Melusine

L.S. Bassen

Belongings

In 1982, no man in Isle End felt he was good enough for Roberta Powers. At 37, Roberta was thin and small. Her face looked like a thumb. She had grey eyes and dark short hair. Roberta taught history at the high school from which she had graduated (with the highest GPA ever recorded), and in time became Department Chair. Roberta liked to go fishing and to have a few drinks after school with colleagues.

Most of the women of her generation married and were the mothers of the children that Roberta Powers taught. She had written a book about Isle End’s origins on Long Island in the 1600’s, when the Powers had first arrived. The book contained a chapter about Isle End’s whaling heyday rivaling New Bedford’s throughout the 19th century, a best seller that made a successful case for designating Isle End a national historical landmark community. She secured the Federal money to restore the Whaling Museum, the Wagner Estate, and many homes along Estate Avenue. Roberta Powers was the uncontested Board Chair of the Isle End Historic Society. Cranks originally complained that she transformed Isle End from village into Manhattan annex, but after 25 years, most blamed vineyards and Wall Street bonuses. All these facts about Roberta Powers could be discovered in Who's Who of American Women (or by Googling). Isle End believed that whatever Roberta Powers waved her wand over would happen.

Her mother had taught piano to most of the children of Isle End. Her father had run the town nursery for the farming community. The house where Roberta had grown up and still lived was on Estate Avenue. It was large and porch-fronted. In the winter, Roberta’s mother restored flowers, pressing them under glass. From her kitchen at Christmastime the aromas of baking meats, breads, and homemade candy spread cheer. Roberta’s room in this house was white with shades of green Wedgwood in the reproduction wallpaper. She used an antique china cabinet as a bookcase.

One of Roberta Powers’s mother’s piano students had been Richard Limb, who now taught English at Isle End High School. He was seven years younger than Roberta. She remembered the first time he had approached the front porch of her house when he was eight years old. She had been sitting on the swaying divan, reading a book. Roberta did not know Richard from church. But she had heard of Richard because of his awful eye. At fifteen, Roberta was fascinated by disease.

At first, Roberta had not been able to see his eye. He walked with his head bent down. His father was already a violent alcoholic; Roberta could see a bruise on Richard’s cheek. He was wearing old jeans and a faded shirt. They listened to a musical scale being dutifully played indoors. Richard asked Roberta if he could have a piano lesson, as if she were the judge. When he looked up, Roberta gasped. Where his other gorgeous brown eye should have been was a white pearl – no, an opal. The boy endured her stare without repeating his request, as if in payment for the lesson he had no money for. Then Roberta’s mother was at the door.

Roberta never forgave herself for that rudeness, nor did she lose sight of him. Her ears picked up if his name was mentioned at the family table when she returned during visits from college and graduate school. She knew of his failed romance with a cousin of hers, nicknamed Mambo, and how Richard Limb had attempted suicide at the Wagner Estate on the Point. He had tried to jump from the terrace into the ocean, stopped by Isle End’s venerated Professor F. Post Gordon. Isle End blamed the death of the 90 year old man, known affectionately as Flash Gordon, on this exertion. It made Richard even more of an outcast; Isle End was relieved when a scholarship enabled his departure.

But during his first year of law school his father had died, and Richard Limb returned to support his mother. He began teaching English at Isle End High School, riveting his students with his reading of Poe’s “Telltale Heart” in which a grotesque eye prompted madness and murder. After his mother died, Richard Limb stayed at the high school, a kind of Pied Piper, encouraging students to leave Isle End. Roberta argued about this with him. After nearly a decade of their debates (Roberta would sip from whiskey and Richard would nurse a beer he never finished), a summer approached when an eye surgeon in New York said Richard’s cataract was ripe enough to be removed.

By Thanksgiving, Isle End acknowledged that Richard Limb was a new person. He was handsome and popular. When he and Roberta went out after school to the bar, they were never alone. It was early winter. The air tasted of iron and ocean. It was too cold for snow. Roberta’s mother was always baking something. Roberta stayed out of the kitchen, preferring the chill in her own room and the desk always stacked with student essays.

One Saturday in December, Roberta attended a Historic Society meeting at the library. There, she saw Richard Limb skating on the pond in front of the library. He was wearing no more than a thick Irish fisherman sweater, muffler, and leather gloves, and he was skating over the ice with a student, a senior named Lucy. Roberta stopped to watch them skate through a figure eight and receive loud applause. At the end of the figure, Richard released Lucy and waved to his audience. As he flew past Roberta, he grinned. She watched the line of his long back lean against the wind. Roberta felt the cold burning up the marrow of her leg bones.

Christmas came. Sugar cookies her mother had baked hung from the tree. Friends and family came for wassail. Richard Limb asked Roberta out for a drink. She hesitated.

“Be there,” he ordered her and hung up.

The bar was crowded with townspeople, many singing carols around an old piano. Roberta felt the chill she brought into the room. People shook hands with her and wished her Merry Christmas, but when Richard Limb came in after, he was cheered. Roberta felt awkward. After two drinks, she told him so. He was wearing the heavy ice-skating sweater. He’d finished two tall mugs of Irish coffee. Abruptly standing up, he peeled off the cabled wool. Roberta had started to speak when he disappeared under the sweater, but his disrobing silenced her. When his face reappeared, it was flushed in the reddish light of the bar.

“You’re embarrassed to be seen with me?”

She switched to her teacher-voice. “You misunderstand,” she said. “You look like your father now.”

His temper was always quick. “It’s the liquor coming out in my face, “ he said. “What do you mean, I shouldn’t be seen with you?”

“I just wish it would snow.”

Since the successful cataract operation, Richard’s face had not only become handsome but also unguarded. “It’s the best winter of my life. I wish my father could have seen it.”

“I thought you hated him,” Roberta said.

Richard took a long swallow from a third cup of liquored coffee. The whipped cream gave him a moustache he licked away.

“He’d take me out on the boat at night in the summer, when it was easy to make money. We’d go out with other men and their sons, and we boys would hold flashlights when the men speared fish in the shallows. It was easy in the shallow water with the light blinding the fish.”

Roberta reached under the sleeve of her sweater and turtleneck to scratch.

“I went to the doctor about this itching,” she said. “I scratch until I bleed. He says it’s the cold, dry air. He says I’ve got the worst case he’s seen.”

“Maybe it’s being all covered up,” Richard said. “Your face looks fine.” Richard took another long swallow. He ordered food, but Roberta wasn’t hungry.

“Tell me what you’ve been up to,” she said.

“I’ve been in the City. Which reminds me,” Richard said, leaning down for a small gift from under his bench. “When I saw it, it reminded me of you. Open it now.”

That was the second order he’d given her. Roberta removed the silver paper. Richard’s food was served. Inside a velvet box lined in satin, distinctly like a coffin, lay a large glass diamond. A heavy paperweight instead of an engagement ring.

“It’s Steuben crystal from Fifth Avenue,” Richard explained.

Roberta took a sip of her drink to help her swallow. “It will remind me to do my paperwork. Thank you. “ She closed the box. ”And what did you get Lucy?”

“What?”

“You’re playing with fire,” Roberta said.

Richard ate some of the food on his plate, motioned the waitress over, and ordered another Irish coffee. When she left, he said, “It’s too cold for Apple Island.”

Roberta stiffened further. Richard referred to the small island directly east of Isle End – where apple orchards planted in the 17th century by a Powers ancestor still thrived, attracting bees and, every Spring, Isle End’s lovers.

“I don’t believe rumors,” Roberta said.

Richard’s alcohol flush deepened. His voice reminded her that he had gone to the edge of the Wagner Estate a dozen years before.

“Don’t you? When I was Lucy’s age, I was Isle End’s horror show, and I remember you,” he paused, “managed to ‘sneak a peek at the local freak!’”

Roberta stood.

Richard grabbed her arm. She pulled away, but his grasp tightened and he stood, leaning over her and kissing her mouth, once, then a second time, harder. He moved back, licking his lips. People pretended not to notice. His hands still gripped her arms.

She barely heard him say, “I’m – I’m so sorry.”

Roberta’s chin rose. “Let go,” she ordered, and he obeyed.

January passed. The new year was as cold as the old had been. Roberta and Richard had not spoken to each other since Christmas. Spring semester began in February. One Sunday, a blizzard stunned the Northeast, closing airports as far south as Washington, D.C. After the big snow, there was more moisture in the air, and the light was lengthening daily. Roberta’s dead skin peeled off. Her new skin was soft.

At the end of February there was a one-week school vacation. Crocus tips broke through open brown patches. Following a school calendar all her life, Roberta called this “the downhill time of year.” Now everything would race toward June. Richard’s absence from school the entire week after the February break was the major topic of school gossip. Only Lucy’s presence in school diverted the talk from being utter scandal. The principal requested that Roberta “look into the matter.”

“But I’m not his Department Chair,” Roberta said.

“She asked me to ask you,” the principal said.

Roberta sighed. Richard Limb’s phone repeated a busy signal. Roberta drove out to his house on North Road. The air smelled of the Sound. She saw smoke coming out of the chimney. Roberta had to bang on the storm door until Richard opened it. He walked into the living room and sat down in a wing chair facing the fireplace. The room smelled of woodsmoke and scotch. Richard resumed drinking.

“You’re...”

“Drunk,” Richard said. “And you’re right, as usual. “ He took another long swallow. “What do you want?” Richard slurred.

She surveyed the room. “What are you doing?” Roberta said.

“I was thinking what a terrific wave – waste – it was for Flash Gordon to die stopping me from jumping.”

Roberta sat in a chair across from his. The fire snapped. She took off her coat.

“Aren’t you cold?” Richard said. “You’re always cold.”

Roberta looked across the dining room toward the kitchen at the back of the house. Richard seemed to forget she was there, drinking and staring into the fire. Then she stood.

“I’m going to make coffee.”

“Not for me, you’re not. Why do people always brew coffee in the presence of drunkenness? My mother was always boiling up pots of black coffee my father never drank. He’d knock the pot right out of her hand, burning her, and then beat us both up.”

Roberta went to the kitchen, another mess, and set a pot on the stove. Then she returned to the living room and stood by the mantel, facing Richard. The fire pulsed heat against the backs of her legs.

“What happened, Richard?”

He shut his eyes. For a moment, she thought he’d passed out.

She took the glass out of his hand. He didn’t resist, but grabbed her other hand.

“What happened?” Roberta said, shaking his hand off. She sat on the floor at his feet.

“What happened? That’s only history. Literature is what happens.”

“The past becomes the present,” Roberta said.

“Curiosity killed the cat,” he said, tapping her brow gently.

“Tell me.”

“Wasn’t my suicide attempt documented by the Historic Society?” he said. “No? My father was in fine form that day. About my chances with your cousin Mambo…” His eyelids began to fall.

Roberta murmured his name.

He roused himself. “… between punches, but how he’d share Mambo’s retarded sister. I ran – I ran away...”

Roberta heard the coffee boiling over. She rushed to the kitchen, returning with two mugs.

Richard refused the one she offered. “I didn’t… Lucy,” he said, shutting his eyes.

“You are not your father,” Roberta said. “Why do you think old Professor Gordon saved your life?”

His eyes opened. “Why did he? He made me swear I would save ‘My Lady’ and he was repeating ‘Away,’ or ‘a way’ until...”

Richard tried to stand. Roberta moved to him; he waved her away. He bent over suddenly and vomited over himself, the chair, the carpet, into his hands trying to cover his mouth.

Roberta rushed to the kitchen, returning with wet towels and water. Richard was on his knees. He held one hand to his head and the other to his stomach. Roberta knelt beside him and gave him the water, then washed his brow, his eyes, and his mouth. She helped him to the stairs.

Richard kept mumbling about the Lady.

“Yes,” Roberta soothed, “I’m here.”

She helped him upstairs and then returned to the living room, opened the windows, gusts billowing curtains, clearing the air. When the room was clean, it was cool. She put two more logs on the fire. She shut the windows, and the heat steaming up from the radiators made her remove her sweater. She pictured Richard upstairs where she had undressed him and put him to bed. In the kitchen, she wiped up the coffee that had boiled over. She touched the white stove that was now hers.

L.S Bassen's The End of Shakespeare & Co. was the winner of the 2009 Atlantic Pacific Press Drama Prize. Ms. Bassen also won a Mary Roberts Rinehart Fellowship for German Sabbath, about the successful assassination of Adolf Hitler, and has been published in several print and online publications, including Kenyon Review and American Scholar. A Vassar grad, she has been married for 42 years, and recently moved from NYC to Rhode Island. She is a produced and published playwright and commissioned co-author of a WWII memoir.