Caroline was shelling peas at the kitchen table. I smiled at my sister benevolently.
“Mercy, Wheeze, you stink like a crab shanty.”
I gritted my teeth, but the smile was still framing them. “Two dollars,” I said to my mother at the stove, “two dollars and forty-five cents.”
She beamed at me and reached over the propane stove for the pickle crock, where we kept the money. “My,” she said, “that was a good morning. By the time you wash up, we’ll be ready to eat.”
I liked the way she did that. She never suggested that I was dirty or that I stank. Just—“By the time you wash up—” She was a real lady, my mother.
While we were eating, she asked me to go to Kellam’s afterward to get some cream and butter. I knew what that meant. It meant that I had made enough money that she could splurge and make she-crab soup for supper. She wasn’t an islander, but she could make the best she-crab soup on Rass. My grandmother always complained that no good Methodist would ever put spirits into food. But my mother was undaunted. Our soup always had a spoonful or two of her carefully hoarded sherry ladled into it. My grandmother complained, but she never left any in the bowl.
I was sitting there, basking in the day, thinking how pleased my father would be to come home from crabbing and smell his favorite soup, bathing my sister and grandmother in kindly feelings that neither deserved, when Caroline said, “I haven’t got anything to do but practice this summer, so I’ve decided to write a book about my life. Once you’re known,” she explained carefully as though some of us were dim-witted, “once you’re famous, information like that is very valuable. If I don’t get it down now, I may forget.” She said all this in that voice of hers that made me feel slightly nauseated, the one she used when she came home from spending all Saturday going to the mainland for her music lessons, where she’d been told for the billionth time how gifted she was.
I excused myself from the table. The last thing I needed to hear that day was the story of my sister’s life, in which I, her twin, was allowed a very minor role.
2
If my father had not gone to France in 1918 and collected a hip full of German shrapnel, Caroline and I would never have been born. As it was, he did go to war, and when he returned, his childhood sweetheart had married someone else. He worked on other men’s boats as strenuously as his slowly healing body would let him, eking out a meager living for himself and his widowed mother. It was almost ten years before he was strong enough to buy a boat of his own and go after crabs and oysters like a true Rass waterman.
One fall, before he had regained his full strength, a young woman came to teach in the island school (three classrooms plus a gymnasium of sorts), and, somehow, though I was never able to understand it fully, the elegant little schoolmistress fell in love with my large, red-faced, game-legged father, and they were married.
What my father needed more than a wife was sons. On Rass, sons represented wealth and security. What my mother bore him was girls, twin girls. I was the elder by a few minutes. I always treasured the thought of those minutes. They represented the only time in my life when I was the center of everyone’s attention. From the moment Caroline was born, she snatched it all for herself.
When my mother and grandmother told the story of our births, it was mostly of how Caroline had refused to breathe. How the midwife smacked and prayed and cajoled the tiny chest to move. How the cry of joy went up at the first weak wail—“no louder than a kitten’s mew.”
“But where was I?” I once asked. “When everyone was working over Caroline, where was I?”
A cloud passed across my mother’s eyes, and I knew that she could not remember. “In the basket,” she said. “Grandma bathed you and dressed you and put you in the basket.”
“Did you, Grandma?”
“How should I know?” she snapped. “It was a long time ago.”
I felt cold all over, as though I was the newborn infant a second time, cast aside and forgotten.
Ten days after our birth, despite the winter wind and a threat of being iced in, my mother took Caroline on the ferry to the hospital in Crisfield. My father had no money for doctors and hospitals, but my mother was determined. Caroline was so tiny, so fragile, she must be given every chance of life. My mother’s father was alive in those days. He may have paid the bill. I’ve never known. What I do know is that my mother went eight or ten times each day to the hospital to nurse Caroline, believing that the milk of a loving mother would supply a healing power that even doctors could not.
But what of me? “Who took care of me while you were gone?” The story always left the other twin, the stronger twin, washed and dressed and lying in a basket. Clean and cold and motherless.
Again the vague look and smile. “Your father was here and your grandmother.”
“Was I a good baby, Grandma?”
“No worse than most, I reckon.”
“What did I do, Grandma? Tell me about when I was a baby.”
“How can I remember? It’s been a long time.”
My mother, seeing my distress, said, “You were a good baby, Louise. You never gave us a minute’s worry.” She meant it to comfort me, but it only distressed me further. Shouldn’t I have been at least a minute’s worry? Wasn’t it all the months of worry that had made Caroline’s life so dear to them all?
When Caroline and I were two months old, my mother brought her back to the island. By then I had grown fat on tinned milk formula. Caroline continued at my mother’s breast for another twelve months. There is a rare snapshot of the two of us sitting on the front stoop the summer we were a year and a half old. Caroline is tiny and exquisite, her blonde curls framing a face that is glowing with laughter, her arms outstretched to whoever is taking the picture. I am hunched there like a fat dark shadow, my eyes cut sideways toward Caroline, thumb in mouth, the pudgy hand covering most of my face.
The next winter we both had whooping cough. My mother thinks that I was sick enough to have a croup tent set up. But everyone remembers that Captain Billy got the ferry out at 2:00 A.M. to rush Caroline and my mother to the hospital.
We went that way through all the old childhood diseases except for chicken pox. We both had a heavy case of that, but only I still sport the scars. That mark on the bridge of my nose is a chicken pox scar. It was more noticeable when I was thirteen than it is now. Once my father referred to me teasingly as “Old Scarface” and looked perfectly bewildered when I burst into tears.
I suppose my father was used to treating me with a certain roughness, not quite as he would have treated a son, but certainly differently from the way he treated Caroline. My father, like nearly every man on our island, was a waterman. This meant that six days a week, long before dawn he was in his boat. From November to March, he was tonging for oysters, and from late April into the fall, he was crabbing. There are few jobs in this world more physically demanding than the work of those men who choose to follow the water. For one slightly lame man alone on a boat, the work was more than doubled. He needed a son and I would have given anything to be that son, but on Rass in those days, men’s work and women’s work were sharply divided, and a waterman’s boat was not the place for a girl.
When I was six my father taught me how to pole a skiff so I could net crabs in the eelgrass near the shore. That was my consolation for not being allowed to go aboard the Portia Sue as his hand. As pleased as I was to have my own little skiff, it didn’t make up for his refusal to take me on his boat. I kept praying to turn into a boy, I loved my father’s boat with such a passion. He had named it after my mother’s favorite character from Shakespeare to please her, but he had insisted on the Sue. My mother’s name is Susan. In all likelihood he was the only waterman on the Chesapeake Bay whose boat was named for a woman lawyer out of Shakespeare.
My father was not educated in the sense that my mother was. He had dropped out of the island school at twelve to follow the water. I think he would have taken easily to books, but he came home at night
too tired to read. I can remember my mother sometimes reading aloud to him. He would sit in his chair, his head back, his eyes closed, but he wasn’t asleep. As a child, I always suspected he was imagining. Perhaps he was.
Although our house was one of the smaller of the forty or so houses on the island, for several years we owned the only piano. It came to us on the ferry after my mainland grandfather died. I think Caroline and I were about four when it arrived. She says she remembers meeting it at the dock and following while six men helped my father roll it on a dolly to our house, for there were no trucks or cars on the island.
Caroline also says that she began at once to pick out tunes by ear and make up songs for herself. It may be true. I can hardly recall a time when Caroline was not playing the piano well enough to accompany herself while she sang.
My mother not being an islander and the islanders not being acquainted with pianos, no one realized at the beginning the effect of damp salt air on the instrument. Within a few weeks it was lugubriously out of tune. My inventive mother solved this problem by going to the mainland and finding a Crisfield piano tuner who could also give lessons. He came by ferry once a month and taught a half-dozen island youngsters, including Caroline and me, on our piano. During the Depression he was glad to get the extra work. For food, a night’s lodging, and the use of our piano, he tuned it and gave Caroline and me free lessons. The rest, children of the island’s slightly more affluent, paid fifty cents a lesson. During the month each paid twenty cents a week to practice on our piano. In those days, an extra eighty cents a week was a princely sum.
I was no better or worse than most. We all seemed to get as far as “Country Gardens” and stay there. Caroline, on the other hand, was playing Chopin by the time she was nine. Sometimes people would stand outside the house just to listen while she practiced. Whenever I am tempted to dismiss the poor or uneducated for their vulgar tastes, I see the face of old Auntie Braxton, as she stands stock still in front of our picket fence, lips parted to reveal her almost toothless gums, eyes shining, drinking in a polonaise as though it were heavenly nourishment.
By the time we were ten, it became apparent, though, that Caroline’s true gift was her voice. She had always been able to sing clearly and in tune, but the older she grew, the lovelier the tune became. The mainland county schoolboard, which managed the island school more by neglect than anything else, suddenly, and without explanation, sent the school a piano the year Caroline and I were in the fifth grade, and the next year, by what could only have been the happiest of coincidences, the new teacher appointed as half of the high school staff was a young man who not only knew how to play a piano but had the talent and strength of will to organize a chorus. Caroline was, of course, his inspiration and focal point. There was little to entertain the island youth, so we sang. And because we sang every day and Mr. Rice was a gifted teacher, we sang surprisingly well for children who had known little music in their lives.
We went to a contest on the mainland the spring we were thirteen and might have won except that when the judges realized our chief soloist was not yet in high school, we were disqualified. Mr. Rice was furious, but we children figured that the mainland schools were too embarrassed to be beaten out by islanders and so made up a rule to save their faces.
Sometime before that Mr. Rice had persuaded my parents that Caroline should have voice lessons. At first they refused, not because of the time and effort it would take to get Caroline to the mainland every Saturday, but because there was no money. But Mr. Rice was determined. He took Caroline to the college in Salisbury and had her sing for the head of the music department. Not only did the man agree to take Caroline on as a private pupil, he waived the fee. Even then the two round-trip tickets on the ferry plus the taxi fare to Salisbury put an unbelievable strain on the weekly budget, but Caroline is the kind of person other people sacrifice for as a matter of course.
I was proud of my sister, but that year, something began to rankle beneath the pride. Life begins to turn upside down at thirteen. I know that now. But at the time I thought the blame for my unhappiness must be fixed—on Caroline, on my grandmother, on my mother, even on myself. Soon I was able to blame the war.
3
Even I who read Time magazine from cover to cover every week was unprepared for Pearl Harbor. The machinations of European powers and the funny mustached German dictator were as remote to our island in the fall of 1941 as Silas Marner, which sapped our energies through eighth-grade English.
There were hints, but at the time I didn’t make sense of them: Mr. Rice’s great concern for “peace on earth” as we began at Thanksgiving to prepare for our Christmas concert; overhearing a partial conversation between my parents in which my father pronounced himself “useless,” to which my mother replied, “Thank the Lord.”
It was not a phrase my mother often used, but it was a true island expression. Rass had lived in the fear and mercy of the Lord since the early nineteenth century, when Joshua Thomas, “The Parson of the Islands,” won every man, woman, and child of us to Methodism. Old Joshua’s stamp remained upon us—Sunday school and Sunday service morning and evening, and on Wednesday night prayer meeting where the more fervent would stand to witness to the Lord’s mercies of the preceding week and all the sick and straying would be held up in prayer before the Throne of Grace.
We kept the Sabbath. That meant no work, no radio, no fun on Sunday. But for some reason my parents were out on the Sunday afternoon that was December 7, my grandmother was snoring loudly from her bed, and Caroline was reading the deadly dull Sunday school paper—our only permitted reading on the Sabbath other than the Bible itself. So I, bored almost to madness, had wandered into the living room and turned on the radio, very low so that no one could hear, and pressed my ear against the speaker.
“The Japanese in a predawn surprise attack have destroyed the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. I repeat. The White House has confirmed that the Japanese…”
I knew by the chill that went through my body that it meant war. All my magazine reading and overheard remarks fell at once into a grotesque but understandable pattern. I rushed up to our room where Caroline, still innocent and golden, lay stomach down on her bed reading.
“Caroline!”
She didn’t even look up. “Caroline!” I ripped the paper from under her hands. “The Japanese have invaded America!”
“Oh, Wheeze, for pity sake.” And hardly looking up, she grabbed for her paper. I was used to her ignoring me, but this time I would not allow it. I snatched her arm and dragged her off her bed and down the stairs to the radio. I turned the volume up full. The fact that the Japanese had attacked Hawaii rather than invaded the continental United States was a distinction that neither of us bothered to quibble over. She, like me, was totally caught by the tone of fear that even the smooth baritone of the announcer’s voice could not conceal. Caroline’s eyes went wide, and, as we listened, she did something she had never done before. She took my hand. We stood there, squeezing each other’s hand to the point of pain.
That is how our parents found us. There was no remonstrance for having broken the Fourth Commandment. The crime of the Japanese erased all lesser sinning. The four of us huddled together before the radio set. It was one of those pointed ones that remind you of a brown wood church, with long oval windows over a cloth-covered speaker.
At six, Grandma woke, hungry and petulant. No one had given any thought to food. How could one think of supper when the world had just gone up in flames? Finally, my mother went to the kitchen and made plates of cold meat and leftover potato salad, which she brought to the three of us hunched about the set. She even brought coffee for us all. Grandma insisted on being served properly at the table. Caroline and I had never drunk coffee in our lives, and the fact that our mother served us coffee that night made us both realize that our secure, ordinary world was forever in the past.
Just as I was about to take my first solemn sip, the announcer said, “We pause, now, for sta
tion identification.” I nearly choked. The world had indeed gone mad.
Within a few days we learned that Mr. Rice had volunteered for the army and would be leaving for the war soon after Christmas. In chorus one morning the irony of celebrating the birth of the Prince of Peace suddenly seemed too much. I raised my hand.
“Yes, Louise?”
“Mr. Rice,” I said, standing and dramatically darkening my voice to what I imagined to be the proper tone for mourning, “Mr. Rice, I have a proposal to make.” There were a few snickers at my choice of words, but I ignored them. “I feel, sir, that under the circumstances, we should cancel Christmas.”
Mr. Rice’s right eyebrow shot up. “Do you want to explain that, Louise?”
“How,” I asked, my glance sweeping about to catch the amused looks of the others, “how dare we celebrate while around the world thousands are suffering and dying?” Caroline was staring down at her desk, her cheeks red.
Mr. Rice cleared his throat. “Thousands were suffering and dying when Christ was born, Louise.” He was clearly discomfited by my behavior. I was sorry now that I had begun but was in too deeply to retreat.
“Yes,” I agreed grandly. “But the world has not seen, neither has it heard, such a tragic turn of events as we face in this our time.”
Tiny little one-syllable explosions went off about the room like a string of Chinese firecrackers. Mr. Rice looked stern.
My face was burning. I’m not sure whether I was more embarrassed by the sound of my own voice or the snorts of my schoolmates. I sat down, my whole body aflame. The snorts broke into open laughter. Mr. Rice tapped his baton on his music stand to restore order. I thought he might try to explain what I had meant, would try in some way to mediate for me, but he said only, “Now then, let’s try it once more from the beginning—”
“God rest ye merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay,” sang everyone except me. I was afraid if I opened my mouth, I might let go the enormous sob that was lurking there, right at the top of my throat.