The Whole World Over (37 page)

Is that what I might be? she wondered: someone who roams and
roams yet always goes home to roost?

After leaving the bathroom, she stopped to look at the desk against
the back wall. There, pinned to another board, was another picture of
those same two children, younger perhaps. They sat in the lap of a
pretty woman with milky skin and red hair threaded with silver. Saga
had been in the store many times by now and was sure she would
remember if she'd seen this woman before. Or maybe she wouldn't. Or
maybe Fenno was divorced. There was also a picture of a Border collie
lying against a bookcase. That must be the dog he'd lost, the one he
missed. Saga touched the dog's nose—graying, just like the hair of the
pretty woman. A dog who'd lived to a ripe old age; that pleased her.
Fenno took good care of those he loved—but where were his children?

For most of the time since the accident, certainly since David had left,
Saga had assumed that she would probably never find someone to marry,
certainly never have babies. Her doctors did not bring it up, and neither
did she. She had her periods—the part of her that could nurture a baby
was healthy—but until two years ago there had been the seizures, and
even now she had spells of vertigo, numbnesses that came and went, the
headaches. Whenever she felt a longing—as she did when she heard
Michael's news—she couldn't help feeling that to ask for too much was
to tempt fate. She was lucky to be walking, conversing, leading an
almost regular life.

And she had her shared life with Uncle Marsden. Alone together, they
joked about what it must look like to people who didn't know them.
"Look at that bozo. He thinks you're my child bride—my trophy wife—
and I don't mind one bit!" Uncle Marsden had said one evening last
summer. It was a gorgeous evening, the air about them soothing and
pink. They'd been playing Parcheesi on the front porch as neighbors and
their weekend guests walked along the road and waved. Uncle Marsden
and Saga waved back. Sometimes they took a picnic to the beach just as
the sun began its slide toward the west. Uncle Marsden might take a
book of poems and read to her. It was awfully close to romantic.

But ever since the strange, frightening day when Saga had met Stan
and they'd had sex, the impression of that physical encounter had
trailed her like a ghost, one that grew less malevolent with time. Saga
could not forget the orgasm, nor could she stop herself from re-creating
it—and when she did, she thought not of Stan (certainly not!) but of
men she'd seen yet did not know, men from the train, the beach, the
supermarket. Across the street, in Commodore Perry's house, there was
a grown son who came to visit on weekends: he had long dark hair, wide
shoulders, and a smooth golden chest. In the summer, he walked about
in nothing more than a skimpy black bathing suit and sneakers.

It was as if she'd rediscovered a flavor of life that the accident had
erased from her mental palate—a flavor she now craved, as maybe she
had in the time before. Had David fulfilled that craving? She supposed
he must have, though she did not recall sex with David very clearly. The
memories had faded naturally, or they had been blurred.

And then she had stumbled into that bookstore, and she had met
Fenno: the bird prince, the man who made her think of Rapunzel, the
princess trapped in the tower, the tower in the garden. Not that Saga
was Rapunzel, certainly not. And not that Uncle Marsden's wonderful,
wonderful house could ever be seen as a prison. No, it was a palace, the
place a princess would want to end up, would want to live happily ever
after. If, of course, it was rightfully hers.

WHEN SAGA ARRIVED AT HOME THAT NIGHT
, she found Uncle
Marsden sitting on the living room floor. Beside him, on a patch of
newspapers in the middle of the Persian rug, stood an antique cradle,
dark wood with long graceful rockers and spindles carved to look like
slender pine cones. There was also a pile of rags and a bucket of gray
water. The air smelled heavy, like varnish.

"Hello, my dear! Will you come have a peek at this grand little treasure
I've rescued from oblivion and rot? My father made it. I could
hardly manage so much as a balsa toy plane! I missed out on
these
genes." Uncle Marsden ran four fingers along the rail he had been
polishing.

He stood and went over to the sofa. He lifted a lumpy rectangular
object. "Horsehair," he said. "I can hardly believe I let our daughters
sleep on this. Ouch! Like a pincushion now. Feel how heavy." Saga took
the mattress from her uncle. It was prickly and leaden and smelled like
mildew.

"You'll need to get a new mattress," she said as she leaned it against a
wall. She began opening windows. The air that poured in was fresh and
cold, a relief from the stifling chemical smell.

"Yes, some newfangled fireproof organic-wool moth-resistant never-wrinkle
sort of thing that will cost an arm and a leg—which bringing
this thing down two flights of stairs nearly cost me as well."

Saga ran her own hand along the cradle. Cleverly, it had been made to
rock not side to side but head to foot, the way a mother would rock her
baby in her arms. The pine cones must have taken forever. Words were
carved into one of the plain pale slats in the bottom; she knelt to look.
PRO FILIO MEO
1925. A small thrill ran through Saga; this cradle had
been made by her own grandfather. Had her mother slept in it, too?
"
Filio
—isn't that 'son'? Uncle Marsden, this was made for
you.
"

He looked over her shoulder. "Young lady, you will not carbon-date
me.
Now stop snooping into chronological matters and make me a
drink. Please."

As she stood at the bar, Saga watched her uncle reach into a cardboard
box. He shook out a parcel of tissue paper and held up a tiny lacy
dress, impossibly long and lapsed from its original white to the yellow
of untended teeth.

"Oh my." Uncle Marsden peered at the dress. "Michael's christening
gown." He smoothed it out against the back of the sofa. "Oh my."

Saga gave him his drink. The gown looked like an object from a
museum; hard to believe that Aunt Liz would have dressed a baby in this
garment. Had this, too, been Uncle Marsden's before it was Michael's?

The box was labeled
BABY MICHAEL
. Her uncle reached into it and
pulled out a grubby stuffed elephant in a clear plastic bag; a wooden
fire engine, its red paint cracked and peeling; a tiny three-legged stool
painted with a fleeing dish and spoon; a pair of brown leather shoes that
had curled and petrified; and three picture books:
Roar and More
,
Wee
Gillis
, and
The Cat in the Hat Comes Back.

"Oh my goodness, my goodness me," said Uncle Marsden. "I do
remember reading
this.
" He opened
Roar and More
, a yellow book with
a crouching lion on the front. The spine snapped. "If a lion comes
to visit, don't open your door. Just firmly ask 'What is it?' and listen to
him . . . ROOOOOAAAARRR."

Saga and Uncle Marsden laughed loudly. She sat beside him on the
couch as he flipped through the book, murmuring with pleasure. "Oh,
this verse I always loved. 'Fishes are finny, fishes are funny. They don't
go dancing. They don't make money. They live under water. They
don't have troubles. And when they talk, it looks like bubbles.' " Uncle
Marsden attempted a bubbling noise.

Saga looked closely at the illustration of pastel green fish. She felt a
gust of cold air from an open window. She was sure she could remember
Uncle Marsden reading this book to her, this very verse, along with her
cousins. He paged slowly to the end—past a cat, a pack of yellow dogs,
bees, a mouse, a giraffe—and closed the book. He let it sit on his lap,
both hands flat on the cover. Saga noticed all the brown spots on his
hands, the sliver of fragile white skin under the edge of his wedding ring.

"Let me see that one." Saga reached across her uncle and picked up
Wee Gillis
, a book with a plaid jacket and a drawing of a boy in a jaunty
Scottish cap.

Uncle Marsden winced and set his book aside. He clasped his left shin
with both hands.

"What is it?" said Saga.

"Oh, I bollixed myself up good when I was trying to get the cradle
around that turn on the landing."

"Let me look." Saga sat on the floor at Uncle Marsden's feet. He did
not protest when she lifted his trouser leg. Sure enough, there was a
nasty red and purple scrape below his knee. "You don't want this to get
infected."

"I think I'd look dashing with a peg leg, don't you?"

She went to the bathroom and brought back alcohol, cotton, a large
Band-Aid, and a tube of ointment.

"Let's go hunting for lichens this weekend, shall we?" said Uncle
Marsden as she tended to his leg. "We're supposed to have a last little
warm spell, and I need to add to my slide show for that lecture I'm giving
in March. Freshen my material. Though, alas, morphology is now
passé. It's all about DNA."

Saga agreed to the expedition. Unless Stan summoned her, she rarely
went to the city on weekends; the bookstore had so many customers
then, and Fenno did not work on Sundays. Perhaps he spent Sunday
with his children.

The house still stank of turpentine, so Uncle Marsden decided they
would go out to dinner. At the Oyster Shack, a place with dusty fishing
nets and lobster traps suspended from the ceiling, they ate fried clams
while Uncle Marsden reminisced about what it was like to take on
fatherhood in his late thirties, how his best friend's children had been
applying to college when Marsden was helping Liz, for the second and
not the last time, warm bottles at four in the morning. "I was the laughingstock
of the department. And now," he said, "only now does it occur
to me that Michael's doing the same thing—though nowadays it seems
to be the norm, does it not?
Now
I wouldn't be snickered at, would I?
I'd be doing the
mature thing.
Parenthood as a
rational choice.
"

"People want to pack a lot in now," said Saga. "Before they have
kids."

"I saw people pack in plenty back then, even with kids in tow," said
Uncle Marsden. "We weren't so finicky. Everything wasn't so scheduled.
Everything wasn't so absurdly safe. People drove across the country in
station wagons with half a dozen children bouncing around like billiard
balls."

"I don't think wanting to be safe is bad," said Saga. Her remark came
out accidentally as scolding, and Uncle Marsden looked at her intently.
She knew the look: it meant he was thinking about her in some critically
tender way. This always made her nervous. She didn't want him to comment
on her "progress" or ask when her next checkup would be or,
worse, how her friend Stan was doing.

She said, "A year from now, we'll have a baby around." She smiled.

"Yes," Uncle Marsden said quietly. "Won't that be something." He
was still giving her that look, but when he next spoke, he was back on
the condominiums again, how they must be stopped.

Only later, as she climbed into bed with this curious book,
Wee Gillis
,
did it occur to Saga that Uncle Marsden had asked her nothing about
her day.

SAGA HAD LOVED BEING AN ONLY CHILD
. She'd had the best of
both worlds: all her parents' attention when they had time to play, all
her grandparents' attention when the cousins were not around—and
then, whenever they went to the big house (her grandparents' summer
place before it was Uncle Marsden's all year round), the easy company
of her cousins.

How different it had been when they were small. Michael was always
a little bossy, but you had to excuse that behavior in an oldest child—
and in an only boy, which back then counted for a lot. Frida and Pansy,
only two years apart, were close in those days. By junior high, they'd
formed a plan to grow up and be stewardesses for TWA. Sometimes
together and sometimes apart, they would fly to every continent; by the
time they grew up, there would be regular service to both poles as well.
Fatefully, they would meet foreign princes in first class. Having read an
article about the world's young royals in
Life
magazine, they kept a list
of the candidates, along with other titled heirs.

The sisters would marry their princes—preferably in countries not
too far apart, like Monaco and Greece—and each would have her own
private jet, which she would already know how to fly. Frida said that if
you were a stewardess, you had to learn to fly a plane, in case your pilot
had a heart attack while he was in the air. So they would visit back and
forth whenever they pleased, borrow each other's ball gowns and learn
each other's second languages. Their royal husbands would be best
friends, soul mates, each godfather to the other one's children. Frida
wanted seven children, Pansy just three.

Saga admired their plan and their complete confidence that they
would carry it out. It was decided that Saga, with her love of animals
and her fantasies of seeing the world, would create and run a wildlife
park in each of their countries. Saga would meet and marry someone
like James Herriott or one of the Leakeys—a "prince of science," as
Frida put it.

Michael, meanwhile, planned to become either a magician or the doctor
who would cure cancer. He would not need the use of their silly,
frivolous jets. Sometimes the girls gave in and played Michael's games:
they submitted to being sawed in half, or they were the nurses in his
clinic.

When the four children were not constructing the future, they would
dig great holes on the beach, down to where the sand became a glistening
black, or hunt in the tide pools among the rocks or, back at the
house, play board games or sardines. Charades was a favorite after dinner,
though the grown-ups would insist on joining if they had nothing
better to do. They drank their golden cocktails and clowned around like
the apes Saga would one day have collected for her twin royal wildlife
parks if Frida and Pansy hadn't let life—real, nonroyal boyfriends
and down-to-earth college professors and summer jobs—distract them
from their plans.