5

August 19, 1970

Clambake Heaven

My Dear Phoebe,

Countless artifacts, visions, pieces of poetry and music reminded me of you over the summer. I wanted to share them. But a little nymph told me you were casting your shadow across Europe, with no fixed address. I hope you had a coffee for me at one of Kiki’s haunts—the Dôme, the Rotonde, the Parnasse Bar. (All more vivid somehow than anywhere I’ve actually been.) Maybe you were even able to manage a glass of wine. Surely in Paris, a wise-beyond-her-years sixteen-year-old (Happy Birthday to you!) rates a ballon de rouge, non?

I’m chasing across the Northwest landscape these days. Phoebe, I am making a film. No Children of Paradise, this. But it is about art. And truth. And beauty. Can’t hire actors to play artists on account of how I can’t afford ’em. This is a documentary, I’m forced to use the real things. Oh well, we works with what we gets. In this case, a small grant. How small is it (said the lady to the sailor)? So small I’m living out of car, suitcase, and sardine cans. I’ll miss talking to you on the air. But I’ll check the mailbox at KARP whenever I blow through town to see if there’s anything in it for me (that’s just the kind of guy I am).

It’s all a little rough around the edges just now, but believe me when I say life is but a dream. So row, row, row your boat, my little friend, and don’t forget to sing your songs. I feel happily insane in saying so impulsively, so unreasonably, so irrationally, I love you.

Whit

Phoebe had torn into the envelope at the mailbox and sat on the front porch to read it, going over the last sentence again and again. Whit actually said it—no, wrote it. Point blank, no doubt about it, on the same onionskin paper with the same hole-punching typewriter as before. She felt a little badly now about telling him she’d gone to Europe, but refused to let remorse gnaw away at the bigger thrill, the thrill of being loved. Whit’s letter was the best thing to happen since she came home from camp.

She folded the letter, tucked it into the bib pocket of her overalls, and went inside. Pearl lay sleeping on a hospital bed in the living room, face bloated from drugs, skin mottled from radiation treatments. Her beautiful red hair was gone, too—some of it shaved away for surgery, the rest cut short and falling out in clumps from the chemo. It felt like Pearl had died while Phoebe was away, and this frail stranger had taken up residence in her broken body. Just walking to the bathroom wore her out.

Pearl opened her eyes as Phoebe approached.

“Ready for lunch?” Phoebe asked. “There’s chicken soup and cold cuts in the fridge.”

“No, thanks, dear.”

She tempted Pearl by offering to go get the kind of food they always liked best when they went out to eat together, just the two of them. A French dip from Manning’s Cafeteria on the Ave, where ladies in hairnets and plastic gloves served them. Pizza from Harry’s, where the owner threw dough up in the air. A burger from the Burgermaster, where they brought the food out on trays that attached to the car.

But Pearl just shook her head. “Really, I’m fine.”

“You have to eat, Mother.”

“I’ll have something later. Don’t wait for me.”

Phoebe sat beside the bed and picked up her mother’s worn old edition of Pride and Prejudice. Pearl saw double since her surgery. “How about some more Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy?”

“How about a song instead?”

Phoebe reached for her hand. She knew dozens of daytime songs that Pearl had once sung to her, songs that would have been happier, more cheering, than the only one that came out of her mouth—“Don’t Go in the Lion’s Cage Tonight,” about the girl whose lion-tamer mother gets eaten by her beast. When Phoebe finished, she blinked back tears. “No wonder I’m warped. Daddy actually thought that was a great song for kids.”

“You’re not warped. You’re a very special girl.”

Now the tears were too many to catch. “You’re not going to die, are you?”

Pearl squeezed her hand hard and didn’t let up the pressure. “I’ll do my best to stay alive, all right?”

Everything seemed backwards. Now, when Phoebe wanted her to lie, when she wanted her to promise that she’d live forever, Pearl was telling the truth. “I wouldn’t have left if I’d known.”

“I didn’t want to spoil your summer.”

What could she say that wouldn’t make Pearl feel worse than she already did? She was probably just trying to keep Phoebe safe inside her Magic Circle, a place where mommies with cancer were unimaginable.

That Phoebe had enjoyed the summer only added to her present pain. How could she have been doing something so trivial as having fun while this was happening? Not until now, in retrospect, could she see the signs. Pearl hadn’t sent as many postcards as usual. Birthday presents from Pearl and Jack last month were gift certificates for books and records; they usually went all out for this occasion, shunning anything so generic as a gift certificate. Phoebe hadn’t heard from Jack at all. Daddy’s very busy, Pearl had written. And so Phoebe came home to the shocking sight of Pearl, and Jack so distraught she knew he didn’t have it in him to mislead her the way her mother had, letting her believe everything was fine. Nothing here was fine. Nothing here was the same. It was as if someone had detonated a bomb in her house.

Pearl’s keeping the tumor on her brain a secret as long as she could seemed of a piece with another secret Phoebe had discovered while at camp. “Why didn’t you ever tell me you were Jewish?” she asked now.

Pearl sighed, withdrawing her hand. “Your grandma didn’t raise me Jewish, either.”

“But at least you knew you were, didn’t you?”

“It made life so much harder, Phoebe. I didn’t want that for you.”

“Harder how?”

Pearl picked up a glass of water and took a sip. “It’s a long story, honey. You’ll have it all someday, I promise. Who told you?”

Phoebe shrugged. “I just kind of figured it out.”

Pearl lay back on her pillows and closed her eyes. “I need to be quiet now,” she said.

         

It was really Bobby Shore, a counselor at camp, who figured it out about Pearl. Phoebe was drawn by Bobby’s dark good looks as well as the fact that he knew all the verses to “Joe Hill,” the old union song her grandmother Hannah had taught her. Hannah rarely came to Seattle, but sometimes Pearl would drive to Olympia with Phoebe to visit Hannah at her musty-smelling bookstore. One day in the barn with Bobby, Phoebe conjured Hannah, who died when Phoebe was five, by imitating her speech. “Come here my dollink leettle Pheebala, I’ll put a ree-bon in your hair.”

Bobby looked up from the horse he was currying. “I didn’t know you were Jewish,” he said.

“My grandmother was Russian, not Jewish.”

“Maybe Russian, but definitely Jewish. So you are, too.”

“I am?”

Bobby laughed, then saw she wasn’t joking. “No question.”

Phoebe sang to him from one of Pearl’s lullabies. “Shlof mayn tokhter, sheyne, fayne in dayn vigele…” When she finished she asked Bobby, “Do you know what that means?”

“I can make out a little: Sleep my pretty daughter, I’ll rock you in your cradle—that kind of thing. It’s definitely Yiddish. Didn’t your mother ever tell you?”

“No.” But Pearl’s omission didn’t matter nearly so much then as Bobby’s suddenly heightened interest in her. Someone who helped you discover a secret about yourself was nearly as exciting as someone like Whit, who had to be a secret. Upon reflection, she felt dense for not recognizing sooner what Bobby had revealed. After all, in seventh grade she had been plucked from her school choir to sing in a symphony performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony and, as a result, knew every syllable of the Jewish prayer for the dead by heart. At the time, this meant no more to her than memorizing the German words to Brahms’s Requiem for a similar production the year before. But she knew the Kaddish was in Hebrew. Why didn’t she notice its resemblance to the sounds with which Pearl once sang her to sleep?

Late Sunday night, during the very time Whit would be on the air back home, Phoebe sneaked off to meet Bobby by the river. He played the trumpet, like Chet Baker, and as a result was a very good kisser. Not once did teeth clank or tongues tangle, and instead of getting sloppy and slurpy the longer they went on this way, like a lot of others she’d necked with, he just seemed to get more serious somehow. Not pushy or insistent, just focused and as intent as a heavy-lidded boy too turned on to talk could be. She felt herself go all soft and fluid inside, as if the rising heat between them had melted their limbs, fused them together. His mouth never left Phoebe’s while he unhooked her bra and helped her out of jeans and panties—so smoothly it was as if they were performers in some gorgeous horizontal pas de deux. When Bobby unbuttoned his own jeans and put her hand inside, her breath quickened in surprise. She had expected stiff from what she felt straining against the confines of his Levi’s. But who knew it would have a pulse, a rhythm, a beat? Finally, she was going to get as close as she wanted, as close as she could possibly be to another human being, one who would see her for everything she was.

That was what she expected, anyway, based on how it began. But for all her inexperience, what came next seemed, well, clumsy. It wasn’t just Bobby’s fumbling with a condom. After he got it on, everything felt frantic, quick and fleeting as the pain of his first deep thrust. Even incestuous somehow, as if sharing this heretofore unknown Jewishness of hers—and if Bobby was right about the mother counting for everything in this department, then she was Jewish, she could become an Israeli citizen if she wanted—well, it made them more like brother and sister than lovers, magnets for feelings of failure and shame.

“Were you scared?” Bobby whispered as Phoebe tugged on her boots.

“No, not a bit.” But she could tell he was. Not so much by what they’d done. But by her, by how ravenous she’d been to do it, and her disappointment now that they were finished.

It wasn’t until later, after she crept back to the tent she shared with four other girls and crawled into her cot, that Phoebe felt a stab of fear. She wasn’t worried about getting pregnant; she trusted the rubber. Really, it didn’t seem to be her own fear so much as Pearl’s, penetrating Phoebe’s bones, her blood. But what was it that Pearl could be so afraid of? And how could Phoebe protect someone whose job it was to make her feel safe? Someone who had done that job so well that now she could be freely faulted—for not coming across with all the necessary information, for not fully aiding and abetting the grandest quest Phoebe had managed to define, that of being her most authentic self. Jack wasn’t any more religious than Pearl, but the Bible he sometimes consulted for crossword puzzles was inscribed on the first page with his name and christening date. Surely he must have known. He was a historian, he understood the importance of the past. Why would he help Pearl keep her in the dark? Never mind all the things she hid from her parents, an ever-expanding list that now included Bobby Shore. Teenagers were supposed to hide information from parents. What kept her awake for hours, while the other girls breathed steadily in moon glow all around, was wondering what else she needed to know that these professional educators were concealing. Only after imagining Whit standing next to her cot and crawling in beside her did Phoebe finally fall asleep.

“I realize you’re unhappy with your mother’s choice,” Jack told Phoebe. The two of them were in the dining room, eating Sunday dinner. Phoebe had made meat loaf at Pearl’s request, carefully following the directions on her recipe card, but when it was done it seemed Pearl’s only real appetite had been for inhaling the aroma while it baked. After a few bites, she excused herself and went back to bed. “I might not have made the same choice if I were in her circumstances,” Jack went on, keeping his voice low so as not to disturb Pearl. “But she didn’t want to burden you. It’s her illness, her decision.”

“I guess it was her religion, her decision, too.”

“What?” He chewed for a long moment. “Oh. That. Yes, it was.” More chewing. “We were older when we met.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“After a certain age, it’s not so much someone’s circumstances or experiences that define them. It’s the mental or moral attitude that makes them feel most alive. I’m probably mangling this a bit, but Emerson says discovering the secrets of your own mind reveals the secrets of all minds.”

Phoebe blew out an exasperated sigh. She wanted outright declarations of feeling and here he was, cloaking himself in someone else’s thoughts. “They’re right about you. The students, I mean. You won’t take a stand. You’re as bad as…” It took Phoebe a while to think of what, to Jack, would be the most cutting comparison possible. “You’re as bad as Nixon.”

“Phoebe!” For a second, she thought he was going to send her from the dinner table, the way he had when she was six and said she was voting for Nixon. But all he did was get up and take his plate into the kitchen, where he finished eating alone. Which hurt even more than if he had yelled and sent her away.

“Phoebe?” Pearl called from the living room. Phoebe expected she wanted a glass of water, maybe something from her room upstairs. But when she got there, Pearl just patted the bed beside her and Phoebe went to sit. “Don’t gonna be mad at me,” Pearl said. It was a childhood locution of her daughter’s that she’d always mention in Phoebe’s short-tempered moments. “The meat loaf was wonderful, it’ll be even better when I have it tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

“What’s wrong?”

Hearing the question, Phoebe forgot about why she’d been contentious with Jack and dissolved into the complicity she hadn’t felt with Pearl for so long—not since she started writing Whit. Here was her chance to say, I did it with a college student this summer I’ll probably never see again; am I a woman now? Or, Daddy would be upset if he knew, wouldn’t he? Or, how old were you the first time? Things she might not have wanted to say if Pearl were well. But Phoebe just shrugged. “I’m all right.”

“There’s a movie on tonight.” Jack had brought the television up from the basement den for Pearl. “Want to watch it with me?”

The movie was Bell, Book and Candle, with Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart. While the titles ran Jack came out to join them, looking relieved to see Phoebe lounging beside Pearl. The movie had none of the visual style that Jack usually enjoyed, or the play of language Pearl preferred. As for Phoebe, she couldn’t help but hoot at Kim Novak’s appearance (“Does anybody really have eyebrows that arch that much?”) and Jack Lemmon’s portrayal of a beatnik (“He makes Maynard G. Krebs look like Allen Ginsberg”). Even so, for a few hours they were once more a family, all absorbed in the same Technicolor world of witches, warlocks, and true love facilitated by a magical cat.

“Terrific picture,” Jack said when it was over.

         

After Phoebe started school again, Pearl went into the hospital with a seizure that turned out to be a stroke. When she came home, she had difficulty speaking and could barely move the right side of her body. Other people were in the house all the time. Nurses, physical therapists, friends who came to leave casseroles, those who tended to Pearl when the nurses were off-duty. Pearl cried at most everything Phoebe had to say, from “I love you” to “I’m taking out the trash.”

If only they could talk again. If only Phoebe had fairy dust to sprinkle over Pearl and fix everything that was wrong. But she didn’t, which made her not just sad but angry, too. Angry at Pearl for not going to a doctor sooner, when the tumor was smaller. Angry at Pearl’s surgeon and oncologist, for putting her through such agony. Angry at Jack for collaborating with Pearl to shut her out. But the anger just deepened her sadness and made her feel small.

“Life goes on,” Jack said, encouraging Phoebe to study and see her friends. But life didn’t seem to be going on for Jack. It was all he could do to keep up with his course load and faculty meetings. He had less time than ever for Phoebe.

No more father, no more mother, no more thrilling voice on the radio every week, either. The first thing she did to get on with her life was tear her room apart, keeping nothing as it was but her books and Land of Make-Believe map.

Gone were the poster bed, the tulip-sprigged drapes, and all the stuffed animals Pearl used to arrange around Phoebe’s pillow forts. The mattress now sat on the floor, covered with an Indian-print bedspread Phoebe bought on the Ave. She hemmed up a set of muslin curtains and took out the regular lightbulbs in her room, replacing them with red and blue ones. Incense or candles burned whenever she was there.

A lot of people were like her, people who knew there was more to life than high school and homework. She listened to their music on her turntable, read their books, made posters for their protests, got high with them at concerts, played guitar and sang with them in the park, used their IDs to get everything from beer to birth control pills. None of them were her age. She had outgrown people her age. A powerful current flowed through the world away from her house, away from her classrooms, away from all the sorrow and tedium that filled her up in those places. All she had to do to swim in it was point her toes and dive.

Whit’s last letter had upped the ante of their correspondence, and Phoebe’s reply was taking months to develop. Her mother’s cancer, her father’s opposition to the demonstrations she marched in and his disappearance into grief, her actual (as opposed to imaginary) lost virginity—she could have written pages and pages about any one of those things. But not to Whit. “Writing Whit” was a place she went to in her mind to escape all that. Besides, she sensed it would be too much reality—or the wrong kind—for him. No, she would stay his fairy girl, only one foot ever on the ground, light as a feather, barely clothed, lips warm from the sun. A bubble of laughter, a bubble of light. The girl alive to all the mysteries, who could unravel the ravelings. That was the girl she dreamed of being for someone. That was the girl who got Whit to say I love you.

First she had to puzzle over the letter’s clues to be sure what he was up to now. A documentary about art. What kind of art? She turned over the envelope to check the postmark; a little town north of Seattle where notable disciples of the Northwest Mystics, along with one or two surviving originals, still painted. He must have been up there traveling around, doing research, filming interviews and landscapes.

Finally, when she was ready, when she had filled nearly half a legal pad with alternate versions of what she would tell him, Phoebe hauled Pearl’s Underwood upstairs and put it on her desk. She decided against the Crane stationery; she’d outgrown that, too. Instead, she used a piece of pale yellow paper, leaving a big blank space on top of the first page. When she was done, she pasted on an intricate collage—a lotus flower in the center of a rippling pool, shooting silver hearts out in all directions.

November 18, 1970

Here, There, and Everywhere

Dear Whit,

This time I’m writing you by candlelight.

And this is what I’ve got to say. If you’re insane, then I’m crazy. Because sometimes I hear music when there’s no music around. When that happens, I think maybe it’s coming from you. It’s almost like you’re still doing your radio show. Only now, a year after your voice came on the air that first time (Happy Anniversary to us!), I’m the only one who can hear it. I don’t know how else to explain it, except there’s this space around me where a part of you lives, and we’re together even though we’ve never met.

Hey, it’s not just Kiki I’m onto. Little Miss Know-It-All knows a little (but not all) about Northwest artists, too. The ones I’m guessing your film’s about. ’Twas my mammy’s doing. She was no spring chicken, as they say, when she married. And before that, she collected local artists. Artists were sort of like rock stars to her, I think. I saved the copy of Life magazine with the Beatles on the cover, she saved the one with the article about Mystic Painters of the Northwest. Well. If anyone can make a magical documentary about them, it’s you. I hope this helps lead you to all the places alive in your heart. When you get there, those places will sing for you. They’ll tell you secrets and giggle in your ear. They’ll be like me.

Coming home hasn’t been easy. I feel a little trapped, wings beating against bars. I’m all for truth and beauty. But a lot of what I’ve discovered is confusing. Can you tell me something about boys? When do they figure out body and soul are meant to go together? Do they ever? Or do I have to wait for a man?

I’m taking your advice and singing my songs. In fact, I’ll be singing them next Sunday afternoon in Volunteer Park. Why don’t you come if you’re around? If you can’t make it, don’t worry. We’ll meet when our fate is ripe for meeting. In the meantime, I’m here listening.

Oceans and skies full o’ love,

Phoebe

Five months passed before Whit’s reply arrived. By then, Pearl was dead. And Phoebe was gone.

         

There had been no funeral for Pearl, only a gathering at home. The dining room table was covered with platters of baked chicken and sliced ham, turkey casseroles made from Christmas leftovers, fruitcakes, bottles of Côtes du Rhône and Sémillon, a cut-glass bowl filled with fruit punch, a coffee urn. Arrangements of scentless gladiolas, anemones, red roses, and lilies filled the living room. Phoebe moved through the crowd, receiving mournful pats and hugs, saying hardly anything at all. No one here had known her well since she was a child. If, that is, they knew her at all. Adam, Pearl’s older brother, was a virtual stranger. Phoebe always had a vague sense that her parents didn’t approve of Adam, an Ivy League attorney who belonged to Chicago’s most elite clubs and Episcopal church. He looked uncomfortable in his expensive business suit among all these elbow-patched academics. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” he told Jack and Phoebe, saying nothing of his own. Phoebe would be damned if she was going to ask him anything about Pearl’s past, or what reasons he had for not wanting to be Jewish (surely they were different than Pearl’s). Instead she wandered, listening to conversations about her mother. How she had worked her way through college and graduate school, inspired her students, made such lovely dinner parties.

What was wrong with these people? Why weren’t they wailing and tearing their clothes? Why weren’t they more, well, Jewish? Why wasn’t she?

An older woman whom Phoebe had never met sought her out by the stairway. “You look so much like her, you must be Pearl’s daughter.”

“Yes, I am.”

“I read about your mother in the paper. If my son had lived, you might have been my granddaughter.”

Phoebe shook her head, not comprehending. “His plane went down in the Pacific,” the woman explained, “less than a month after the wedding. She still had some things of his; I was hoping I might get them.”

“My mother was married before?”

“You didn’t know?”

Phoebe shook her head.

“Oh dear,” the woman said. “Never mind, then.”

Unable to think of anything else to do, Phoebe reached out to hug this stranger, recognizing the heavy scent she wore as Youth Dew, almost synonymous with crepe-skinned ladies in orthopedic shoes and pastel wool suits. Still, it was a relief somehow, exerting herself to comfort someone. Someone much older but smaller than Phoebe—though who knew how tall she’d been in another time, when her son was alive. “I’m sorry,” the woman said as she pulled back to dab her eyes with an embroidered hankie. “I’m so very sorry.” Then, turning, she walked away.

First a secret religion, now a secret husband. What else did Pearl hide from her? As Phoebe gripped the banister, head reeling, someone took her by the hand. Carla, a former student of Pearl’s. She used to babysit for Phoebe—though “babysitter” never seemed the right description for Carla, who taught her to play the chords she so quickly mastered on her first child-sized guitar and let her stay up as late as she pleased. Carla who, with her frosted lipsticks and swinging straight curtain of blonde hair, had added an extra measure of urgency to Phoebe’s already substantial hurry to become a teenager.

“Let’s go upstairs,” Carla said. She led Phoebe to her room and sat down on the bed. “I got pregnant when I was at Brookland,” she said. “Your mother never told you, did she?”

“No. She didn’t tell me anything.” And with that, Phoebe pitched onto the pillows with huge, rib-rocking sobs, weeping more for the mother who didn’t live long enough for her to understand than for the one she had lost. Carla held her until she was quiet. “I just thought it might be something you’d want to know. That she helped girls like me who got in trouble.”

“How did she help?”

“She knew about a good doctor, she arranged everything. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? I mean, I volunteer at the women’s clinic because of what happened to me. But I never had the nerve to ask if anything like that ever happened to her.”

Another unanswered question. But at least the parts were fitting together a little bit better now.

Carla drew the curtains and lit candles. They spent the rest of the afternoon in Phoebe’s room, with Carla bringing up plates of food. Phoebe remembered a line from one of the songs she and Carla used to harmonize on: “I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy.” Well, she could see by Carla’s outfit—a granny dress made from fabric much like Phoebe’s bedspread—that they were alike as any two cowboys. Gone was the makeup, along with whatever she had once used to straighten her hair; Carla now had the wavy-haired, wide-eyed, clean-scrubbed, Pre-Raphaelite look that was the vogue among hippie girls. She lived in Eugene, where she went to the university and sang in a band. The four years between them never seemed to matter much in the days when Carla was supposed to be in charge of Phoebe, and now, as she promised Carla to keep in touch, they felt nonexistent.

Since Pearl’s illness, the yard had grown wild and jungly. Chrysanthemums that should have been deadheaded hung shriveled on their stems. Weeds filled flower beds, grass and moss overran the flagstone patio. Blackberry vines crept up from the ravine, wrapping around fence posts and choking shrubs. Birdfeeders were empty of seed, but a squirrel who used to eat out of Pearl’s palm still tapped every morning on the sliding glass door to the dining room, begging for peanuts no one had the heart to offer.

Inside the house were other signs of neglect. Towels covered a living room windowsill to absorb water from a leak in the caulking. A burner was out on the stove, the one Jack always heated his morning kettle for tea on, but he still turned the knob and set the kettle there unless Phoebe was around to remind him it didn’t work. Newspapers piled up on the breakfast nook table in such thick stacks it couldn’t be used, but Jack insisted they stay, claiming he’d get to them eventually.

Every morning Jack wore bloody dots of tissue on his face, marking the spots where he’d cut himself shaving. At night, he buried himself in student papers. Phoebe could help only by driving him to the university after breakfast and picking him up in the evening, by taking him grocery shopping, by preparing food. By turning into a shadowy, inadequate version of Pearl when all she wanted in the world was to be more than her grief. The idea of living like this for another two years, until she graduated high school, was already difficult. Then it became unbearable.

In the den was a large box filled with Pearl’s old lecture notes. Jack meant to donate them to the university library as meticulous records of her most distinguished professors’ classes. One night, alone in the house, Phoebe went through the box. Her mother had been a serious student. There were no doodles, no shopping lists, no scribbling of boys’ names encircled by hearts on these pages—just sheet after sheet of complex thoughts in a tight, efficient, well-formed hand. Amid all the drab, aging cardboard notebooks, a bright red binder caught her eye. She flipped it open and saw that it was filled with more words, only these were loopier, looser, more hurriedly written. “For Phoebe when she turns eighteen,” it said on the first page, dated last summer.

My earliest and most often repeated lesson in life was that you can’t count on the people you love to stay alive. I wanted to give you a life free of my troubles, free of my losses, free of my pain. The past was a thing to flee, to escape, in order to survive.

Phoebe shut the notebook. She couldn’t read it here, breathing air still thick from Pearl’s medicines, Pearl’s death. But she wasn’t about to wait until she was eighteen to find out what her mother wanted her to know.

Instead of going to school the next day, she drove Pearl’s Buick downtown and caught the ferry to Bremerton, staying on board with her mother’s journal as the boat went back and forth, an hour in each direction, the city and mountains by turns receding and looming, rain spiraling around the Sound as if chasing light.

You knew that my father died of a ruptured appendix before I was out of diapers. One result of losing a parent so young, I’ve read, is that it gives an imagination for disaster. Well justified in my case—which I’ll try to put down for you as best I can between all these damn hospital tests and treatments. I’m not sure why it seems so important. Maybe because the death I’ve so often thought I deserved seems likely now.

I let you think my father was a Russian immigrant, like my mother. But he wasn’t. He was Dutch. What they both were was Jewish. Mother never spoke of my father. I suppose she was angry at him for dying, for failing her the way everyone she loved inevitably did. But I used to imagine that had he lived, life would be perfect and I’d be his favorite, the way my brother Adam was Mother’s.

Pearl described the misery of her childhood in Olympia, where Hannah supported the family by opening a used-book shop. Whatever energy Hannah had left after escaping the shtetl and surviving the Depression was reserved for Adam, whose success would affirm the worthiness of all her struggles. Hannah made sure Adam got into Harvard when he graduated from high school, quotas be damned. When Pearl graduated in 1938, she got a course in court stenography. But first she left to visit her father’s family in Amsterdam. So many aunts and uncles, all transferring their abiding affection for Leo Blume onto his blossoming, sixteen-year-old American daughter. Her passage was their graduation gift.

Phoebe remembered how Pearl used to say that since she had skipped an early grade, she was lucky that she developed a figure young; it helped her fit in with the older girls in high school, when fitting in was everything.

She read on. What was to be just a vacation, with a week in the city and another at the beach in Zandvoort, turned into an extended leave. Pearl got a job, typing and filing for the import business owned by her Uncle Abe. She lived in his and Aunt Mirjam’s house, bunking with their daughter Erika. Soon, Pearl’s good high school German had paved her way to passable Dutch.

It was the happiest I’d ever been. I decided to stay and work and save money and go to school there. I was in love with Amsterdam, the smell of spices in Uncle Abe’s warehouse, my family and their Sephardic community. So different from Olympia, where Jews were an oddity. And before long, I was in love with Hans. He was a distant cousin, just a few years older and an art student at the university.

Curled up in her booth on the ferry, Phoebe laughed out loud at Hans’s come-on line to Pearl: Of what importance do you think it that Hemingway makes Jake Barnes impotent? She wished there were more about their romance on the page, but instead of confirming her hunch that Hans was Pearl’s first lover—was Phoebe genetically programmed to start having sex at sixteen?—Pearl went on to describe what her Dutch family called “Hannah’s Chicken Little letters” ordering her to come home. The first one arrived after Czechoslovakia capitulated to Germany. More letters followed, addressed to the family at large, filled with dire newspaper clippings and warnings, urging them to put Pearl on a boat and book their own passage. But despite the family’s monitoring of German broadcasts and debates on Hitler’s designs, none of them could imagine uprooting themselves the way Leo and Hannah had. They were all in agreement, not only about this but about Hannah, too.

They thought their dear Leo had married down, choosing a shtetl Jew for his wife. They knew the type, and her dark, doleful nature was no more appealing to them than to me. This, too, shall pass, they said. We’ll be safe, they said. The fever will spike and disappear. I wanted them to be right so that my mother would be wrong, wrong as she was in favoring Adam.

Russia and Germany’s nonaggression pact sent Mother spinning into high gear. A telegram arrived, offering to pay my way to the University of Washington for one year. The most generous gift she ever promised. I hated leaving, but I couldn’t refuse. What if this proof of love was all I ever got from her?

On the boat trip to New York, I attributed my nausea to seasickness. When it persisted on the train ride west and my period failed to arrive, I realized I was pregnant. I fantasized about returning to Amsterdam to become a wife, to become a mother. But not for long. Hans was still more romantic boy than budding man. And a dream of mine was about to come true. The dream of Pearl the college girl, striding across campus in her saddle shoes and twin-sweater set, re-creating herself in an intellectual world where no one knew her as the Russian book lady’s daughter who slept in the back of the store. So I promised the little girl inside me—I knew it was a girl, I just knew—I promised her she could come back later. And you see? She did.

Ink splotched that place on the page, as if from a tear.

Mother called me a whore and said “those people” had ruined me. But the thought of an illegitimate grandchild was even more awful to her than a promiscuous daughter. She found a nurse who did safe abortions and I went to Seattle for the start of winter term. In May, as I studied for final exams, Holland surrendered to Hitler. With open sea to the north and west, the Reich to the east, occupied Belgium to the south, my family couldn’t escape now if they wanted to.

After V-E Day, when I finally learned what happened in Holland, I heard voices in my head. Uncle Abe saying it was fortunate there were so few Dutch Nazis. Hans saying he supposed he could live without going to the movies for a while. And then they would be sewing stars on their clothes, Aunt Mirjam and Erika debating whether the thread should match the star or the garment itself. Then deciding it best to report for labor service, still praying for a quick Allied victory. Then the transports to Auschwitz. Then dead. Everyone, including Hans. All gassed or lost to typhoid. And what did I do? Got married as fast as I could. To a lovely boy who died, too.

Phoebe closed the journal and went into the ferry cafeteria for a wad of napkins to mop her face. So much more grief to outrun.

There were only a few pages of Pearl’s journal left to read, and Phoebe put off finishing. Not so much as with a novel she didn’t want to end, but because she hated the idea of having even more new questions that could never be answered.

A memory surfaced, one from a hot summer day when she couldn’t have been more than three. She was digging in the dirt while Pearl gardened, and before lunch they took a bath together. Sitting in that deliciously cool water, she wondered what it was like being a baby and drinking milk from her mother’s full round breasts, the way Pearl said she had. When she leaned over and put her mouth on Pearl’s nipple to see if it still held anything for her, Pearl told her no in a strange, sharp voice. After that, there were no more naps or baths together. Pearl began working in her study and Phoebe learned, with difficulty, she wasn’t allowed to disturb her.

Just a rough spot from an otherwise happy time—that’s all it was. Still, strange how she could have the same sort of cast-out feeling now, from such different causes. Only later, standing outside on the ferry deck with wet wind whipping her braids, was she struck by the weight of all the hours Pearl had spent barricading herself, her slow surrender to everything she’d buried so deep.

In the weeks that followed, Phoebe rode the ferry nearly every day, ditching school to play her Martin and sing for other passengers, picking up a little extra money with everything from “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” to “Surabaya Johnny,” a despairing Brecht and Weill song few would think to do in that context, much less on guitar. In February, when the sun split clouds and crocuses cracked the earth, she took to hanging out at the Fishermen’s Terminal in Ballard, where she had loved going as a child on fish-buying expeditions. It was always a sweet experience—literally, since part of the drill was Pearl buying ice cream or hot chocolate for her, depending on the season. But now what she liked to do was spend time with the fishermen—and the rare fisherwoman—laying out and mending nets behind the Terminal docks. She liked their talk, vivid and direct. And it soothed her somehow, watching them weave integrity back into their nets.

Pearl had been on her own at sixteen. Now Phoebe was, too, with her mother’s maps to guide her. The map of the Land of Make-Believe, still hanging by her bed, and the map of Pearl’s sorrow, inhaled like air and burrowing into her heart.

         

Perfect grades no longer hid Phoebe’s truancy. She was failing, deliberately failing—the ultimate act of rebellion for a daughter of academics. No plea, no bargain Jack offered had any effect. He sold the Buick, but that was too little, too late. She was already unreachable. Dropping out of high school doesn’t have to be the end of the world. That’s what Phoebe’s adviser told Jack. Phoebe’s such an unusual girl. So talented. So loving. So obstinate. Don’t cut her off. Stay involved. Give her substance to scratch up against when she needs it. She’s too smart to destroy herself. But if you fight her on this, she might destroy you.

Phoebe could have written the script herself.

Carla invited her to perform at a music festival in Eugene. It was spring break, and Jack had to go on a retreat with the university president and other department heads to thrash out a policy toward student dissidents. What he really needed was to formulate a policy toward his daughter. “Eugene’s three hundred miles away,” Jack said. “How would you get there?”

“By bus,” Phoebe said. “I already have my ticket.”

“I don’t think so, Phoebe. I’d be worried about you.”

“I’ll be fine; Carla will take good care of me.”

In the end, Jack gave reluctant permission. If he couldn’t control Phoebe, he couldn’t very well ask another adult, some friend of the family’s, to do it for him. She was going whether he wanted her to or not.

On the Sunday she was to return, Phoebe called collect. “Your map is gone,” Jack said, meaning the map of the Land of Make-Believe.

“I know. I’ve got it with me.”

“Your curtains, too. I should have looked before you left.”

“Please don’t feel bad; it wouldn’t have made any difference. There’s an extra room in Carla’s house. She and her roommates say I can rent it. I’m staying here.”

There was a long pause on Jack’s end. “Am I really as bad as all that? As bad as Nixon?”

“Daddy, I love you. I just can’t live with you anymore.”

         

Jack included an envelope containing Whit’s next letter with the check he sent to Eugene for Phoebe’s expenses.

April 15, 1971

Station WHIT
(KWIT west of the Rockies)

Dear Phoebe,

There is no question about it: I am a rotten pen pal and you deserve better. But please be assured—in the pile of mail I found waiting for me at KARP, the only piece that mattered was from you. Even before tearing open the envelope, I felt bigger inside somehow. Like your words were sure to open up some secret space. You write with a peach blossom beauty, you know. I stared at your collage with a huge hunk of the intensity that made it. I read somewhere that lotus flowers have their roots in river-bottom muck. Don’t we all? So wiggle your feet in it, honey, and while you’re at it, make a few mud pies.

As for boys versus men, since I’m barely keeping my own particular pieces of body and soul together, I am probably not the best source of advice. But it does seem that one thing all the ancient books of wisdom agree on is the impossibility of finding “it” if you’re hunting “it” down. So just keep yourself in as good shape as possible. And then let it come to you. It will. When you’re ready. Just like these letters of ours. It’s ALL in the hands of destiny. And I never screw around with destiny.

Whatever little bird sang into your ear about my little film sang true. She is slooooooowly taking shape. I’m trying to be a good father and not force her into finishing school. When the time comes, I’ll let you know when and where to look. I have a feeling your response will mean more to me than that of any critic who might stumble upon it.

I lean out from this page and kiss your cheek.

Whit

Well. These were sentiments that called for an immediate reply—even though once again, like at camp, Phoebe was without Pearl’s black portable Underwood. She shot back a postcard she’d been hoarding for Whit ever since she found it. On the front was a Man Ray photograph of Kiki’s face, sideways next to an upright African mask. On the back Phoebe wrote a sentence she’d been honing for days: Must be love that makes every heartbeat of mine echo yours. Then she printed her Eugene address. Here’s where I live now—everybody’s sister, nobody’s daughter. That looked kind of pathetic. I like it fine, she added. Not the honest-to-God truth, but so much of her took shape in letters to Whit, maybe just declaring this would go a long way toward magically making it so.

         

Phoebe’s life soon settled into its minimalist Eugene routine. After paying rent, she banked most of what Jack sent every month. Another housemate at Carla’s had taught her how to knit and tie macramé knots. “They’re cool things to do when you’re stoned,” she said, but to this girl, everything was cool to do stoned, from flossing teeth to peeling an apple. Phoebe had other ideas. Soon she was knitting socks and mittens, spinning knots into plant holders and wall hangings, items she could barter at the Saturday Market, swapping for a leather jacket, used books, the occasional burrito. She worked at the farmers’ co-op in exchange for locally grown foods, and could often be found among the hippie welfare mothers who showed up by the Dumpsters at Safeway and Albertsons when trucks arrived with fresh produce, knowing that enormous amounts of aging fruits and vegetables would soon be tossed, theirs for the taking, to make room for a new shipment. Phoebe transformed the stale stuff into tasty stews, soups, and pies that her housemates devoured. Before long, she’d bartered a deal with them, too: reduced rent in exchange for “shopping” and cooking.

What better proof could Jack want of the success of all his Emersonian theories on raising a self-reliant child? Here she was, daily defining herself as someone responsible, thrifty, nurturing—not some crazy kid who ran away from home, piling more pain on her already grieving father. But it didn’t feel like that so much as it did that essential parts of her nature were surfacing, parts that needed to function autonomously and exercise authority. Even a treasured only girl-child like her—blessed with lessons for every talent she ever showed, weaned on carefully edited and expressed concepts of truth and beauty—could find authority, real authority, something difficult to discover at home, where adults had already carved most of it up among themselves.

She applied some of this new authority to her body. No more shaved legs or armpits. No more harsh, perfumed deodorants. No more sore, enlarged breasts from birth control pills; now, she had a diaphragm.

Meanwhile, she wasn’t exactly turning into a drudge. She sometimes sang at a coffeehouse where the owner paid her in psilocybin mushrooms and allowed her to collect tips. Missing salt air, she bought a bus ticket for Yachats (“Yah-hots,” the Greyhound clerk corrected when she said it to rhyme with “hatchets”) and spent a sunny October afternoon tripping her brains out in a secluded cove. There was a TV game show host who always used to ask his housewife contestants, in a big booming voice, “How would you like to be Queen for a Day?” Alone on the beach, Phoebe giggled, imagining herself draped in ermine, only instead of winning the right to reign over a Maytag washer-dryer or freezer the size of a closet, she had an empire of crashing waves, scudding clouds, squawking seagulls, and mussels big enough to pry off rocks for that night’s soup. All she surveyed seemed capable of cracking jokes, assuming independent identities, even falling in love. Everything was new and original, like a play improvised especially for her. Although later, coming down on the bus back to Eugene, she had difficulty imagining being always engaged by such a performance. Now it made a new kind of sense that most druggy communes, which she was far too worldly to ever want to join, were located in isolated, rural areas. Who could stand to be always alive that way anywhere else? Better to absorb the awareness so it became a kind of technique, there for the tapping. By whom? By her chosen people, of course. By artists. If time had all the dimensions she was beginning to suspect, maybe in some intrinsic sense she was that love child Pearl had conceived with Hans, sent away but invited to reappear later and discover her source like this.

When Carla had a paper to write or an exam to study for, Phoebe substituted with her band. It was amazingly easy to end up having sex with somebody she found attractive, though rather more difficult to do it more than once or twice; when told how old she really was, they would either back off, nervous and embarrassed, or go overboard in the opposite direction, as if she had suddenly become nothing but a piece of fine fresh pussy. Either way, it killed whatever fun she’d been having.

         

The Kiki postcard Phoebe sent to Whit came back to her in an envelope, with his additions printed in the margins around her original message.

Mine yours, too, praise the Lord and amen…Checked the schedule down your way, so you are hereby ordered to park your precious self in front of Channel 7 on the 23rd, 9 o’clock.

Phoebe watched Whit’s documentary alone, sitting inches away from a tiny black-and-white portable—the only television in the house. It didn’t matter, not having color, since the film was in black and white, too. There was no narration, no explanation, no questioning voice coming out from behind the camera. Still, you knew exactly what was going on because of the deft, intuitive way Whit intercut images of Northwest Mystic paintings with interviews, archival footage, and long pans of shorelines, wetlands, mountainsides, and migrating geese. There was music, too. Smoky jazz, spare Satie, lush classical guitar. From start to finish, Phoebe sat in open-mouthed awe, much as she had spent her day in Yachats. He did it, he captured that awareness—in every object, every brushstroke, every leaf, every stone.

Again she wrote to him with pen and ink.

Nobody else but you could have made this film. You might not believe me, but I felt you in almost every frame. Terrific picture, absolutely terrific. It’s going to change your life. I know it did mine. What’s next? Why not a movie-movie, about Kiki? I’ll bet that would sell a lot of popcorn.

When she’d been in Eugene for a little over a year, Phoebe finally received a reply, typed on a sheet of doctors’ notepaper advertising Valium.

I’m in trouble, and it’s all your fault. My mouth wrote a check on Kiki that my brain’s having a tough time cashing. Rented a house in a fishing village built on stilts, far away from bill collectors and distracting women. The Port Pritchard post office will be a regular haunt, so come August please write me there, in care of the blues. Do your books travel with you? If so, I have a favor to beg. I’ve looked everywhere, and I do mean everywhere (libraries, antiquarian bookstores, behind refrigerators), but I can’t find a copy of Kiki’s memoirs en anglaise. If you would be so kind as to loan me your edition again, I promise to treat it like fine bone china. Meanwhile, permit me the cliché of observing how quickly time flies as prelude to inquiring—are you eighteen yet?

Inside the envelope were newspaper clippings, three different stories with underlined words in each.

“It happened all of a sudden, just like in a movie,” Gomez said. “I went after him, got stabbed in the hand but then knocked him out by throwing a chair at his head.”

It reads just like a movie script: a man convicted of a crime nurses the sick officer whose testimony convicted him; a friendship builds, and on his deathbed the officer clears his friend, thus bringing a happy ending to the story.

An Israeli soldier said, “I was standing next to a glass partition with dozens of other people when all of a sudden explosions erupted, just like in a movie.”

Phoebe pieced it together pretty effortlessly: He was following her advice, trying to write a movie about Kiki. She sent back another Man Ray postcard, the one with an image of a violin superimposed on Kiki’s nude back, as though the camera had caught her in the process of transforming into a stringed instrument.

Real life, just like in the movies. Who could ask for anything more?

The book’s in Seattle. Don’t worry, I’ll get it for you.

Carla was cramming for finals when Phoebe sang for her one Saturday night. The gig was at a tavern in Blue River, fifty miles outside Eugene but still in Lane County. Between sets, Phoebe sat with Robbie, the good-looking Vietnam vet who tended bar. Phoebe never drank liquor, but by evening’s end she was looped on tequila shots and scrambling lyrics to an old Tina Turner song. “Do I love you, my oh my,” she sang. “Mountain deep, river high.”

Phoebe was in no shape for the long ride back to town, so Robbie brought her home with him, to his trailer on the banks of the McKenzie River. She stood in a hot shower for five minutes at Robbie’s insistence, then stumbled into his bed, naked and still drunk. He wouldn’t touch her. Which was ironic, considering how they were awakened a few hours later by a county sheriff who burst in to search for drugs; after failing to find any, he arrested Robbie for having sex with a minor. They’d been naked in the same bed—who would believe he hadn’t? Certainly not this stern-eyed, silver-haired sheriff, in whose hands Phoebe’s fake ID instantly fell apart.

“I’ll tell you what,” the sheriff said to Robbie. “You’re awful goddamn lucky she’s not my daughter.”

“It’s the truth,” Phoebe said. “We didn’t do anything. I was too drunk.” Then, as if to prove it, she barfed all over the sheriff’s shoes.

Robbie made his jailhouse call to a lawyer who got him off with a warning and a heavy fine. Phoebe wasn’t allowed to place a call, but the sheriff made sure she heard every word of what he had to say when Jack got on the line.

“She’s a beautiful girl, your Phoebe. Probably a nice one, too. But if you leave her down here, she’ll be ruined forever. These people will turn her into trash. Is that what you want, Mr. Allen?”

Jack talked the sheriff into releasing Phoebe to Carla. Several days later, he arrived in Eugene by train and took Phoebe out for dinner in a Greek restaurant near the university. Neither one could meet the other’s eyes. “Here’s the book you asked for,” Jack said, placing Pearl’s copy of Kiki’s memoirs on the table. “I hope she’s not your role model.”

“I’m not trash,” Phoebe countered hotly. He didn’t respond, but the waiter who had just set down a bowl of avgolemono soup in front of him flashed her a sympathetic smile.

Jack sampled the soup. “It’s good,” he said. “Nice and light—not too much lemon, just the way you like it. How about a taste?” Phoebe shook her head. Then, between spoonfuls, Jack continued. “I have a proposal I want you to give serious consideration. I think that instead of going back to high school, you’d be much happier signing up for a course to earn a high school equivalency certificate.”

“I’m not coming home,” Phoebe said.

“You can do it here. I’ll be in Eugene this summer, too, teaching a labor seminar. Tomorrow I’ll look for a rental close to campus.”

“When did you arrange all this, Daddy?”

“A while ago.”

“Before that sheriff took me in?”

Jack held her gaze steady for a long, convincing moment. “Yes.” He pushed away his empty soup bowl and steepled his fingers with a sigh that said they need never speak again of that night, that sheriff, that phone call. “So. My idea is, we’ll both have our classes and such during the day. Then in the evenings we can do things together.”

“What kind of things?”

“Whatever we find appealing. Dinners, movies, plays, concerts.”

“I like the sound of that,” Phoebe said.

“In the fall,” Jack went on, “you can start school.”

“Start school? I can’t even apply before I get the certificate, can I?”

“You don’t even need to apply. A former student of mine is dean at a junior college in Mount Jensen. He’s willing to take you on right now, so long as you commit to getting your equivalency. It’s pretty up there, the school is small—a fine place to start. If your grades are good, and I see no reason why they won’t be, you can transfer after a year or two to a school of your own choosing.”

“Is Mount Jensen near Port Pritchard?”

“Yes, I believe it is.”

Phoebe was growing weary of her Eugene routine, its dearth of intellectual challenge. And it was nice, very nice, to feel looked after again, to anticipate sharing all the things that had once held her close to Jack. But none of that mattered anywhere near so much as her absolute certainty that his plan had the fingerprints of destiny, with a capital D, all over it. Not that she had dreams of being a college girl, like her mother did. All her fantasies about going to school in Mount Jensen centered on Whit. By the time she got there, she would indeed be eighteen, of legal age.

“Do you believe in fate, Daddy?”

“Only in Emerson’s sense—‘the soul contains the event that shall befall it.’”

What better way to have her ticket to Whit punched than by her own father?

In exchange for her agreement to everything Jack proposed for the summer, Phoebe asked only one thing: that he ship Pearl’s Underwood down to her as soon as he got home. Her letter to let Whit know all this, the letter that would accompany Kiki’s memoirs, had to be an especially good one.