The phone rings between ten and eleven every morning, and it is always Mike. He wants to be sure I’m still alive and kicking. The one time I had flu and was too sick to answer the phone, he was over like a shot in that funny lobster boat of his. I could hear him pounding up the stairs and shouting my name. He even had his friend, Dr. Lil Meyer, with him. A real doctor, he calls her, not his kind, “all letters and no learning.”
They gave me plenty of juice and spent several nights, though it meant sleeping on the floor for both of them. But they didn’t seem to mind. And when I was well again, they took off in the lobster boat, waving madly and leaving a wake as broad as a city sidewalk.
For a doctor, Lil Meyer wasn’t too bad. She seemed to know about the heart. She said to me—whispered so Mike wouldn’t hear her—just before she left, “You’re sounder than any seventy-five-year-old I’ve ever met, Aunt Lyssa. I don’t know if it’s the singing or the running or the news. But whatever it is, just keep doing it. And Mike and I will keep tabs on you.”
The day I heard the seals singing, I left off my laps and went investigating. It never does to leave a mystery unsolved at my age. Curiosity alone would keep me awake, and I need my sleep. Besides, I knew that the only singing done on these shores recently was my own. Seals never came here, hadn’t for at least as long as I had owned the lighthouse. And according to the records, which the Coast Guard had neglected to collect when they condemned the place, leaving me with a week-long feast of old news, there hadn’t been any seals for the last hundred years. Oh, there had been plenty else—wrecks and flotsam. Wrackweed wound around the detritus of civilization: Dixie cups, beer cans, pop bottles, and newsprint. And a small school of whales had beached themselves at the north tip of the beach in 1957 and had to be hauled off by an old whaling vessel, circa 1923, pressed into service. But no seals.
The lighthouse sits way out on a tip of land, some sixteen miles from town, and at high tide it is an island. There have been some minor skirmishes over calling it a wildlife preserve, but the closest the state has come to that has been to post some yellow signs that have weathered to the color of old mustard and are just as readable. The southeast shore is the milder shore, sheltered from the winds and battering tides. The little bay that runs between Lighthouse Point and the town of Tarryton-across-the-Bay, as the early maps have it, is always filled with pleasure boats. By half-May, the bigger yachts of the summer folk start to arrive, great white swans gliding serenely in while the smaller, colorful boats of the year-rounders squawk and gabble and gawk at them, darting about like so many squabbling mallards or grebes.
The singing of the seals came from the rougher northwest shore. So I headed that way, no longer jogging because it was a rocky run. If I slipped and fell, I might lie with a broken hip or arm for hours or days before Mike finally came out to find me. If he found me at all. So I picked my way carefully around the granite outcroppings.
I had only tried that northern route once or twice before. Even feeling twenty-five or forty-five, I found myself defeated by the amount of rock-climbing necessary to go the entire way. But I kept it up this time, because after five minutes the seal song had become louder, more melodic, compelling. And, too, an incredible smell had found its way into my nose.
I say found, because one of the sadder erosions of age has been a gradual loss of my sense of smell. Oh, really sharp odors eventually reach me, and I am still sensitive to the intense prickles of burned wood. But the subtle tracings of a good liqueur or the shadings of a wine’s bouquet are beyond me. And recently, to my chagrin, I burned up my favorite teakettle because the whistle had failed and I didn’t smell the metal melting until it was too late.
However, this must have been a powerful scent to have reached me out near the ocean, with the salt air blowing at ten miles an hour. Not a really strong wind, as coastal winds go, but strong enough.
And so I followed my ear—and my nose.
They led me around one last big rock, about the size of a small Minke whale. And it was then I saw the seals. They were bunched together and singing their snuffling hymns. Lying in their midst was an incredibly dirty bum, asleep and snoring.
I almost turned back then, but the old man let out a groan. Only then did it occur to me what a bizarre picture it was. Here was a bearded patriarch of the seals—for they were quite unafraid of him—obviously sleeping off a monumental drunk. In fact I had no idea where he had gotten and consumed his liquor, or how he had ever made it to that place, sixteen miles from the nearest town by land, and a long swim by sea. There was no boat to be seen. He lay as if dropped from above, one arm flung over a large bull seal which acted like a pup, snuggling close to him and pushing at his armpit with its nose.
At that I laughed out loud, and the seals, startled by the noise, fled down the shingle toward the sea, humping their way across the rocks and pebbly beach to safety in the waves. But the old man did not move.
It was then that I wondered if he were not drunk but rather injured, flung out of the sea by the tide, another bit of flotsam on my beach. So I walked closer.
The smell was stronger, and I realized it was not the seals I had been smelling. It was the old man. After years of dealing with children in libraries—from babies to young adults—I had learned to identify a variety of smells, from feces to vomit to pot. And though my sense of smell was almost defunct, my memory was not. But that old man smelled of none of the things I could easily recognize, or of anything the land had to offer. He smelled of seals and salt and water, like a wreck that had long lain on the bottom of the ocean suddenly uncovered by a freak storm. He smelled of age, incredible age. I could literally smell the centuries on him. If I was seventy-five, he had to be four—no, forty—times that. That was fanciful of me. Ridiculous. But it was my immediate and overwhelming thought.
I bent over him to see if I could spot an injury, something I might deal with reasonably. His gray-white, matted hair was thin and lay over his scalp like the scribbles of a mad artist. His beard was braided with seaweed, and shells lay entangled in the briary locks. His fingernails were encrusted with dirt. Even the line of his face were deeply etched with a greenish grime. But I saw no wounds.
His clothes were an archeological dig. Around his neck were the collars of at least twenty shirts. Obviously he put on one shirt and wore it until there was nothing left but the ring, then simply donned another. His trousers were a similar ragbag of colors and weaves, and only the weakness of waistbands had kept him from having accumulated a lifetime supply. He was barefoot. The nails on his toes were as yellow as jingle shells, and so long they curled over each toe like a sheath.
He moaned again, and I touched him on the shoulder, hoping to shake him awake. But when I touched him, his shoulder burst into flames. Truly. Little fingers of fire spiked my palm. Spontaneous combustion was something I had only read about: a heap of oily rags in a hot closet leading to fire. But his rags were not oily, and the weather was a brisk sixty-eight degrees, with a good wind blowing.
I leaped back and screamed, and he opened one eye.
The flames subsided, went out. He began to snore again.
The bull seals came out of the water and began a large, irregular circle around us. So I stood up and turned to face them.
“Shoo!” I said, taking off my watch cap. I wear it to keep my ears warm when I run. “Shoo!” Flapping the cap at them and stepping briskly forward, I challenged the bulls.
They broke circle and scattered, moving about a hundred feet away in that awkward shuffling gait they have on land. Then they turned and stared at me. The younger seals and the females remained in the water, a watchful bobbing.
I went back to the old man. “Come on,” I said. “I know you’re awake now. Be sensible. Tell me if anything hurts or aches. I’ll help you if you need help. And if not—I’ll just go away.”
He opened the one eye again and cleared his throat. It sounded just like a bull seal’s cough. But he said nothing.
I took a step closer and he
opened his other eye. They were as blue as the ocean over white sand. Clear and clean, the only clean part of him.
I bent over to touch his shoulder again, and this time the material of his shirt began to smolder under my hand.
“That’s a trick,” I said. “Or hypnotism. Enough of that.”
He smiled. And the smoldering ceased. Instead, his shoulder seemed to tumble under my hand, like waves, like torrents, like a full high tide. My hand and sleeve were suddenly wet; sloppily, thoroughly wet.
I clenched my teeth. Mike always said that New England spinsters are so full of righteous fortitude they might be mistaken for mules. And my forebears go back seven generations in Maine. Maybe I didn’t understand what was happening, but that was no excuse for lack of discipline and not holding on. I held on.
The old man sighed.
Under my hand, the shoulder changed again, the material and then the flesh wriggling and humping. A tail came from somewhere under his armpit and wrapped quickly around my wrist.
Now, as a librarian in a children’s department I have had my share of snake programs, and reptiles as such do not frighten me. Spiders I am not so sanguine about. But snakes are not a phobia of mine. Except for a quick intake of breath, brought on by surprise, not fear, I did not loose my grip.
The old man gave a humph, a grudging sound of approval, closed his eyes, and roared like a lion. I have seen movies. I have watched documentaries. I know the difference. All of Africa was in that sound.
I laughed. “All right, whoever you are, enough games,” I said. “What’s going on?”
He sat up slowly, opened those clean blue eyes, and said, “Wrong question, my dear.” He had a slight accent I could not identify. “You are supposed to ask, ‘What will go on?’”
Angrily, I let go of his shoulder. “Obviously you need no help. I’m leaving.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know.” Then, incredibly, he turned over on his side. A partial stuttering snore began at once. Then a whiff of that voice came at me again. “But of course you will be back.”
“Of course I will not!” I said huffily. As an exit line it lacked both dignity and punch, but it was all I could manage as I walked off. Before I had reached the big rock, the seals had settled down around him again. I know because they were singing their lullabies over the roar of his snore—and I peeked. The smell followed me most of the way back home.
Once back in the lighthouse, a peculiar lethargy claimed me. I seemed to know something I did not want to know. A story suddenly recalled. I deliberately tried to think of everything but the old man. I stared out the great windows, a sight that always delighted me. Sky greeted me, a pallid slate of sky written on by guillemots and punctuated by gulls. A phalanx of herring gulls sailed by, followed by a pale ghostly shadow that I guessed might be an Iceland gull. Then nothing but sky. I don’t believe I even blinked.
The phone shrilled.
I picked it up and could not even manage a hello until Mike’s voice recalled me to time and place.
“Aunt Lyssa. Are you there? Are you all right? I tried to call before and there was no answer.”
I snapped myself into focus. “Yes, Mike. I’m fine. Tell me a story.”
There was a moment of crackling silence at the other end. Then a throat-clearing. “A story? Say, are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m sure.”
“Well, what do you mean—a story?”
I held on to the phone with both hands, as if to coax his answer. As if I had foresight, I knew his answer already. “About an old man, with seals,” I said.
Silence.
“You’re the classics scholar, Mike. Tell me about Proteus.”
“Try Bulfinch.” He said it for a laugh. He had long ago taught me that Bulfinch was not to be trusted, for he had allowed no one to edit him, had made mistakes. “Why do you need to know?”
“A poem,” I said. “A reference.” No answer, but answer enough.
The phone waited a heartbeat, then spoke in Mike’s voice. “One old man, with seals, coming up. One smelly old god, with seals, Aunt Lyssa. He was a shape-changer with the ability to foretell the future, only you had to hold on to him through all his changes to make him talk. Ulysses was able …”
“I remember,” I said. “I know.”
I hung up. The old man had been right. Of course I would be back. In the morning.
In the morning I gathered up pad, pencils, a sweater, and the flask of Earl Grey tea I had prepared. I stuffed them all into my old backpack. Then I started out as soon as light had bleached a line across the rocks.
Overhead a pair of laughing gulls wrote along the wind’s pages with their white-bordered wings. I could almost read their messages, so clear and forceful was the scripting. Even the rocks signed to me, the water murmured advice. It was as if the world were a storyteller, a singer of old songs. The seas along the coast, usually green-black, seemed wine-dark and full of a churning energy. I did not need to hurry. I knew he would be there. Sometimes foresight has as much to do with reason as with magic.
The whale rock signaled me, and the smell lured me on. When I saw the one, and the other found my nose, I smiled. I made the last turning, and there he was—asleep and snoring.
I climbed down carefully and watched the seals scatter before me. Then I knelt by his side.
I shook my head. Here was the world’s oldest, dirtiest, smelliest man. A bum vomited up by the ocean. The centuries layered on his skin. And here was I thinking he was a god.
The I shrugged and reached out to grab his shoulder. Fire. Water. Snake. Lion. I would outwait them all.
Of course I knew the question I would not ask. No one my age needs to know the exact time of dying. But the other questions—the ones that deal with the days and months and years after I would surely be gone—I would ask them all. And he, being a god who cannot lie about the future, must tell me everything, everything that is going to happen in the world.
After all, I am a stubborn old woman. And a curious one. And I have always had a passion for the news.
Names
Her mother’s number had been D248960. It was still imprinted on her arm, burned into the flesh, a permanent journal entry. Rachel had heard the stories, recited over and over in the deadly monotone her mother took on to tell of the camp. Usually her mother had a beautiful voice, low, musical. Men admired it. Yet not a month went by that something was not said or read or heard that reminded her, and she began reciting the names, last names, in order, in a sepulchral accent:
ABRAHMS
BERLINER
BRODSKY
DANNENBERG
FISCHER
FRANK
GLASSHEIM
GOLDBLATT
It was her one party trick, that recitation. But Rachel always knew that when the roll call was done, her mother would start the death-camp stories. Whether the audience wanted to hear them or not, she would surround them with their own guilt and besiege them with the tales:
HEGELMAN
ISAACS
KAPLAN
KOHN
Her mother had been a child in the camp; had gone through puberty there; had left with her life. Had been lucky. The roll call was of the dead ones, the unlucky ones. The children in the camp had each been imprinted with a portion of the names, a living yahrzeit, little speaking candles; their eyes burning, their flesh burning, wax in the hands of the adults who had told them: “You must remember. If you do not remember, we never lived. If you do not remember, we never died.” And so they remembered.
Rachel wondered if, all over the world, there were survivors, men and women who, like her mother, could recite those names:
LEVITZ
MAMOROWITZ
MORGENSTERN
NORENBERG
ORENSTEIN
REESE
Some nights she dreamed of them: hundreds of old children, wizened toddlers, marching toward her, their arms over their heads to show the glowing numbers, reciting names
.
ROSENBLUM
ROSENWASSER
SOLOMON
STEIN
It was an epic poem, those names, a ballad in alphabetics. Rachel could have recited them along with her mother, but her mouth never moved. It was an incantation. Hear, O Israel, Germany, America. The names had an awful power over her, and even in her dreams she could not speak them aloud. The stories of the camps, of the choosing of victims—left line to the ovens, right to another day of deadening life—did not frighten her. She could move away from the group that listened to her mother’s tales. There was no magic in the words that told of mutilations, of children’s brains against the Nazi walls. She could choose to listen or not listen; such recitations did not paralyze her. But the names:
TANNENBAUM
TEITLEMAN
VANNENBERG
WASSERMAN
WECHTENSTEIN
ZEISS
Rachel knew that the names had been spoken at the moment of her birth: that her mother, legs spread, the waves of Rachel’s passage rolling down her stomach, had breathed the names between spasms long before Rachel’s own name had been pronounced. Rachel Rebecca Zuckerman. That final Zeiss had burst from her mother’s lips as Rachel had slipped out, greasy with birth blood. Rachel knew she had heard the names in the womb. They had opened the uterine neck, they had lured her out and beached her as easily as a fish. How often had her mother commented that Rachel had never cried as a child. Not once. Not even at birth when the doctor had slapped her. She knew, even if her mother did not, that she had been silenced by the incantation, the Zeiss a stopper in her mouth.
When Rachel was a child, she had learned the names as another child would a nursery rhyme. The rhythm of the passing syllables was as water in her mouth, no more than nonsense words. But at five, beginning to understand the power of the names, she could say them no more. For the saying was not enough. It did not satisfy her mother’s needs. Rachel knew that there was something more she needed to do to make her mother smile.
At thirteen, on her birthday, she began menstruating, and her mother watched her get dressed. “So plump. So zaftik.” It was an observation, less personal than a weather report. But she knew it meant that her mother had finally seen her as more than an extension, more than a child still red and white from its passage into the light.