CLINTON ST. QUARTERLY Her shyness was an animal thing, as engrained in her physique as the length of her legs or the Romany jutting of her cheekbones. The hour arrived. We were all exaggeratedly silent as she rose to speak. Then she began so badly that we all wished fervently that we were' somewhere else, not witnessing the clumsiness of our only beauty. She stumbled on the way to the music stand that served as a podium. An oratory in that class meant a structured, written, totally memorized, ten-minute speech. No one who has not attempted it can conceive of the thousands of words with appropriately orchestrated gestures required to fill up ten minutes. Amanda grabbed the music stand with both hands. I saw her long lids lift; a ghastly white flash of eye swept us. She was afraid. We all knew the fear of the audience and saw how terribly it was magnified in her slender frame. “ I want to tell you about a trip I took last summer...” she began. I could hear the intake of breath from every body in the room. Surely she didn’t say that. Not even we, in our plump gaucherie, could have stooped to Yosemite, or Aunt Matty’s place on Great Bear Lake. Her face was white, making her eyes and brows stark and the full thick mouth like a crusted wound. She licked her lips. “ My father and I flew from Miami down to Rio de Janeiro...” she continued. We all sat rigid. This note gave us hope. Rio de Janeiro would surely not degenerate into the size of the mosquitos or the naming of Old Faithful. “ We had bought, unseen, a 38- foot ketch named Hester. It was moored in the harbor at Rio and we intended to take possession and sail round the Horn and up the west coast of the Americas to Astoria.” She had us. Not a muscle in the room relaxed but we were no longer taut with embarrassment. Now it was interest that held us, and an exhilaration, a justification of the mystery we had read into this fellow mortal. It did not matter that she stood stiffly, unable to use the physical rhetoric in which we had all been drilled. There was no artful turning of the body to focus attention, nor movement of the hands to elucidate emphasis. She clutched the music stand unknowingly and her voice was monotonous, not at all the controlled variety of disciplined tones that we all strove for. Very soon another thing happened. She forgot us. As she spoke she stopped looking at us. Eye contact is high on the speech teacher’s list of requirements, but Amanda Hubert spoke to a point on the rear wall of the room, and as she continued, seemed to find that spot responsive and congenial, sympathetic to her expressions, so that for her purposes we others were not present at all. We felt it and did not mind. We were grateful for the small ease it brought her. They had found<he Hester in good sailing order but had spent some weeks familiarizing themselves with her manners and habits. They lived on board and sailed every day in the neighboring waters. At first they were accompanied by a deck hand who had been employed by the previous owner. “ He had never worn shoes, I believe. When he stood on the cabin housing and I was on deck, my eyes were precisely at the level of his feet and ankles. Though his legs were very lean and well shaped, the skin of his feet was terribly dry and scaling, maybe from constant exposure to the wind and salt water. A thick pad of callus covered the bottom of his feet. It was so extreme that it actually protruded slightly on either side of the foot and was very pronounced under each toe. He gave the impression of walking on thick sandals without straps. He helped us a great deal with learning Hester's ways, so my father paid him a bonus on the last day he was with us.” They had collected and stowed the necessary provisions for their trip when certain considerations made them decide against the trip south. She paused at “ certain considerations,” as though she would have been more explicit if she had not remembered herself, or rather us, for a moment. They set sail on a northerly course for the Panama Canal. For days they would sight no land and stayed under constant sail by trading watches. “ The one asleep would wake in time to fix a meal and bring it to the one on deck before taking over so the other could sleep. The noise was like silence, water and wind and Hester moving around us.” She was lost to us again, communing with the spot on the wall. Her hands relaxed on the music stand. They came to small islands, and tied up at little docks and walked > t seems there was a motive other 1 than big business that made Hubert refuse small investors’, ’ my father said. ‘‘I call it damned decent o fhim. ’’Hepaused to chew luxuriously while examining the rapt audience aroundhis dinner table. We waitedmutely. unsteadily on hot sand to the few grayed wood houses looking for fresh fruit and water. They answered the cheerful questions of the islanders. It must have been in the same dutiful vein as her answers to my questions, an attempt to make their reality seem normal. The Panama Canal came as a relief, she said. They both slept for hours while the work was done for them. Then they were in the western sea and came north. “ For a week the weather was good. We had the wind and kept 10 or 12 miles offshore. Toward the end of the second week out of the canal we were loafing. The weather was so easy that we’d lash the helm and both sleep at the same time. On a Friday night the storm struck us. At supper the barometer had dropped a little but seemed steady. It was not quite midnight when the first wind came down on us. We were both waked up by the noise. It was sudden, a shrieking in the rigging and the hull groaning and beginning the slam... slam...slam against each new wave. I couldn’t believe it. We ran on deck and began tying everything down. We had gotten careless.” She shook her head over their heedlessness. One hand left the music stand to toss back her hair, then slid down to grasp the opposite elbow. In the audience we stared, biting our lips. The storm was bad. For four days they beat offshore, tacking constantly to keep from being blown onto the teeth of the continent. “ I was always afraid. When my turn came to go below I would try not to sleep, thinking I couldn’t get out if we broke up. But I was too tired to stay awake and I had dreams...It wasn’t so bad when I was on watch. Then I could see the waves coming and I had enough to do to keep from thinking about it. My father only slept a few hours during these storm days. On the fourth day the wind gradually died and we went on running north again in huge rollers but they didn’t break over us anymore. It was two or three in the morning before the glass was well up and rising steadily. My father went to sleep finally and I sat with the helm. I was very dirty and tired but it seemed so good to have the soft air back that I didn’t care. It began to rain a little. The storm had been nothing but wind. It was warm rain and felt good on my face. The wind can make your face so sore. Then the rain passed and the sky opened. The dawn was red on the last of the clouds. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful as that, the red light above the dark sea.” They rested then and made the port of Astoria just two weeks later. Hester was moored there still, and they went down to sail each weekend. Amanda was studying Celestial Navigation in a Coast Guard class in the evenings. She stopped. Her eyes fell from the* wall and flowed over us. She glanced at the teacher and let go of the music stand. The rigid formality took her over again. “ Thank you,” she said, and she walked slowly to her desk and sat down, feeling her way. In a matter of days the school year had ended and the annual graduation ceremony had been performed for the Seniors, Amanda among them. But it was only a week after that Friday ceremony when the news broke in our town and all over the state. My father brought it home to supper from the barber shop, and I believe that at least fifty similar conversations were in progress at that same moment on our street alone. “ You know,” said my father, “ that big real estate deal that Jim Hubert was promoting? It involves 20 miles of the coast. The biggest operation ever conceived in this state. Two complete townships and dozens of tourist accommodations. There are plans for seven thousand new summer homes with supporting services. There’s so much money wrapped up in it that Hubert made a stipulation from the beginning that no private stockholders were allowed. Only large solvent corporations were permitted to buy in. Hubert’s managed to pull in over six million dollars from various investors, the paper companies, the Co-z Motel chain, and a lot of others. Well, it seems there was a motive other than big business that made Hubert refuse small investors. I call it damned decent of him.” My father paused to chew luxuriously while examining the rapt audience around his dinner table. We waited mutely. “ The reason I say it was decent behavior is that Hubert has taken that money in cash. He and his daughter left the day after she graduated, went down to Astoria where they kept a yacht. They set sail for the South Seas, with the money. The chairman of the board received a letter two days after they sailed. I hear that Hubert thanked them in the letter for helping to liberate him from the bondage of work and wished them all similar luck in the future. He was in international waters by that time, of course.” “ Do I hear you?” my mother gasped finally, “ I cannot believe such a thing of Jim Hubert!” “ Nobody would. That’s why he could do it,” grinned my father. “ But you act as though you approve!” “ Not exactly. I would never do such a thing. But he didn’t hurt anyone. No man will have a thinner winter coat because of Jim Hubert. Those big companies will have a good tax write-off this year. Jim used to come to the diner while I was having my morning coffee. He always struck me as a man so absorbed by something inside himself that he couldn’t waste time on any meanness or pettiness. Well, now I know what it was. But he made a constant effort to notice us. He’d listen to our complaints and miseries. He would try to help. I think he felt sorry for us all.” The talk went on in my house until very late that night, and filled the town for many months thereafter. Attempts were made to lay hands on the Huberts, but nothing came of it. I believe the town as a whole was relieved when the Huberts could not be found and could not be prosecuted. There is one footnote to what I know of the Huberts, a yellow clipping from the Portland newspaper. Just two inches of filler picked up from the wire service as though randomly; Dateline Papeete. “ The 38-foot ketch, Hester, registered in Portland, Oregon, suffered a smashed rudder in a brush with Diaz Reef in the Tuamotu Archipelago during a 40-knot wind last night. A radioed S.O.S. brought the D’Angelo Mission boat from nearby Tuame to the scene of the accident. Temporary repairs were effected, and the Hester was reported limping towards Papeete at dawn.” I dreamed once of Amanda’s frail body in the wind, salt crusted, drenched and pounded and afraid, for she must often have been afraid. Her illness, too, was genuine, and I wonder how much of a danger it would be to them out there. But it is clear to me that this lonely, trembling sojourn in the great blank spaces of the sea was a burning joy to her. And it is equally clear that the long, unfathomably long hours that she paced our halls and sat embedded in rooms full of our thick-fleshed complacence must have been torture. I never chanced to see Amanda’s father myself, but I know what he must have looked like, thin and dark with a strange sweet alien air that could not be broached or explained. Some of the talk has, naturally, been uncharitable. There are those who half hope that Amanda was not his daughter at all, but a child lover. Yet others think she was his daughter as well as his lover. I don’t reject these theories. I set them up to look at with the others. The Huberts were a species other than my own. Their capabilities were mysterious to me, and their drives were tilted, concentrated to an intensity that burnt them away to the bone, and displayed the bone itself as beautiful and engraved with purpose.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz