LONG PANTS

Pamela Schoenewaldt

If my George had lived, it would have been his eighty-first birthday and I wouldn’t be in the Maple Grove dayroom watching an aide making the rounds with a clipboard, checking which of us were “all there.” I wasn’t all there—I was sucked back in the whirlpool of memory that would not let me go, caught in the torment of “what ifs” and “if only” and never having peace.

“Do you need a sweater, Miss Margaret?” the aide asked me. “You’re shivering.”

Called back to the now, I shook my head. “Just a bad dream,” I said as clearly, as definitely as I could. The dayroom was actually warm, the vinyl armrests sticky. “You’re here for the quiz?” I asked her. That’s what Agnes, my roommate, and I called it, which probably annoyed the staff.

The aide studied me, round blue eyes with blue-powdered lids like portholes to the sky. “Just a few questions, if you don’t mind.”

Minding or not didn’t matter, but the quiz wasn’t hard, so, “Fine, sure.”

“You know what eight times nine is?” Blue Eyes asked.

“Seventy-two. Plus seven makes my age.” Arithmetic was my strong point—I’d been a baker all my life. How many cookies in eleven pans? How much flour for the Sunday coffee cakes? Cinnamon for sticky buns? Yeast for the day’s white loaves?

The smooth brow furrowed, calculating, checking. “Ah—seventy-nine years old. That’s right. And you know today’s date?”

Yes, I knew George’s birthday, but for a moment I couldn’t speak, remembering his face lit by the candles of my Madeira cake, his favorite.

“Do you know—” Blue Eyes repeated and Agnes looked over anxiously.

“June 22, 1969,” I blurted, adding for good measure, “I’ve been here since July 1968. Eleven months and one week.”

“Very good, dear. And who’s the president?”

I wasn’t her dear, but never mind. “Richard Milhous Nixon. Carl Stokes is the mayor of Cleveland, since January of last year.”

“Thank you, Miss Margaret. I’ll let you enjoy your day.”

“Thank you,” I muttered as Blue Eyes moved on to Agnes, blocking her view of The Price is Right. Agnes didn’t volunteer Mayor Stokes, but she listed the past five presidents, which worked just as well. She and I kept our minds sharp by reading, playing bridge and challenging each other with crossword puzzles. Passing the quiz was everything. Failing got you that much closer to the third floor, where the only ways out were on a stretcher or in a bag.

Blue Eyes had reached Carol Ann, who’d soon be on the third floor, poor thing. “President Nixon,” I kept telling her. “Imagine a nick of time.” But she’d just smile. When Blue Eyes asked about three plus three, Carol Ann looked away.

“You can’t help her,” Agnes whispered. “Nobody can.”

“Nobody can” swirled me back into the whirlpool. Maybe nobody could have helped George. But our nephew David? That was my fault for giving him the long pants. “How could you know?” Agnes asked the one time I told her about David. But that’s not how the mind works. The fact is, I gave him the pants.

“It’s a beautiful June day,” a crisp, familiar voice was saying. The head nurse had just come in. Heavy white shoes clattered on linoleum as she crossed the dayroom to open the patio doors. “Would anybody like to go out for some nice fresh air?” No, everybody was fixed on The Price is Right or at least the flickering screen.

Agnes liked beating the contestants, so I went on the patio by myself. It was a beautiful day—blue, blue sky with red and white peonies around the brickwork like a giant skirt. I grew peonies back in Cleveland Heights. When she was little, Gwen loved to hide in ours, bright smile and rosy curls framed by giant globes of bloom. Gwen, my cheerful, capable, American daughter, not a trace of England in her voice, the image of her father, Ben, my solid, even-tempered American husband. He raised my son Albert like his own and Albert adored him. There was never that edge between them, as if I was his stepmother and Ben his natural father.

I was convinced that Albert blamed me. “No, no, he was too young when—it happened,” Ben always said, but I didn’t think so.

It was getting warm on the patio, so I followed a path out of the peonies into the flickering shade of a birch grove where tall ferns grew, green waves of froth. Nobody stopped me. Probably they were busy with Carol Ann. I kept walking, but I wasn’t all there.

I was back in England, 1912, on one of that warm February day that teased springtime. I’m young, still copper-haired, walking arm in arm with George, who’s explaining how much finer our life could be in America, far from the soot and grime of Manchester. There would be work for us at his cousin’s bakery in Cleveland, Ohio.

“Ohio? The middle of the country?” I ask.

“Yes, but the city’s on a lake bigger than any in England, maybe all of Europe, and the River Cuyahoga runs right through it. I’ll show you on a map.”

“I don’t fancy crossing in steerage, and that’s all we can afford,” I say.

“It won’t be like you think,” George assures me. For my sake, he’d hounded the ticket office with questions, demanding proof, finally coming away convinced that White Star is the finest shipping company on earth. “Believe me, Margaret, their third class is like a hotel. Families have their own rooms.” When I ask what we’ll eat on board, he knows that too—oatmeal, bread and shortbread, honey, marmalade, tea, coffee and beer, cheese, potatoes and onions, vegetable soup, sausage, fried tripe, and roast beef on Sunday.” Better than we eat at home, I have to admit. There’s more—third class has smoking rooms, a library and little theater, card rooms and galleys for walking. “And a piano anyone can use,” George adds. “Won’t David love that?”

Yes, I agree, he would. David, my orphaned nephew we’re raising as a son, knew we couldn’t afford lessons, so he didn’t beg, but bless his heart, I’d caught him listening outside rich folks’ houses to children being prodded through practice.

“Southampton to New York takes less than a week,” George says.

“Enough to get seasick,” I remind him. “Remember that ferry to the Isle of Wight? I wanted to die.”

“Margaret, you’ll be fine. This is the largest ship ever built. It really is titanic, just like the name. You’ll glide across the sea, cozy and comfortable, like on a sofa in our front room.” I see again the dark curl that flops forward, the wide brow and dear, pale cheeks. George is holding my hands. “We’ll give the boys a better life in America. We’ll have a better life. Isn’t that worth a few days at sea, my love?”

“With roast beef on Sunday,” I say, and we laugh.

At last I agree because I trust George, because our little Albert, just turned three, is crazy for ships. Because maybe in America, David can have piano lessons and even someday a piano. We can have a house with an indoor toilet. George and I can bake together, work that we love.

So we buy our tickets and begin our good-byes. Since we’ll be at sea for David’s thirteenth birthday, I pack a present, his very first pair of long pants, genuine Harris Tweed. An extravagant expense, but he’ll look like a fine young man when we get to Ellis Island.

A car horn startled me, and I stepped back on the curb. “Watch yourself, ma’am,” the driver called out, not unkindly, and I realized that I’d almost reached the Cuyahoga River.

“It’s not like there’s a fence around Maple Grove,” Gwen had said in her campaign to have me move. “You can take walks and go shopping, just let them know.” In fact, most residents, even Agnes, spooled between the dayroom, dining room and their own rooms. They might as well be shut up inside the Titanic, away from the cold sea air—April was barely spring on the North Atlantic.

If I’d told Blue Eyes I was taking a walk, she would have asked me why, where to, for how long, and didn’t I want an orderly to go with me. No, I didn’t want an orderly—and I was curious about the river. Years ago, we had a church picnic at a park near the headwaters. It was so peaceful, on a grassy bank with clover and buttercups.

I’d read in the paper that these days the Cuyahoga was moving sludge, an open sewer, thick with every kind of factory waste, the water black, brown, sickly yellow and rust, every color water shouldn’t be. I didn’t care. It felt good to be in the sunshine, on my own and out of the dayroom.

When Gwen was all for my moving to a rest home, she’d been as assiduous as George persuading me to emigrate, getting referrals, asking questions, listing reasons why there was no point staying in that falling-apart house with rickety steep stairs, a new high rise shading my peonies to death, friends dying or moving away and the whole neighborhood going down.

“A good change” is how she put it, but Gwen didn’t think, and I didn’t think enough about the real change—that at least at home I was busy. Even after Ben died and the bakery was sold, I still made cakes in my kitchen for parties, weddings, church dinners and every kind of fundraiser, sometimes going whole days without remembering April 1912, when my life cracked in two.

For David’s birthday on the ship, George made friends with the cook, who filched some chocolate cake from the second-class kitchen. We had a little party. David was thrilled with his new long pants. “Thank you, thank you, Aunt Margaret and Uncle George, these are prime,” he said. He went in the washroom to change and came back nearly strutting, looking so grown up. He would have slept in those pants if we hadn’t stopped him, and he was up before dawn, putting them on to show one of the ship musicians who was giving him piano lessons.

“Margaret, it’s not your fault,” Ben insisted when we were courting, and I told him the story so he’d know who he was courting. “If anything, it was the captain’s for hitting an iceberg—or that officer filling the lifeboats—or White Star, for not having enough boats in the first place.”

“Forgive yourself,” my pastor said. “The Good Lord surely forgives you.”

All my love couldn’t save George. “Women and children only,” was Officer Lightoller’s order. But suppose I’d given Albert to one of the women already on the boat, grabbed David, never mind Lightoller, and pulled him with us? If I had his passport, proving his age? What if . . . if only.

The smells jerked me back from that night when I reached the Cuyahoga—rotting garbage and piercing barbs of what might be gasoline. At least it wasn’t the North Atlantic, no tiny boats far below, and all around in the darkness, screaming, pushing, clanging, groaning, cracking, orders barked, ropes creaking on the winches.

Noonday sun glinted off railroad tracks on the far bank of the river. Rainbow swirls of oil curled through rusty water. Boards and bottles rode the sludgy surface. A dead rat drifted by, bloated like a ball. Yellow-brown scum frosted the banks strewn with every kind of refuse—a broken toilet and old refrigerator, metal scraps, bricks and soggy wads of newspaper, a rope slick with algae that nearly trapped my feet, reminding me of other ropes.

A lifeboat lowered down thirteen stories until it’s tiny as a toy, but still you hear women screaming for their men. I’m with George on the slanting deck, strapping jackets on our boys.

Lightoller is handing women and children off to seamen like a bucket brigade. Two women won’t leave the ship, afraid of freezing water. Children shriek. Albert’s in my arms and I have David by the hand. Lightoller sees only long pants and pushes him back to George.

“He’s a child, a child!” I shout. “He’s just thirteen.”

George tries to shove David forward, but David, frightened, clutches George, who cries, “David, go! Save yourself!”

Albert’s screaming, “Davey, Papa!” Still reaching for them, I’m torn away by two burly seamen who pick me up and land me with a thud in the lifeboat, Albert’s arms so tight around my neck that I’m choking as I shout, “George! David!”

“We’ll get the next one!” George tells me. “Don’t lose heart, my love. Be strong.”

“Release brake, prepare to lower,” Lightoller orders and we’re swinging wildly, winched down. I see George waving, and the top of David’s head, then David’s gone, then George, and then . . . nothing, as we hit the waves, women keening. The seamen at our oars finally confess—there aren’t enough lifeboats. Our men are gone.

The flares of rescue, the hoisting up to our savior ship, New York harbor, Ellis Island and the train to Cleveland where George’s cousin received us—bits of memory in a fog of pain.

In the years that followed I worked. I met Ben at church. We married and had Gwen. I took over the bakery. After Ben died, Albert moved to California. Now we barely talk. Maybe it’s true that he barely remembers that night. For me it’s a beast ready any moment to leap up, clawing my heart with should have . . . if only . . . and damn the long pants.

Suddenly, young voices on the stinking Cuyahoga. It couldn’t be, but yes—two boys headed downstream in a rowboat, pushing a dead, tar-covered dog away with their oars. “You children shouldn’t be on the water,” I called out. “It’s poison.”

“We’re OK, lady,” one boy shouted back. “We’re not children. We’re thirteen. Our pal bet us that we couldn’t—”

A train speeding by swallowed his words, throwing out sparks like the flares of the RMS Carpathia coming to our rescue. Some of those sparks landed on the oil-slick river which instantly burst into flame, scarlet tongues blotting out the sun. I froze. A river burning—as impossible as the unsinkable Titanic rearing like a mammoth beast before diving into the swallowing sea.

The boys’ shrieks unfroze me. Barely visible through rolling churns of smoke, they were frantically rowing backward as the sludgy current drew them closer to the flames.

I grabbed the algae-furred rope at my feet that by God’s grace ended in a knot. I wound the free end around my left hand and threw the knotted one to the boat, splashing near enough for the boys to grab. As they pulled themselves in, I held so tightly to the algae-slick rope that my palms burned. Doesn’t matter, hold on, I told myself, heels dug into the mucky ground, firm as any steel post as the boys hauled themselves hand over hand until they could jump free and clamber up the bank. By the time they reached me, flames were swallowing the little boat.

Together we ran from the terrific heat, a boy on each side, pulling me along until we reached grass. Exhausted and shaking, I sank to the ground, the boys laughing wildly, wiping away grimy tears. Sirens howled, coming closer.

“Goddam, that river burned,” the small one said, then, “Sorry, ma’am, but the river burned! And you saved us!”

They kept talking loudly, but the pain of my palms, the sirens and heat confused me. Where was I and when? “Boys, you’re thirteen and still in short pants?”

They glanced at each other. “It’s summer, ma’am, and hot,”’ the tall one said carefully.

Of course. This was America and 1969. People dressed for the weather, not old English rules.

“My dad’s rowboat!” the other yelped. “He’ll kill me.”

I grabbed the boy’s shoulders. “He won’t. He’ll just be glad, you understand? Glad!” I shook him.

The boy nodded slowly, eyes wide, and pointed to the pin they made us wear. “You from Maple Grove, ma’am? Should we walk you back? It’s the least we can do after you saved us.”

I let him go so quickly that he nearly fell backwards. “That would be kind,” I said.

They helped me up, careful of my hands, and introduced themselves. “I’m Davey,” said the short one, ginger-haired and freckled.

“And I’m Cliff,” said the other, grinning through buck teeth.

The fire trucks were coming closer. “You’re good boys,” I shouted over the sirens.

“I dunno, ma’am,” Davey said. “I lost my dad’s boat on a stupid dare.”

“It’s just a boat,” I said firmly and then said nothing, just putting one foot in front of the other the long way back. Once in sight of Maple Grove, I pulled myself free. “You boys better go on home now. Your folks will be worried.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, I’m fine. Just stay away from the river.”

“We will. Thanks again.” They started off, stopping once to turn and wave back at me.

I was exhausted. Everything hurt, but if I showed up at Maple Grove with escorts, Blue Eyes and the head nurse would have a hundred questions. What was I thinking? Did I realize the risks I’d run? The what ifs? No, I didn’t want interrogation. The burn of my palms was easing. Agnes could find me some salve and bandages. We’d make up a story.

Finally back with the peonies, I sank onto the nearest bench, breathing deeply. My years grew together like dough of braided bread I once made. Scenes came to me. Manchester . . . my life with George and our few happy years with David . . . the goodness of Ben . . .Gwen and Albert growing up . . . two boys running home to parents who would clutch the slender bodies still smelling of rot and smoke, laughing and crying for what might have been. Slowly, slowly, peace enfolded me, inexplicable as fire on water, something like a benediction.

Pamela Schoenewaldt's three historical novels were all published with HarperCollins, including a USAToday Bestseller and Barnes & Noble Great Discovery. Her one-act play in Italian, Espresso Con Mia Madre, was produced at Teatro Cilea, Naples. Her short stories, published in the U.S., Italy, France and England, have won the Chekhov Prize in Fiction, the Peter Taylor Prize, and Cascado Travel Writing Award. Her work has appeared in The Crescent Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Mediphors, Mondogreco, New Letters, New Millennium Writing, Paris Transcontinental, Square Lake, The Sun, Women's Words, and the anthology, The Moveable Nest. She was Writer in Residence at the University of Tennessee Library in Knoxville, TN, where she lives now.