The Faithful

THE FAITHFUL

The ice is silver: tarnished and spotty in the moonlight. Harvey, my mother’s second husband, not my father, has just gassed up the chainsaw. It screeches to life, all teeth and danger.

My mother, whom we have all referred to as ‘Kitty’ since the early 1970s, pops open a bottle of Moët and Chandon. “Merry Christmas,” she laughs up and down the scale. Champagne overflows onto her lap, then rolls off the coyote fur she’s wrapped around herself for warmth. The coat is old. It sheds in handfuls. She is sitting on the edge of the frozen lake on a chaise lounge. She is wearing a bathing suit, the color of a summer sky, but you can’t see it. The coat covers all.

It’s their last Christmas here. Harvey and my mother are retiring to a condo in Orlando, Florida. “We hear the call of the mouse,” Harvey likes to say. Then, often, he sings the theme to “The Mickey Mouse Club.”

“Who’s the leader of the club that’s made for you and me?”

I try not to answer.

Harvey and my mother are selling everything: the business, the house, and this small lake, which has no name. I still call it Dad’s Lake, because my father had it dug. He loved it. The house winds around a good portion of it. I suspect, as ‘waterfront property,’ the house will bring good money. The ad in the newspaper referred to it as an “Executive Retreat.”

I’m afraid to touch anything. Everything feels for sale.

On the shore, just a few feet away, the bonfire is edgy. Bits of old doors and lumber from the barn fuel the fire. It arcs, snaps at the sky.

Kitty, my mother–the phrase always fills me with amazement. Now, at this moment, even more so. She’s wearing cat’s-eye sunglasses, despite the fact that it’s dark out, and a long white scarf wrapped around her head. It’s her usual. She’s worn that same Lana Turner look since she was 17 years old. She looks like nobody’s mother, but has two children. I have a younger sister, Josie, who no longer speaks to either of us.
I hold the paper cups out for Mother to pour. For a moment, the chainsaw sputters, coughs. And then goes quiet. My ears still ring from it. Overhead, the squawking of geese, late leaving, goes unheard.

“Need any help, Harvey?” I shout over my shoulder but don’t know anything about chainsaws. He shakes his silver head. Pulls the cord again. The saw jerks back and hits the ice chewing. Black diamonds fly into the Minnesota night.

“Harvey never needs help, darling. He’s a determined man,” my mother says. She should know. Harvey is also my uncle. He and Dad, born a year apart, looked nearly identical. Like twins, some said.

“So shoot me,” she said when she married Harvey last year.

Nobody came to the wedding, not even me. It isn’t that I don’t like Harvey. He’s great. Not my father, but great. Really great, that’s what I told Kitty. “Just really great.”
She hung up the phone.

Now, nearly a year later, under the shy new moon, Kitty looks all World War II pretty again, just as she was when she and my father met at the USO. He was a sailor on the USS Intrepid, an aircraft carrier. The Intrepid is huge, an Essex Class carrier.

“It was my brush with greatness,” he told me.

I grew up in the shadow of it.

When Josie and I were kids, Dad told us all about The Big Boat. It was the one bedtime story we never grew tired of. He told us about how hard it was to land the bombers on the flight deck at night in the middle of the sea, in the middle of nowhere.

“In that thick ink, the ocean and sky blurred into each other,” he said. “Runway lights looked like stars. Stars just looked away. Worst of all, everything smelled of gas and smoke. Always. Creeps into your dreams.”

The USS Intrepid was the backbone of World War II, and then Vietnam. Between those wars, it was the primary recovery vessel for NASA. But, in the 1970s, it was scrapped. Relegated to rust. The summer after it happened, right before my senior year in high school, Dad drove us all to the boatyard to say our farewells. It was the only vacation he ever took with us, if you could call it that. He wore his old dog tags and made my sister and me say a prayer. I blew a kiss. Kitty held him tightly, and wept. It was the first time I could remember seeing her cry, or seeing them embrace.

Then, in 1982, the most amazing thing happened. The Intrepid became a floating museum in New York City’s harbor. Renamed The Intrepid Sea Air Space Museum, it was docked in the Hudson River, and open to the public.

As soon as I heard, I felt we should all go together to see it. I proposed a family vacation.

“Just like the last time,” I said, enraptured by nostalgia. “Just the four of us.”

Dad’s face turned hard. “Me and The Big Boat have a lot in common,” he said. “But nobody wants to see me float again.”

“But it would be fun.”

“No. It would not.” I’ve never heard him sound so stern. “Can’t live in the past.”

Then he looked at Kitty, and poured himself another gin.

Five years ago, my father died at his desk. Harvey found him. He told the police he stood there for a long time just watching Dad’s body grow cold.

“Must have been in shock,” he later said. “He was like my shadow.”

They even walked alike. The same lilt, a little to the left.

The chainsaw now goes silent. “Nearly done!” Harvey shouts.

Mother and I manage a limp wave.

It’s thirty-two degrees, officially freezing, and we’re getting ready for a Christmas Eve swim. It’s Harvey’s idea. He and Dad always took a swim in Lake Superior on Christmas when they were kids.

“Fitting way to say good-bye to your Dad’s Lake,” he told me. “Don’t you think?”

“Never thought about it,” I said. “Never thought I’d have to say good-bye.”

I feel badly about that now.

Harvey puts the chainsaw down and runs towards us. Puts his arm around me. Gives me a squeeze. “You’ll love this,” he says. “When you hit that cold water, and your heart stops for just a minute, it’ll put the fear of God in you better than church.” Then he laughs. It is so cold his teeth rattle like coffee cups.

“Harvey,” Mother scolds. “Finish the hole.”

“Henpecked,” he says to me in mock resignation. Then, like a good boy, he leans over and kisses my mother’s forehead and runs back to his work.

“They are just like children,” she says. Kitty always says this about men. I want to disagree, but decide against it. This is my last night at Dad’s Lake. Next week, it will probably belong to someone else’s father. I don’t want to argue. That’s not why I came. I just want to be here one more time. Just want to stand on this shoreline. Just want a perfect moment at this perfect place. I take another sip of champagne, and watch Harvey as he works.

It takes him a while to cut through the ice, but finally the swimming hole is ready for us. My nose is completely numb. From where I’m standing, close enough to the winding house to make a run for it, I can see that the hole is perfectly round and big enough for all of us. The moonlight is shaky and pale. Harvey inspects the hole carefully. He’s wearing an old pair of black galoshes with buckles, and a beautiful cashmere coat, which is the color of fawns. The chainsaw is still screaming in one hand. He waves it to the heavens.

“Happy Birthday, Jesus!” he shouts over the din.

Then turns off the chainsaw. He is laughing and panting at the same time. The air reeks of gas and feels close. Steam rises from the hole he’s cut into the ice. It’s then that it happens. Harvey turns back to us and does something I’ve never seen him do before––he salutes. Mother and I stop laughing because at that moment, Harvey looks so much like my father, it’s overwhelming. I can hardly breathe. I can hear Dad’s voice again, and imagine him on The Big Boat. All gas and smoke. Creeps into your dreams. Tears roll down my cheeks. I want, so badly, to hear the stories again; to sail The Big Boat with Dad. My mother reaches up, and hands me a paper napkin. Her hand is trembling.

“Wipe your face, darling,” she says softly.

“It’s just the wind,” I say.

She takes off her sunglasses. Her eyes are filled with tears, too.

Harvey runs over to us. Mother quickly puts her sunglasses back on. I wipe my face.
He doesn’t notice we’ve been crying. “How’s my girls?” he says, “Too cold out here for you?”

Then he puts his arm around me and gives me a hug like he used to when I was just a girl and he was still my Uncle Harvey. I notice the champagne has turned to slush in my glass.

“It’s nearly as bad as incest,” my sister said and threw their wedding invitation in the trash.

“You’re being a little hard on them, aren’t you?” I asked. Josie hasn’t spoken to me since.

She was right, of course. I know that now. But he’s still my Uncle Harvey. And Kitty is always Kitty. They’re all we have.

Still, I don’t know why I’ve come.

“Come on, chickens!” Harvey says, all buttered-rum cheerful. He tosses his cashmere coat across my mother’s lap. Underneath the coat, he’s wearing Hawaiian-print swimming trunks. Baggy. They catch the night air like twin sails. “I’ve still got it,” he says and winks. Then poses like the strong man in a sideshow.

He is, indeed, well built for his age. Never been married before. Works out with a trainer. Harvey is what Kitty would call “vital.”

“Full of piss and vinegar,” Dad used to say.

He and Harvey were in the pyrotechnics business together, specialists in corporate and community events. The plant is right across the border in Wisconsin. A conglomerate from China is currently the highest bidder.

“It doesn’t feel the same without your dad,” Harvey told me. “He was the brains of this operation. I just did what I was told.”

My mother had a different take.

“They were both madmen with dangerous toys.”

It’s funny, but I remember Dad differently. To me, he was a serious man––not given to toys, or madness. He worked long hours. Always worried about the business. He never left his desk.

“I’ll vacation when I die,” he’d say.

I am still waiting for his postcard.

Every summer, we took our vacation with Harvey, instead. It didn’t seem strange at the time. My mother didn’t drive¬, so Harvey was our only hope. Since he designed the shows, there wasn’t much for him to do after Independence Day. So, every July 18, my birthday, we waved good-bye to my father, jumped into Harvey’s Thunderbird convertible and headed to Florida. The T-Bird was black with lots of chrome and a candy-apple red interior. Kitty, in her cat’s-eye sunglasses, sat in the front. When we put the top down, her ever-present scarf slapped in the wind like a storm warning.
The first night we’d always stop at Howard Johnson’s, where a birthday meant a free sundae to go along with the clam-strip dinner. After dinner was done, we’d go back to the room. I’d write my father the first of fourteen letters, one for every day we were gone, on the motel stationery.

“I had an extra scoop for you,” I’d always write. “XXXOOO.”

In all those years of all those vacations–an entire decade of them, to be exact–I never wondered why, at the motels, Kitty always took a separate room, right next to Harvey. Now that my father’s dead, I think about it a lot.

Harvey had the best of us––hot summer days on the shore, birthdays, and ice cream. My father had our sickness, our sadness, and the sobbing nights of tornadoes or blizzards––or any number of things that frightened us because they were well beyond our control.

Love is well beyond our control.

Kitty is pouring champagne in my plastic cup. “Would you like some more?” she asks, as if there’s a choice.

“Aren’t we going for a swim?” Harvey says. “We can drink later.”

His smile is crooked, ripples like the lake underneath our feet. He grabs me around the waist and I can feel his body shaking, mostly from cold. He hugs me as a child would, all sloppy love and need.

“Thanks for coming,” he says. “Means a lot.”

My champagne glass is between us. He jostles it by accident and it spills onto the collar of my red wool coat, slides down the strap of my bathing suit. The bubbles leave a trail of goose bumps and ice.

“Sorry,” he says, and looks at me with my father’s eyes. For a moment, we are breathing the same breath, like horses––all steam and heat.

“I really am sorry,” he says, and it is clear that he is not talking about the champagne.
I know that he’s sorry. He’s sorry about it all, but I say nothing. The moment rusts.
Harvey pulls away, uncomfortable. “Got to go toast up,” he says and runs toward the bonfire before I can see his face, but his tears have fallen on my coat. As he runs his boots jingle like far-off sleigh bells, like somebody else’s Christmas.

My mother and I are silent. She pours herself another drink. Most of it, this time, ends up in the glass. She looks out at the freshly cut hole in the ice, the blackness of the water.

“It’s hard not to miss him,” she says and squeezes my hand. “The lake house is the last part of him. Hard to see it go.”

Creeps into your dreams, I think. I don’t know what to say, so we stay like this for a while, not speaking, just listening to the bonfire behind us kick and spit and watching the wind brush snow across the tarnished ice.

After a time, I realize Harvey is standing at the bonfire watching us and I wonder how we look to him. Like sailor’s women waiting. He sees me watching him. Caught, he laughs. Runs past us. “Come on!” he shouts and runs to the hole in the ice we’ve been staring at. His “swimming hole” as he calls it. As he runs, his arms are flailing. He nearly trips as his boots slide along slick lake. He looks like a cartoon, like Elmer Fudd.
I begin to laugh, it’s hard not to. He’s beet-red and flapping. My mother is still holding my hand. I can feel her sweat in my palm when Harvey cannonballs into the water. The lake shoots up like a fountain.

“Harvey truly loves you,” she says. “Always has.”

I drink the rest of my champagne in one swallow. “You, too,” I say, and regret the tone as soon as I do.

Mother lets go of my hand.

In his perfect hole, in the perfectly freezing water, Harvey, unaware, is jumping up and down. “Oh come all ye faithful,” he sings in a false vibrato, my father’s voice. “Joyful and triumphant. Oh come ye, oh come ye to Bethlehem!”

I want to run, but he motions us into the water.

“Too cold,” Kitty shouts back. She is watching him, unsmiling.

He begins the song again. “Joyful and triumphant!” he sings. It’s clear that he’s forgotten the words.

“I’m sorry you and your sister don’t approve,” Mother says, angry. Her voice is dark and low.

“It’s almost midnight,” I say.

She looks at me, terse and thin-lipped, expecting another remark. I’m fresh out, so I take the cup from her hand.

“Better go,” I say gently. “Midnight kiss and all that.”

She hesitates, then stands, always graceful, always Kitty, and walks toward him, without a word. Doesn’t look back.

I drink the rest of her champagne. It smells of her perfume, of musk and roses. A cloud silts over the moon. I look at my watch. There’s not much time left. It has been agreed that at midnight there are to be fireworks. It’s Harvey’s idea.

“Just like the old days,” he said, and meant the days before me and Kitty and Josie. The days when he and my father would shoot bottle rockets into the sky and scream, “Happy Birthday!” Those were the days when they knew each other’s thoughts.
On the other side of the chaise lounge there’s the box Harvey brought from the office for the occasion. It’s red and yellow with the names of the rockets in Chinese characters and English, side by side.

Harvey is still singing while I fumble in my coat pockets for some matches. His voice is clear, rises and falls. I rummage through the box. The names of Chinese fireworks are always so beautiful––‘Coconut Grove Song’ and ‘Fringed Iris’––as beautiful as the fireworks themselves. The Chinese have a way with pyrotechnics. They transform chemistry into art. Charcoal for the gold sparks. Calcium carbonate for the red stars. Bismuth trioxide for stars that crackle, what they call ‘Dragon Stars’. Barium chlorate for the green flames.

It’s all formulas and electrical ignitions. Then beauty. Then hope.

In the bottom of the box, there’s a large rocket painted with happy children holding lotus blossoms. ‘Mountain Flower in Full Bloom’. I pull it out and set it on the ice. Nearly two feet tall, it has a long wick. It’s a shooter. It’ll go far, but could also explode in your face. So, I kick the rest of the box away from the rocket, just to be careful.
On the shore, the bonfire has made its way through the old doors and now, half-hearted, has settled down, smoldering.

I look at my watch. It’s ten seconds to midnight. I kick the chaise lounge away, too. It rattles, frozen. I’m standing over the rocket with my matches.

“Happy Birthday,” I whisper to the heavens and look out over the lake.

In the water, Harvey is still jumping up and down, red-faced in the moonlight. My mother stands over him on the ice. She seems a little hesitant, not quite ready to take the icy plunge into the “swimming hole.” Still, he cajoles her until she takes off her scarf. It trails away, caught in the wind like a cirrus cloud. I strike a match, but I can’t stop watching them. Her coyote coat, silver as her hair, silver as the moon, makes her look like an animal. Something large and hungry. Something I’ve never seen before. She jumps into the water still wearing the coat.

I light the wick. It hisses.

Harvey has now stopped singing, stopped jumping. He pulls her closer. She screams, joyful, then laughs.

The burning wick fires the rocket.

Kitty’s fur coat floats on the surface, spreads out.

The rocket shoots up.

Harvey takes Kitty into his arms and there’s a trail of gold stars.

Kitty places her hand on his face, and studies the curve of his nose. Blue stars erupt overhead. She pulls him even closer. Harvey kisses her face, her hair, her lips.
They are floating together in the icy water. Salvaged.

And just when she kisses him back, the rocket explodes into a fountain of stars, all different colors at once––red, violet, gold, and blue.

Chemistry and electricity. Then beauty. Then hope.