The Shipping News

14 Wavey

A SATURDAY afternoon. Quoyle was spattered with turquoise drops from painting the children’s room. Sat at the table with cup and saucer, a plate of jelly doughnuts.

“Well, Aunt,” he said, “you are in the yacht upholstery business.” Sucking at the tea. “I thought all along it was sofas.”

“Did you see my sign?” The aunt sanded a bureau, rubbed the wood with hissing paper, sling of flesh under her upper arm trembling.

Bunny and Sunshine, under the table with cars and a cardboard road that unfolded in racetrack curves. Bunny put a block on the road. “That’s the moose,” she said. “Here comes Daddy. Rrrr. Bee bee-beep. The moose don’t care.” She crashed the car into the block of wood.

“I want to do that!” said Sunshine, reaching for the block and the car.

“Get your own. This is mine. “There was scrabbling, the knock of skull on table leg and Sunshine’s howl.

“Crybaby!” Bunny scrambled out from under the table and threw the block and car at Sunshine.

“Here, now!” said the aunt.

“Calm down, Bunny.” Quoyle lifted Sunshine into his lap, inspected the red mark on her forehead, kissed it, swayed back and forth. Across the room Bunny damned all three with killing eyes. Quoyle’s smile signaled his disinterest in glares. But it seemed to him the sounds of his children were screaming and scraping. When would they start to be gentle?

“The shop is sixes and sevens at the moment, but at least the sewing machines are set. Getting experienced help is the big problem, but I’m training two women, Mrs. Mavis Bangs and Dawn Budgel. Mavis is an older woman, widow, you know, but Dawn’s only twenty-six. Went to university, scholarships and all. Absolutely no work in her field. She’s been doing lumpfish processing at the fish plant to fill in-when there’s work-and then scraping along on unemployment insurance. That’s the lumpfish caviar.” Didn’t care for it herself.

“No, I didn’t see the shop. I interviewed two of your customers, I’m writing about their boat. The Melvilles. It was a surprise. No idea you were a yacht upholsterer.”

“Oh yes. I’ve been waiting for my equipment to come. Opened the shop about ten days ago. I started the yacht upholstery, you see, after my friend died. In 1979. What these days they’d call a ‘significant other.’ Warren. That’s who I named the dog after. In the postal service. Warren was, not the dog.” She laughed. Her face flashed elusive expressions. Didn’t tell Quoyle that Warren had been Irene Warren. Dearest woman in the world. How could he understand that? He couldn’t.

“I swear until today I never knew such a thing existed. I would have been less surprised if you’d been a nuclear physicist.” It came to him he knew nearly nothing of the aunt’s life. And hadn’t missed the knowledge.

“You know, you’re very easily surprised for a newsman. It’s all simple and logical. I grew up beside the sea, saw more boats than cars, though sure, none of them were yachts. My first job in the States was in a coat factory, sewing coats. The years Warren and I were together we lived on a houseboat, moored it at different marinas on the Long Island shore.

“We got a special rate at Lonelybrook, the marina we were at longest. And if we got tired of seeing the same familiar boats, on Sundays we could drive away to some other harbor, look at their boats, have a dinner. It was like a hobby, like bird-watching. Warren would say ‘What do you think about going for a ride, look at some boats?’ We dreamed we’d have a nice little ketch someday, cruise around, but it never happened. Always intended to come back here, back to the old house, with Warren, but we put it off, you know. So for me, coming back is a little bit in Warren’s memory.” More than that.

“I reupholstered an old chair we had on the houseboat, nice lines to it but a sort of mustard brown with the piping all frayed and thready. Got a good upholstery fabric, a dark blue with a red figure in it, took off the old upholstery and used it for a pattern. Just took my time stitching and fitting and pressing. It came out perfect. And I enjoyed doing it. Always liked sewing, working with my hands. Warren thought it was nice. So I did one in leather. That was something, working up leather. This real dark red, burgundy I guess you’d say. The only thing was I didn’t get the welting as perfect as I should have. It pooched out a little here and there. And I had a lot of trouble with the tufting. Made me sick to look at how that beautiful leather was spoiled. Because to me it was spoiled. So Warren says-knew I enjoyed it-says ‘Why don’t you take a workshop in leather upholstery? Some kind of a course?’

“And Warren was the one that noticed the ad in Upholstery Review. Got me the subscription for Christmas. A reader. Read anything came into the house, the toothpaste boxes and wine labels. Used to buy a bottle of wine for Friday night supper. Books! My dear, that houseboat was filled with books. So this ad was for a summer course-Advanced Upholstery Techniques-at a school down in North Carolina. Warren wrote off for the brochure. I was just horrified at the cost, and I didn’t want to go off alone for a whole summer. It was an eight-week course. But Warren said ‘You can’t tell, Agnis, you might never get the chance to do this again.’ Upshot was, I decided I would.”

Sunshine squirmed out of Quoyle’s arms and got the blocks. She put one on the road under the table, glanced triumphantly at Bunny. Who swung her legs. Shutting first one eye and then the other, making Sunshine and Quoyle and the aunt hop back and forth. Until it seemed something appeared on the edge of her vision, something out in the tuckamore, a gliding shadow. Something white! That disappeared.

The aunt was rolling, telling Her Story. The romantic version. “It was at college in a little town on Pamlico Sound. There was about fifty people there from all over. A woman from Iowa City who wanted to specialize in museum restoration using antique brocades and rare fabrics. A man who did doll furniture. A furniture designer who kept saying he wanted the experience. I wrote to Warren, glad I came. Told them I didn’t have a specialty, just liked working with leather and wanted to improve at it.”

She put the sandpaper aside and wiped the tabletop with a waxy rag, long swipes that picked up the dust. Bunny sidled along the wall, came to Quoyle, needing his proximity. Squeezed his arm with both hands.

“About halfway through the course this instructor, he works with the Italian furniture designers, said ‘Agnis, I’ve got a tough one for you.’ It was a little twenty-foot fiberglass cruiser that be longed to the school’s janitor. He’d just bought a used boat. My job to fit and upholster the odd-shaped cushions that were settees in the daytime and berths at night. There was a triangular bar that he wanted upholstered in tufted black leather, the tufting spelling out the boat’s name which was, as I remember, Torquemada. I persuaded him that wouldn’t look as well as a classic diamond pattern of pleated tufting with a smart padded bumper at the upper rim. I said he could have the boat’s name etched on a brass plate to hang behind the bar, or a nice wood sign. He said go for it. It worked.

“I put in some curves, scrolled and rolled edges, gathers and pleats-a very sumptuous style that suited the fellow’s dream. Really, there’s quite an art to it, and I was upholstering beyond myself. Pure luck.” She pried open a tin. Yellow wax. The smell of housekeeping and industry.

“Instructor said I had a touch for boat work, that yacht upholstery paid. Said you got to see some great boats and met a lot of interesting people.” Clear enough the aunt let a stranger’s praise change her life.

Quoyle was on the floor with his daughters, building a bridge over the road, a town, a city crowded with block cars and roaring engines. Patiently rebuilding bridges that fell as trucks caromed.

“Dad, make a castle. Make a castle in the road.” He would do anything they told him.

“On the bus on the way back to Long Island I worked it all out, how I could start up my own little business. I sketched out the sign-Hamm’s Yacht Upholstery-with a full-rigged sailing ship under the letters. I intended to rent a storefront down by the wharf at Mussle Harbor. I made a list of the equipment I needed-an industrial-grade sewing machine, button press, pair of padded trestles, taking-down tools-tack lifters and ripping chisels, rebuilding tools-hide strainers, webbing stretchers. I told myself to start small, just get the leather I needed for each job so’s I wouldn’t tie up a lot of money in leathers.”

The castle rose, towers and flying buttresses, one of the aunt’s bobby pins with a bit of yarn for a pennant. Now the cars metamorphosed to galloping horses with destructive urges. Bunny and Sunshine clicked their tongues for hoofbeats.

“So home I get, all excited, just pour this out fast as I could talk, Warren sitting there at the kitchen table nodding. I noticed the weight loss, looked sort of grey like how you get with a bad headache or when you’re really sick. So I said ‘Don’t you feel good?’ Warren, poor soul! All knotted up. Then just burst out with it. ‘Cancer. All through me. Four to six months. Didn’t want to worry you while you were taking your course.’ ”

The aunt got up, scraping her chair, went to the door to get a breath free from the moral stench of wax.

“Turned out, it was over in three months. First thing I did when I pulled myself together was get that puppy and name her.” Didn’t explain the need to say part of Irene Warren’s name fifty times a day, to invoke the happiness that had been. “She didn’t get bad tempered until after she was grown. And then it was only strangers. And after a while I rented the storefront space and started in on yacht upholstery. Warren-my Warren-never saw the shop.”

Quoyle lay on his back on the floor, blocks piled on his chest, rising and falling as he breathed.

“That’s boats,” said Sunshine. “Dad is the water and these are my ferryboats. Dad, you are the water.”

“I feel like it,” said Quoyle. Bunny back to the window, put two blocks on the sill. Looked into tuckamore.

“Anyway, I’ve been working at it for the past thirteen years. And when your father and mother went, though I never knew your mother, I thought it was a good time to come back to the old place. Or risk never seeing it again. I suppose I’m getting old now, though I don’t feel it. You shouldn’t get down on their level, you know.” Meaning Quoyle on the floor, covered with blocks. “They’ll never respect you.”

“Aunt,” said Quoyle, his mind floating somewhere between the boats under his chin and the yacht upholstery business. “The woman in your shop. What did you say she studied at university?” He had always played with his children. The first embarrassed pleasure of stacking blocks with Bunny. He took an interest in sand pies.

“Dawn, you mean? Mrs. Bangs never set foot in a grade school, much less university. Pharology. Science of lighthouses and signal lights. Dawn knows elevations and candlepower, stuff about flashes and blinks and buoys. Bore you silly with it. And you know, she talks about it all day long because it’s slipping out of her head. Use it or lose it. And she’s losing it. Says so herself. But there’s no jobs for her, although the shipping traffic is so heavy you can almost lie awake at night and hear it tearing over the ocean. Why, are you interested in Dawn?” The aunt slid her fingers, feeling the waxy surface.

“No,” said Quoyle. “I don’t even know her. Wondered, that’s all.”

A fly crawled on the table, stopped to wipe its mouth with its front legs, then limped on, the hind legs more like skids than moving limbs. The aunt snapped her rag.

“Why don’t you come by the shop some day next week? Meet Dawn and Mavis. We can have a bite at Skipper Willie’s.”

“That’s a good idea,” said Quoyle. Glanced at Bunny staring out into tuckamore.

“What are you looking at, Bunny?” Her scowling gaze.

“When I grow up,” said Bunny, “I am going to live in a red log cabin and have some pigs. And I will never kill them for their bacon. Because bacon comes from pigs, Dad. Beety told us. And Dennis killed a pig to get its bacon.”

“Is that right?” said Quoyle, feigning amazement.

Tuesday, and Quoyle couldn’t get started on the piece. He shoved the page of rain-smeared notes on the Botterjacht under his pile of papers. He was used to reporting resolutions, votes, minutes, bylaws, agendas, statements embroidered with political ornament. Couldn’t describe the varnished wood of Tough Baby. How put down on paper the Melvilles’ savageness? Bunny much on his mind. The door-scratching business in the old kitchen. He shuffled his papers, looked at his watch again and again. Would go into town and take a look at the aunt’s shop. Wanted to ask her about Bunny. Was there a problem or wasn’t there. And insatiable Quoyle was starving anyway.

Before he started the station wagon the tall woman, Wavey, came to mind. He looked down the road both ways to see if she was walking. Sometimes she went to the school at noon. He thought, maybe, to help in the lunchroom. Didn’t see her. But as he came up over the rise and in sight of Jack’s house, there she was, striding along and swinging a canvas bag. He pulled up, glad she was alone, that he was, too.

It was books: she worked in the school library twice a week, she said. Her voice somewhat hoarse. She sat straight, feet neatly side by side. They looked at each other’s hands, proving the eye’s affinity for the ring finger; both saw gold. Knew at least one thing about each other.

Silence, the sea unfolding in pieces. A skiff and bobbing dory, men leaning to reset a cod trap. Quoyle glanced, saw her pale mouth, neck, eyes somewhere between green glass and earth color. Rough hands. Not so young; heading for forty. But that sense of harmony with something, what, the time or place. He didn’t know but felt it. She turned her head, caught him looking. Eyes flicked away again. But both were pleased.

“I have a daughter starting first grade this fall. Bunny. Her name is Bunny. My youngest daughter is Sunshine, goes to Beety Buggit’s house while I’m at work.” He thought he had to say something. Cleared his throat.

“I heard that.” Her voice so quiet. As if she was talking to herself.

At the school driveway she got halfway out the door, murmured something Quoyle did not catch, then strode away. Maybe it was thank-you. Maybe it was stop by and have a cup of tea some day. Her hands swung. She stopped for a moment, took a white, crumpled tissue from her coat pocket, blew her nose. Still Quoyle sat there. Watched her run up the school steps and in through the door. What was wrong with him?

Just to see the way she walked, a tall woman who walked miles. And Petal had never walked if she could ride. Or lie down.