You Can’t Go Home Again
18
ROOTS
September 1968
The woman next to me probably weighed three hundred pounds. She wheezed in her sleep, lungs laboring to lift the burden of her massive bosom for the two-hundred-thousandth time. Her hip and thigh and pudgy arm pressed against mine, unpleasantly warm and damp.
There was no escape; I was pinned on the other side by the steel curve of the plane’s fuselage. I eased one arm upward and flicked on the overhead light in order to see my watch. Ten-thirty, by London time; at least another six hours before the landing in New York promised escape.
The plane was filled with the collective sighs and snorts of passengers dozing as best they might. Sleep for me was out of the question. With a sigh of resignation, I dug into the pocket in front of me for the half-finished romance novel I had stashed there. The tale was by one of my favorite authors, but I found my attention slipping from the book—either back to Roger and Brianna, whom I had left in Edinburgh, there to continue the hunt, or forward, to what awaited me in Boston.
I wasn’t sure just what did await me, which was part of the problem. I had been obliged to come back, if only temporarily; I had long since exhausted my vacation, plus several extensions. There were matters to be dealt with at the hospital, bills to be collected and paid at home, the maintenance of the house and yard to be attended to—I shuddered to think what heights the lawn in the backyard must have attained by now—friends to be called on…
One friend in particular. Joseph Abernathy had been my closest friend, from medical school on. Before I made any final—and likely irrevocable—decisions, I wanted to talk to him. I closed the book in my lap and sat tracing the extravagant loops of the title with one finger, smiling a little. Among other things, I owed a taste for romance novels to Joe.
* * *
I had known Joe since the beginning of my medical training. He stood out among the other interns at Boston General, just as I did. I was the only woman among the budding doctors; Joe was the only black intern.
Our shared singularity gave us each a special awareness for the other; both of us sensed it clearly, though neither mentioned it. We worked together very well, but both of us were wary—for good reason—of exposing ourselves, and the tenuous bond between us, much too nebulous to be called friendship, remained unacknowledged until near the end of our internship.
I had done my first unassisted surgery that day—an uncomplicated appendectomy, done on a teenaged boy in good health. It had gone well, and there was no reason to think there would be postoperative complications. Still, I felt an odd kind of possessiveness about the boy, and didn’t want to go home until he was awake and out of Recovery, even though my shift had ended. I changed clothes and went to the doctors’ lounge on the third floor to wait.
The lounge wasn’t empty. Joseph Abernathy sat in one of the rump-sprung stuffed chairs, apparently absorbed in a copy of U.S. News & World Report. He looked up as I entered, and nodded briefly to me before returning to his reading.
The lounge was equipped with stacks of magazines—salvaged from the waiting rooms—and a number of tattered paperbacks, abandoned by departing patients. Seeking distraction, I thumbed past a six-month-old copy of Studies in Gastroenterology, a ragged copy of Time magazine, and a neat stack of Watchtower tracts. Finally picking up one of the books, I sat down with it.
It had no cover, but the title page read The Impetuous Pirate. “A sensuous, compelling love story, boundless as the Spanish Main!” said the line beneath the title. The Spanish Main, eh? If escape was what I wanted, I couldn’t do much better, I thought, and opened the book at random. It fell open automatically to page 42.
Tipping up her nose scornfully, Tessa tossed her lush blond tresses back, oblivious to the fact that this caused her voluptuous breasts to become even more prominent in the low-necked dress. Valdez’s eyes widened at the sight, but he gave no outward sign of the effect such wanton beauty had on him.
“I thought that we might become better acquainted, Señorita,” he suggested, in a low, sultry voice that made little shivers of anticipation run up and down Tessa’s back.
“I have no interest in becoming acquainted with a…a…filthy, despicable, underhanded pirate!” she said.
Valdez’s teeth gleamed as he smiled at her, his hand stroking the handle of the dagger at his belt. He was impressed at her fearlessness; so bold, so impetuous…and so beautiful.
I raised an eyebrow, but went on reading, fascinated.
With an air of imperious possession, Valdez swooped an arm about Tessa’s waist.
“You forget, Señorita,” he murmured, the words tickling her sensitive earlobe, “you are a prize of war; and the Captain of a pirate ship has first choice of the booty!”
Tessa struggled in his powerful arms as he bore her to the berth and tossed her lightly onto the jeweled coverlet. She struggled to catch her breath, watching in terror as he undressed, laying aside his azure-blue velvet coat and then the fine ruffled white linen shirt. His chest was magnificent, a smooth expanse of gleaming bronze. Her fingertips ached to touch it, even though her heart pounded deafeningly in her ears as he reached for the waistband of his breeches.
“But no,” he said, pausing. “It is unfair of me to neglect you, Señorita. Allow me.” With an irresistible smile, he bent and gently cupped Tessa’s breasts in the heated palms of his calloused hands, enjoying the voluptuous weight of them through the thin silken fabric. With a small scream, Tessa shrank away from his probing touch, pressing back against the lace-embroidered feather pillow.
“You resist? What a pity to spoil such fine clothing, Señorita…” He took a firm grasp on her jade-silk bodice and yanked, causing Tessa’s fine white breasts to leap out of their concealment like a pair of plump partridges taking wing.
I made a sound, causing Dr. Abernathy to look sharply over the top of his U.S. News & World Report. Hastily rearranging my face into a semblance of dignified absorption, I turned the page.
Valdez’s thick black curls swept her chest as he fastened his hot lips on Tessa’s rose-pink nipples, making waves of anguished desire wash through her being. Weakened by the unaccustomed feelings that his ardor aroused in her, she was unable to move as his hand stealthily sought the hem of her gown and his blazing touch traced tendrils of sensation up the length of her slender thigh.
“Ah, mi amor,” he groaned. “So lovely, so pure. You drive me mad with desire, mi amor. I have wanted you since I first saw you, so proud and cold on the deck of your father’s ship. But not so cold now, my dear, eh?”
In fact, Valdez’s kisses were wreaking havoc on Tessa’s feelings. How, how could she be feeling such things for this man, who had cold-bloodedly sunk her father’s ship, and murdered a hundred men with his own hands? She should be recoiling in horror, but instead she found herself gasping for breath, opening her mouth to receive his burning kisses, arching her body in involuntary abandon beneath the demanding pressure of his burgeoning manhood.
“Ah, mi amor,” he gasped. “I cannot wait. But…I do not wish to hurt you. Gently, mi amor, gently.”
Tessa gasped as she felt the increasing pressure of his desire making its presence known between her legs.
“Oh!” she said. “Oh, please! You can’t! I don’t want you to!”
[Fine time to start making protests, I thought.]
“Don’t worry, mi amor. Trust me.”
Gradually, little by little, she relaxed under the touch of his hypnotic caresses, feeling the warmth in her stomach grow and spread. His lips brushed her breast, and his hot breath, murmuring reassurances, took away all her resistance. As she relaxed, her thighs opened without her willing it. Moving with infinite slowness, his engorged shaft teased aside the membrane of her innocence…
I let out a whoop and lost my grasp on the book, which slid off my lap and fell on the floor with a plop near Dr. Abernathy’s feet.
“Excuse me,” I murmured, and bent to r
etrieve it, my face flaming. As I came up with The Impetuous Pirate in my sweaty grasp, though, I saw that far from preserving his usual austere mien, Dr. Abernathy was grinning widely.
“Let me guess,” he said. “Valdez just teased aside the membrane of her innocence?”
“Yes,” I said, breaking out into helpless giggling again. “How did you know?”
“Well, you weren’t too far into it,” he said, taking the book from my hand. His short, blunt fingers flicked the pages expertly. “It had to be that one, or maybe the one on page 73, where he laves her pink mounds with his hungry tongue.”
“He what?”
“See for yourself.” He thrust the book back into my hands, pointing to a spot halfway down the page.
Sure enough, “…lifting aside the coverlet, he bent his coal-black head and laved her pink mounds with his hungry tongue. Tessa moaned and…” I gave an unhinged shriek.
“You’ve actually read this?” I demanded, tearing my eyes away from Tessa and Valdez.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, the grin widening. He had a gold tooth, far back on the right side. “Two or three times. It’s not the best one, but it isn’t bad.”
“The best one? There are more like this?”
“Sure. Let’s see…” He rose and began digging through the pile of tattered paperbacks on the table. “You want to look for the ones with no covers,” he explained. “Those are the best.”
“And here I thought you never read anything but Lancet and the Journal of the AMA,”I said.
“What, I spend thirty-six hours up to my elbows in people’s guts, and I want to come up here and read ‘Advances in Gallbladder Resection?’ Hell, no—I’d rather sail the Spanish Main with Valdez.” He eyed me with some interest, the grin still not quite gone. “I didn’t think you read anything but The New England Journal of Medicine, either, Lady Jane,” he said. “Appearances are deceiving, huh?”
“Must be,” I said dryly. “What’s this ‘Lady Jane’?”
“Oh, Hoechstein started that one,” he said, leaning back with his fingers linked around one knee. “It’s the voice, that accent that sounds like you just drank tea with the Queen. That’s what you’ve got, keeps the guys from bein’ worse than they are. See, you sound like Winston Churchill—if Winston Churchill was a lady, that is—and that scares them a little. You’ve got somethin’ else, though”—he viewed me thoughtfully, rocking back in his chair. “You have a way of talking like you expect to get your way, and if you don’t, you’ll know the reason why. Where’d you learn that?”
“In the war,” I said, smiling at his description.
His eyebrows went up. “Korea?”
“No, I was a combat nurse during the Second World War; in France. I saw a lot of Head Matrons who could turn interns and orderlies to jelly with a glance.” And later, I had had a good deal of practice, where that air of inviolate authority—assumed though it might be—had stood me in good stead against people with a great deal more power than the nursing staff and interns of Boston General Hospital.
He nodded, absorbed in my explanation. “Yeah, that makes sense. I used Walter Cronkite, myself.”
“Walter Cronkite?” I goggled at him.
He grinned again, showing his gold tooth. “You can think of somebody better? Besides, I got to hear him for free on the radio or the TV every night. I used to entertain my mama—she wanted me to be a preacher.” He smiled, half ruefully. “If I talked like Walter Cronkite where we lived in those days, I wouldn’t have lived to go to med school.”
I was liking Joe Abernathy more by the second. “I hope your mother wasn’t disappointed that you became a doctor intstead of a preacher.”
“Tell you the truth, I’m not sure,” he said, still grinning. “When I told her, she stared at me for a minute, then heaved a big sigh and said, ‘Well, at least you can get my rheumatism medicine for me cheap.’”
I laughed wryly. “I didn’t get that much enthusiasm when I told my husband I was going to be a doctor. He stared at me, and finally said if I was bored, why didn’t I volunteer to write letters for the inmates of the nursing home.”
Joe’s eyes were a soft golden brown, like toffee drops. There was a glint of humor in them as they fixed on me.
“Yeah, folks still think it’s fine to say to your face that you can’t be doing what you’re doing. ‘Why are you here, little lady, and not home minding your man and child?’” he mimicked.
He grinned wryly, and patted my hand. “Don’t worry, they’ll give it up sooner or later. They mostly don’t ask me to my face anymore why I ain’t cleanin’ the toilets, like God made me to.”
Then the nurse had come with word that my appendix was awake, and I had left, but the friendship begun on page 42 had flourished, and Joe Abernathy had become one of my best friends; possibly the only person close to me who truly understood what I did, and why.
I smiled a little, feeling the slickness of the embossing on the cover. Then I leaned forward and put the book back into the seat pocket. Perhaps I didn’t want to escape just now.
Outside, a floor of moonlit cloud cut us off from the earth below. Up here, everything was silent, beautiful and serene, in marked contrast to the turmoil of life below.
I had the odd feeling of being suspended, motionless, cocooned in solitude, even the heavy breathing of the woman next to me only a part of the white noise that makes up silence, one with the tepid rush of the air-conditioning and the shuffle of the stewardesses’ shoes along the carpet. At the same time, I knew we were rushing on inexorably through the air, propelled at hundreds of miles per hour to some end—as for it being a safe one, we could only hope.
I closed my eyes, in suspended animation. Back in Scotland, Roger and Bree were hunting Jamie. Ahead, in Boston, my job—and Joe—were waiting. And Jamie himself? I tried to push the thought away, determined not to think of him until the decision was made.
I felt a slight ruffling of my hair, and one lock brushed against my cheek, light as a lover’s touch. But surely it was no more than the rush of air from the vent overhead, and my imagination that the stale smells of perfume and cigarettes were suddenly underlaid by the scents of wool and heather.
19
TO LAY A GHOST
Home at last, to the house on Furey Street, where I had lived with Frank and Brianna for nearly twenty years. The azaleas by the door were not quite dead, but their leaves hung in limp, shabby clusters, a thick layer of fallen leaves curling on the dry-baked bed underneath. It was a hot summer—there wasn’t any other kind in Boston—and the August rains hadn’t come, even though it was mid-September by now.
I set my bags by the front door and went to turn on the hose. It had been lying in the sun; the green rubber snake was hot enough to burn my hand, and I shifted it uneasily from palm to palm until the rumble of water brought it suddenly alive and cooled it with a burst of spray.
I didn’t like azaleas all that much to start with. I would have pulled them out long since, but I had been reluctant to alter any detail of the house after Frank’s death, for Brianna’s sake. Enough of a shock, I thought, to begin university and have your father die in one year, without more changes. I had been ignoring the house for a long time; I could go on doing so.
“All right!” I said crossly to the azaleas, as I turned off the hose. “I hope you’re happy, because that’s all you get. I want to go have a drink myself. And a bath,” I added, seeing their mud-spattered leaves.
* * *
I sat on the edge of the big sunken tub in my dressing gown, watching the water thunder in, churning the bubble bath into clouds of perfumed sea-foam. Steam rose from the boiling surface; the water would be almost too hot.
I turned it off—one quick, neat twist of the tap—and sat for a moment, the house around me still save for the crackle of popping bath bubbles, faint as the sounds of a far-off battle. I realized perfectly well what I was doing. I had been doing it ever since I stepped aboard the Flying Scotsman in Inverness, and f
elt the thrum of the track come alive beneath my feet. I was testing myself.
I had been taking careful note of the machines—all the contrivances of modern daily life—and more important, of my own response to them. The train to Edinburgh, the plane to Boston, the taxicab from the airport, and all the dozens of tiny mechanical flourishes attending—vending machines, street lights, the plane’s mile-high lavatory, with its swirl of nasty blue-green disinfectant, whisking waste and germs away with the push of a button. Restaurants, with their tidy certificates from the Department of Health, guaranteeing at least a better than even chance of escaping food poisoning when eating therein. Inside my own house, the omnipresent buttons that supplied light and heat and water and cooked food.
The question was—did I care? I dipped a hand into the steaming bathwater and swirled it to and fro, watching the shadows of the vortex dancing in the marble depths. Could I live without all the “conveniences,” large and small, to which I was accustomed?
I had been asking myself that with each touch of a button, each rumble of a motor, and was quite sure that the answer was “yes.” Time didn’t make all the difference, after all; I could walk across the city and find people who lived without many of these conveniences—farther abroad and there were entire countries where people lived in reasonable content and complete ignorance of electricity.
For myself, I had never cared a lot. I had lived with my uncle Lamb, an eminent archaeologist, since my own parents’ death when I was five. Consequently, I had grown up in conditions that could conservatively be called “primitive,” as I accompanied him on all his field expeditions. Yes, hot baths and light bulbs were nice, but I had lived without them during several periods of my life—during the war, for instance—and never found the lack of them acute.
The water had cooled enough to be tolerable. I dropped the dressing gown on the floor and stepped in, feeling a pleasant shiver as the heat at my feet made my shoulders prickle in cool contrast.
I subsided into the tub and relaxed, stretching my legs. Eighteenth-century hip baths were barely more than large barrels; one normally bathed in segments, immersing the center of the body first, with the legs hanging outside, then stood up and rinsed the upper torso while soaking the feet. More frequently, one bathed from a pitcher and basin, with the aid of a cloth.
No, conveniences and comforts were merely that. Nothing essential, nothing I couldn’t do without.
Not that conveniences were the only issue, by a long chalk. The past was a dangerous country. But even the advances of so-called civilization were no guarantee of safety. I had lived through two major “modern” wars—actually served on the battlefields of one of them—and could see another taking shape on the telly every evening.
“Civilized” warfare was, if anything, more horrifying than its older versions. Daily life might be safer, but only if one chose one’s walk in it with care. Parts of Roxbury now were as dangerous as any alley I had walked in the Paris of two hundred years past.
I sighed and pulled up the plug with my toes. No use speculating about impersonal things like bathtubs, bombs, and rapists. Indoor plumbing was no more than a minor distraction. The real issue was the people involved, and always had been. Me, and Brianna, and Jamie.
The last of the water gurgled away. I stood up, feeling slightly light-headed, and wiped away the last of the bubbles. The big mirror was misted with steam, but clear enough to show me myself from the knees upward, pink as a boiled shrimp.
Dropping the towel, I looked myself over. Flexed my arms, raised them overhead, checking for bagginess. None; biceps and triceps all nicely defined, deltoids neatly rounded and sloping into the high curve of the pectoralis major. I turned slightly to one side, tensing and relaxing my abdominals—obliques in decent tone, the rectus abdominis flattening almost to concavity.
“Good thing the family doesn’t run to fat,” I murmured. Uncle Lamb had remained trim and taut to the day of his death at seventy-five. I supposed my father—Uncle Lamb’s brother—had been constructed similarly, and wondered suddenly what my mother’s backside had looked like. Women, after all, had a certain amount of excess adipose tissue to contend with.
I turned all the way round and peered back over my shoulder at the mirror. The long columnar muscles of my back gleamed wetly as I twisted; I still had a waist, and a good narrow one, too.
As for my own backside—“Well, no dimples, anyway,” I said aloud. I turned around and stared at my reflection.
“It could be a lot worse,” I said to it.
* * *
Feeling somewhat heartened, I put on my nightgown and went about the business of putting the house to bed. No cats to put out, no dogs to feed—Bozo, the last of our dogs, had died of old age the year before, and I had not wanted to get another, with Brianna off at school and my own hours at the hospital long and irregular.
Adjust the thermostat, check the locks of windows and doors, see that the burners of the stove were off. That was all there was to it. For eighteen years, the nightly route had included a stop in Brianna’s room, but not since she had left for university.
Moved by a mixture of habit and compulsion, I pushed open the door to her room and clicked on the light. Some people have the knack of objects, and others haven’t. Bree had it; scarcely an inch of wall space showed between the posters, photographs, dried flowers, scraps of tie-dyed fabric, framed certificates and other impedimenta on the walls.
Some people have a way of arranging everything about them, so the objects take on not only their own meaning, and a relation to the other things displayed with them, but something more besides—an indefinable aura that belongs as much to