Port Mungo (10 page)

Chapter Eight

He did bring Peg to New York, and for three weeks they lived with me here in the house. I will not forget meeting them at the airport, seeing them emerge into the arrivals hall among a crowd of travellers, as families surged forward with cries of joy. I didn’t surge, myself. I stood watching them for a few seconds before I stepped forward. They were certainly a shabby pair, Peg in patched jeans, a baggy T-shirt and scuffed canvas shoes, heaving a battered suitcase I recognized as Jack’s from the old days. She was eleven now, and no longer the child she’d been when I last saw her. There was a new kind of aura about her, its source, I think, an awareness of her own dawning womanhood: the gangling tomboy of Port Mungo was in the process of changing into a tall, slim swan of a girl with delicate features and a riotous tangle of jet-black hair. She was distinctive too for her ringing shouts of laughter, as for example when she saw me coming forward in the arrivals hall. She had certainly gained in confidence.

Her father was no less remarkable. Gaunt and sunburnt, he wore a faded cotton shirt, khaki pants and sandals, and Mayan bracelets on his wrists. He was as brown as his daughter, and his face and bearing suggested he might be a member of a missionary sect just returning from the Amazon. But he was no missionary. Tough and serious he may have been, but there was no piety there; he was cursing as he dug through his bag for cigarettes, and in the few moments I watched him, trying to see him with the eyes of a stranger, I found myself suddenly deeply impressed at what he’d become. I felt love, admiration—envy, even—with the recognition that he had held to his commitment and become an artist. Suddenly my own placid existence seemed a safe and cautious thing, altogether lacking in the fervour that burned in this tall frowning man who stood oblivious to everything in the arrivals hall of LaGuardia Airport and fired up an unfiltered, foul-smelling, crumpled Mexican cigarette.

It was May, the weather fine and warm, and we took a cab into the city. Peg had her head out of the window the entire trip. Jack was quiet. He must surely have been thinking about the last time he was in New York, when he and Vera were newly in love, and it could only have saddened him. There were times, he told me later, when he quite simply
ached
for the woman. Where was she now? He didn’t know. He’d had a postcard from Mexico City, that was all. The house on West 11th Street is a narrow brownstone on a quiet block, with a steep flight of steps to the front door, and three floors plus an attic. It is a house I love, for it has been my haven and sanctuary, and Jack’s as well, eventually. This was the first time he had seen it, and he walked inside with his arm round my shoulder, looking rather apprehensive, Peg struggling behind with the suitcase. What did he see? Sanded floors, a few framed posters, Mexican rugs, large cushions, flowers, ferns, books everywhere, wicker furniture, sunlight, cats. Lingering smell of incense.

—Lot of rugs.

—I love rugs, I said defensively.

He said nothing more, but for the first time I found myself unsure about my rugs. Peg meanwhile had made straight for the fridge and found the ice cream. I showed her the garden at the back of the house, but she wasn’t impressed. She wanted to see the river, so I promised her we’d walk down to the Hudson before dinner.

It was a happy visit. We went to the Museum of Natural History, Central Park, the Bronx Zoo, the Empire State Building. Jack had never taken the boat out to Liberty Island, though he certainly had strong associations with the statue, having spent long hours staring at it from a bench in Battery Park. We went to the art museums, and I was aware of the intensity with which he inspected the recent American work. He later spoke dismissively of almost all of it. It was not a good moment for painters, he said. Not propitious. But he was deeply impressed by Rothko’s work. Those great gloomy paintings held his attention for many minutes, and so fierce was his concentration that I did not dare speak while he stood frowning at them, and led Peg away so he wouldn’t be disturbed. Afterwards I tried to discover what he thought of them, but he wouldn’t tell me, and it was only much later, after he’d moved back to the city, that one night after a few drinks he said that he’d been humbled by Rothko. I never heard him say that about any other contemporary artist.

One evening during that first visit we were sitting over dinner in a quiet restaurant in the Village. We had emptied four bottles of wine between us. Peg was fast asleep in her chair. I had suggested to Jack that they come live in New York but he said no, that wouldn’t happen until the work was right.

—And her, I said, indicating the sleeping girl.

—Why would I want to move her?

—She can’t stay down there all her life.

—Why not?

Jack was unconcerned. He thought that if Peg ever wanted to go live in a city she would figure out how to do it for herself. But for now, why disrupt the girl’s life? And as for him, when the time came he would know. Another five years, he thought. He knew he had to come back eventually. Wasn’t that the point of Port Mungo, to paint in peace until the work came right and then bring it to New York? That had always been the plan.

We fell silent, we smoked, we were comfortably drunk. I was startled by the simple clarity of his commitment. Neither his own comfort nor his child’s future, apparently, would change the course he had chosen. Perhaps he was a kind of missionary after all: a priest of art.

A day or two before they were to leave I asked him if he had everything he needed. He thought I meant art supplies. No, I said, had he bought any
clothes
? I smile now when I think of it. He was startled by the question. I think the idea of spending money on clothes had simply not occurred to him. He was a very frugal man, but then he had to be. He had no source of income other than the allowance I gave him, the drip-feed, as he called it. Perhaps, I said, we might go up to Bloomingdale's? Brilliant idea—why hadn’t he thought of it?

I knew then that my brother was becoming a genuine eccentric. We went to Bloomingdale’s and got him some jeans and shirts—he only wanted clothes, he said, that could take the smear of paint. Peg came along and soon disappeared into a changing room with a miniskirt and a few other items, and when she emerged Jack and I were astonished: only eleven years old, but she was a mere whisper away from womanhood. And what an actor she was! Far from feeling shy or uncertain in such unfamiliar garments, she minced up and down in front of us, pouting and preening and swinging her little bottom, and not for the first time I was struck by how much of her mother was in her, the performance was pure Vera.

They visited me again a year later and that was the last time I saw Peg. How sad it was. Her brief moment of grace had vanished. She had become a lanky, sullen adolescent. Things remained unstable at home. Vera was as rootless as ever. Jack had come to accept that she was flawed, irredeemably so, and he no longer held out hope of her amounting to anything as an artist. He had lost her, he said, not so much to alcohol as to a kind of chronic restlessness, an inability to stay in any one place for more than a month or two; she even found it hard to stay in bed all night, and would wake in the small hours and pace about the house, the insomnia eventually provoking the need of a drink and thus compounding the sorry cycle. He said he thought it must be an organic disorder of some kind, but she wouldn’t do anything about it.

—I can’t kick her out, he said, it would break Peg’s heart. She worships her. She wants to be just like her. I’m the villain now.

I saw this during the time they were with me. It was not a successful visit. The tension between father and daughter was palpable from the moment I met them at the airport. Since I’d last seen him Jack had decided that he must soon move back to New York or he would sink into a kind of terminal stagnation, and all the work he had done would count for nothing. At the time it did not occur to me that he was frightened of New York, but of course why wouldn’t he be? He had more than enough imagination to realize that for a painter like himself, already in his thirties, to gain a toehold in this most competitive of art worlds would not be simple. But the idea that he might have become fearful, working in the obscurity of Port Mungo—and obscurity brings safety in its train, and breeds rigidity—this I didn’t consider, I suppose because I had never imagined him afraid of anything. I wonder now whether Rothko was the inciting agent.

Peg’s feelings on the face of it were less complicated. She simply didn’t want to be here. She was twelve now and had too much going on in Port Mungo to want to accompany her father on this trip. But it seems Jack had insisted, I assumed because he didn’t want to leave her unsupervised at home, which I could well understand after seeing how the girl behaved. She got drunk several times, and affected the kind of bravado I recognized as a copy of one of her mother’s performances. She was angry, she was rude to both of us, she was uncooperative, sulky and disobedient. Her moods were erratic. For the ten days they stayed with me I never knew when she came down in the morning if she would be elated or depressed. This I took to be the standard stuff of growing up, and I wondered how Jack coped, given his sustained focus on his work. It could not have been easy, having this volatile adolescent under the same roof.

Then I saw how he coped. Or I should say, I saw an ugly exchange between the two of them which at the time I dismissed as atypical, a response to unusual stress in an unusual situation rather than an instance of how they normally related to each other. We were sitting in a restaurant one evening. Jack had been silent for most of the meal, as had Peg. Each of them was preoccupied, or angry, or both, I didn’t know why, nor did I particularly want to find out—I had discovered early in the visit how unrewarding it was to attempt to winkle out the cause of a malaise that one or the other of them might happen to be entertaining at any given moment. It never cleared the air, the reverse if anything, and they didn’t thank you for trying. So we’d eaten in silence, and drunk several bottles of wine, though this had had no perceptible effect on anyone’s mood. When the main course was cleared away Peg abruptly rose to her feet. Jack seized her wrist.

—Where are you going?

—To meet someone.

—I don’t think so.

Peg tried to shake free of her father’s grip.

—Let go of me, Daddy, you’re hurting me.

Still Jack held tight to the girl’s wrist, with an expression I had never seen in him before: face set hard, like bronze, jaw clamped tight and eyes wide. Peg was a tall girl, lithe and strong, but her father was stronger. Heads had turned in the restaurant.

—Jack, I murmured.

—Shut up, Gin.

—Daddy!

—You’re not going anywhere, you’re coming back to the house.

—You’re hurting me.

Then Peg suddenly stopped squirming and pulling. She was still. She was stiff. She stood silently staring down at her father—the whole restaurant riveted on this drama now—the pair of them like statues. The moral advantage swung decisively in Peg’s favour: no longer the unruly child, she was the victim of her father’s power. Jack flung the girl’s wrist from him with disgust, and turned away.

He uttered a coarse epithet.

Peg stood there a moment longer as her father’s ugly word fell into the silence their conflict had created in the room. I could hardly believe what I had just heard. This was Jack, my brother, voicing such bitter contempt for his own daughter! Peg allowed just enough time for the import of what he had said to register on everyone who’d heard him, and then tossed her mane of black hair and strutted out of the restaurant.

—Get the check, Gin, said Jack.

I was on the point of telling him to get it himself, and walking out after the girl, but I did not. It would not have done any good. As I say, I thought this was just an appalling aberration that had come about because he was stressed and Peg was being difficult. But I thought later: What if it was not unusual? What if their relationship had deteriorated to the point where shabby power struggles like this occurred routinely, with Jack using physical force to subdue the girl, and snarling at her, as he had in the restaurant? It occurred to me that I had perhaps glimpsed the reality of their life in Port Mungo, where Vera’s constant absences had created a kind of hell in which my brother habitually indulged his anger at his daughter’s expense.

The next day she came home with her head a mess of tufts and spikes, having had all her lovely hair cut off by a kid she’d met in Washington Square Park. I was very shocked by it. I saw in this angry gesture a violent rejection of her femininity, as though she was excising the part of herself that possessed the capacity to love. So much rage in that ugly gesture!—I would almost have said it was an act of injured sexuality, had she been a few years older.

Chapter Nine

It was not many months after this visit that Anna was born. I tried to discover whether Vera’s pregnancy was having an effect on Peg at this time, perhaps contributing to her anger towards the world, and towards her father in particular, but Jack was not forthcoming, he didn’t like to speak about the period between Anna’s birth and Peg’s death. But I have always thought how desperately sad it must have been for him, that he should have lost his daughter before they had come through this difficult phase of her growing up, and how predictable, in a way, that he should feel responsible for her death, as though the anger he’d felt towards her had caused actual harm to befall her.

I worried at it often, over the years, but for a long time it seemed it was to remain unknowable, what happened in the mangroves, at least to me—a mystery, although I hate the word. There are no mysteries, only people who conceal: only
secrets.
And certainly the immediate circumstances of Peg’s death were a secret, Jack’s secret, possibly Vera's, and that was how it would stay unless one of them chose to divulge it. In the end Jack did tell me, but for several years, in our times of greatest intimacy—late at night, in drink, typically—we could talk about anything but that. He would mention his own stupidity, his failure to prevent her death, always in such a way that it roused me to tell him not to blame himself, he wouldn’t have let it happen if he could possibly have prevented it. But he never mentioned the details of the thing. I used to think: What did he have to hide? He was not by nature a man to withhold his thoughts, no matter how complicated, or absurd, or shaming they were, certainly not with me, who knew him so much better than anyone. Was I hurt at his withholding? I suppose I was, also concerned, inasmuch as I disliked the idea of the thing festering in him, and I am enough of a Freudian to believe the mind must discharge toxic materials or become infected by them. I assumed Jack’s silence about Peg’s death indicated some malignancy, or some guilt, rather, though whether his own or another’s I didn’t know. There had been hints, if that is not too strong a term for the odd muttered half-sentence—again, late at night, in drink, when the talk had veered in that direction—such muttering at once cut off, lips sealed, shake of the head, the disinhibition brought on by copious alcohol no match for the powerful engines of repression at work in him.

One night, I remember, we sat up late in the big room downstairs—he was still in the loft, we had been out to dinner and come back to 11th Street for a nightcap—and the talk shifted to Port Mungo. Jack had a way, when a conversation which had begun to languish then took a turn that seized his attention, of coming up out of his long-legged sprawl across a chair or a couch and sitting forward with his elbows on his knees, back bent and chin cupped in his palm, the other hand hanging in the air, with a finger lifted—or drumming his fingers on the table—I think I had said that the biggest problem faced by artists in cities was light—and all at once he saw something, he came up out of his chair and spoke as if responding not to what I’d said but to the chain of association it had started in his mind.

—It was the light!

—What was?

—It woke her up.

At which point he became aware that he was talking not to himself but to me. He rubbed his eyes, finished his drink and left soon after.

On three or four occasions he let slip similarly oblique remarks, but they made no sense in and of themselves, or in any combination I could make of them. Another time—and we were very drunk that particular night, I forget why, so drunk in fact that I have lost the context of the conversation—he said that she got it wrong, and all I knew, when I woke the next morning, was that this too referred to Peg’s death, though who got what wrong I didn’t know, nor did I imagine that Jack made it clear when he said it. I once asked if I would ever be told what happened to Peg.

—One day, he said.

—What day would that be, Jack?

—The day I die.

His face split open and out leapt a wheeze of sulphuric laughter. That was Jack. That was my brother. But try and deny the imagination its creative imperative—you cannot. What I did not know I could not help but attempt to imagine. I thought about the mangrove swamps of the western Caribbean, and what I had seen of them during my visit to Port Mungo. There was an old, white-planked skiff moored to Jack’s dock which he’d picked up cheap soon after coming to Pelican Road, and in it he and Peg had explored the coastline north and south of the town, the waterways of the Mungo drainage and the inshore lagoons.

A couple of days after Vera showed up during my visit to Port Mungo, she suggested that Peg and I go out in the boat with her. Jack of course would be working in his studio all day. So we set out at dawn, the three of us. We crossed the bay and came out into the open sea, where Vera opened the throttle and the boat shot forward, creating a great wash behind us and shattering the trembling stillness of the early morning. I was far from easy with the speed of the boat, not least because Vera was red-eyed and unsteady, having been up till all hours drinking. The sun was just over the horizon, a pair of pelicans drifted by and Peg was hanging over the bow raking the water for dolphin and manatee. Twenty minutes later Vera swung the boat back towards the coast. The narrow fringe of white beach and palms had given way to a dense hedge of tangled mangrove. We came in fast towards it, the bow lifting and the keel bumping, and it was only seconds before we went in that I saw the channel through the mangrove opening before us. The two of them were grinning at me, this an old joke apparently, and though I’d kept my mouth shut my white-knuckled grip on the seat told them of my mounting apprehension as we hurtled towards what looked like certain destruction.

The channel was narrow and serpentine, but Vera slung the boat through it at speed and our wash went lapping through the mangrove and raised heron and ibis, which flapped off languidly from the canopy. For a few hellish moments a thick cloud of mosquitoes blotted out all vision and had me dementedly flapping at my face, much to Peg’s continued amusement. The channel grew more narrow still, and Vera at last slowed the boat and cut the motor. All at once the humidity descended on us like a warm wet blanket.

We drifted in silence. On every side I saw spidery, stiltlike mangrove roots branching out from thick-clustered branches before plunging into the soupy waters of the swamp. There was movement within the tangle of roots, sudden cries, now and then a distinct
plop!
as some unseen creature dropped into the water. Peg sat up in the bow with her legs hanging over the side, and turned to see if I was still terrified. I had spent enough time in boats with Jack, when we were young, that I was quite accustomed to daredevil nautical adventures, and Vera was every bit as reckless in a boat as Jack had once been. Suddenly we were through the mangrove and into a lagoon, this body of silver water placid, utterly still. Here the mangrove gave way to mudflats, a narrow fringe of gravelly beach, and a small boggy field of grass and bush behind. Peg called softly that we’d arrived, then stood up. As the bow scraped against the gravel she leapt off the boat and hauled it a few feet up from the shore, with Vera pushing from the stern.

The beach was firm enough but when Peg reached the pasture her bare feet sank into oozing black mud. A profound stillness had settled over the lagoon, intensified by the sudden screams and chatterings of birds. Peg pulled bottles of beer from the icebox and opened one for each of us, then handed out the sandwiches she’d made the night before. Happily we munched our breakfast and swigged cold beer as the sun climbed into a pale-blue sky streaked with wispy white clouds. It was in that place, or in a place very like it, that Peg’s decomposing body was later found, submerged face-up in a tangle of mangrove roots.

This is what Jack eventually told me about her death. When Peg was sixteen she and Vera had taken the boat out one night. They were both drunk. They wanted to get to a village up the coast because Johnny Hague was drinking in a bar there and had insisted they join him. Jack knew it was a foolish idea, and told them he wouldn’t allow them to go. They laughed at him. There was an argument on the dock, and after a few minutes he threw up his hands and went back inside. They took off into the bay and then turned north, up the coast. It was a cloudy night.

They were going way too fast when they hit the coral head. Vera was knocked unconscious. When she came to she found herself alone in the boat, drifting on the open sea with no idea where she was, or what had happened to Peg. The motor had stalled but there was no damage to the propellor, and she was able to start it up again. For hours she went round in circles shouting for Peg until she had almost no gas left. As Jack described all this I could see her in my mind’s eye, leaning far out over the side of the boat, growing increasingly desperate, screaming her daughter’s name into the darkness—but no answering cry. The wind was already rising when she got back to Pelican Road and told Jack what had happened.

They went back out and searched for several hours more. The weather grew worse. Vera was no longer sure where the accident had occurred. The mangrove swamps north of Port Mungo cover many square miles and form an intricate labyrinth of channels and lagoons, and Peg might have been swept almost anywhere by the current. Five days later a crab fisherman found her. In those five days Jack and Vera had continued to search, as had many others from Port Mungo, but with growing certainty that they would not find the girl alive.

Jack decided at the time of the accident to stay silent about the circumstances of that last trip in the boat, in the belief that no good would come of speaking up. He talked to me about it only once, and as far as I know he told only one other person. Nor did Vera ever admit her involvement in her daughter’s death, in fact she vigorously denied it. At the time they said they didn’t know who Peg had been with the night she died, and that was why it had remained a mystery.

It is hardly surprising then that my brother did not merely grieve for Peg, but was haunted by her memory and found no peace. I don’t think he was free of a sense of his own culpability for the rest of his life: he believed he should have stopped them going out that night. When he came to live in New York I became sensitive to his moods in this regard, and saw for myself the extent to which Peg continued to dominate his consciousness. I knew when she was coming to life in his mind, I could almost feel her stirring, and although he tried to push her down by sustaining his focus on his work, with Peg that rarely succeeded. I have never had a child myself but I do know erotic love, I know all about the bone-deep grinding and screaming of buried living emotion and worse, the utter black despair it engenders—all transient. All healed by time. But Jack’s feelings for his daughter were more intense than that, and after she died those feelings did not fade away, as a lover’s do, they merely slept, and why? Because his love for his daughter was infected with guilt, and the guilt interacted with it like an unstable chemical, producing virulence and combustion.

I remember watching him once while it happened. He was standing at the window in the big room downstairs, gazing down at the street below. For minutes on end he stood there silently, and I stood beside him, but he was not with me, he was somewhere else, he was in Port Mungo—when all at once a Yellow Cab came to an abrupt stop outside the house and provoked a blast of horn from the car behind. Some faint shouting as a fat young man in a black leather jacket clambered into the back of the cab. Jack came awake. He clicked his tongue, he was annoyed, as he always was when his thoughts began this absurd cycle again. It is me, Jack Rathbone, and I am the one who is still here, alive—can I not live a month of my life without being ravaged by these ancient memories? This was the voice of the upper self, which at the sight of a fat man climbing ungainly into the back of a cab all at once dispelled the phantom. He crossed the room and flung himself into an armchair and drummed his fingers on the arm. He banished her memory, and for a while, at least, through the sheer force of his will, he was free of her.

He told me once of seeing her in Central Park. Late autumn in the park: schoolchildren, joggers, a few tourists, people with dogs. Peg was in his thoughts, for in the early days after her death he had become adept at rousing her, and found he missed her less if he assumed she was with him, and spoke to her in his mind.

So he was walking through the park, conducting a mental conversation with his dead daughter, when he saw her on the path ahead of him. Lanky striding girl in a tattered hippie skirt, scuffed tennis shoes, faded denim jacket—same leggy gait, same tumble of tangled black hair—and he began to follow her. Jack loved the park, he knew it in all its moods, and that day there was mist in the trees, the squirrels busy among the heaped dead leaves, few people about, sounds muffled and colors muted, grays and browns, Rembrandt’s colors. She seemed to be making for the lake.

He stalked her along the path by the water’s edge. He kept his distance, still uncertain, but every moment growing more sure, and with a rising excitement, that it was her. Clumps of rushes all brown and dry in the shallows, a few geese still lingering, and drifting on the water the same mist that hung in the branches of the trees on the far shore. Beyond them the towers of Fifth Avenue beneath a gray, lowering sky. He saw a man throw a stick, and a dog go bounding into the lake and swim out to retrieve it. The geese lifted honking off the water. The dog returned to the bank, the stick between its teeth, and floundered out with its coat plastered wetly to its flanks.

He began running to catch up with her, calling her name.

Not her, of course, how could it be her? The face which abruptly turned to see what mad shouting creature pursued her was pitted, black-eyed, Slavic—Jack turned and walked off smartly in the opposite direction. It had happened before, he told me, this seeing-a-ghost, and I suspect it may have happened since.