Part 28 (1/2)
”I have, of course. You're a great poetry lover, aren't ye? I seen ye with the Yeats. I'm from the Yeats country myself.”
”That's where I'm going,” I said, excitedly. ”To Sligo.”
”Yer takin' the ferry?”
”Nine o'clock.”
”What a shame. I won't have much time to show ye Swansea. But we could have a drink or two.”
”Okay,” I said, anxious for talk. ”You must have traveled a lot of places.”
”Oh, all over,” he said. ”It's a great life, the sailor's.”
He brought us drinks and I tried to encourage him to talk about himself, his home, his travels. I don't remember what he said, only that I was disappointed that he wasn't describing his life more colorfully, so I was glad when he suggested going for a walk to show me what he could of the town.
There really wasn't much to see in Swansea; he took me to the Catholic Church, the post office, the city hall. Then he suggested another pub. I said I had to be going, I didn't want to be late for the boat. He told me not to worry, he knew a shortcut; we could go there now.
I don't know when I realized I was in danger, but at some point I knew the path we were on was leading nowhere near other people. When he understood that I was not deceived, he felt no more need to hesitate. He must have known I would not resist, he didn't have to threaten. He merely spoke authoritatively, as if he wanted to get on with things.
”Sit down,” he said. ”And take that thing off your back.”
I unbuckled my backpack and sat among the stalky weeds.
”Now take yer things off on the bottom.”
I did what he said, closing my eyes. I didn't want to look at him. I could hear the clank of his belt as it hit the ground.
”What's this,” he said. ”One of yer American tricks?”
I had forgotten I was wearing a Tampax. Roughly, he pulled it out. I was more embarra.s.sed by the imagination of it lying on the gra.s.s, so visible, than I was by my literal exposure.
”Yer not a virgin?” he said worriedly.
I told him I was not.
”All right then,” he said, ”then you know what's what.”
In a few seconds, everything was finished, and he was on his feet. He turned his back to me to dress.
”I want ye to know one thing,” he said. ”I've just been checked out by the s.h.i.+p's doctor. Ye won't get no diseases from me, that's for sure. If ye come down with something, it's not my fault.”
I thanked him.
”Yer all right?” he said.
”Yes,” I told him.
He looked at his watch.
”Ye missed yer ferry.”
”It's all right,” I said, trying to sound polite. ”There's another one in the morning.” I was afraid that if I showed any trace of fear, any sense that what had happened was out of the ordinary, he might kill me to shut my mouth.
”I'll walk ye to the town.”
I thanked him again.
”I'm awful sorry about yer missing the boat. It's too bad ye'll have to spend the night in this G.o.dforsaken town.” He said this with genuine unhappiness, as though he had just described what was the genuine offense.
We walked on silently, looking at hotels blinking their red signs FULL.
”I'll be fine now,” I said, hoping now we were in public, I could safely get him to leave.
”As long as yer all right.”
”I'm fine, thank you.”
”Would you give me yer name and address in the States? I could drop you a line. I'm off to South America next.”
I wrote a false name and address on a page in my notebook, ripped it out and handed it to him.
He kissed me on the cheek. ”Now don't go on like all these American ladies about how terrible we are to ye. l.u.s.t remember, treat a man right, he'll treat you right.”
”Okay,” I said.
”Adios,” he said, and waved.
I stepped into the foyer of the hotel we were standing in front of and stood there a while. Then I looked out onto the street to be sure he was gone. There was no sign of him, so I asked the hotel clerk for a room. I wanted one with a private bath, and he told me the only room available like that was the highest priced in the house. I gladly paid the money. I couldn't bear the idea of sharing a bathtub. It wasn't for myself I minded; I cared for the other people. I knew myself to be defiled, and I didn't want the other innocent, now sleeping guests, exposed to my contamination.
I traveled through Ireland for ten days, speaking to no one. It wasn't what I had expected, a country made up of bards and harpists and pa.s.sionate fine-limbed women tossing their dark red hair. Unlike the other countries of Europe, there was nothing one really had to look at, and the beauty of the landscape seemed to wound, over and over, my abraded feelings; it made me feel even more alone. The greasy banisters of the urban hotels I stayed in sickened me; the glowing pictures of the Sacred Heart in the rooms of the private houses that, in the country, took in guests, disturbed my sleep. I felt that I was being stared at and found out.
And that, of course, was the last thing I wanted, to be found out. I've never said anything about the incident to anyone, not that there's much reason to keep it from people. Except, I guess, my shame at having been ravished, my dread of the implication, however slight, that I had ”asked for what had happened,” that my unwisdom was simply a masked desire for a coupling anonymous and blank. And so I have been silent about that time without good cause; how, then, could I ever speak of the second incident, which could, if I exposed it, unravel the fabric of my family's life?
My Uncle William was my father's only brother. He was two years older, handsomer, more flamboyant, more impatient, and it was said that though he lacked my father's steadiness, my father hadn't got his charm. Their mother had died when they were children, and their father drowned before their eyes when my father was seventeen and William nineteen. They agreed between them, teenage orphans, that my father should go off to college- he would study engineering at Purdue- and my uncle would stay home and run the family business, a successful clothing store my grandfather had built up and expanded as the town's prosperity increased and its tastes became more daring. When my father left for school it was a thriving business and it was a.s.sumed that with William's way with people, women especially (he planned to build his line of women's clothing; his first move was to enlarge the millinery department), it could only flourish. But in two years, everything was lost and my father had to leave college. The truly extraordinary aspect of the affair, to my mind, is that it was always my father who was apologetic about the situation. He felt it had been unfair, a terrible position to put Uncle William in, making him slave alone in the hometown he had never liked, while my father had been able to go away. William was really smarter, my father always said. (It wasn't true; even my mother, a great fan of Uncle William's and a stark critic of my father, corrected him, always, at this point in the story.) My father and my uncle agreed that it would be better for my uncle to go away; he'd put in his time and it was my father's turn; there was no reason for Uncle William to stick around and endure the petty insults and suspicions of uncomprehending minds.
In five years, my father had paid all the debts, a feat that so impressed the president of the local bank that he offered him a job. His rise in the bank was immediate, and it led to his move to Cleveland and his continued steady climb and marriage to my mother, the daughter of a bank president. I've never understood my father's success; he seems to trust everyone; wrongdoing not only shocks but seems genuinely to surprise him; yet he's made a career lending people money. I can only imagine that inside those cool buildings he always worked in, he a.s.sumed a new ident.i.ty; the kind eyes grew steely, the tentative, apologetic yet protective posture hardened into something wary and astute. How else can I explain the fact that somebody so lovable made so much money?
In the years that my father was building his career, my uncle was traveling. We got letters from around the country; there was a reference in one, after the fact, to a failed marriage that lasted only sixteen months. And occasionally, irregularly, perhaps once every five years, there would be a visit, sudden, s.h.i.+mmering, like a rocket illumining our ordinary home and lives, making my father feel he had made all the right decisions, he was safe, yet not removed from glamour. For here it was, just at his table, in the presence of the brother whom he loved.
I, too, felt illumined by the visits. In middle age, William was dapper, anecdotal, and offhand. He could imitate perfectly Italian tailors, widows of Texas oilmen, Mexican Indians who crossed the border every spring. In high school, my friends were enchanted by him; he was courtly and praising and gave them a sense of what they were going away to college for. But by the time we had all been away a couple of years, his stories seemed forced and repet.i.tious, his autodidact's store of information suspect, his compliments something to be, at best, endured. For my father, however, my Uncle William never lost his l.u.s.ter. He hovered around his older brother, strangely maternal, as if my uncle were a rare, invalid jeunefille, possessed of delicate and special talents which a coa.r.s.e world would not appreciate. And while my father hovered, my mother leaned toward my uncle flirtatious and expectant and alight.
Once, when I was living in New York, his visit and my visit to Ohio coincided. I was put on the living room couch to sleep since my uncle had inhabited my room for two weeks and I would be home for only three days. At twenty-five, any visit home is a laceration, a gesture meanly wrought from a hard heart and an ungiving spirit. No one in town did I find worth talking to, my parents were darlings, but they would never understand my complicated and exciting life. Uncle William, in this context, was a relief; I had, of course, to condescend to him, but then he condescended to my parents, and he liked to take me out for drinks and hear me talk about my life.
One night, I had gone to dinner at a high school friend's. She had recently married, and I had all the single woman's contempt for her Danish Modern furniture, her silver pattern, her china with its modest print of roses. But it was one of those evenings that is so boring it's impossible to leave; one is always afraid that in rising from the chair, one is casting too pure a light on the whole fiasco. I drove into my parents' driveway at one thirty, feeling ill-used and restless, longing for my own bed in my own apartment and the sound of Lexington Avenue traffic. In five minutes, I was crankily settling onto the made-up couch, and I must have fallen instantly to sleep. I have always been a good sleeper.
It was nearly four when I realized there was someone near me, kneeling on the floor. Only gradually, I understood that it was my uncle William, stroking my arm and breathing whiskey in my face.