Continental Drift полностью

He remembers not so much the dream as the emotions it carried, conflicting emotions that Bob can’t imagine resolved: shame and pride; solitude, desertion, being left behind — a child’s horrified view of these conditions — and social acceptance, the security of rite and family affection; fear of death, pure terror of it, and an uncontrollable longing to confront it, an obsessive curiosity, almost. The images come and go — his mother’s hands crossed on her chest in the coffin, his father’s glad hand clapped on his suited shoulder, Elaine nudging him from behind, saying, Go on, Bob, you can do it, you should do it, and the abandoned, sweltering airplane, the smoke, the holy water from the font splashing into the coffin. But somehow the images from the dream are mixed with his memories of the actual people and events they shadow. He remembers the spring night his father came home after work at the tannery and sat in his easy chair and picked up the Catamount Patriot and saw a picture of his son and discovered that Bob had been selected to the all-state high school hockey team, just as Eddie had been the year before. The local sportswriter had coined the phrase “The Granite Skates” for Bob and Eddie when they had played together that year, and the headline read: SECOND GRANITE SKATE ALL-STATE ICEMAN. His father said nothing to commemorate the event, Bob now recalls. He ignored it completely, until finally at supper Bob asked him if he’d seen the paper yet, and the man nodded and smiled across the table, and Bob smiled back. That was all. Eddie was gone by then — had been working ten months at Thom McAn’s, had his own apartment on Depot Street above Irwin’s bar and in a year would leave for Florida — or there might have been an animated, prideful discussion of the award, backslapping and jokes, fantasies and teasing, which would have left: Bob feeling sated instead of somehow disappointed and then embarrassed by his disappointment, even ashamed of it.

In everything his father did and said, there seemed to be one lesson: life is grudging in what it gives, so take whatever it gives as if that’s all you’re ever going to get. A dog finding a tossed-out bone doesn’t celebrate; it simply sets to gnawing, before the bone gets yanked away. Bob knew his father had a secret, fantasied version of things that was different, that often, after everyone had gone to bed, he’d sit in the living room half-drunk, playing “Destiny’s Darling” on the phonograph, but that was the man’s weakness, not his strength. Bob understood his father’s weakness; it was his strength that left him confused.

His mother he viewed as all weakness, all fantasy and delusion, a vessel filled with a resigned optimism that she used to make her passivity and helplessness coherent to herself. There was, of course, God’s will, and, too, there was a blessedness, a magical election, that she believed her sons possessed — at least until incontrovertible evidence proved otherwise, and even then, there was always the possibility that God had long-range plans that just hadn’t been revealed yet. She knew her boys were destined to be rich and famous, and she suspected that one of the reasons (there were doubtless many) God had made her poor and obscure was to help make her sons rich and famous, a kind of trade-off. In the end, she treated Bob’s and Eddie’s few accomplishments and honors exactly as her husband treated them, as if they were to be expected. She would smile and nod approvingly, as if to say, See, God’s looking after you, just like I said He would.

Neither parent, then, treated the boys’ futures as something the boys themselves had any control over. And when you come right down to it, Bob thinks, as he drives north on Route 1 into Islamorada, they were both right. That’s what Eddie’s finding out, and because it’s coming late, it’s coming hard. He’s been lucky, that’s all, which is the basic difference between his life so far and mine, Bob decides. It’s not intelligence or hard work or courage. It’s luck. And luck can’t last a lifetime, unless you die young.