Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object Read online

  Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object

  A Novel

  Laurie Colwin

  To Richard Davies and Leslie Long

  O Leben Leben, wunderliche Zeit

  von Widerspruch zu Widerspruche reichend

  im Gange oft so schlecht so schwer so schleichend

  und dann auf einmal, mit unsäglich weit

  entspannten Flügeln, einem Engel gleichend:

  o unerklärlichste, o Lebenszeit.

  —Rainer Maria Rilke

  PART I

  1

  My husband died sailing off the coast of Maine, leaving me a widow at the age of twenty-seven. This was the time when a lot of girls were losing their husbands to the air war or the ground war; I lost my husband to recklessness, to a freak storm and a flimsy boat. I had no bitter, apologetic telegram to inform me, no grieving soldier at my door with the unsent letter, watch, and kit, no child to console.

  His name was Sam Bax, and no one ever stopped him from anything. His brother Patrick and I watched him sail out of Little Crab Harbor when he knew there were storm warnings. We passed the binoculars back and forth, but Patrick got the last full glimpse of him. When he passed the heavy glasses over to me, there was a bright white dot on the horizon, but it might have been a buoy and not the last of Sam’s sail. I remember thinking at the time that Sam acted out every wild impulse Patrick had ever entertained and fought down. Sam was thirty, and Patrick thirty-two, the oldest and staidest of youthful lawyers. He executed his violence on the tennis court, and the first time I met him—before Sam and I were married—he and Sam got drunk after dinner and played a vicious game of midnight tennis that ended with Sam’s wrist and ankle taped, and Patrick with a dent in his head where he had collided with the racket Sam hurled at him. And that was pretty much the outlet for Patrick Bax. He had squashed his recklessness down to an ironic sort of caution that was a slap in his own face.

  Sam, on the other hand, during our five years together, broke his collarbone when a skittish horse threw him in front of a hurdle, and Sam, who had never jumped, narrowly missed breaking his back and smashing his skull. He broke his right leg skiing, and on a rock climb he cut his shoulder, so deep that, when they carried him down, he was bright gray, unconscious, and you could see bone beneath the wound. I was used to sharing my bed with plaster, tape, and ace bandages. It wasn’t athletics, although the Bax boys were athletic in a well-rounded, general way. It wasn’t sport at all. If there had been no sports, they would have invented something much more dangerous. They were natural front-line soldiers, but both of them beat the draft by staying where their upbringing dictated they stay—in school—and they graduated as lawyers like their father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before them.

  The Baxes summered at Little Crab Harbor, a bleak enclave with a beach composed of lunar-looking rock. From the shore you could see, set on a hump of boulders, the lighthouse at Great Crab, and at night you could hear the bell buoy tolling arrhythmically. Their house was a big, rambling, cedar-shingled cottage with a clay tennis court next to the potting shed. All summer long they walked around in smudged whites, their kneecaps powdery gray. All of them—Sam and Patrick and their parents, Leonard and Meridia—were tennis crazy. A little rise, shaded by ash and pine, looked down on the court, and I spent countless hours reading there, or dozing off to the sound of the ball. The Baxes believed in playing until you felt you might collapse. Leonard’s face usually turned purple when he had had it, and Meridia became quite yellow under her tan.

  But Sam and Patrick never knew when to give up. They kept a big pitcher of water at the side of the net, and they played and drank under the hot sun until the water ran out. Then they held their heads under the pump and returned, dripping, to the court while the air dried them off. If either gave up, it was my turn, but I wasn’t much fun for them. I was good for a couple of bracing sets, after which I lost interest and went back to my book. Their usual cry, when I retired to my place under the tree, was “But you were just getting warm!” When I said I wanted to improve my backhand, I could tell they were truly puzzled. That didn’t have anything to do with playing, they said.

  Patrick and I were at the bay window when Sam sailed out. Patrick was annoyed—his chief reaction to his brother. He delivered himself of his standard lecture, referring to Sam as “that collection of accidents.” His voice was prim and remote.

  “Our Sam is hoping to be elected the world’s most dangerous boy,” he said. “You shouldn’t have let him go. Why the hell didn’t you stop him?” He peered through the binoculars. “I wonder if I should put some tarps over the court before it rains.”

  When he put the glasses down, his eyes were dreamy and angry. You could tell he envisioned himself in that Sailfish, thrilled by the small-craft warning, pitting himself against the sea. It was the end of summer. The leaves were on the verge of turning, and some recent gales had brought down branches. Underfoot, the moss buckled. An hour after Sam sailed out, the sky turned the color of tin and you could see a knot of greenish clouds out by the Great Crab lighthouse. When we went to put the tarps on the court, the air was poised and still, the way it is before it storms.

  I said, “I told him not to go. He said it would be his last sail of the season and he wanted me to come with him.”

  “Sam isn’t happy unless someone is worrying,” Patrick said. “That’s how he keeps his boyish laughter.”

  As we walked back to the house the wind came up and it began to rain, large, heavy drops that hit on a slant and raised puffs of dust. Patrick spent the afternoon pacing and calling the Coast Guard. I sat leafing through a stack of old salt-bloated magazines, and suddenly I was exhausted: it occurred to me in a rush of panic what I was waiting out.

  We had come up to close the house for the year. Leonard and Meridia were in Boston. I thought we ought to call them.

  “I think you should have a drink,” Patrick said. “Sam does this every year. He’s probably beyond the margin of the storm anyway.”

  By dinnertime the storm broke, and the winds were fierce enough to knock three bricks down the chimney, splattering the floor with wet soot. At the sound of it I flinched and Patrick’s face was as tight as a fist.

  For dinner we had ham sandwiches and brandy. Patrick decided that Sam had sailed over to Great Crab and was putting up with Danny Sanderson, one of his tennis mates, but when he called the Sandersons, no one answered. For an hour or so I drank while Patrick drank and paced. The rain let up and then let down in great, incessant sheets. Patrick called the Coast Guard again and I went into the kitchen and wept quietly by the cupboards. When I tried to light the kerosene lamps in case the lights went out, the match trembled in my hand. I was terrified, but if I had presented any part of my fright to Patrick, he would have pushed me away with his restraint. But from the doorway I watched him pace his circle around the braided rug and it seemed to me that his arm’s length was justified: he couldn’t bear to be ignited. I sat in a chair and watched the storm, and then I fell asleep. It was early morning when I woke up, still dark, and Patrick was asleep on the couch.

  The first thing we did was to call the Coast Guard again, but nothing had been sighted. We kept the radio on, and through the crackle of static, we could hear their signals. The water was deep gray and the waves looked hazel. By noon I knew I was going to break down, so I went upstairs and cried in a rocking chair behind the closed door. It was pure fear. When it passed, I looked up and saw Patrick at the door. He looked like someone caught in a wrestling hold.

  “Cut it out, Elizabeth.”

  “I’ve cut it out. I’m sorry.”

  “There are only two of us here,” he said, presenting
me with his handkerchief. “Nothing’s happened yet.” For the rest of the afternoon, we behaved like people who have broken all their bones but are upright: we avoided any collisions.

  Sam’s body washed up at Great Crab two days later, and Patrick drove over to identify it. By this time Leonard and Meridia had arrived, but I don’t remember Patrick calling them. I don’t remember much of the two days Patrick and I spent pinned in that house, startled by the slightest noise, waiting for Sam to call, for the Coast Guard to call, waiting for anything. When the storm spun out, we took turns patrolling the coast. Exhaustion made us level, and we went through two bottles of whiskey and countless pots of coffee. We were as helpless as chickens.

  At one point there was an argument between Leonard and Patrick about who would identify the body, but Patrick overrode the responsibilities of wives and mothers and fathers. If he had been challenged, I had the feeling, he would have gone berserk. I asked him if I might go with him and he said, “Just give me this, please,” as if he felt this was a horror he should witness and carry through life. I think he wanted me to have a live Sam to think about, but I don’t know if it was the Christian gesture it was meant to be. I carried the live Sam with me to share with Patrick, but the dead Sam was Patrick’s own.

  Attempts were made, by the Baxes and by my parents, to keep me tranquillized with bourbon while what they called “the arrangements” were made, but there was no need to keep me drunk. I was in that state of numbness that suspends energy, and I made pots of tea, pots of coffee, drinks, and sandwiches and passed them around as if I were floating. My parents drove up from Connecticut; Patrick’s girl, Sara Lazary, flew from New York; and Sam’s grandmother was driven up from Chestnut Hill by a cousin who lived in Philadelphia and left after an hour. The local doctor, George Reeves, appeared with a satchel full of sedatives, all of which were refused by our stoic group, except by my mother, who had the good sense to take a bottle of tranquillizers to keep handy just in case. No one slept, except in fits and starts, and the sleep we got seemed to beat us down. I was crowded by family and they were right to crowd, but I wanted to go off by myself. Since I knew under these circumstances what dramatic weight that gesture would have, I waited until midnight, when only Patrick and his grandmother were up playing solitaire, and then took a long walk on the beach to think about the Bax boys.

  They were both filled with blind abandon. In that state, there was no one home in back of their eyes. This proclivity was rampant in both, but in Sam it was almost rompish—as if life were a series of pratfalls from motorcycles. I had always thought it was a fatal condition in Patrick, because he did nothing except play violent tennis with it. There was no joy, no expression—just an intense, concentrated power, like electricity. But it killed off Sam, and at the dining-room table Patrick was playing solitaire with his grandmother, and probably winning. Or he was sleeping dreamlessly, or he was drunk. His grandmother, on seeing me, had said, “I’m used to all this now.”

  These lean, rough boys stand flanking their parents, Leonard and Meridia, the former Miss Hollander of Chapel Hill and Crab Harbor, Maine, in a photo that used to stand in an enameled frame on Sam’s desk. Meridia was lean and flat. She kept her iron-colored hair stylishly short and she had a voice that had been burned by cigarettes into its harsher reaches. She was as stripped and weathered as a plank, but she was chic. From a distance, she looked like an old, jaunty sailor. Up close, she was the New England edition of Coco Chanel. Her lipstick was bright pink against her tan skin, and in the midst of all that weathering her eyes were the stark gray-blue of a child’s. She treated her children as if they were gypsies who had dropped in unannounced and had to be dealt with in a civil and efficient fashion, and she probably loved them, but she had always treated them as if they were full grown and did not need the outer symbols of a mother’s love. She thought her sons did not want her to fuss over them; and she was right; but, then, she had never fussed.

  Her two remedies covered all ailments: a hot shower if you were sick, a cold one if overemotional. Everything at both her houses was immaculate and arranged for comfort, and she was a good, plain cook. When you saw at Little Crab Harbor the wicker baskets of freshly pressed sheets she brought up from Boston, or the bunches of red basil hanging upside down from a beam in the kitchen to dry, or the sheen on her copper pots, or the intelligent books and eclectic pile of magazines she kept in the guest rooms, you thought you were in the presence of domestic splendor. But when you got to know Meridia, you saw she didn’t much care. If her boys, or a storm, or a wrecking company with the wrong address had smashed her house, melted down those gleaming copper pots and burned to ash her needlework couch and braided rugs, you had the feeling that nothing would flicker across her face, and as she coped heroically she might make a case for the charm of a spare life. There was not an ounce of sentiment in her, and she doted on nothing she owned. She remembered birthdays, anniversaries, and other ritual events with the aid of a big leather diary in which she noted the upcoming social events of her life. Meridia had replaced feeling with efficiency: it served her very well and it looked like the same thing. Sam’s drowning was only a hard, harsh fact in her life.

  Her indomitable competence was calculated to make things work so smoothly that she didn’t have to think about them, and when you looked into those large blue plates she had for eyes, you wondered what her connection to the world was. She lived in a universe in which things were brisk, cheery, and workable. You could not imagine her giving in to pain or weeping with joy, and nothing distressed her. The people she knew did not divorce, or die young, or get kidnapped, or commit crimes. She used her remoteness like a shield, and Sam, her youngest, understood his mother about as well as an unborn child understands quantum mechanics. Patrick said of her, “Some women want only sons, but a daughter or two might have softened her up.”

  Leonard was tall and silent. His legs were thin and his knobby knees were the size of ashtrays. He was all edges, but they were comfortable edges. However, he was not the sort of man you want to hug. His eyes were a dark, unyielding brown. Sam and Patrick understood their father: after all, they were just like him. They were lawyers, tennis players, landowners in Maine. The prep school they had gone to he had gone to, and they had graduated from his college and his law school. From Meridia they got their thick, wavy hair and the roundness of their eyes, but everything else was Leonard’s. They had his flat nose and cheekbones, his build and leanness. But their fleetness and danger were all their own.

  I was twenty-one when I met Sam. He came roaring down from Cambridge on a Vincent Black Shadow with Eddie Liebereu, the boy it was assumed I would marry. Eddie had been the shining star of my high school. He was a Merit Scholar, a Westinghouse fellow, the editor of the newspaper. He was three years older than I, and it was quite the thing to have a crush on him. We spent a summer together teaching retarded children how to swim, and the rest followed a safe, comfortable pattern. When he went to college he wrote me letters which I answered within four days. Each letter took at least five drafts before I thought it suitable to send to Cambridge. At holidays he appeared and took me to parties, receptions, concerts, and lunches. He sat at my parents’ dinner table and I sat at his. Under the table, concealed by lace and damask, we played benign footsie. Over the anemones his mother favored and the freesia my family used for a centerpiece he winked at me. In my senior year of high school, he got me up to Harvard for a weekend after this was cleared by my mother through Mrs. Liebereu. He took me by the elbow and squired me through Harvard Yard, through Harvard Square, past shimmering pairs of older girls I incorrectly assumed he was sleeping with. He steered me through the Fogg Museum and gently explained to me the significance of Gentile da Fabriano. How could I have seen him for so much Harvard Yard? In my second year of college, Eddie took me to his apartment and thus became my first lover, and it was assumed that he would be my first husband, but by that time my life was fairly divided. We had to commute to get to each other, and in ou
r times apart, a hidden but audible voice indicated to me that tame Eddie Liebereu was not the love of my life at all.

  When Sam appeared with him, I knew at twenty-one that I was a gone woman for sure. How we conspired to dump Eddie at the library and leave him there for the afternoon, how we managed to convince him that a motorcycle ride with Sam would be an educational experience for me, how we managed to get him to leave the next day, and how I managed to treat him so awfully and live with myself I cannot imagine. We did all these things. With my arm around Sam’s waist, racing down the River Road, I felt that I was a flame and Sam was a flame, and that I did not belong in a world of candle snuffers and wet pockets like Eddie Liebereu.

  It was late October, and the leaves along the Hudson River were bright yellow. We sped by large abandoned barns, past trees that looked like burning bushes, and finally we pulled into a seedy bar and grill by the ferry docks in Michaelstown for a beer.

  “What’s with you and Eddie?” Sam said. “Are you trying to get rid of him?”

  “I wasn’t trying to get rid of him until this morning. I’m supposed to love him, but I can’t.”

  Sam said, “Wanna come up to Cambridge and stay with me next weekend?”

  “Yes,” I said. I was pretty daring at twenty-one.

  “Wanna put him on the train and spend the rest of the weekend with me?”

  I said I thought that was just what I wanted. We left the bar and roared off back to school until we came to a dirt road that led to an apple orchard. Sam leaned his bike against a tree.

  “Don’t you think we ought to seal this bargain with a kiss?” he said, and then, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Are you?”

  “I’m sure if you’re sure.”

  “I’m perfectly sure,” is what I said.