6
Jesus calls us o’er the tumult
Of our life’s wild, restless seas...
In our joys and in our sorrows,
Days of toil and hours of ease.
—Mrs. Cecil F Alexander
“Red?” asked Barbara Jean. “But she’s a blonde.” She gave my hair a critical look. “Sort of. Sandy anyhow. So why Red?”
You’d have to be thicker than a creosoted piling not to sense the waves cresting around us, and Barbara Jean’s not thick.
Her question gave me time to find breath enough to steady my voice—I think it was steady—before I took his outstretched hand and said, “Hello, Lev.”
“It’s short for Redneck,” Lev told Barbara Jean. My hand was swallowed up in his. I’d forgotten how big his hands were. He was only one and three-fourths inches taller than me, yet each hand would make almost two of mine. Hands that had picked me up when I slipped on those icy steps, hands that later pulled me down upon him, hands that guided my—
“Enough of that now!” warned the preacher.
Abruptly, I pulled my hand free.
“Redneck?” Linville Pope was prepared to be amused. “I am sure there is a story here.”
“She was the only one in my ethics class,” he explained.
“Lev was a graduate assistant when I was in law school at Columbia,” I said. “And redneck wasn’t the only category I filled.” I was back in control now and glibly prepared to amuse. “I forget exactly what the point of it was—demographics maybe, or the insularity of urban ethnicity—anyhow, this was one of those huge lecture sessions when Lev was subbing for the professor. He asked everybody who was Jewish to raise a hand and about two-thirds of the class did. Then he asked all the Catholics and another third of the hands went up. Then he asked for all the Protestants and four hands went up: me, one black guy, and two Asians, which meant I was the only WASP as well.”
“So never having seen that many WASPs up close, I naturally made her stay after the class,” Lev said, bending the truth like one of his Aunt Ida’s homemade pretzels. “And here she is, a judge.”
“And here you are, a—what are you now, Lev?”
“A potential investor in a very nice project I am putting together,” Linville Pope said smoothly.
“If the details can be worked out,” he agreed, looking at me with half-tilted head.
“But not tonight,” said Linville Pope. “Not now that you have found an old...student?”
She must know him well, I thought, to pick up on that undercurrent in his voice. Either that or she had a natural talent for sensing when to plant the hook and when to give more line, because she backed off without a hint of the frustration she must be feeling if she’d hoped to talk money with him tonight.
Assuming it was money.
(Assuming it was talk?)
Instead, as Barbara Jean pressed Lev for more details of my student days in New York, Linville patted her arm gracefully. “If you two are going to monopolize my escort, I shall just go find Chet and make him an offer he cannot refuse.”
“That won’t be hard,” laughed a sturdy brunette who was evidently an old friend of the Winberrys and who had paused on the edge of our conversation. “Come on, honey, let’s you and me go jump him while Barbara Jean’s got her back turned.”
If Linville Pope was half as subtle and deliberate as she appeared to me, I couldn’t picture her jumping a man. Even in fun. Nevertheless, she went off with the brunette.
As they melted through the crowd, an ex-assemblyman from Goldsboro who’d once known my mother immediately claimed my attention, and I let myself be swept away by one of those little eddies of movement that swirl through all big parties.
Evidently I still wasn’t over my compulsion to put distance between myself and Lev Schuster.
The airy room through which we moved projected in a wing off the main house and had opposing windows and French doors on the two long sides. The furnishings were casually eclectic and reflected their proximity to the water. Seascapes framed in bleached driftwood hung upon the pearl-gray walls, the deep turquoise carpet had probably been woven to order in Burlington, the white wicker chairs and couches were capacious turn-of-the-century originals with modern cushions of blue and sea-green canvas. Shells filled the clear glass bases of the table lamps, and a collection of old iron tools hung above the gray stone fireplace. I recognized an adze and mallet that would have been used in boat building, a saw, C-clamps, brace-and-bit, even an old froe, plus several more I couldn’t identify.
At the opposite end, glass shelves held a stunning collection of handmade decoys, everything from a redheaded duck carved from wood to an old swan with a wooden head and painted canvas-and-wire body that should have been in a museum.
(“What does stewed swan taste like?” I’d once asked Andy Bynum.
“Well, I personally don’t like it as much as stewed loon,” he’d answered in all seriousness.)
The elderly assemblyman murmured pleasantly about knowing Mother and my Aunt Zell when they worked at Seymour Johnson Air Field near the end of World War II. He professed himself unable to get over “how very like little Susan Stephenson you are.”
Normally I’d have hung on every syllable. My mother died when I was eighteen and though she’d told me most of her secrets, I knew there were things about her Seymour Johnson days that she’d left unsaid. Yet I couldn’t concentrate on his words.
“May I come talk to you when we can speak more freely?” I asked above the dull roar of so many conversations going at once.
“Why certainly, my dear. Only don’t leave it too long. I’m eighty-three,” he warned.
We exchanged cards just as Micah Smith came up with my Bloody Mary, “Lost you there for a few minutes,” he said by way of apology for the delay.
“No problem.” I sipped my drink gratefully and made for the open French doors on the sea side of the room, only half-attuned to the waves of talk that washed over my ears as I passed.
“—’course my daddy always said a scalloper won’t nothing but a fisherman with his brains knocked out.”
“—so figuring seventy percent occupancy, that’s still more than sixty million dollars right here in Carteret County alone, and if you factor in the motels alone from here to Dare—”
“Yeah, well let the so-called ‘private sector’ stay private instead of grabbing their profits and passing the real costs downwind and downstream to the public taxpayers.”
“The people of this state have an obligation—a duty, dammit!—to bring a vision of what this area is to be.”
“—but I don’t see why the whole of Taylors Creek’s got to be a no-wake zone. Why shouldn’t water-skiers have the right to ski where they want? One of my customers—”
“Oh, they’ll say a menhaden’s the soybean of the ocean, but try asking for the same subsidies those crybaby farmers get and see if—”
“—one thing to stick up for your constituents but for Basnight to bring the legislature into it when—”
“Yeah, but if Marine Fisheries would just use the power they already have—”
I stepped back to let two chamber of commerce types pass (green blazers, plaid pants) and landed myself between a passionate young social scientist and the owner of a tackle shop.
“Commercial fishing’s had its day,” the tackle man was saying. “Carteret County gets a hundred times more money from tourism than—”
“Only because upstate pollution’s killing the estuaries and the recreation industry’s driving traditional watermen off the water,” the sociologist interrupted. “If you’re an uneducated black or white blue-collar worker, your only slice of the tourism pie’s going to be cleaning motel rooms or clerking at the local Seven-Eleven for minimum wages. We’ve got to have better-paying blue-collar jobs if we’re ever—”