The Zigzag Way (2 page)

“Sebastian,” he cried in alarm, looking about him wildly “where are you?” and darted out of a door that opened not into the square that Eric had come through but onto a narrow side street.

Of course that was just when the child's mother appeared—the woman with the dark hair in a red ribbon who had let him in. Looking around, she too began to call, “Sebastian! Sebastian!” and Eric felt compelled to point at the open door and peer out of it himself.

On that side street, where only one lamp hung, casting all else into darkness, they saw the child sitting on the curb, holding a puppy in his arms. Sometimes, when it struggled and yipped, he set it down, where it snuffled among bits of paper, rags, empty cans. The child, too, got down into the drain so they could explore the debris together. The puppy had seized something it found particularly tasty—a shoe sole, perhaps, or a stained rag—and the child tried to tug it away. Both pulled and struggled. The child was laughing to feel the puppy's small, fierce strength and tried to match it.

Then both of Sebastian's parents converged on the pair and picked their son out of the drain. He kicked his legs and protested loudly but they kissed his cheeks and stroked his hair and carried him back into the inn.

Eric saw there was to be no more conversation tonight; he was to be left to turn things over in his mind as if they were cards in a game of solitaire and to watch the bustle in the kitchen gradually close down for the night.

By then he had drunk a whole bottle of red wine. That, on top of his exhaustion and the doubts and discomforts of a journey undertaken on a whim. So, when he finally went down to bed—down, down the stone stairwell, one pounding step after another, in semidarkness, the last journey of the day—he felt his head, his brain, his mind come crashing down together. Bits and pieces, shreds and shards, all cluttered and confused and rattling as he threw himself on the bed. He lay against the red cushions, under the white wool bedspread, and tried to steady the swinging of his mind.

Usually it was steadying to think of Em, so he did. Although he had no idea how far along she was with
her
journey, he could be certain that wherever she was, she was Em. Down to the shadow of a disapproving frown on her brow as she observed him sprawling there, idle. It would creep across her face whenever she came back from a long day at the lab and found him at home, in Boston, reading and listening to Mozart and to Schumann, with the cat Shakespeare ensconced on his lap, and his book held slightly to the side. Her disapproval would never really cast a shadow on his mood, which tended by nature to be halcyon; besides, it was more like a cool, gray cloud than a threatening storm. He would tell her of his day at the library, pass on amusing bits of information he had extracted from his reading, and describe the scenes at the café where he had his tea and scone overlooking Harvard Square and from where he watched the tramps, the musicians, the chess players and students who provided it with movement and amusement. He carefully refrained from letting her know how bored he had been during those long hours at the library, how he could scarcely bear to look at the thesis he had written on immigration patterns in Boston in the 1900s and then proposed to expand, for lack of a fresh idea, into a study of immigration in general. He had received a generous grant to do so but that did not help to inspire him. Dispersing the particular into the general seemed to cast it far into space and his intention of pursuing it faltered and dwindled and threatened to fail. He would have gladly thrown it into the trash can at the door to the café and been rid of that last link to tiresome student days but he was not prepared to confess this to Em. Her interest in his “studies,” perhaps a polite reciprocation of his interest in hers, was still of importance to him.

It had astonished him, to begin with, that the young woman he had noticed for her somewhat aloof and preoccupied air, setting her apart from the groups crowding the hallways of their dormitory with their clutter and noise, could show such an interest in a subject and field other than her own. Yet she was willing to stroll with him across the campus to their classes, earnestly talking, and when he searched her out in the cafeteria, to eat her sandwich and her soup with him rather than with anyone else. He was to learn that it was Emily Hatter's gift to give her entire and serious attention to the subject at hand, so much so that it bolstered his own rather uncertain confidence in it. After their graduation, almost without any discussion about the matter, they moved into an apartment together and were not surprised to find the arrangement entirely comfortable, even Em's cat adjusting to it without protest. (The idea of “shelter” often came to Eric's mind even if he never spoke of it.) After a day spent in separate academic pursuits, they would come together to cook a dish of pasta and make a salad and eat to the melodious outflow of sound from piano, horn, and clarinet, compositions that seemed to express their own harmony. Even the crease between Em's even eyebrows would gradually soften and smooth over. They seemed to have already arrived at a stage that many couples require thirty years to achieve, although both were still graduate students and had not spoken once of marriage; there was often an atmosphere of self-congratulation hovering over these perfect occasions.

It was not his increasing loss of faith in his own studies that finally upset the safely even keel and security of their lives together in the apartment they shared in a red-brick block of student apartments on a street lined with many more such blocks. Unexpectedly, it was Em who announced one evening toward the end of a long, sorry winter that it was now unavoidable that she carry her research into “the field.” Her field was the forests of Yucatán, where mosquitoes teemed and malaria was rife. Boston had become too limited for her; she had outgrown its resources and needed to proceed.

That evening she sat quietly, running her fingers over and over again through her cropped hair—so fair as to seem almost ashen—committed to the next stage of her work but aware of its significance to their relationship. “I'll be away in the field with my professors,” she kept explaining as if afraid he did not understand the implications. It appeared he did not because, instead of turning apprehensive or worried as she expected him to be at the announcement of her departure, he seemed stirred and excited by the news. “But, Em, it'll be just the thing for me,” was his unexpected response, in a voice that had risen by several decibels, and with his glasses flashing his enthusiasm. “You know how stuck I am for ideas.”

She had not known. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, I've done all the work on that thesis I ever wanted to do. I haven't really the least interest in taking it any further—”

“But your fellowship? You were given it to work on a book.”

“I just can't—you see, I haven't the right kind of mind for theory. I've always worked with detail, Em. And can't seem to find the one I need.”

“Have you spoken about this to your professors?”

“No, no, not yet. But I've considered making a fresh proposal.”

“Have you? You never told me about it.”

“No, well, I haven't any fresh ideas yet,” he confessed, “but if I came with you to Mexico, I'm sure ideas would just
come flooding
in,” and he smiled as winningly, as persuasively, as he could, refusing to be discouraged by the doubt in her gray eyes.

As she ran her fingers nervously through her hair, he ran his through Shakespeare's.

Outside, Boston lay like a lumberyard, incapacitated by winter, knee-deep in slush, ice, and mud, its houses sagging under their sodden weight. Gutters awry, window frames moldy, woodpiles and metal junk protruding from the soiled snow. As if to emphasize its plight, a branch of the bare tree at the window cracked and plunged downward with its burden of ice. One glance through the curtains—he could never get them to meet—at the traffic crawling in the street below, and Eric resumed his pleas.

“I might come across, um, something in Mexico that would put me on the right track,” he said in what he hoped was a confident tone.

“Or not. You don't know Mexico, you've never been there, it might not prove the right place at all. You're an Americanist after all.” Em could not see how her Mexico, and its mosquitoes, could possibly provide him with ideas for a book on American immigration.

 

B
UT IN THE SUBSEQUENT
months of preparation for the field study, it became clear that Em would be away in Mexico for a considerable amount of time, and she began to give way to Eric's persuasions; they found themselves discussing such details as where Shakespeare was to be housed in their absence and arranging to take him to Eric's parents before they left.

Visits to Eric's family were always hasty, improvised, scrambled affairs, infrequent and rarely satisfactory. Em, who came from a solid phalanx of doctors, dentists, optometrists, and surgeons in Philadelphia and its environs, so that her own choice of a medical profession seemed not only logical but inevitable, never could find such a link between the Eric she knew and his family, which was, effectively, his mother's side of it.

There they were, all over the great muddy yard by the sea, at one end the fish market and at the other the restaurant that carried the family name, O'Brien's, on its great wooden signboard with its painted image of a fiery red lobster, and down below the docks where the boats drew up with the daily catch. The collection of white clapboard houses they lived in were scattered up and down the slope of granite with its crown of tough, stunted fir trees at the top. In one dogs barked, in another babies squalled, smoke billowed from the chimney of a third, and laundry flapped on a line outside a fourth. Men and women dressed identically in blue jeans, plaid flannel shirts, and rubber boots climbed up and down between them, bearing lobster pots and tubs of fish or dragging lengths of fish netting. Some were setting out in their boats, others returning. The smells of diesel fuel from boat engines, of fish from the sea, of brine and seaweed, swirled as thick as steam in the chill autumnal air, and gulls hovered, shrieking with unappeased greed.

Em hung back, letting Eric go before to find his parents within the crowding clan. How could he, her Eric—scholarly and spectacled—have emerged from out of it, she wondered, as always. She held the cowering, apprehensive Shakespeare in his box in her arms, protectively, but it might have been Eric she was protecting.

He had explained to her, often, his parents' recognition of the awkwardness of having such a misfit for a son, this pale, frail scholar within a clan of hearty Maine fisher folk. Eric's father had always gamely accepted the blame, as an Englishman and an intruder on their Irish Catholic tribe, but it was his mother who had, in her direct and practical way, dealt with the problem by plucking him out of the turmoil of a high-spirited family bred for the outdoors, and sending him to a boarding school for an education. This went totally against the family tradition—it was not even a parochial school run by the Irish priests, which she might have chosen if she had wanted and which would have been quite acceptable, but a small, progressive school run by an old friend of hers from the convent school who had rebelled against their own education and created an alternative in the hills of New Hampshire. Here they taught Eric according to the precepts of Rudolf Steiner, and after years of dancing barefoot to the music of a piano, painting with oils in airy studios, playing the flute, and attending classes on wooded hilltops, he found himself totally unfit for life in the family's boatyards and fishing boats; lobster as food totally repelled him. The one direction he could take was to the universities and libraries of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Returning to the clan remained as daunting and bracing as a plunge into the Atlantic Ocean.

Not that anyone had the time to notice his trepidation, or Em's. Eric was directed to the back room of the restaurant where his father had an office and kept the books while Em went in search of Eric's mother. She was not to be found in her house, having communal duties to fulfill, but Shakespeare could be unboxed in the relative privacy it afforded before Em ventured into the restaurant, where the clan had gathered for a meal now that it was closed to the public for the season. She and Eric sat on opposite sides of the long table and she glanced at him, quiet between his equally quiet father and a large and gregarious uncle. Then there was the clam chowder to attend to with the accompanying oyster crackers, and after that a procession of dishes each as large as a basin and oozing with sauces and gravies, melted butter and cream. “You city folk need some feeding up,” she was told again and again each time someone heaped another spoonful on her plate.

The talk ricocheted back and forth across the table, and she found she was not required to add to it. Eric had previously pointed out to her how no one in his family—other than his mother, privately—ever asked them a question about their own lives; where they lived or how, what they worked at, where they had been or what they planned to do; these were simply not subjects of any interest. Instead, as usual, they told and retold the same family stories, each time evoking the same responses. Em could hardly believe it but yes, once again they were telling the story that Eric so hated to hear, about the first time he went trick-or-treating as a child on Hallowe'en.

“You remember that mouse mask we gave you to wear, Eric—”

“The Mickey Mouse mask from the cereal box—”

“When you wanted to be Batman—”

“And you set off brave as a lion, with a pillowcase for candy, and when you got to the first house and saw all the pumpkins lined up with candles in them—”

“On a dark and windy night—”

“And then the door opened and this hu-uge clown with a red nose and carroty hair and great big grin painted on his face came out to give you some candy—”