The Almanac Branch (12 page)

Djuna had discussed her fears with Uncle Webster the day she had him drive her over from Dering Harbor, and had warned him not to be upset with her if she declined to take the Brush job because she thought the children were unmanageable. When they were returning from the Merriam place out at the end of Ram, Webster could hardly believe his ears.

“The poor girl suffers from they don't know what, has these horrid bouts … persecuted by the pain of it, from what her mother was saying.” Her uncle was glad, if astounded, for he himself had no interest in going back to work and, at any rate, hadn't he already carried a better part of the load since Hibby died and he'd offered to let Djuna come over and live with him? He thought, Hibby would have a coronary listening to her go on about this Grace and Desmond, if he hadn't already had a coronary; he was buried right near where he was born, over in Orient, but they might just as easily have thrown him out into the harbor for what good he'd bothered to make of his time on earth, was what Webster believed. Social security only goes so far, and therefore Djuna's moving out to live with these Brush people made a lot of sense to him, who would be partial beneficiary of her labor.

“Besides,” he told Djuna, “being around children will keep you young where hanging out with an old fossil like me will just wrinkle you faster than a soak in tea.”

Djuna was in her late forties, and yet it was true she looked to Grace like a grandmother, given how silver her hair was, how heavy were her wrists and ankles, and with what warm, old, knowing blue-gray eyes she looked at the girl. All her dresses were old, too, and the prints she wrapped about her stout middle were invariable in their large floral patterns and fifties colors—once vivid, now rather faint with hundreds of washings. It was a style of dress that Grace would later pick up herself; through her early twenties she fancied secondhand dresses, layers of clothing, vests over open forties blouses over silk tops. For all her girth, Djuna seemed fragile. One sensed that there lingered just beneath the sturdy outward carapace of competence and forthrightness, of stamina and strong opinions, very delicate nerves, which if strained would produce serious melancholy. In this, she believed that she and the Brushes' daughter shared a bond. Djuna knew what was under her own skin, and she sensed she knew what was under Grace's. She hadn't been around Grace for long before she came to think she understood the girl better than anybody else. She didn't suffer physically in the way Grace did, but she did carry around inside her, she felt, similar problems she wasn't about to let anyone see. It didn't, in the end, matter whether she was correct in all her assumptions of morbid kinship with the girl; the very fact that she identified with her, empathized with her, came through in the various ways she behaved toward Grace. And that was, in itself, a healing thing.

Grace's father must have observed this sensitivity of Djuna's toward Grace because he was not only supportive of her, but was attentive to her needs—in some ways more attentive to her than to Erin. He liked Djuna, though there wasn't much for them to talk about, since they held so little in common, and since neither of them could claim to understand the other. They seldom exchanged more than a few words when Charles was on the island, during his sojourns with the family; nonetheless, the bond was deep, at first because of a mutual affection for Grace, and over time grew deeper out of a common, simple respect.

Perhaps because of her own curiosity, or else because she felt protective not just toward Grace but toward Charles as well, within a week or so of talking with Jenny, Djuna took it upon herself to make some casual inquiry. She'd known most of these islanders since she was a child. She understood that there was no way for her to be subtle enough about it that they wouldn't see through her questions, and therefore she chose to be direct. She asked about Erin, and her suspicions were confirmed. There was no reason to take much of an adverse view toward Erin in a moral way, as such, she told herself; Erin wasn't doing something terribly unusual. She didn't, however, approve of Erin's choice in Gabriel Segredo, and considered going to Erin to tell her, warn her maybe about the downside of what she was about out here.

Instead, she determined to remain silent. All her energy would go toward making the house solid against the trouble that was surely going to be coming its way. She wanted to see Scrub Farm survive. And she didn't want to hear Erin Brush tell her in the same words she herself had used with Jenny to “mind your own business, would you?”

Mother's learning how to drive an automobile was the great moment of liberation for her, it gave her not just the means to effect her freedom but in a way provided her with the reason to take her chances. If she hadn't wanted to drive she wouldn't have needed a car, and if she hadn't gone out looking for a car she wouldn't have met Gabriel Segredo—this was the equation I had constructed, at any rate.

Webster was the one to instruct her. He was rewarded with a water glass filled with stout at the end of their several lessons, and would run his commentary on her progress at the kitchen table while all of us—Segredo included—listened. “She done fair on the straights down the beach road there, but you got to work on the brakes, Erin, too heavy on the brake pedal, nearly blowed us both through the windshield.”

“I did, I did,” Mother admitted, herself drinking cocoa-brown stout from the bottle, leaning forward from the edge of her chair in her black jeans, tapping the floor with the heels of her cowboy boots (red, like the car), which I had never seen on her before. “It felt wonderful,” and she spread her knees, put her hands on them, and hunched her shoulders up. What a beatific smile there was on her face. She was transformed before us. I had to confess to myself that if this is what my mother looked like when she was truly happy, it was a happiness that was alien to her, and to me who was witnessing it.

And we all laughed, perhaps all of us laughing with her, with the freedom to which she seemed so openly to have exposed herself, the same freedom that must have suggested to her that it was all right for her to unbutton the top three buttons of her blouse, and let her hair tumble down, literally, over her cheek and one eye. She sat next to Segredo, and he studied her with loving solemnity. I could sense so easily what was between them, as human beings, as physical beings. Who was I—though I loved Faw so much, or at least the idea of Faw, since as an absentee father he became more and more an abstraction—who was I to deny her an unfurled blouse, and this open-mouthed smile and the stout and all this unusual sexuality she was now so casually, even innocently, expressing to those of us she adored at the kitchen table?

She caught right on with the driving business, which surprised all of us. Maybe she surprised herself the most. Nothing seemed to make her giddier; yes, it was her independence she was gaining, and she was learning what she wanted to do with it. I noticed that I had never viewed her as a person before, but that she was, and within a month, so quickly the transformation occurred, she graduated from being just my mother to being more beautiful than any woman I'd ever seen, there in her car with her delicate neck craning to left and right, Webster beside her directing as they began driving down the gravel lane toward the beach road. I might have asked why it was that now both my parents found their greatest joy in being away from Scrub Farm, and, above all, away from
me
, but it's the kind of question a child has no will, nor way, to put forward. I was, instead, pleased for her, just as I was overly understanding of my father's crazy mercantile picaresque, and I didn't quite have enough experience with life to know that what all this boded for me was—abandonment. Yet what was I, who had no authority anyhow, to say to this blossoming woman who before now had been devoted only to dead petals in cold vases? I kept my mouth shut.

So she brought over her new friend, whom she met, she told us, after she bought it, this red treasure shaped like a horseshoe crab confident with its fresh wash and wax, its chrome and all its curves, angles, and fins. The pretext was the car needed some body work, was rusting as all cars rust on islands, and the guy who sold it to her said Gabriel was good at such things. Already, though, I believe—this remains hazy to me—somehow they had met before. I was convinced she actually wanted Desmond and me to meet him, to show him off to us almost as if he were a confident red roadster too. “I think you'll like him,” she said, as if she were the youth and I the adult to whom she might look for judgment. From my perspective now, and knowing what I know, not only about her, but about myself and how the world and love can work, I admire her for her lack of restraint.

Segredo lived across Coecles (pronounced like “the Cockles of my heart”) Bay. At the end of the poorest street on the island he worked on cars in his yard in the day, whenever work came his way, and made sculptures the rest of the time. He worked with metal, he told me. He had tried carpentry, and given it up. He'd tried his hand at a number of other things, but he kept coming back to iron and steel and welding torches. The way he said the very word “metal” was reverential.

Leaning against Mother's car, he said, “People take it for granted, but metal is one of man's greatest inventions.

“Metal is not an invention,” I said—I could tell that he was talking to me as an adult talks to a child, and I wasn't going to let him get away with it so easily.

“It is, you don't mine metal. You make it. It's a process, and it changed civilization. Before they learned how to slag iron ore, to carburize, quench, temper, handle hot metal, all that, man had to do everything with stones and bones. You know what the word metal comes from?”

I didn't; I gazed up into his eyes, and yes, they were steely, as was his hair, woven with silver prematurely, for he wasn't even forty. Blue jeans, big buckle, black shirt with sleeves rolled away from his wrists, and black boots—of course, I realized, the clothes my mother had begun to wear were influenced by him.

“From the Greek
metallan
, it means, to search, to search for metal, see, like prospecting, mining. Metal will always be better than wood, for instance. Wood rots. And bones, bones rot.”

“Stones don't rot.”

He wasn't used to being contradicted by children, indeed he wasn't used to being around children at all. Here he had shifted so quickly from speaking down to me to speaking with me as if we were equals that I found myself out of my league. But there was a lot of child in Segredo, and he himself struck up just the right kind of argumentative tone, and paused before countering, “Metal is stronger than rock, though. You think Grissom could have orbited the earth inside a rock?”

“The Flintstones have rock cars.”

“—Flintstones,” and he smiled at me a conspiratorial smile, to which I answered with a roll of the eyes, which intended to inform him, No, the joke is on you, man.

“Glenn,” said I, “it was Glenn who orbited.”

“What did I say?”

Was he making fun of me? How would I have attempted to handle Grace Brush if I ever met a Grace Brush?“My father was born in the place where they make steel,” I continued, and I should have known then that when he didn't ask me more about that, something was wrong—after all, absent though he was, indeed partly because he was so often absent, no one was more interesting to me than my father; “Pittsburgh” put an end to this fragment of dialogue.

A decade out of college, where he had drifted from major to major before settling into the art department, Gabriel Segredo had himself a yard of cars stripped down to pure metal, cars, discarded propane tanks, trucks, even an old school bus that had been in an accident. When he had tried to sell them as automobiles, trucks, tanks, none sold, and so—following the creative tendencies he had nurtured at school—he decided to see what it would be like to torch them into pieces, reconstitute them as sculptures and live on welfare for a while. Though he would accept the occasional mechanic job as necessary, he became more serious about what he was doing; but none of the galleries in the city, where he sometimes went to show his slides on Saturday mornings, “viewing mornings” for many of the dealers, took him on, and he wasn't able to sell anything on his own. His collection of automotive parts and half-finished constructs, which aged quietly among the thistles and weeds in front of his garage, constituted an informal outdoor museum of rusting debris and works in progress.

Mother drove me and Desmond over to the sculpture yard once. He apologized for not having anything to offer us children and told us that the combination of being a bachelor and an artist whose work doesn't sell keeps his cupboards empty. We did have white bread spread with peanut butter and sliced pickle, cut by Segredo into lovely triangles and squares and “sigmoids.” He was deft with the paring knife. I admired him for the little flourish, yet his house on this dead end street off Coecles Inlet was a drear and disorderly place, and was nothing compared to the riotous, garish jumble of raw materials—as he called them—that filled the landscape behind the bungalow. His neighbors didn't seem to mind that whatever boundaries there were along that low bluff which gave onto a treed slope, a narrow beach, and the inlet with its fleet of moored boats beyond seemed to be breached on either side. Tall iron rods reached up and well over toward the east, so that a swing set with molded ropes that was there, its children evidently long since having outgrown it, seemed not so much encroached upon by Segredo's labors, but rather incorporated into them. Desmond and I walked around, picking up pieces of this and that, and climbed up into one sculpture, outfitted with rungs, or so we presumed the series of parallel ribs were that went up its side. We clanged a hammer we found against different lengths of catapulting steel, and made music. Then Desmond had wanted to go back up to the bungalow. I suppose I must have known that Mother and Segredo were in his house doing what Desmond and I had tried and failed to do in the osprey marsh. I kept looking up the hill at the windows and wondering why the curtains had not been drawn. Was I making it all up? It gave me pause, since the alternative was so strange. Is it possible she was so involved with him by this point that the chances of being caught in flagrante delicto by her youngest children didn't frighten her enough for her to bother to hide herself behind some dirty calico? Again, her boldness was extraordinary.