Three Short Novels (41 page)

The languor from the brandy was spreading all the way down to her feet. She tried to raise her knees, and the languor brought her Dan. “Dan,” whispering. She placed a hand each side of him, there at his waist, to form him and to bring him to lie down upon her with the weight of his life, but he denied himself to her and disappeared.
Burdened as he was with himself, he could still turn away from those who would further burden him with themselves.

Left alone again, she summoned up the people on the train to be with her. On the train there had been lots of company, sleeping and awake, curled up and sprawling, in all the seats up and down the coach, and she had drowsed side by side with an old woman whose throat noises in sleep accompanied the mechanical noises of the train. The train swept along, wayside lights flickering, vanishing. Lurching figures to and from the toilets, quiet, deformed elderly women—lumping together of breasts and belly, lumping down of ankles—going dimly by in slippers, hardly there and gone, and their quiet husbands in white shirts cross-marked by suspenders, the cross of morning reprisal that the king's scout leaves on the door at night, figures gentle to their own selves as to children who wake in the night and must be led.

Naomi slept, opened her eyes to a lighted station deep in night, the train stock-still, waiting. Someone was pottering about in a little office of unshaded light. What station was it? What town?

“Isobel?” swallowing down sleep.

Isobel, moving around in the light from the kitchen doorway, her bathrobe hanging open, the sash trailing. “You never should have come,” said Isobel.

“What time is it?” Naomi whispered. Was it time to get up and get dressed and go down to the ferry dock?

“Four.”

Ah! Guy and the girl! The couple in the car! Naomi sighed a long, anxious sigh, a favor done for sleepless Isobel, a comprehension of this terrible night and who was to blame for it. She lifted her feet off the table, aware that a scolding for one thing leads to a scolding for another.

Isobel yanked up the trailing sash. “You come and tell me a little thing like you can't find pity for Hal. So you can't, so what? Is it a
crime? Maybe it is, but if it's justified why make it into such a big thing? Why come all that way to tell
me
about it? There are so many crimes, who can keep track of which are right and which are wrong?”

Naomi sat with the blanket around her, no longer like a potentate or a child but like an invalid with a little commonplace ailment that she'd exaggerated into a consuming one. What was it, little or big?

“The ferry leaves at six,” Isobel was saying. “You get dressed and make yourself some coffee and call a taxi. It's daylight then.” She left on the kitchen light for the departing guest to dress by.

Naomi in her blanket heard Isobel climb the stairs, and her love trailed after, her early love for Isobel that she had brought along, hoping it would keep her upright, save her from tottering around. But Naomi's love was nothing to Isobel, was of no account, a nuisance, and so love gave up on Isobel, couldn't find her again, she was nowhere, and Naomi was alone in an empty house.

12

S
eagulls again, flying against the wind, their scornful laughing like that of a colony of lunatics on an excursion. She sat by a window, on a wine-varnished bench in the ferry's warm interior, comforted by the constant vibrations of the engines. Only one person was out on deck, a portly man in overcoat and hat, passing her window for the second time in his morning round-and-round of exercise, pushing against the wind. The rest of the commuters were reading fresh newspapers, their face content with the routine of crossing deep waters. Her overnight case lay under the bench, in it her black nylon nightgown, the pink panties she hadn't changed into, the toothbrush she hadn't used. What kind of dead-letter depository received suitcases left by persons jumping overboard if the next of kin wasn't as close as the next of kin sounds? Isobel, what would she do with it? Or Cort, back home? Pauline would give her things to a church rummage, and who would buy her black nylon nightie for twenty-five cents and feel her lover's hand come in under? With her heel, she felt for the case under the bench to assure herself that she was still there, in touch with her possessions.

The cup of coffee she'd drunk in Isobel's kitchen seemed to have rinsed out her stomach. She'd left a dirty cup and a dirty spoon, and after Isobel had washed them and put away the blanket, would everything be the same as before? Maybe Naomi was to be around forever. She had dug up a root from the father's body to plant in the son, that root that was a need for a reason to stay on this earth. Not the reason his mother taught him, nor the ones that seemed to work for others, not even the real solemn reason you got for going to church. A need for a reason that she, Naomi, who thought she was so smart, hadn't even known about. Why did you need a reason to stay among the living? You stayed because you'd been put there. But when Hal took his life, out there among the willows in the night, she'd learned for the first time that some people never find a reason good enough.

The sun was concealed behind a blanket of high, gray clouds, but its light was reflected on the open waters—a cold, glittering patch far out, like a drifting island. No next of kin would fall heir to the overnight case under her heel. She'd keep it herself. She'd stay inside the ferry, with the morning faces around her, in the warm, vibrating air. She'd stay with the women like herself, combed, powdered, their faces adjusted to the day, nightmares and resignation wiped off by the washcloth. She'd return on the train and hand up to the conductor the long, folded ticket. (She had expected the ticket to be small, like a movie ticket.) She'd unlock her door, unpack, and toss the overnight case onto the closet shelf, and maybe in a month or two she'd move out, move into a two-room apartment closer to work, a place with a tiny kitchen, and maybe get herself a cat. But this anticipation of a time that was to be her own stirred up a vast need to love someone, to use up that future time with love for someone, and it came to her, as she said
Mama, Mama
, inside her mouth with her lips closed, that her love for someone, for all of them, had been her reason for living, as futile a reason as it seemed now. This past love for them, among them her brother in his life before his death, absolved her now of her
sin of no pity, and, absolved, she felt the pity for him come flooding over her, like all the pity in the world.

Again the man out on the deck appeared, coming up alongside her, facing her way, the wind thrusting him back, his glasses misted, his hands rammed into his overcoat pockets. He passed her, going on toward the bow, and for a moment he was a forbidden sight—a struggling man, his back exposed.

The gray mound of the city was separating itself into angular buildings and on the large ships moored below the city an array of minute objects became huge anchors, smokestacks, cranes, men. On the roofs of the wharf sheds and high on the log pilings, seagulls watched the ferry enter the slip. The passengers were folding up newspapers, tucking papers into their briefcases as the city filled all the windows of the ferry, both sides. Naomi rose with them and went down with the pressing crowd, quickstep into the terminal, passing under the high small lights of the vast echoing waiting room.

GINA BERRIAULT was born in Long Beach, California. She was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, the National Books Critics Prize in fiction, and the Rea Prize for lifetime achievement, and many other awards including two O'Henry prizes and the Aga Kahn Fiction Prize. Her several screenplays included “The Stone Boy,” made into a film starring Robert Duvall and Glenn Close in 1984. She died in Marin Country, California, in 1999.