34
WE WERE SITTING at the table in Ariane’s kitchen. I was working on my second helping of lasagne. She was still poking at her first.
“Night after night, he would stand at the window,” she said, “as if he were standing at the porthole of their cabin, and he would describe their progress.”
“Did you—ah—”
“Did I ‘ah’ what?”
“See him there?”
“You mean, did I watch him?”
I nodded.
“Oh, yes. Many a night.” She put her fork down. She had given up on her lasagne. “I’d see him there, just a dark shape in the window. Filling the window. He was a big man, your grandfather.” She took a swallow of her wine. “And many, many a night he and I talked about—well—about everything. He would come to Corinne’s, and we would talk. I was always—often, anyway—trying to cheer him up. I even played Tootsie Koochikov now and then—a little bit. But he was awfully edgy—”
“Fretful.”
“Yes. Anxious. He grew more and more concerned that his being away would spoil the illusion. He couldn’t bear to be out of the house for long absences. He would tell Eleanor that he was going to be up on deck standing watch, but even so he just couldn’t bear to be away for long. He needed some help.”
OF COURSE, he had some help. I think we all helped, at least a little, but he didn’t have the kind of help that Ariane was talking about, someone who was as involved in the voyage as he was, as devoted to it. He needed, in effect, a first mate, and Ariane was about to sign on in that capacity, but before she does, fairness dictates that I pause here to acknowledge the help of kindly Dr. Roberts. The whole effort would never have succeeded without him.
Dr. Roberts was a nearly legendary doctor of the small-town variety. His grandfather and his father had both been doctors in Babbington before him, and most of the citizens of the older sections of Babbington had been under the care of one Dr. Roberts or another; many of them had been delivered by a Dr. Roberts. This Dr. Roberts, Wendell, the one I always think of as “kindly Dr. Roberts,” was my grandparents’ contemporary. He had known them all his life. He came to the house to attend to my grandmother when she was lying-in with her two children—my father and his ill-fated older brother, he was there to see to my father’s and uncle’s sniffles and childhood diseases, and of course to attend to my grandmother when she was dying.
The Robertses were descended from displaced Acadians, as were several other families in Babbington, Grandmother’s among them, and like most of the displaced Acadians in Babbington they had abandoned their faith and their old-world allegiances long ago. My grandmother was an Anglophile and a regular parishioner of the Babbington Episcopal church. My grandfather spent his Sundays on the bay, although at Easter and Christmas he would escort my grandmother to church, even though she never required it. (His family, the Leroy family, is another story. Their American sojourn began when Black Jacques Leroy was drummed out of the Foreign Legion in Algeria for, as my grandmother used to put it, “finding it impossible not to keep saying amusing things about Napoleon III.” That may or may not have been the actual reason; my grandfather used to make his skeptical snort when Grandmother mentioned it. He made that snort in lieu of any other remark when he heard people talking nonsense. It had something of a laugh in it and something of the involuntary shudder that one makes at the sight of something revolting, like maggoty meat. I heard him, many times, make that snort from behind his newspaper, snorting at the reported follies of humankind. With regard to religion, Grandfather’s attitude was summed up in the skeptical snort. He could be counted on to snort whenever my grandmother and one of her fellow parishioners began talking about church doings. I think that he was, in the sense that Lucretius and Diderot were, a materialist.)
[to be continued]
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