Joseph had not said we were pirates, and I thought I had been very clever.
My mother looked at me. “All right,” she said. “I don’t see why there had to be such a secret.”
That night, in bed, Joseph didn’t tell a story. Instead, we talked about how something had been wrong at dinner. Finally, proud of my invented story, I mentioned the buried money.
“She wasn’t even mad,” I said. “We can get the money tomorrow.”
“She wasn’t mad at you, but she was mad at me because I wouldn’t answer.”
“We can buy candy down at the store all month,” I said.
There was a long silence. Then Joseph said, “The money’s gone.”
I didn’t question it. He whispered, “The money’s gone,” and suddenly I knew that it was, that it was punishment for my having told the secret. Before we fell asleep he relented a little. “It might get put back somehow,” he said. But when we whispered the next night it wasn’t about the money, and we never dug for it or mentioned it again.
For years I forgot about it. I remembered it recently, riding the bus; I looked out the window and saw a squirrel run up a tree very much like the tree where we had buried the box. All at once I felt so sentimental I had to concentrate hard not to cry. I had remembered that there was something that was his and mine, that it was still there, and that I could go and get it. I got off the bus and walked to my room. It was a nice room with walls painted oyster-white, and the bare walls made me think of the rose-covered wallpaper all through the house in New Hampshire, and of what Sebastian had told me years before about the hospital he went to when he had his breakdown — how he would study the plain white walls and know that he had to get out of that place. The hairline cracks in them would appear in his dreams; imagined smudges would make him wake up, in a fit of anxiety. His obsession with the walls was only making him crazier.
In 1969 Joseph died in Vietnam. My mother received official notification, then a letter from a friend of his that was full of praise for his valor, his wonderful sense of humor, his skill with a rifle. It was an odd letter, one that the man probably would not have sent if he had thought it over. There was a paragraph near the end praising Joseph for having changed the man’s taste in music, for Joseph’s having explained what was really important musically. A list of several meaningful songs followed. The letter concluded mournfully, and he signed it “God bless.” I read it over and over, all summer, and at the end, every time, I would hear Red Skelton’s voice saying the “God bless.” The man who had written the letter was obviously heartbroken, yet it just wasn’t the kind of letter to send. He was alive and Joseph was not. He seemed to give equal weight to a sense of humor and rifle skills. What sort of person could he be?
Instead of going to the main beach, I went to the dock and sat at the end of it with my feet in the water and the letter beside me, carefully closed in a book so it wouldn’t get wet.
He had a sense of humor, all right. He had such a fine sense of humor that he laughed when I told him to go to Canada.
Every day I sat on the dock, and when the sun went down I walked back to the house and had dinner.
For eight years my father has not lived in the house. He and my mother are not divorced, but the other day I saw an ad she had circled in the Village Voice about Haitian divorces. On and off, Curtis lives with her. Curtis is Phil Renshaw’s younger brother, who works for Phil now that my father is gone.
One day at the end of the summer when my brother was killed, my mother walked down to the dock. I was smoking grass, as usual — staring out at the water. When she came to the dock I was thinking about how often my friends and I thought ironically, and how irony had been absent from my childhood. The memory of the conversation about how much my father liked children began to come back to me. I was wondering if children miss a lot of ironies, or whether that had been a different world and everything in it really hadn’t been ironic.
My mother sat down. She didn’t say anything about what I was doing. Finally she said, “Your father is totally irrational. He holds it against me. He thinks that God did this to curse us, to even the score for that abortion I had years and years ago.” She took off her sandals and put her feet in the water. It was wet where she sat. She was sitting in a puddle on the dock. “Can you imagine your father being religious?” she said.
“No,” I said. “I can’t imagine him living in Mexico with a twenty-four-year-old girl either.” I did not say that I found it hard to believe that she lived with Curtis Renshaw. He was plain-faced, less willing to work at anything than even my father. And he was vain — he always washed with a special soap. There was a plastic soap dish in the tub with a bar of putty-colored soap in it that was Curtis’ soap.
“Your father loves you,” she said. “He should pay more attention to you. When Joseph died he lost all perspective — he’s forgotten what he’s got.”
I stared at our four feet, spooky and slender in the water.
“He should have sent the money for the plane ticket. He shouldn’t have said he was going to and then not done it.” She brushed the hair out of her eyes. “Is that part of why you’re blue?”
“No,” I said.
“I know,” she said.
Then, being as deliberately cruel as my father had been with his sarcasm and his silence, I said, “He didn’t send the money because she’s going to have a baby and he doesn’t want me around now.”
“Yes,” she sighed. “There’s that, too.”
It didn’t seem to have made her angry at me, though I knew she could hardly stand to be reminded of it.
“She’s twenty-four years old and a Catholic. I hope he keeps her pregnant and that they have hundreds of children for him to support, and no abortions.”
The dock needed some boards replaced; that was why there was the puddle next to me. She wouldn’t repair it, and Curtis wouldn’t repair it, and I wouldn’t. In June I had finally repapered the living room because the wallpaper was at once so faded and so garish. She had always asked my father to do it, and now, years later, I had done it with no prompting, wild for something to do with my hands. I suspect she didn’t care about the wallpaper anymore because she didn’t care any longer about the house. He had left it to her — his parents’ house (my grandmother had died five years before; no longer even any reason to fix it up for her summer visit) — as if to say: You care about material things, here it is. Then he traveled and finally ended up in Mexico City. What would have happened if she had had the other baby? Would anything that simple have kept them married?
“What’s that you’re reading?” she said.
I looked down at the book I held, with the letter closed inside it. The book was Cooking with Wine.
Sebastian comes to my apartment. “It’s nice,” he says. “What? Don’t you like it?” He sits on one of the two Salvation Army chairs. “It’s nice in here,” he says.
He comes here often, and is always ill at ease. He never knows what to say. After a dozen visits, today is the first time he’s passed comment on the apartment. He used to call and invite himself over. After he had called a few times I called him and began inviting him because I knew that was what he wanted. He drinks too much now. He knows I’m going to school and don’t have much money, so he brings his own bottle, and a bottle of white wine for me.
It’s winter now, snowing. I was surprised he came, because you can’t get a cab, and the streets are too bad to drive, so he had to take three buses to get here.
His shoes are on top of the newspaper in front of the door and he’s sitting in the chair with his socks drying on the arm. His feet are so familiar. In the summer, in spite of rough floorboards and rocky beaches, nobody ever wore shoes.