- Home
- Rebecca Heath
Letters To My Mother Page 7
Letters To My Mother Read online
Page 7
I looked at David inquiringly. “I know what you’re thinking; just wait and see.” He opened the door and a billow of warm air surged out, carrying with it the aroma of seafood, the babble of men’s voices and the insistent pulsation of rock and roll.
David guided me toward the cash register. “Before we eat, you I want you to see a picture of Sam’s boat; he’ll be pleased I showed it to you.” Hanging on the wall was a mural-sized photograph of a fishing boat, with a group of men on deck hauling nets against a panorama of snow-clad mountains.
“She’s a beauty. Sam must have fond memories of her. Did you see mountains like that when you were in Alaska?”
“Every day. Once you get north of Puget Sound you can sail close to shore sheltered by a string of islands. Everywhere you look there are mountains and waterfalls, and the land is so pristine that moose and bear come right down to the water’s edge to stare at you. Alaska’s a grand country, rugged and clean. I hope you get to sail the Inside Passage some day.”
“I hope so, too. If you’re ever going up to Alaska again and need a crew member …” I stopped and laughed, surprised at my boldness.
David smiled. “Don’t think that hasn’t occurred to me.” He took my arm. “Let’s find a table away from all these people where the atmosphere’s a bit quieter.”
The restaurant was crowded with men, fishermen I gathered from their conversations, but we finally located a small table for two near a window. We were no sooner seated than Sam himself, wearing a white chef’s apron and a green baseball cap with “Gut Salmon?” embroidered on the visor, walked over to greet us.
“Good evening, doctor, good evening. What have we here?” Sam’s good eye, round and bird-like, seemed to swivel in his head like a chameleon’s, and come to rest on me. A black patch hid his other one, giving him a piratical air, and I half expected to see a parrot on his shoulder. Sam’s teeth jutted from his gums at irregular intervals and when he smiled, his mouth resembled a battered comb. David introduced us and Sam held out a ham of a hand.
“I am delightful to meet you, young lady. Are you a nurse, my dear?”
I stared at him, not understanding his question.
“Kate’s a student at the university. She sails with me on Sturmvogel.”
Sam’s smile widened further. “So you’re a sailor too, are you? Doctor, be sure to show Kate here the picture of the Hazel M. before you go.”
“David showed it to me as soon as we came in. You must have been very proud of her.”
Sam wiped his hands on the apron. “That I was. Man and boy she was my home for 40 years. I’ve dropped anchor now, but Hazel M. is still working the Alaska fishery. Best damn boat in the fleet, if you’ll pardon my French.” He paused. “Was you out today, in the rain squalid?”
I nodded, trying to repress a giggle.
“You must be hungry then. There’s nothing like salt air to simulate the appetite. How about a bowl of clam chowder to start things off? The sole is also exceptionable tonight.”
Sam handed us a couple of greasy, plastic-covered menus and, wishing us a “bone appetite,” he moved along to chat with other customers.
“You’re right about Sam. He’s really an original. Does he always talk like that?”
“Sam’s surprisingly well read for a man who didn’t go beyond the fourth grade, though I’ll grant you his English is a trifle idiosyncratic. I’ll never forget the time he told me how he pulled an octopus from one of his nets and the beast wrapped its testicles around him.”
David nudged the menus to the edge of the table with the side of his hand. “I don’t think we’ll need these. If Sam recommends the clam chowder and the ‘exceptionable’ sole then, believe me, chowder and sole’s what we ought to order. Unless, of course, you’d rather try something else.”
“Sole’s fine with me; I adore all seafood. Why did Sam ask if I’m a nurse?”
David laughed. “Because you’re with me. When I first came here, several years ago, a friend introduced me to Sam as Dr. Rosenau, and he’s had the idea ever since that I’m a medical doctor. When he started asking me to diagnose his aches and pains, I told him I’m a Ph.D, not an M.D., but I don’t think he’s entirely convinced. I did overhear him telling someone once, however, that I’m ‘the kind of doctor who don’t do you no good.'”
After the chowder, the waiter brought us two platters of sole and David asked me to pass him the salt. He took the shaker from me with his right hand, and with his left opened my fingers and examined my nails. I pulled back and tried to close my fist, but David held on, frowning.
“Kate, do you bite your nails?”
“I used to, but as soon as I got my high-paying job with you, I hired someone else to bite them for me.”
“Smartass! Seriously, do you have any idea how many bacteria…” His hand closed around mine, I drew in my breath and our eyes met. For a moment he stopped smiling and just looked at me, and then he released my trembling hand. There was an awkward silence and for the first time in hours, neither of us could think of anything to say. David eventually bridged the gap with some commonplace remark about the food; we glanced at each other furtively and I returned my eyes to the tablecloth.
“Shall I call the strolling violinists over to serenade us?” David asked after the waiter had cleared away the dinner dishes. In answer to my expression of inquiry, he nodded toward the jukebox selector on the table.
“Judging from what we’ve been hearing I don’t think you’ll find anything that would interest you.”
He studied the list. “Oh, I don’t know. Not everything’s rock and roll; some of these are very pleasant, but no one’s playing them. Let’s each choose one song.”
I flipped the pages inside the box. “All right, I’d like D-5, please. David deposited the coins and punched two selections. Moments later a raucous piece came blaring from the speaker, something about a mad motorcycle going boom-boom-boom.
David raised his eyebrows. “Is that yours?”
“Heavens no! Someone else must have beaten you.”
My choice was next and David listened in silence until the end. “The tune is familiar, but I can’t remember the title. What is it?”
“'Unchained Melody.' I think it’s from a movie called Unchained, about a prison, however unlikely that sounds. The song is one of my favorites.”
“Does it have lyrics?”
“Yes.”
“What are they?”
The first three lines went through my head:
Oh, my love, my darling
I've hungered for your touch
A long, lonely time.
I shook my head. I knew I wouldn’t be able to recite them to David without choking up.
“Will you tell me someday?”
“Maybe.”
David’s selection, "Stranger in Paradise," was next.
“Borodin” I remarked with a smile. “I should’ve known you’d manage to find something classical even on a jukebox.”
David gave me a long look. “I just like the song.” He laid down his cup. “Kate…,” he began. I glanced up, expectantly. He waited for several seconds before speaking, as if deciding whether to continue. “Oh nothing. Would you care for some dessert?” He ordered two pieces of cake, leaving me to wonder what he’d intended to say.
We lingered at the table for more than an hour, drinking coffee and talking until Sam announced, regretfully, that it was closing time.
David had told me before about his childhood in Argentina, but never so vividly as he did that night, and when he talked I could hear the sigh of the wind through the pampas grass, smell beef barbecuing over the gauchos’ campfires and imagine David as he was then, a tall, dark boy on horseback, always alone.
David’s father practiced medicine outside a small town in the province of Cordoba, about 500 miles northwest of Buenos Aires. As a little boy, David often accompanied his father on his rounds, David wedged into the saddle in front of his father and later, when he gre
w older, beside his father on a horse of his own. Except for these excursions, David rarely left their farm until he was old enough to attend school; few children his age lived nearby and he spent most of his time in the company of adults.
David told me about his first day at school, sitting beside an older student during recitation. When the teacher called on the boy to read aloud, he stumbled over the text and five-year old David snatched the book away from him impatiently. “That’s not how you read it; it goes like this.”
David couldn’t recall a time when he wasn’t reading. By the age of ten he’d devoured almost every book in his parents’ extensive library, from medical texts to the Tarzan adventures his grandparents sent him from Buenos Aires, and he counted the days to their annual visit to the capital, when he could spend hours browsing in the bookstores that lined Avenida Corrientes.
David’s precocity and arrogance won him few friends among either his schoolmates or his instructors. He chafed at a school curriculum that emphasized spelling and grammar rather than composition, and David’s teachers never knew of the poems and short stories he wrote for his own amusement. Despite his ability, David was an indifferent student; memorization bored him and he was frequently absent. In fair weather he would load his saddlebags with the essentials – bread, cheese, a few books – and, leaving a note for his parents, turn his horse to the hills. David reveled in the solitude of the wilderness and often camped for days on the shore of a small lake, returning home only when his supplies ran out. When David’s mother protested he should be in class, his father supported him. “Let the boy go; he’ll learn more out there by himself than he ever will in that so-called school.”
David’s athletic ability earned him the grudging respect of his classmates, but if he was the first to swim across a river, the fastest rider, or the first to reach a mountaintop, he was indifferent to either the praise or the awe of the other boys. In anyone else this reaction would have passed for modesty, but David had a healthy appreciation of his own considerable gifts and was uninterested in the opinions of his inferiors.
When David was twelve and his brother Daniel nine, his grandfather insisted on paying their tuition at a British boarding school in the capital, ending David’s days of freedom. The transition was painful; English was the language of instruction, and while he spoke both Spanish and German fluently, David had only a shaky grasp of English. For the first time his arrogance was humbled by competing with other boys of outstanding ability who had the advantage of a superior education and exposure to the cultural life of a cosmopolitan city. Instead of memorizing, the school asked David to think critically, to pose questions and find the answers. In return, he had sympathetic teachers who recognized in “el salvaje” (the savage) a boy of exceptional ability, one whose tenacity and ambition they could channel to useful ends.
At home he’d often lain on his back at night, gazing at the sky, but he balked at memorizing the names of meaningless galaxies. In Buenos Aires he studied astronomy, and he marveled at the complexity of the universe and at the laws which hold the stars and planets in their course. When he examined a drop of water under a microscope and discovered a new world of plants and animals, David told me he felt the awe of an intruder in Lilliput. It was, he said, as though he’d been born with bandaged eyes, and when the wrappings were removed, he was in perpetual motion, looking at everything, studying everything, making up for twelve years of mental darkness. The transformation in David’s personality was dramatic; his grades improved and he made friends. At the end of the term he finished second in his class and by the end of the next semester he was number one, a position he never relinquished through all the years of college and graduate school that followed.
Understanding David was easier after he told me about his childhood. He smiled when I said my first impression of him was Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Even then, after more than 30 years of civilizing, something of the savage boy still lurked in David. I saw it in his ruthless desire to excel in everything he did, in his disdain for people less gifted than he, and above all in his passion for sailing. David didn’t sail for pleasure or relaxation the way other men did; for David the ocean was an arena where he pitted his knowledge and strength against the Goliath of nature.
David told me, too, about his undergraduate life in Berkeley, and he related a few incidents of graduate school at Harvard, but on the subject of his present circumstances, he was mute. If I hadn’t known better, I would have suspected he kept a sleeping bag in one of his filing cabinets and lived in his office.
“Did you ever consider studying medicine, like your father?”
“Oh, the idea occurred to me. At one point I thought of becoming a doctor and ministering to some heathen tribe in New Guinea or the Congo. A sort of Schweitzer sans Jesus”
“How come you changed your mind?”
David laughed. “I’m not like Papa. I lack the human touch. If I were a medical doctor, I’d probably alienate so many of my patients that I’d starve to death. My problem is I love humanity; it’s just people I can’t stand. After I decided to major in biochemistry I thought of teaching abroad; I still dabble with the idea occasionally. On a more rational level, what I’d like is to teach at a first rate university on the Pacific Coast, such as Stanford or Berkeley. I’ve received job offers, but …” He stopped.
“Why didn’t you accept?”
He hesitated. “Personal reasons.”
I sensed he was shutting the door again. “Do you have any regrets?”
“About biochemistry? No. About other things … when I was young, Kate, I had so many dreams. I was going to be the first man to climb Mt. Everest. I was going to be the first Argentine to sail around the world alone. I was going to be an explorer, an adventurer. It’s funny, isn’t it what you dream when you’re young? I wasn’t going to stay in one place for more than a few years, or work at a desk or go to an office from nine to five. Not I! That sort of life was for dull, pedestrian people. So here I am, working at a desk from nine to five, about as adventurous as a limpet on a rock.”
“But David,” I protested, “those things you mentioned like Everest or sailing around the world, they’re unrealistic and self-indulgent; other people have done them, but how can sports records possibly compare with what you’ve accomplished? Surely you’re proud of your work.”
“That’s a strange thing to say.”
“Strange? Frank idolizes you. He’s told me all about your important research, your publications, the prizes you’ve won. I have a confession to make. I looked you up in The Biography of American Scholars, and even Frank’s not aware of all your achievements. If I had one third your accomplishments I’d be supremely happy.”
I thought he would smile, but he didn’t, and I wondered if he considered my research an invasion of his privacy.
“Yes, I suppose my curriculum vitae is impressive to you and Frank and, in a way, it is to me, too. I’m not regretting Everest; that would be childish petulance, but the important things in my life turned out so very differently from what I’d hoped. If you measure achievement with an academic yardstick, then I’m a roaring success but, honestly Kate, I’m a failure in everything that matters.
“Now that I’ve acquired tenure and a few gray hairs, I’ve become a father confessor. Not a day goes by I don’t talk to at least one student who’s flunking organic chemistry, or who’s worried he won’t receive the fellowship he’s counting on, or who’s scared he’s got his girlfriend pregnant. I sit in my office dispensing wisdom, the omniscient Dr. Rosenau, resident guru of the biochemistry department. It’s ironic; they’re flocking to me for advice, but I’m more confused than they are, only I don’t have the excuse of youth. Some days I’m so depressed it’s all I can do to put one foot in front of the other, just to keep moving. I’ve reached the point in my life where I’m running out of time. You know how it is when you’re young: the future seems like an eternity. If you can’t do something today, well, there’s always next week or
next year, but I’m 47 and I’m running out of ‘tomorrows’. There have been moments recently when I’ve felt like someone looking through a chink in the wall of Eden; the breath of paradise caresses my cheek, I’m as young as on the first day of creation … and suddenly it’s all snatched away.”
He stopped and looked at me. “I’m sorry. I know you don’t have the faintest idea of what’s chewing on me. I wasn’t planning to unload this dung heap of self-pity on you; usually I manage to repress my emotions somewhat better.”
“You’re terribly harsh on yourself. I wish I could say something comforting, but … I don’t know what to say. No one has ever talked to me before the way you do.”
“I suppose not; you can consider yourself blessed.”
“No, you’re wrong. It’s awfully hard for me to say what’s in my heart. You’ve shared your joy with me, your love of music, books, sailing. I … wish you’d share your sadness with me as well.”
He reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “Thank you, Kate. On Fridays, when you’re coming at three, from one o’clock on I start to feel happy." I realized he was quoting from Le Petit Prince, and a lump rose in my throat.
David looked at me and smiled. “Enough of me. Definitely enough of me. Tell me your dreams. What do you see yourself doing in, say, twenty years from now? I seem to recall someone else who’s planning to sail around the world.”
“That’s a bit premature. My dreams? I don’t think I have any, not like yours anyway. I’m always waiting for something dramatic to happen in my life to give me a focus, a direction, like St. Paul meeting Jesus on the road to Damascus. When I was a little girl I was sure I’d die before I was 21; I suppose I couldn’t imagine myself functioning as an adult. In a way I still can’t, though I don’t have the death premonitions any more. I guess I’d like to travel more than anything else, maybe work for the Foreign Service after I graduate, even if it’s only a clerical job. I don’t want to teach; I’d be petrified in front of a room full of students. Your aspirations were a lot more altruistic than mine are.