The Art of Keeping Cool Read online

  Abel stood where he was and watched them come. In a little while, though, he began slowly to back away from them. He moved closer to the sheds, circled around them to the left, and came very near me. He passed by without seeing me. He was staring over his shoulder at the crowd again. Some people had caught sight of him. They were pointing him out to a police officer.

  Abel Hoffman moved away. Circling again, he gazed thoughtfully into the fire. His paintings were still visible in places. Some hadn’t fallen yet. Their stretched canvas faces had burnt and split, roasting like bits of rawhide into brownish shreds. The larger frames had lasted longer and were holding their form.

  Abel began to walk toward these last frames, shielding his face from the heat with his hands. He moved with steady steps, not fast and not slow. When he was almost at the fire’s edge, he turned and glanced back again. Not at the crowd this time but at the world in general, it seemed to me; at the confusing green-blue, gray-brown, light-dark world he had tried to paint. He looked curiously, the way you might to catch a last glimpse of a strange place you had just finished visiting, and then he stepped into the flames. A second later, I saw the shadow of his body pass upright before a rack of paintings. Then he was gone, or in shock I shut my eyes, I can’t remember which.

  13

  AFTERWARDS, I LOOKED for Elliot. He must have been there somewhere in the confusion of people and smoke and flying sparks but I never saw him. Only later, I went to Grandma’s on my way home and found Carolyn in the backyard by herself.

  “Elliot got sick,” she said. “He came home and got sick in his room. Grandma heard him. Now she has to stay with him in case he does it again.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “Grandpa gave him some medicine but he threw that up, too. He has the shivers all over.”

  I went up to Elliot’s room and saw him curled in a knot in his bed with his eyes closed, and Grandma sitting beside him. When I went near, his eyes opened a crack and looked at me, then they closed again.

  “He hasn’t said a word since he came home,” Grandma whispered. “Everything he has on smells of smoke. Has something happened to the painter in the woods?”

  I nodded. Grandma put her finger on her lips, so we didn’t talk then. Later, Elliot fell asleep and she came downstairs. I told her how Abel Hoffman had escaped from the police, and the mob had chased him until he’d walked into the flames of his own paintings. Then the wind had blown up and the fire began to spread to other parts of the field, even into the forest. Everyone was frightened and we all went to work to fight it.

  For the next two hours we stamped and beat at the flames like maniacs. We cleared bushes in the fire’s path, made human chains to drive back upstart blazes, wetted down branches with what water was left in the brook. Abel’s boat-studio was saved, and the white-hot shed fires were contained. They burned down until all that was left were two glowing piles of charred wood. People gradually slipped off and disappeared back into the woods to go home.

  Grandma covered her face with her hands and shook her head while she listened.

  “That poor boy. Oh, that poor, poor boy,” she said over and over. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if she was talking about Elliot or Abel.

  Elliot laid in bed all the rest of that day and that night. Uncle Jake sat with him, then Aunt Nan, then both of them together. The next day, he got up and seemed better. Aunt Nan stayed home from work to be sure, but he wouldn’t tell her anything. He wouldn’t talk to Uncle Jake, either, or to me or anyone. About mid-afternoon, he suddenly disappeared and Aunt Nan got scared that he’d run off. She started telephoning people up the road, and had all of us racing around looking for him. Grandpa even went out in the car.

  A couple of hours later Elliot showed up. It turned out he hadn’t been anywhere but in the barn. The whole family was furious. They thought he’d just been hiding out, taunting them, but I knew that wasn’t it. I was pretty sure he’d been up in the high loft with Abel’s painting, not wanting to come down the way he hadn’t before. That painting was the only one left now of all those Abel had painted in the woods—a terrible thing to think about, even for me. You couldn’t blame Elliot for wanting to go up there and be alone. I just hoped he wouldn’t get sick all over again from being yelled at.

  Everybody knew by then, because I’d told them, how he’d been spending his afternoons with Abel. They’d heard about his drawing and painting, and his trips to the post office to pick up Abel’s packages. They said they were surprised that Elliot could have been that sly and secretive for so long, though I had a strange feeling Aunt Nan and Uncle Jake knew more about what he’d been doing than they let on. Grandma must have known, too, because she guessed, even before I told her, where Elliot had been the day of the fire.

  Only Grandpa seemed really surprised. After supper, when no one was looking, he spoke to Elliot, and took him out back to his office. I was worried and crept along behind to watch through the window. I got there just in time to see Grandpa crank up.

  “Sneak!” he shouted at Elliot. “Liar! Fool! Did it ever occur to you that you were putting us all at risk? Running the Germans errands, buying his food. Did you really suppose he would teach you to paint?”

  “I guess I did,” Elliot said.

  “As if that would be any help to the world. The mans art was a joke, anyone could see that. You’d be better off learning to paint houses—if you could learn anything, which I’m beginning to doubt. Where’s your sense, boy? Where’s your self-resepct? Do you mean to go through life in this utterly mindless and irresponsible manner?”

  “I hope not,” Elliot said, bending low before the wind as he always did.

  For that, he was let go. He knew very well how to damp down Grandpa’s fury, and though part of me was glad, another part despised him for it. I knew I’d never allow myself to be put down that way. I’d have taken on the old bully if he’d said those things to me. I’d have told him where to get off and a whole lot more. So what if he hit me? I’d have laughed in his face.

  • • •

  The embers from the shed fires were barely cool before Sachem’s Head settled back into the business of day by day wartime living: hoarding gas coupons and stretching meatless meals, blacking out windows and painting car headlights, buying war bonds, writing to servicemen overseas, waiting for return mail, and keeping up with troop movements in the newspaper.

  What Abel Hoffman had done and what he deserved were questions most people didn’t choose to think about very deeply or for very long. Whether this was due to shame, or shock, or a general nervousness brought on by the war, who knows, but within days of his death, Abel was buried history.

  The FBI agents tried to follow up their suspicions by ransacking his boat-studio a third time. They uncovered nothing more except a supply of unopened whiskey bottles under the floorboards. With no evidence to tie Abel to any real spying activity, and the fort drawings securely attributed to Elliot, who spent an hour answering questions on the score, the Feds’ case was closed. The area was posted against trespassers. The studio sat abandoned under its thatched roof in the field. I walked over to visit a short time later. I was having a hard time getting the man out of my head.

  “Is all his stuff still there?” Elliot asked me, casually, when I got back.

  “Mostly. The FBI agents took the whiskey.”

  “It must still stink around there after that fire.”

  “It’s getting better.”

  “Did you see Abel’s hawk?”

  “No. I think he’s gone.”

  “I guess he would go.”

  “Maybe he got caught in the flames.”

  “No, he’s flown off somewhere. He’ll be back, I’m sure of it,” Elliot said. I could see that was important to him. To tell the truth, it bolstered me up a bit, too.

  “Abel’s pastels are there. Do you want them?” I asked. “Someone else is going to go in there and take them if you don’t.”

  Elliot said he didn’t want them, but
I guessed he might not object if they suddenly appeared. So I went over again, brought the box back and left it on the table in his room. I didn’t say anything about it and he didn’t either, but soon he began to use them.

  • • •

  My father had been missing six weeks when, with a screech of brakes, Uncle Jake arrived grim-faced in our yard one night and, two minutes later, carried my mother off in his truck. She had a telephone call up at Grandma’s, a Captain Smith who, when told that Helen Saunders was at another house, asked to wait until she was brought over so he could give her his news in person.

  Carolyn was tucked in for the night but not yet asleep, and I went in to be with her. For an hour we lay on her bed, staring out the window, waiting for my mother to come back.

  “Is it about Daddy?” Carolyn asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe they found him.”

  “Maybe,” I said. She must have heard something in my voice of what I was trying not to show her, because she took hold of my hand and said:

  “Don’t be scared, Robby. Pretty soon we’ll know.”

  “Who’s scared?” I said, the same way Elliot always said it when he really was. That made me laugh a little. “Anyway, I guess people have a right to be scared if they’re waiting for bad news about their father,” I said.

  She was quiet for a minute, then she asked: “People can be scared waiting for good news, too, can’t they?”

  I had to agree they could, but deep in my stomach a feeling was growing that this wasn’t what we were going to hear. I thought of Willie Vogel, whose father had died fighting at Midway, and wondered if I would start being a bad student like him. But Willie never got very good grades, even before his father died, so it didn’t seem likely.

  I thought of my mother’s banner with the blue star, and how she’d have to sew a new one with a gold star on it now. I wondered if we’d ever go back to the farm and if my father would come home in a box with an American flag wrapped around it like the dead servicemen I’d seen in the fort newsreels. I wondered if he’d been shot up in his plane like the navigator in his letter, or got smashed to pieces when the plane crashed. By the time Uncle Jake’s headlights showed up, I’d gone through just about every way there was of being killed in a plane, and I felt weak and didn’t want to look at my mother’s face when she came in the front door.

  So, I lay there and didn’t get up. Carolyn went downstairs and when I heard my mother’s voice begin to tell her something, I blocked my ears to put off hearing a little longer. Finally, my mother came up and sat on Carolyn’s bed. I could see she’d been crying. When she started talking, new tears came into her eyes.

  “Robert, it was your father,” she said.

  “I knew it,” I said, my hands still over my ears.

  “No, I mean on the phone. From London. He’s all right.”

  “All right?”

  “He’s safe, Robert. He had a grand escape. From France. He told me all about it. Just now.”

  “He called?” I asked dumbly, as if I hadn’t heard a word.

  “Robby, are you asleep?” My mother laughed. She reached out and shook my shoulder, and I guess I had been kind of asleep for the last hour, because suddenly I felt myself rise up through a dull fog toward some surface. Then I blasted through and was wide awake, and my father was alive.

  • • •

  Anyone would think that the news would have caused a celebration in our house. It didn’t. My mother was up early the next morning doing laundry, washing down the kitchen floor. She was going back to work the next day, she told me and Carolyn when we came downstairs.

  “But, can’t we bake a cake or have a party or something?” I asked. “Grandma would like to. So would Aunt Nan, I bet.” The story of my father’s return was so fantastic.

  His plane had been shot up during a bombing run over France and lost two engines. He’d managed to fly it back as far as the English Channel, when something, maybe a gas line, had exploded and flames had erupted on board. The crew bailed out as the plane nose-dived into the sea. My father alone, unconscious and with four broken ribs from a hard landing, was rescued. By pure luck, a French fishing boat had seen his parachute hit the water and chugged over to investigate.

  He was brought into port, hidden from the Germans by a French family, nursed. Finally he recovered enough to travel. Late one night, while a storm raged in the channel, he was ferried across to England in a boat so small it nearly capsized in the waves. He’d had to swim the last stretch to shore because they’d blown so far off course. A grand escape, as my mother had said. But celebrate?

  My mother frowned. “Not yet,” she said. “Your father’s not home yet. We’ll wait till he’s here to start waving our flags.”

  I saw something more than superstition in this answer, and it made me angry. “Dad will never come here so we might as well give up ever waving anything,” I said in

  “What do you mean?”

  “Captain Smith? Dad couldn’t say who he was when he called his own family? After he was lost and almost died?”

  “He wanted to talk to me first is all,” my mother said. “He told me to tell everyone he was all right, and I did, last night. Now Robert, that’s the end of it. Don’t say anymore about celebrations to Grandma or Nan, because were all doing fine here, just fine. We’ll leave everything the way it is, that’s my final word.”

  And so our old routine started up again. Carolyn still spent the day with Grandma. I worked odd jobs around the two houses and in the vegetable gardens which, along with the eggs from Grandma’s hens, we depended on more and more for our meals. At night, we ate with Uncle Jake and Elliot, then stayed on until my mother got back, when we walked home to our cottage. In this way, we passed through September. School loomed. Carolyn was to enter the first grade, and she felt nervous about it.

  “Why do you have to work so much?” she blurted out to my mother one evening on the way home. “I’m sick of Grandma. She never lets me to do anything.”

  “I work to pay for our food and rent,” my mother said. Maybe she was more tired than usual, because she added, “Were a working family, Carolyn, in case you forgot. I work. Your brother works. Your father works in the war. Your job is staying with Grandma, not a great deal to ask, considering.”

  “Yes it is a great deal,” Carolyn said.

  “You don’t know how lucky you are,” snapped my mother who, having grown up as an orphan in other people’s houses, had no patience for those who could “carry on in a coat closet” (as she often said) if things didn’t go their way. This especially applied to her children.

  “Wait a minute,” I said, “doesn’t Grandpa own our cottage? Grandma says he does.”

  “Yes, he does,” my mother answered. “He bought it back from the bank after Uncle Jake lost his mortgage. That’s who I pay rent to.”

  “Why doesn’t he just let us live there if he owns it? He’s got enough money.”

  “Because your grandfather believes in people paying their own way. And so do I,” my mother said.

  “Even family?” I asked.

  “Even family. He’s a hard man, but fair.” That raised a question I’d been wanting to ask for some time.

  “Was it fair when Grandpa sat by while Uncle Jake and Aunt Nan lost their house? He could have helped them,” I said. “Most people would if they saw their own children in trouble.”

  My mother made no answer to this. When I glanced over to see why not, I saw she had turned her face away toward the sun, just then dipping below the horizon.

  “Well, I don’t think fairness came into it,” I told her. “I think Grandpa wanted to punish Uncle Jake and Aunt Nan. Grandpa thinks people should be taught a lesson if they don’t do the right thing. He gets angry and then he does something to teach them.”

  “Maybe they need to be taught a lesson,” my mother said. “Maybe they’ll be better for it.”

  “Was Dad taught a lesson?” I asked her. “Was he bett
er for it? Is that why he went away and never came back?”

  As if she had not heard me, my mother strode ahead to catch up with my sister.

  • • •

  No one could say Grandpa didn’t work hard. More often than not, he was out in the evenings, making house calls, running up to the hospital. Being a doctor, he had extra gas rationing coupons, and he was generous about visiting patients who weren’t able to come to him.

  That was just fine with us. Everyone felt relieved when he wasn’t at the table. Grandma could make a joke without being glared at. Uncle Jake and Elliot could act like their real selves. There was even a chance the conversation might swing around to something interesting, like my father.

  We all wanted to talk about him, I think. His name had been outlawed for so long. Now, with his incredible return, everyone was thinking of him and, at the supper table, behind Grandpa’s back, we began for the first time to speak about him as a family.

  I remember Elliot asking my mother when “Uncle Ken” would be coming home. My mother had no idea and, as it happened, my father wouldn’t take a leave for another five months, but that simple question, posed so openly, gave me a shock of relief I’ll never forget.

  Another time, Uncle Jake told about a prank he and my dad had pulled off as kids. They’d imitated Grandma’s voice over the telephone (“Hello? This is Mrs. Saunders down on Parson’s Lane . . .”) and ordered a gallon container of store ice cream delivered to the end of the driveway.

  “When it came, we told the man to put it on the house bill and ate it on the spot. No one ever knew,” Uncle Jake said, with a big grin at Grandma. He and my father were exactly the same age, it turned out. They’d been in the same class at school.

  Grandma kind of cocked her head. “And who says no one ever knew?”

  Uncle Jake stopped smiling. “Well, no one ever said they knew.”

  “Let the record show that the day was a hot one and that, by good fortune, you boys had a secret ally in the house,” Grandma said. “But don’t try it again or I won’t be responsible for what happens.” She shook her finger at Uncle Jake and glanced back over her shoulder, as if Grandpa’s glowering face were about to appear. We all broke up laughing.