The Age of Infidelity

I spent my childhood chasing a vision of my dead sister. In the summer of 1960, the year Holly drowned in the river, she was sweet sixteen. Her boyfriends tied up the party line night and day, and no wonder. She wore crinolines, two or three at least beneath her swirling skirt. She pulled her dark hair back in a poof and curled her bangs so they grazed her eyebrows just so. Did she go dancing in saddle shoes? We had only the one school picture of her on the mantel, all the others packed away. I got my ideas about what she wore from reruns of Dobie Gillis, Holly's favorite show. And maybe I had to strain to remember how she looked––she was nine years older––but the funny thing was, I could hear her just fine. I could hear her cajoling my mother, clear as if they were standing over me.

Can I go out on the river?

May I go out on the river.

All right. May I go out on the river.

No, you may not. I do not trust a teenage boy with a boat.

You are the meanest woman who ever walked the earth.

Holly's voice was soft and fluty, bored, and if she used it to drive my mother crazy, my mother got her revenge by bellowing no to whatever Holly asked. My mother was the clearest deepest alto at Division Street Methodist. She had a voice like a bassoon.

She kept up the choir after Holly died, she kept up most everything and seemed to be doing as well as anybody could expect of a mother who'd lost half her children, till one day I came home from school to find her crouching in the hallway. It was three years since Holly died. My mother wouldn't get up off her haunches till I closed all the drapes––she'd seen a gunman on the roof across the way. He'd been watching her for hours, waiting to pick her off. She got the idea from Lee Harvey Oswald, so I guess you could say we were both taking our visions off the tv set.

That first time my mother was up in the state hospital close on to a year, and I wasn't allowed to go visit, so naturally I pictured her in a damp dungeon with chains around her ankles. My father came back from seeing her with his face gone as gray-green as modeling clay. I figured out I should probably be cooking for him and found my mother's Lowcountry Recipes. When she was home we didn't eat anything out of the river, but I got to be pretty good with deviled crab and boiled shrimp, which my father ate like he was scared the ocean might run out. We set down two big plates of shrimp on newspaper, a bowl of melted butter between us, and that was all we needed in the world. Then we made ourselves comfy with the television, which my mother hated. We took to watching the news during supper, and after the news something to make us laugh.

When she was finally discharged, her voice muffled so you could hardly understand her, we stopped buying seafood at the docks, and we thought we'd have to turn the tv off, too. But she sat right down with us and watched with a puzzled look on her face, as if everybody onscreen was speaking Hungarian. That I should like That Was the Week That Was was beyond human comprehension, or her comprehension anyway. After a few months had passed, she said:

I don't believe I can live this way.

She waited till my father left to hide her pills and to show me just which shelf they would be sitting on in case of emergency. She said that with the help of Jesus she was going to practice mind control and after a week, sure enough, she smiled at the television. After two weeks she laughed till the tears streamed down. After three weeks she was completely herself, and it was just like the old days:

What are we doing wasting our lives on television? Why was it ever invented.

Then it was time to paint the master bedroom and reline the linen closet and why not move the garage door while we were at it. She could sleep for three days straight after she'd been on a rampage. We went back to ham and chicken, no more crab or shrimp or anything else that might smell of the river.

You have to understand, when you talk about the river in Due East you could be talking about a marsh or a creek or the bay or the sound, all of them tidal, salty, clumped through with marshgrass, meandering till they flow into one another. The currents are crazy. When a boy says Do you want to go out on the river he means get in his Boston Whaler or his Sailfish or, if he's rich, his catamaran. He means go where the water takes you, and that might be as far as the ocean. When I turned sixteen I heard an echo: Holly, begging to go out on the river, and my mother denying her.

Everybody in this whole town, everybody in this whole entire town.

You are not everybody. Those currents are treacherous.

Oh Mama, for goodness sake. Life's treacherous.

I would never in a million years say that life was treacherous or ask if I could go out on the river. It was a word we didn't say in our house, like the word crazy, or the word dead. It was a story we didn't tell. I still didn't know whether Holly fell off the boat or jumped or a storm came up fast or who knew what all. It even occurred to me that somebody might have pushed her. She could swim, I knew that much. I knew because our mother said I couldn't take swimming lessons, what good did they do Holly, they only made her think she could go out on the river and play Russian roulette with her life.

See how I called her our mother instead of my mother? She'd been practicing her mind control for six whole years and she was hell-bent on controlling me, too. I needed Holly's backtalk in my ear.

May I go to the show Friday night please?

With whom?

With Jack.

And who might I ask is Jack.

You know. Jack Wesley.

I don't believe I approve of that name for a Methodist child.

Jeez Louise, his name is homage.

Language!

But he's named in honor of John Wesley.

Who will be driving?

Jack.

Does he have his night license.

Yes ma'am.

Is the car equipped with seat belts.

No, Mama. Aw come on.

Well, why doesn't his car have them.

He's got an old Studebaker from when they hadn't even invented seat belts.

You're not going anywhere in an old Studebaker. My word.

No, I'm not going anywhere ever but just stay locked up in this house forever.

You may go out with Jack when he finds a newer, more appropriate vehicle equipped with seat belts.

You are probably thinking: naturally she felt that way. She lost one daughter, she was not about to lose two. But she was the same about watching Laugh-In or I Spy or playing a record by the Kinks. The Kinks! And no, I could not go to some ecumenical service, we knew who we were. WE KNEW WHO WE WERE. Next thing I'd be asking to go to Mt. Zion AME, or maybe I'd like Temple Beth Israel better than Division Street Methodist.

She confiscated my Revolver. No I couldn't go to Merilee's beach house, and no I couldn't go to a movie if it starred that home wrecker Elizabeth Taylor. Not five minutes after she said her last no, she was humming “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” or “Blest Be the Dear Uniting Love,” while she rearranged the spice rack in alphabetical order, her face set smug and victorious.

She caught me by surprise when she showed up at the high school and got them to call me down to the office in the middle of French class. You heard your name called over the intercom only for a family tragedy and truth to tell, I was pretty sure my father had killed himself. What put such an idea in my head I cannot to this day tell you, but that was my fear when I came into the office at a full gallop. My mother spun around from the front desk to face me, index finger to her lips, signaling me to hush. This was our little secret.

Out in the hallway I took her by the elbow and steered her through the front door before she got me in any worse trouble with her tittering. If you've ever heard a woman with a voice like a bassoon titter, you know that it is a dislocating sound.

What's wrong? What's wrong.

Not a thing in the world, lambkin. I'm stealing you away to the bazaar.

What bazaar?

She gave me a look. Due East had only two bazaars a year, Catholic in the fall and Episcopal in the spring, and the buds had already opened on all the magnolia trees. Why did she want to go to their bazaar? Episcopalians were a tad too lax about their faith for my mother's taste and then, she always said, there was the false friendship. They'd ask you in for a cup of tea and they'd start to talk about the latest books and before you knew it you felt small, which was their intention all along.

Why don't you read the latest books then.

I would never say such a thing aloud to a woman practicing mind control with the help of Jesus. Before she got married, my mother lived with all the other single women at the teacherage and taught French at the junior high, and learned to speak the way teachers do, turning questions into sentences so you know exactly who's in charge. She was from the upcountry, the first person in her family to make it all the way through high school, much less college. Her people were lintheads who worked the textile mills, their accents so thick you couldn't understand a word they said unless you grew up among them. In college, she said, she learned how to speak two new languages, not just French but the English she'd never heard properly spoken before. If she was going to teach me anything, it was how to speak so I didn't shame myself, but what I learned from her was how to turn my questions into sentences.

Mama what do you think you're doing. I'm in the middle of French class.

You can go to school any old day of the week.

You're the one said I had to take French.

It will change your life! You'll travel the world the way I would have done.

You won't even let me out the house.

Didn't I just take you out of school? And fib to do it?

Mama I think maybe you better take one of your pills.

Oh fiddle-dee-dee.

I knew we were in big trouble when she started doing her Scarlett O'Hara. People were supposed to think they were Jesus or Satan when they went nuts, not Vivien Leigh. She skipped along to her car, waiting for us in the No Parking zone, and slid behind the wheel. She said she'd be my French teacher for the day and commenced to conjugate simple verbs she could still remember, chanter and s'amuser, only they sounded like chanteye and samoozeye in her upcountry accent. She said she would have gone to Paris if she hadn't married my father, but they would have laughed us both out of Paris.

She thought she was driving stylishly, weaving through cars on the John C. Calhoun Road and forgetting she had a blinker, much less a seat belt. When she got to the Episcopal Church, all the other big sedans were angled willy-nilly by the side of the street, but she decided to parallel park and in one swoop she parallel parked herself right into the back of a fat live oak. We heard a taillight crunch.

Ça ne fait rien. We'll think about that later.

Mama, maybe we better drop by the house first and pick up those pills.

Oh sweetheart sugar, poor lamb. Those pills are dust.

She gave me a sad quiet look, as if she pitied me for all I had to learn about the world. She was right. Those pills were old, and it wasn't like we could go show up at my father's insurance agency either, not after all the trouble my mother had already given his secretary. No, it was just me between my mother and the nuthouse.

I followed her down the brick path through the old crumbling tombstones. She sniffed at the blooms just opening and said she'd never seen the attraction of white roses herself. At the door to the parish house, she shrank back a little. She was used to Methodist ladies, who mostly looked just like her, their hair dyed a shiny bright shade and their fingernails like scarlet talons. Episcopalians, now. They let their hair grow out white and twisted it back with bobby pins, and they wore flats instead of high heels, and they tootled off to Paris anytime they liked. I peeked in over my mother's shoulder and saw the first room of the bazaar, where they laid out all the linens, the embroidered napkins, the crocheted doilies, the needlepoint pillows. Over in the back corner they had watercolors propped up on easels, but I knew we'd never get to the paintings, or to the rooms beyond where you could guess how many painted peach pits in the pot or date the arrowhead. I could feel my mother's whole body tremble.

Ooh! Isn't that darling.

She ran in and scooped up an armful of linen at every table she passed. Piles of material unfolded at her feet and cotton dust flew up around her head. She stopped at one table to finger the scalloped hems, at the next to ogle the white roses embroidered on pillowslips. I guess she could see their attraction better in here. When she clicked open her pocketbook, bills fluttered to the table below, and white-haired ladies scooped them up. They didn't even look like they thought she was crazy––they were too polite for that––but still I held up her load of tea towels, so they couldn't see my face.

My goodness gracious. I have got to have that one.

She dashed over to pick up the most un-Episcopalian pillow I ever hope to see, a portrait of Jesus just as gaudy as a portrait of Elvis, pink on a purple background. His blond hair and beard flowed out in ringlets till he looked like a white rose himself.

How much is that?

Isn't that something? said the Episcopalian lady.

How did you make such a thing?

Mercy! I didn't make it, laughed the lady. Is it worth twelve dollars to you?

Oh dear Holly, do we have that much left?

I can see you've been on a little spending spree, the lady said.

Yes we have. Holly and I have decided to live a little today.

We've even decided to raise the dead. I didn't have to say that last, I know it was uncalled for, but my mother didn't even know she'd called me by my dead sister's name. She didn't know anything she was doing, not that she held twenty sheets in her arms or that she'd spent all my father's money. She might just as well have guzzled down a bottle of Episcopalian sherry and walked through their bazaar stark naked. And they would have been just as pleasant.

Isn't it a comfort to have your daughter's help?

Yes, indeed. Ma petite fille reste dans le tiroir.

I beg your pardon?

But my mother had run out of words, and stared at the lady with the same incomprehension that used to visit her when she was watching tv. Finally it occurred to her to say: What's the name of this church? Notre Dame? Sacré Coeur? Au secours? A look of panic crossed her eyes. She didn't even know what country she was in, or what was the polite way to tell people you were loony tunes. The lady too wore a puzzled, troubled look, but she held out her own trembling hand for my mother to grab hold.

My mother made a dash for it instead. The pile of bed sheets in her arms began to topple off, and soon enough she was on her knees, grabbing for what she'd lost. The Episcopalian ladies all ventured out from behind their tables, hands to their mouths. Some of them called for help, in plain old English anybody could understand.

Naturally she had to go up to the state hospital again, and this time I was old enough to visit. The sight of the heavy gray metal lock-door she lived beyond chilled me like nothing I have ever seen before or since. It took forever for someone to come let us in, and that someone was a perky little redhead of a nurse, the kind to make me puke.

Hey there, Mr. Matthews. I see you brought your daughter to visit! Now isn't that going to do Miz Matthews a world of good.

Is she in her room?

I'm afraid she's in the quiet room just now.

Oh dear. She didn't.

No, she didn't hurt anybody. She was just a little rowdy.

Oh no. Should we.

You just come by the tv, and I'll find an orderly to see if she's calmed down some. Does she ever speak in tongues?

No, I don't believe so. We're just plain old Methodists.

You hang onto that sense of humor. You're going to need it!

We walked down a long, dark corridor shot through with dust motes. Patients shuffled along behind us like they were crippled, or shackled. We passed the nurses' counter and headed toward a big tv mounted from the ceiling, a dozen plastic chairs scattered beneath it. One little old lady sat hunched over. I couldn't tell if she was white or black, her skin that pecan shade that might come from working all your life in the hot sun or might come from mixed-up genes. She held her face down so low we couldn't see her properly.

We sat down next to her and presently we saw that she was watching an interview with some marine who looked even younger than I did. The marine said lately they'd been throwing Viet Cong from helicopters. He'd seen them do it, he'd done it himself, it made him sick. He had to tell someone. He told how they hogtied the Cong and put them in the chopper and threw them into the sea. It was like all those years ago when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald right in front of us and we couldn't stop it happening and we couldn't stop them showing us. They told us over and over again what we'd just seen, as if otherwise we would never understand. Maybe they had my mother in a straitjacket. I felt my own arms tied back. The old lady mental patient was making twitchy motions with her hands and feet.

I be hearing things again.

No ma'am, you're not imagining.

Child, you wouldn't lie to me?

No ma'am, I said, the way I'd been taught to do. It's the gospel truth.

That soldier lying? All that evildoing?

My father said: I sure to God hope so. Let me see can I shut this thing off.

Oh, they won't let you shut it off. No sir. You got to sit and take it.

My father rose and took a step toward the tv, but it was high above him and no nurses in sight. I guess they would get away from bad news all right. He sat back down. Mental patients, some of them dressed and some of them in pajamas and some of them half-and-half, came to look us over. Sometimes they snorted or shook their heads like we weren't at all who we were supposed to be. My father jumped up to light one man's cigarette when the lighter glued to the wall didn't work. I didn't even know he kept matches in his pocket. Five minutes passed, ten minutes, fifteen. I couldn't swallow. I got some phlegm up from the back of my throat and then I couldn't breathe. I was drowning sure as Holly drowned. My arms were tied behind me. I was drowning sure as those Viet Cong.

Daddy I can't . . .

At the sound of my voice he turned to face me, and I saw that he'd gone that gray-green color and would rather not hear any more trouble: one daughter dead, who knew how, and one wife crazy. I was just going to have to sit and take it.

Look! Here she comes.

And there was my mother shuffling down the hall wearing her white nightie, escorted by an orderly who looked for all the world like a prison guard. From where we were sitting in the television's glow, we could see a lopsided grin on her face, as if she knew she'd been a very naughty girl. My father leaned in close and said:

You know, her people were fearful generally. She can't get past that.

His speech took me by surprise. I told him I understood how Holly made her crazy, but he said:

No, honey, she was sick before too. I've been dealing with this a long, long time.

I hadn't heard him say something so important in sixteen years, but here she was already, looming above us with her guard at her elbow. We sat there stuck to our tv chairs. My father didn't even say hello. Her hair was beginning to grow out gray at the temples. I could see through her white nightie to her nipples, brown circles as big as silver dollars. Wouldn't you think they'd put a robe on her?

But she was just as cheerful as she could be. She was just a giggly girl again when she looked my father right in the eye and said:

Is my little girl cooking you all that seafood you like? Has she moved into our bedroom yet? Has she moved into our bed?

I'll ask you: do you think you could ever forgive your mother, she said something like that? I'd never heard anything so disgusting in all my days. I wouldn't go back to visit, not once, and I blamed her entirely for the dreams I was having, when I threw her out of a helicopter and sometimes threw the red-headed nurse behind her for good measure.

This time she wasn't gone nearly so long, and when she came back home she waltzed in as if that conversation had never happened. She shut off the news as soon as it started, and she served us heavy roasts, all she had the concentration to fix, just when we were starting to savor oysters again. I couldn't so much as meet my father's eye if she was in the same room. I couldn't meet his eye whether she was in the room or not.

This time my father stood over her to make sure she took her pills, and she swallowed them down like communion. Her tongue was thick, as if it had swollen up in her head, and sometimes in bed at night I imagined that my tongue was swollen too. My father said it was a terrible illness she had, just terrible, but I agreed with Holly and thought it was a terrible meanness. She was hell-bound to make me as crazy as she was. Her speech was so halting it called to mind those patients shuffling down the dark hallway, the television light a beacon up ahead.

Did Jack get seat belts. Installed.

Frankly I'd just as soon hurl myself through the windshield.

How can you say such a thing after. Holly.

But it wasn't even Holly that made her crazy, according to my father. She wasn't allowed to drive the car anymore, so she walked through town every day to the bluff by the bay, right out on River Street. Sometimes she braced herself on a big oak, staring at who knows what, at the bridge swinging open, at the islands out beyond our island. My father said it was better than staring at her bedroom walls, but I wasn't so sure about that. Every girl in senior year took a turn asking if that wasn't my mother down on River Street, and they asked in a sweet pitying God I'd kill myself if my mother was crazy voice.

Jack Wesley moved on, to a cheerleader who was allowed to sit in his car without a seat belt. Well, who could blame him? I was ready to move on myself, ready to get out to college and never look back. When my mother asked me did I mean to major in French, I heard my voice go cruel and tight.

No, I believe I'll learn some Russian or Chinese. Maybe some Vietnamese.

And I thought, look around you. Nobody takes French anymore. You stare out at nothing all day, but right here on the television there's a war going on and kids yelling through bullhorns. Maybe I won't even go to Carolina. Maybe I'll go somewhere they have a free speech movement. Maybe I'll go where they have a free love movement. My mother said we were living in an age of infidelity and wickedness, and by God I was willing to be the first foot soldier in that new territory.

I'd never once been out on the river with a boy, the way every other girl in town had been. I couldn't even swim. I started to wonder if Holly had inherited our mother's disease and walked into the water with stones in her pockets. I started to wonder if I had it too, just a touch of it that kept me from being able to swallow sometimes.

My father moved out of the house and into the little apartment behind his agency, and you can be sure his eyes didn't meet mine when he told me his intention. My mother didn't even cry. Why cry, she said, when he's been lusting after his secretary all these long years, when he's been abandoning us all this while. So I took it upon myself to weep for all of us, but only when she couldn't hear. The silence in our house echoed till I was sure I really had lost my mind, sure as she'd lost hers.

Now I was the one who had to stand over her morning and night to see she took her pills, and I was the one had to listen to her hymns. I should have seen the danger signs when her sentences came faster, when she took an interest in the linen closet even though she didn't have a husband to keep house for anymore. Maybe I knew there wasn't a thing I could do to stop her.

This time when they called my name over the intercom I took my sweet time, but when I finally opened the office door, my mother was nowhere to be seen. It was a phone call for me instead, and whose voice should I hear in the receiver but my father's secretary. She'd just seen my mother down at the boat ramp, wading in the water. Maybe somebody ought to go down there and see was she all right. She sure hoped the high school didn't mind, my getting a call like this.

They minded all right, they minded plenty, and so did I. I had to suffer the look the monitor gave me when I told her it was an emergency, and I had to walk past the boys blowing smoke rings in the parking lot, when what I wanted was to grab one of their cigarettes and run off in their cars and let my father's secretary go take care of my mother. No. I turned over the engine and drove down the John C. Calhoun Road at the speed limit and turned the blinker when it was time to make a right.

But by the time I parked in the corner of the parking lot, behind the stacks of Sunfishes and Sailfishes, I was steaming. And maybe more than that: maybe I was a little out of my mind myself. She was right there at the bottom of the ramp, in broad daylight. She wore a big wide skirt, damp at the hemline. Was she wading out to drown herself the way Holly did?

I stood at the top of the ramp and I called down: I want you to tell me right here and right now how did Holly drown in the river.

She swiveled round and gave me a quick-breaking grin, a little lopsided. I hadn't looked at her face in a long time, and in the bright daylight I saw how old she was, her powder caked in the lines running down her mouth. She still wore her lips cherry red when I'd been telling her nobody wore those bright shades anymore. When she opened her mouth I could see lipstick on her top teeth, and I knew she hadn't been swallowing those pills after all.

Why, what are you doing down here, sugar lamb?

I want you to tell me how Holly drowned, and then I want you to tell me were you planning on drowning yourself, too. You were, weren't you.

She gave me a look that was begging me for something, the very same look she gave that white-haired Episcopalian lady who was selling her Jesus pillow for a joke and didn't even understand my mother wanted to buy it for real. She was standing in water halfway to her knees.

I said I want you to tell me were you going to drown yourself.

Now, of course I wasn't, sugar. You know better than that. I was just trying to get used to the water.

So you could drown yourself.

No, I don't think so.

She didn't THINK so? Maybe you can understand why at that moment I felt like pushing her into the water myself.

How did Holly die.

Her upper lip crumpled. Why wasn't my father here, plucking her from the river? Why did he leave me to do it all alone?

Is this where she drowned?

No, it wasn't here.

And I believed that much, because if you looked out from where we stood you couldn't see death or drowning at all. You saw the air and that water the same color as my mother's dyed hair, gold and silver. You saw an egret balancing itself on one stick-leg out by the sandbar. You saw the old docks along the shore collapsing into the mud, the live oaks heaving down with moss, the tabby seawall crumbling. You saw this town looking out on the bay so very pleased with itself, its big old white-columned houses fronting the water, and its white teenagers sunning themselves in their sailboats, a town so smug it wouldn't even notice some middle-aged crazy lady wading out into the water in the middle of the day.

She was sailing over yonder. My mother hadn't ever before used a word like yonder with me: it was an upcountry word. She held her arm up and pointed out past the sandbar, out past the deep channel, out past the ends of the earth.

She killed herself, didn't she.

No lambkin. Where'd you get that idea? You've got suicide on the BRAIN.

Well, who wouldn't have suicide on the brain, your mother saying you slept with your father, like you were in some Greek tragedy, and your father walking out like it was all your fault. I stared at her with no love in my heart whatsoever. Her hair was set into those tight old-fashioned curls she favored. She looked like she belonged on Ozzie and Harriet. She came from another time and another place, and furthermore she was crazy.

Then tell me how did it happen.

This time she flinched, and crouched down in the water till her whole skirt was sopping wet. She was still asking me for something, and I still didn't know what. I put my hand on my hip and looked as stern as I knew how, and then she answered me as if we were having a normal conversation, only one of us just happened to be squatting down in the water:

She keeled over on that boy's boat.

What?

She keeled over. They said it was her heart. It was . . . a freakish thing.

But you always made it sound like she drowned.

She died in a bikini.

But I always thought she drowned in the river.

She was half-naked.

But you didn't even let her go out on the river in boats.

I couldn't stop Holly for beans! She never minded me the way you do.

I felt as if I'd had a heart attack myself, that I hadn't understood a single word anybody had put to me my entire life. Holly never drowned in the river, and I was the good girl? No wonder I'd been thinking suicide for Holly. At least she got to decide that way. At least she got to defy my mother for once, and to punish her, too.

I waded in after her, thinking vicious thoughts. I wished she'd fight me off so I could twist her arms around her back. But she stood there docile, and she even reached her hand out for me to grab. I'd be damned if I'd take her hand. I circled round her instead and then I gave her a push up the ramp. She made a noise like a motorboat, a noise so strange I couldn't tell if she was crying over Holly or just acting like a child. I wanted to slap her silly.

But I led her to the car, and wrung out her skirt for her, and strapped her into her seat belt. My mother and I had for once and for all changed places, and now I was the one who had to take charge. When I went round to the driver's seat she shot me a timid, obedient look and commenced to hum a hymn, only she wasn't quite humming in alto range and she wasn't quite humming soprano. I cranked up the car and she stopped humming altogether.

I can't remember the words, she said. Not so much as verse one.

Now she truly did sound like a child, puzzling out how you could lose words you'd known your whole life long. Well, I wasn't about to give her the verses to torment me with, but when I looked again her whole face was drawn up into such confusion that I heard myself say:

The words will come back.

Because if I was going to have to be the mother from here on in, I was every now and again going to have to comfort her. She let out a big puttering sigh, and I knew I couldn't bear to take her home and listen to that sad sound. I drove her over the bridge instead, so we could look down on that river where Holly did not drown, and sure enough she perked right up.

The afternoon light still shone gold and silver, and a red-sailed catamaran glided below us, looking for all the world like it was sailing into my mother's Age of Infidelity. The bay was just as unreal as a television screen. I wouldn't have been the least surprised to learn that my father and his secretary and Jack Wesley and even Dobie Gillis and his many loves were all sunning themselves down on that sailboat, while up here I got to carry a load of tormented marines and old ladies hearing voices. I got to carry my mother, who chose the very moment we passed beneath the bridge tender's perch to burst out with that hymn she thought she'd forgotten:

And are we yet alive! And see each other's face!

She made it through all four verses, though she had to double back on some of them. I have never before or since heard a hymn sung at that reckless a pace. By the time I passed the shrimp docks, she'd fallen into a deep wide silence, and when I sneaked a peak I saw that she was sleeping like a baby.

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