Tempest Rising (4 page)

“Signs?” All three girls looked at their mother and hardly breathed as if she were about to explain to them the meaning of life on earth.

“Where are the brownies?” Clarise shouted it and banged the table.

They stared at Clarise with frightened circle eyes and were quiet as deer until Victoria smacked herself on the forehead with the revelation that this was Tuesday night, and their mother was not talking in some kind of code but actually meant brownies.

“Hey, where are the brownies?” Victoria asked. “It is Tuesday night after all.”

“And we don’t smell the brownies, right, Mommie? Isn’t that what you meant when you told Tori to sniff?” Bliss asked.

“You mean, Daddy’s not in his studio making them?” Shern asked. Clarise was rolling Shern’s hair around a curler now, and Shern wished she had a thousand more to do. Her mother’s hands were so warm and hard against her forehead, her fingers dancing on her forehead as she locked the curler in
place. She just wanted the feel of her mother’s fingers to dull the sharp breaths of worry catching in her throat. “Does that mean something’s terribly wrong, Mommie?” Shern asked.

“Is something wrong with Daddy?” Bliss whined.

“My girls are so bright,” Clarise said. “I’ve been blessed with such smart, geniuslike girls.”

“What is it, Mommie? We can handle it, whatever it is. Please tell us what’s wrong with Daddy,” Victoria begged. “Where is he anyhow? I was sure he was in his studio.” Victoria let a sob slip through even though she wanted to be strong and mature amid this dark cloud of a revelation that was hanging over the gold-candled chandelier in the kitchen and getting ready to fall on their heads.

“Please tell us, Mommie.” Bliss got up from her seat and jumped up and down. “Please, Mommie, please. Tell us what’s wrong with Daddy.”

“Is it really bad?” Victoria cried openly now despite her attempts to act mature.

“It is something terrible, isn’t it?” Shern neither cried nor begged. She sat up straight as a board and stared at her mother, trying to let her emotions neither out nor in. She just wanted not to feel, as she watched her mother’s face, her beautiful, exotic face, go from pale to flushed to a blankness that looked like grief.

“Now I smell the sea,” Clarise said as she stared into the darkening breakfast room. “It’s an oily smell tinged with the sweet, sour scent of your father’s breath.”

A
t that instant Finch’s breath was mixing with the sea as he clung to the side of the crabbing boat that had just spilled his catch—his brainchildren that were going to redirect his business, his precious crabs—and him into the sea’s demanding arms. He’d stayed out too long, he now realized. “Be back by sunset,” his second cousin had warned. “This sea does a strange thing at sunset, and my boat seen better days.” But the catch had been so substantial: the crabs had just climbed into his net as if they were saying, “Take me, Finch. I’ll be a part of your all-you-can-eat buffet.” He was so excited and laughing and counting the money to be made as he hauled in net after net he didn’t even notice that the yellow was washing to red in the back of the sky. And when he did notice the red in the sky, he still assured himself that he could make it from the shallow waters of the shoreline through the deeper canal to get to the other side of the shore, where even more crabs were waiting to help him redirect his business. But suddenly, right after his cousin’s boat went into a spin midway through the canal like a tub toy headed for the drain, he noticed the sky was hazy purple on its way to a deeper blue, and his crabs were climbing, not spilling from the boat, and he was too. And now he flogged about, trying to wrestle his life from the sea.

The sea of course was stronger, a bully and a show-off. It wrenched the crabbing boat from Finch
like a spoiled child snatching back a favorite toy, chanting, “Mine, mine, mine.”

“Oh, fuck you then,” Finch hollered out.

The sea laughed in his face, hit him with waves that were like tufted, braided ropes, over and over until he could feel welts unzipping along his back, his face. He started to curse the sea even more: “cocksucker, prick, son of a motherfucking bitch.” Then he realized he was going to die. He’d never been a religous man, but he didn’t want to die with some profane word curling around his tongue. He started to quote a Scripture, something about faith or possibilities. Then a hymn came to his mind; he’d just heard it the other Sunday at the Children’s Day program where Shern was the MC—something about a tempest and raging billows tossing high. He laughed out loud at the appropriateness of the song as the sea continued to spit in his face. He was drowning, he thought, and laughing. Now he realized he was treading water more slowly because the sea had clamped hundred-pound weights in his hands. Now he begged the sea for his life. “I have a wife who needs me, and my girls, three beautiful, well-behaved, perfect girls. Please, dear sea, wonderful, kind, beautiful, magnificent sea, please let me have my life. Please don’t snatch my life!”

He tried to remember what he’d learned about drowning all those years he’d spent on ships. Since he was twelve and had run away from home and lied about his age to get passage on that first ship as a sand spreader and worked his way up to pot scrub
ber until he finally made it to assistant cook, the conversation among the kitchen help often turned to shipwreck stories. They’d say things like “You better pray that the sea is a pretty woman ’cause you sure getting fucked if you find yourself out in it.” But what he remembered right now was the night Deaf-and-Dumb Leaned-Over Johnson cleared his throat and spoke the first words anybody on that ship had heard pass his lips. “I survived the
Titanic,
” Johnson said, his speech slow, almost slurred. “Wasn’t on no lifeboat either, wasn’t no such thing as a lifeboat for the colored help. But I survived ’cause I just give in to the sea.” Finch remembered how Johnson had turned to look at him, as if he were talking to only him; he was an old man, had to be past seventy, but his skin was the smoothest black he’d ever seen, the whites of his eyes brighter than the North Star, almost a crazed look to his eyes they were shining so. “Boy,” he said to Finch—he straightened his back leaned over from the years heaped on it, and suddenly he towered over Finch—“if the sea ever catch you in its belly, just give up the fight. Just give in to the deep. And if you not raised too much hell in your life, if you not filled with too much devilment, the sea might just carry you back to its top, let you rest on its palm whiles you can catch your breath.”

So Finch let go. The fight was leaving his body anyhow, and he’d never been a strong swimmer, too much weight in his legs. And the wave coming at him now was the kind that would separate a man’s
head from his neck. He threw his hands up in surrender; he let his muscles go slack. “Take me deep,” he whispered.

The wave taking him over now was like velvet: its softness made him cry, made him think of Clarise’s hair, Shern’s chin, Victoria’s manner, Bliss’s laugh, the sherry he’d pour the uncles on Sunday nights, Til’s fox-foot collar, the sound of Ness’s name. He thought he should see his life as he tumbled head over knees toward the center of the sea: the South Carolina lean-to where he was born, his mother, who died birthing him, shouldn’t she appear right now with wings and a halo reaching for him to enter into eternity, his brothers, who’d all left home before he was born, who probably never even knew his name, shouldn’t the faces come to him in death that never did in life? And where was Clarise’s face? Could he just see her face one more time. How cruel that he should die and not see his beautiful bride pass before his eyes, even if he couldn’t see his girls—Clarise. Where was Clarise? He jolted to, grabbed at the water in one final tug, one last try to live. But the water was slick, oily, too soft. It went through his hands like spilled milk, and now he really did let go.

I
t had been a month since the closed-casket memorial service for Finch; the casket had to be closed because there was no body to fill it, just his Ferragamo handmade shoes and the gray wool suit that Clarise
used to insist he wear when he garnished with pink. She placed his unabridged Websters in the center of the casket because Finch had been a self-made man and relied on that dictionary so that he could approach prospective clients and dazzle them by describing his food with words like “delectable,” “succulent,” “palatable,” “pithy,” “scrumptious.” Plus she wanted the casket to have a little weight to it because Finch had been such a substantial man.

Now it was twenty-nine days later; she knew it was twenty-nine days because the aunts had stressed that she couldn’t wash the sheets on which Finch had last slept for twenty-eight days. The smell of those sheets had brought her comfort over the past month, the way the creamy sweet of her cold cream blended perfectly with the Royal Crown Finch rubbed nightly in his scalp. But last night she hadn’t been able to fall asleep clutching Finch’s pillow and taking in the scent of his hair pomade because the aunts had come over and stripped the bed themselves the day before. They’d come over every day since Finch had been declared missing and presumed dead. The uncles concocted desserts that begged up fleeting smiles from the girls, while the aunts propped Clarise between the two of them, taking turns squeezing the nape of her neck, helping her hold her head up when the girls were in the room; they cried less when they could look on their mother’s face.

Clarise was fading in and out still, which of course everyone blamed on her grief. Her pastor
from the AME church stopped by once a week and told her things like “Joy cometh in the morning”; her best friend from high school called her daily with conversations that they’d had twenty years before, trying in vain to make Clarise laugh; Finch’s florist sent her a single red rose three, sometimes four times a week; the aunts brewed her tea, chamomile, spearmint, licorice. Everyone had their own prescription to save her from her grief. All to no avail. Because it wasn’t just her grief that was taking her over. It was the medicine.

This was 1965, and Elavil was being dispensed like lemon drops. And even though the drug had been a balm during the first days after Finch turned up missing, when Clarise’s emotions were oozing and running like pus from a picked-at scab, after Finch was declared dead, her doctor increased the dosage so she wouldn’t be devoured by her grief. He didn’t realize, though, that Clarise had a sensitivity to the drug; probably the same thing in her brain that gave her such a heightened sense of smell rebelled against the chemical rockabys. Now her senses were dimming on and off like a short-circuited night-light, so much so that she could barely manage to do the one thing that calmed her, knit.

This morning she tried. She wrapped the loop of yarn around the pointed end of the knitting needle, and then that navy haze dropped over her that always fell right after she took her morning pill. It was irritating, that damned haze, especially when it bunched up between her wrists and got tangled and
she could barely work her knitting needles because of it. She was determined to knit through it, though. She pushed one needle between the looped thread, wrapped the thread around, and easily slid the finished stitch to the other needle, over and over. She was working up a steady clicking to the needles that sounded like a song; it had been so many days since she’d been able to do this. She completed one row, a second, a third. She used bright purple thread, too bright maybe because her eyes were starting to sting, and now tear, and that haze was dropping, so that all she could do was sit there and hold her needles until it lifted.

It wasn’t lifting. She blinked her eyes, trying to blink the haze from her eyes. Her vision cleared enough for her to drag across the room to get her sewing box, lift out her sharpest shears, and snip away at that navy haze wrapped around her hands, tangling up her yarns. She did. Parts of the navy were especially dense, and she had to grip and bear down hard with the scissors to get through it. Until the haze played a cruel trick, retreated suddenly, and it was the skin around her wrist that she sliced.

She didn’t even feel it. Wouldn’t even have known had it not been for the expression on Shern’s face when she came into her room to kiss her good-bye on her way to school, and she stood there in the archway of her mother’s bedroom door with such a horrified expression as if a scream had frozen itself on her face. And Clarise asked her what was wrong. “Talk to Mommie and tell me what is it,” she said
with a tongue so heavy that it seemed to her it took hours to get the words out.

But all Shern could do was point to Clarise’s lap. It was only then that Clarise realized how that deceitful haze had duped her as she looked down and saw her wrists lying loosely in her lap, gaping quietly, spilling their contents like red satin ribbons unfurling gently to the floor.

W
hen Til answered the phone to Shern’s broken, barely recognizable voice and she and Ness and Blue and Show hailed a cab to Chestnut Hill and rushed in on the house already emptied by the emergency crew, and the next-door neighbor told them what hospital, and they barrelled in on the emergency room, pleading: for information, for the girls, they were told they were too late.

Not too late for Clarise. Clarise would live, the hospital told them. She was under a thirty-day court-ordered commitment on her way right now to the Pennsylvania Institute for the Mentally Ill. All attempted suicides were handled this way. But they were too late for the girls. Children’s Services had already claimed them, had someone from Family Court retreive the girls. “Hysterical,” the aunts and uncles were told. “As you can imagine, those girls were hysterical.”

So Til sent Blue and Show back to Clarise’s house, to unspill Clarise’s blood if they could, but at least to remake the house into a place where the
girls could return without the images of what had just run very far awry that morning. Too far awry even for Til and Ness to fathom. They shook their heads right now and tried to still their breathing as they sat facing each other huddled in a brown-aired room at 1801 Vine Street waiting to see the case manager assigned to the girls.