took a fistful of straw.

"He's got your nose for hats," said Dess.

"He has my taste." Constance smiled. It was a startling smile, young and dry and lopsided, and it transformed her face. "Theron. You have a tie on."

"I always have a tie on."

"On a Saturday?"

"I thought it appropriate."

"To what?"

"To the occasion."

"What occasion?"

"I do not know," he said, honestly. "I was advised there would be a key."

"There is a key."

"May I ask what it opens?"

"You may," said Constance, "when you have helped me carry a bookcase."

…

It took forty minutes.

It took forty minutes, three men, two hand trucks and a quantity of language which Constance affected not to hear, to clear the east parlor of Hale's belongings. They carried out bookcases and a rolltop desk. They carried out a gilt mirror, a pair of Meissen urns, eleven shooting prints, and a cabinet of silver cups in which Theron had once, at nine, seen his own white face distorted. At half-past ten the room stood empty, with its pale oblong shadows on the wallpaper where the pictures had hung, and the sun poured in through the tall windows onto a wide bare floor, and Constance, standing alone in the middle of it with the baby on her shoulder, turned slowly round.

"I shall paint it yellow," she said.

"Yellow?"

"A sort of primrose." She regarded the walls. "Gerard wished it green. I wished it yellow. We compromised on a color called Hepplewhite Drab. I have looked at it for fifty-two years."

"Mother. You do not need to do this today."

"I've waited long enough."

"For what?"

"For my house," said Constance, "to belong to someone who lives in it." She took a breath. "I was thirty years married before I understood that I had been furnishing a stage. I put the right things in the right places. I said the right things at the right dinners. And the whole time I was waiting for the curtain to come down. It never did. It took a stroke, and a lawyer, and a young woman in a green coat, and a cashier from Fall River." She lifted her chin. "I'm eighty-one. I have a great deal of yellow in me."

"I should like to help."

"You may. In a moment." She turned to Dess. "My dear, would you hold him? I should like to give your husband a key."

"He's not my—"

"He is a person to whom you are handing a baby with great frequency. In my day that would have constituted a proposal." Constance extracted a small iron object from the pocket of her linen skirt. "Here."

It was a key.

It was an old brass key, long and slender and a little crooked, hung on a string of faded blue twine. It lay across her palm like a thing that had been waiting. Theron looked at it. He knew it at once. He had known it since he was nineteen; it had hung for twenty years on a nail by the kitchen door, and he had passed it a thousand times, and he had never once been permitted to touch it.

"The boathouse," he said.

"The boathouse."

"I thought it was locked."

"I locked it the day after the funeral." Constance's voice was calm. "I could not bear to look at that boat, sitting there, waiting. I did not tell you. It seemed to me that a person has a right to a room she can't enter." She closed her fingers over the key. "But I've been thinking about rooms, lately. I've been thinking that a person who cannot enter a room has made it the most important room in the house."

"Mother..."

"I had the lock oiled on Tuesday. I haven't gone in. I'd like you to." She held it out. "Take it. Go with her. I think it's time Christopher's boy saw where his father spent his summers."

…

The boathouse stood at the end of a long gravel walk, on pilings, over the water.

It was an old gray shingled building, low and crooked, with a peaked roof and a weathervane in the shape of a gull. A pair of wide doors opened onto a slip. A flight of steps went down to a float. The paint was blistered, the shingles silvered, the windows green with salt; and there was a damp, sweet, sleepy smell in the air that he knew at once, of cedar and tar and linseed oil and low tide, a smell that took him by the throat and held him, for a moment, motionless on the path.

Kit, he thought.

He had not been inside since the night of the funeral, when he had come down alone with a flashlight. Before that, he had not set foot in it for years. It had been Kit's, in the end. Their grandfather had built the Kittiwake in it in 1961, a thirty-foot sloop the color of honey, and named her for the gull; and for three summers running, Kit, who was twelve years younger than his brother and had never once been afraid of anything, had stripped her to the planking and put her back together, with a crew of one gravel-voiced driver who pretended he was only there to hold the ladder.

"Do you want me to go first?" said Dess.

"No."

"Do you want me to wait?"

"I should like you to come."

"Okay."

"I should like—" He stopped. "I should like to hold your hand, if you will permit me. I find that I'm somewhat afraid."

She took it.

She did not say anything. She wove her fingers through his, the left, the one that trembled, and held it hard, and Cal, in the carrier on her chest, said "Ba," conversationally, to the gull on the weathervane. Theron fitted the key into the lock. It turned with a soft, oiled, reluctant click. He pushed.

The doors swung back.

…

Light poured in.

It poured in across the water, through the open slip, in a bright shifting net of reflections that wavered on the rafters and the walls and the long gray floor; and in the middle of it, on a pair of cradles, with her bow toward the sea, rode a boat.

He stopped.

She was thirty-two feet of honey-colored cypress, long, lean, graceful, with a sweeping sheer and a tumblehome transom and a low cabin trunk, and she lay on her cradles in the dusty gold light as if she had been asleep for twenty years and might at any moment open her eyes. Her brightwork was dull. Her varnish was crazed with age. A gray fur of dust lay on her coamings. But the lines of her! The sweet, impossible, living lines of her. He had forgotten. He had told himself he had forgotten. And here she was, exactly as he had last seen her, the day before the funeral, when he had come down alone at night with a flashlight to put his hand on her hull.

"Oh," said Dess softly.

"Yes."

"Oh, Theron."

"She was not finished. He had three more coats of varnish to put on." His voice would not come right. "He used to say a boat was never finished. He said you only stopped."

"She's beautiful."

"She is the most beautiful object I have ever seen."

"Why didn't you ever—"

"I could not come in." He heard how it sounded. "I told myself it was my father's wish. It was not. It was mine. It was the one door in the world I knew would be exactly as I'd left it. And I could not bear to find that it wasn't."

"And is it?"

He looked.

He looked at the dust on the gunwale and the cobweb in the shrouds and the small curled heap of shavings under the bench, where a plane had been laid down, and never taken up. He looked at the workbench along the far wall. A leather apron hung on a nail. A radio sat silent on a shelf. On the bench lay a coffee mug, a chipped white one, with a ring dried to its bottom, the twin of the one on his own windowsill, and on its side, in faded black letters: WORLD'S OKAYEST BROTHER.

"Yes," he said. "It is exactly as I left it."

And then he did what he had not done at the funeral, at the grave, at the reading of the will, or in a single one of the long nights in the window, in the whole of the last ten months: he sat down on the floor of the boathouse, in his good gray suit, in the dust, and put his face into his hands.

She sat down beside him.

She did not say a word. She sat with the baby against her chest and her arm around his shoulders, and let him weep. He wept as he had not since he was a child, ugly and shaken and without grace, with his whole long body heaving, and the sound of it rolled round the high beams of the boathouse and went out over the water, where the gulls rose and settled and rose again. The sea slapped softly at the pilings. The sun moved on the floor. And the baby, who had no idea what was wrong, but who had been held through a great many such storms, put up a small fat hand, and patted, with firm and systematic competence, the side of his uncle's neck.

…

"There's something on the bench," said Dess, at last.

"Hm?"

"Under the apron. On the left." She had stopped crying. She was looking, with the dazed gentle absorption of someone who has been quiet for a long time, at a corner of the room. "I think it's... Theron, there's a note."

He wiped his face.

He got to his feet, stiffly. He crossed the gray floor. Under the leather apron, on the corner of the workbench, half-hidden by a coil of line and a rusted tin of copper tacks, lay a small object wrapped in a square of oilcloth. Beside it, tucked under a pot of varnish, was an envelope. It was a plain white one, soft with dust, and across the face of it, in a strong sloping untidy hand he would have known at the bottom of a well, was written one word.

WHOEVER.

"Oh God," said Theron.

"What?"

"It is his hand."

"What does it say?"

"It says—" He turned it over. It was unsealed. "It says Whoever."

"Whoever?"

"I do not understand." He had begun to tremble. He opened the flap. A single sheet, folded in thirds, slid into his palm. Dess had come up behind him; he felt her shoulder against his arm. He read it aloud, in a voice that did not sound like his own.

"Dear Whoever,

I don't know who you are. I figure that's the point. They told me at the clinic that you might be a boy, or a girl, or twins, or nobody at all. That's the thing about doing something like this. You throw it into the sea.

I'm building you a boat. It's not a big one. I'm not a big guy. It's the size of a loaf of bread, and it won't sail, but it'll float, because I made it out of a plank of the first tree I ever cut down. I want you to have it when you're old enough to put it in a bathtub.

Here's what I know about wooden boats. A wooden boat is just a tree that learned to float. That's all it is. It was standing in a forest, minding its business, and somebody said, 'Hey. Want to see the sea?' and it said, 'Sure.' It doesn't get scared. It doesn't ask what's out there. It just floats.

So that's my advice. Be a tree. Float.

Your friend,

K. (4417)"

He stopped.

The boathouse was very quiet. A gull cried outside. A little wave lifted and slapped under the floorboards, and a ribbon of reflected light slid across the rafters and was gone.

"Open it," said Dess.

"I cannot."

"Then I will."

She unwrapped the oilcloth. Inside lay a boat. It was a little cypress boat, eight inches long, no more, hand-carved, with a sharp bow and a rounded stern and a keel as thin as a knife. The wood was pale, and warm, and smooth as skin. It had been oiled many times. There was a tiny mast of dowel, and a scrap of sailcloth tied on with thread, and across the stern, in letters cut so fine they could hardly be seen, one word. She turned it to the light.

CALDER.

"He didn't know," said Dess.

"No."

"He couldn't have. Nobody—"

"He did not know your name. He did not know mine." Theron put out one finger and touched the little hull. It was warm. "Calder was his own middle name. Our grandfather's mother's family. Kit used to say that all the good Wexcombes were named for boats." He swallowed. "He wrote it long before he died. He wrote it for a child he would never meet, and he signed the boat with his own middle name."

"And I picked it for the baby," said Dess. "From the obituary. I never knew he'd carved it first."

"Two people. One name. They never met."

"It's—" Her voice broke. "It's a sign."

"It is a coincidence."

"It is a coincidence," said Dess, wiping her eyes, "that I'm going to believe in for the rest of my life."

…

They sailed in the afternoon.

Not the Kittiwake; she would need, as Dell told them with some severity at the foot of the float, three months and nineteen thousand dollars before she touched water. But the little catboat was ready. It was the Beetle Cat, the old Beetle Cat, the one Theron had patched through the spring, that lay at its mooring off the boathouse with its tan sail furled and the new name freshly lettered in gold on the transom: CALDER. Dell had come in his own skiff to ferry them out. He sat at the oars, a broad gray-bearded man of forty-nine, with a face like a walnut and his battered cap on the back of his head, and he looked at the baby in the carrier and said:

"That's him?"

"That's him."

"Hm." He rowed. "Looks like Kit."

"He's got the chin."

"He's got the ears." Dell leaned on the oars. "I held the ladder for his daddy. I've driven his uncle round for twelve years. I'd say I'm ready to teach this one to complain about the weather."

"Mr. Dell—"

"Don't mister me. I've been called worse." He glanced at Dess, quickly, from under the cap. "Miss. I was in the back of that courtroom. I heard what you said. About the people." His voice roughened. "Best thing I ever heard a lady say about a boat."

"I didn't say a thing about a boat."

"That's the point," said Dell. "Hold on."

He shipped the oars. The skiff bumped gently against the side of the catboat. Theron stepped across; the little craft rocked, and steadied. He held out his hands for the carrier. Dess passed it up. And then he was standing in the cockpit of a fourteen-foot boat with a baby in his arms, in a life jacket two sizes too large, and a woman in a sunhat was climbing carefully over the gunwale, and Dell, in the skiff, was lifting a hand and shoving off.

"Don't turn her over!"

"I shall endeavor not to!"

"Don't get him wet!"

"He is a Wexcombe!"

"That's what I'm afraid of!"

Dess laughed.

She sat down on the side bench, with her hat over her eyes. He freed the halyard and hauled; the sail went up, tan and old and soft as cloth, and filled; the boat leaned and gathered way. And he took the tiller in his right hand, with Cal propped in the crook of his left arm, and steered out into the bay.

…

It was a perfect afternoon.

It was the sort that Rhode Island occasionally gives, as an apology. The wind was steady out of the southwest. The sea was blue and short and bright, and ran in little glittering ridges under the bow. Away to the east lay the long green hump of Conanicut, with its lighthouse, and to the west the shore of Newport rose, white and gray and green, in tiers of roofs and trees. Gulls hung over the water. A big white yacht went by, far off, in dignified silence. And the little tan sail drew and the water chuckled along the hull, and the child in his arm, with his hat pulled down over his ears, watched the sky go by with an expression of profound, thoughtful, entirely unastonished delight.

"Look at him," said Dess.

"I am."

"He's happy."

"I think he has been waiting for this all his life."

"He's eleven weeks."

"That is a long time to wait."

She laughed. She leaned back on the bench with her face to the sun and her feet up on the seat across, bare, brown, with a ring of sand still round the left ankle. She had taken off her sandals. She looked, he thought, absurdly young. She looked as she must have looked at nineteen, in a bus station in Fall River, with a notebook in her bag; and under it, behind it, he saw the other woman: the one who had gone through a hemorrhage, a lawsuit and a depression, and come out with her chin up and her hands open.

This is the part of me that's not afraid, he thought. She asked to see it.

And here it is. It is a boat, and a baby, and a woman with her feet up.

It was always the same part. It was only hidden.

"Theron."

"Yes."

"I need to say something and it's going to be bad."

He looked at her.

"Go on."

"I'm scared," said Dess.

She had not moved. She lay on the bench, with the sun on her face, and the words came out very quiet and clear, a little flat, like a thing being read from a card. "I'm scared of this. All of it. I'm scared I'm going to love it so much that I forget how to leave."

"Dess..."

"No, listen. Because you'll say, 'Of course you can leave.' And I know I can. It's in the napkin. Term Eighteen." She sat up. She pushed back the hat. Her eyes were very wide, and very dark, and wet. "But I grew up with a man who gave me a roof and a toothbrush and a lecture, every night, about what it cost. And I swore I'd never be in a house where love was a thing someone could take back. And I look at you, and the building, and the key, and the boathouse, and I think: this is a lovely cage. It's the loveliest cage in the world. It's got a lemon tree."

"I know."

"And you're not the one who built it. I know that. You didn't mean to. You never mean to." She was crying. "But you don't know how to not do it. You don't know how to want someone without closing a hand."

He was silent.

He sat with the tiller under his arm and the baby against his chest and the wind in his hair. The sail hummed. The water ran. He thought: this is the moment. This is the one I have been afraid of, since the first night, in the coffee shop. She has seen it. She has found the true thing.

And he told her the true thing.

"I do not know how to not do it," said Theron.

"What?"

"I do not know how." He kept his voice level. "I have been trying since November. I have been trying with all my strength. I have taken down cameras, and given up votes, and abdicated a company, and learned to ask twice. And I have discovered, to my considerable distress, that I do not know how to love a person without arranging for her to be warm."

"I know."

"It is not a thing I do on purpose. It is a reflex. It is how my body says I'm here." He met her eyes. "I do not know how to stop. I may never. I shall make you a cup of tea at the wrong moment for the next forty years. I shall carry your bag when you've told me not to. I shall worry, in the small hours, about the draft in your hall, and I shall mention it, and you shall say, Theron, and I shall stop. And then I shall do it again."

"That's not a reassurance."

"It's not meant as one. It's meant as a fact."

"Then what is it?"

"It is the only promise I can make." He drew breath. "I cannot promise not to cage you. I do not know how. I can promise only that the door will have a handle on the inside, and that it will be yours, and that if you ever turn it, I will let you go, and I will say thank you for the time, and I shall not follow. I cannot promise it won't hurt. I can promise that I will not stop you."

She was staring at him.

"That's it?" she said.

"That is all I have."

"No promises."

"Not about what I'll feel. Only about what I'll do." He tried to smile. "I am told that is an acceptable distinction."

"Who told you?"

"A cashier from Fall River."

She laughed, a short wet startled sound. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. And then she moved: she came across the cockpit on her knees, past the centerboard trunk, past the bag of sandwiches, with the boat heeling under her, and sat down beside him on the windward side, and put her head on his shoulder, and said:

"You can cage me with caring."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You can." She was looking at the water. "You can cage me with caring. As long as I say yes. As long as I get to say yes every time. It's not a cage if I'm the one who opens it."

"Dess..."

"I don't want you to stop caring. God, no. I want you to keep making the tea." Her voice shook. "I just want to be asked. Every time. And I want to be allowed to say, 'Not today.' And I want it to be nothing. I want it to be as nothing as saying, 'No thanks, I've got my own.'"

"I can do that."

"Can you?"

"I can try."

"That's all anyone gets," said Dess. She lifted her head. She looked at him, a long steady shining look. "Try, and ask, and say thank you. That's all. That's marriage. That's everything. And I'm not saying we're getting married."

"I understand."

"I'm saying it's the same muscle."

"I understand."

"Say it back."

"Try," said Theron. "And ask. And say thank you."

"And hold the tiller."

"And hold the tiller."

"Right." She rested her cheek against his arm. "Good. Now give me the baby. You're going to run us onto Conanicut."

He gave her the baby. She took him against her shoulder, easily, deftly, as she had learned to, and Cal, who had been surveying the sea in a meditative silence, made a long, rich, ruminative noise, and said, quite clearly:

"Ba."

"That's right," said Dess. "Boat."

"Ba."

"You're a genius."

"Ba!"

"And a Wexcombe." She kissed the crown of the small hat. "Poor thing."

They sailed on. The sun lay a long gold path across the water. And somewhere astern, on a float by a gray boathouse, a gray-bearded man in a battered cap sat in a skiff with his oars shipped and his hand over his eyes, watching a tan sail diminish into the light; and in the stable behind the house, under a tarpaulin, in a dusty row, a hundred and forty years of Wexcombe boats lay waiting for someone to put them in the water.

…

From the blue ledger, Saturday the 28th of August:

Dess gave: 1 fear (out loud).

Dess received: 1 key (Constance's). 1 letter ("Be a tree. Float."). 1 tiny boat that says CALDER. 1 true thing: "I can only promise there'll be a handle on the inside."

Net: I'm not going to write one.

Mom's right. It's just a good day.