At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott Page A

just bad luck that put him in the American camp as his plane was going down, he may have been trying to do some damage, he may have hoped to land and be taken prisoner. No one could really say, although, their father added, he certainly had a clear shot at me, an irresistible shot with that fuel tank in my hands, fuel the very thing he needed, and didn’t take it. There’s no way of knowing, he said. Just as he
would never know, even after he’d seen it close up, in new death, if that terrified young face had been the German pilot’s or his own.
    On the blanket beside him his two grown daughters, covered up now and still hearing the outraged tone of their imaginary letters of complaint, sensed for a moment that here, perhaps and at last, was a story that might support or even simply renew their own interest in their mother’s old contention. But then their father said, “I don’t think I’ve thought of that day for forty years. The plane just brought it back to me out of nowhere,” and they concluded, together and each to herself, that had the incident changed him he would have thought about it before this, would have told the story before this, told it often enough that its significance, clearly established, would have begun to wear thin.
    But it was a new recollection, perhaps the last new recollection he gave them, and their parents were separated by then, had been for some time, so there really seemed to be little sense in further wondering.
    Â 
    In their salty little cottage, in the two weeks he took away from the insurance office where he worked, away from the strict routine of eight to six, cocktails, dinner, homework and baths, read the paper and watch twenty minutes of the nightly news, he indicated to his children what it was he had brought them out here to see and then more or less stepped back, believing that the green trees and furrowed fields, the stretches of pale beach, the moonlight and the sea would all, in and of themselves, give his children a sense of wonder and beauty and whole life. Would serve somehow as antidote to the easy misery of daily life as his wife and her family and too many people he knew lived it. An antidote of green. He’d been given as much himself as a child, dipped once a year into the
greens of Rockland or Westchester by the Fresh Air people as if to be rid of fleas or varnish—even, when he was nine, sent to the mountains for three entire months to recuperate from a bout of ghetto malaria. His mother believed in such cures entirely, as did his six uncles, but her faith took no account of clean air or wholesome food or open spaces and had only to do with what she called the need for beauty. Every child, she said, needed to see some beauty. His own children lived in a house and had grass and trees and flowers in their own back yards but in these two weeks he was able to walk them through woods or point out the Milky Way or, in a rented wooden boat with a small outboard motor, teach them, rocking slowly, to contemplate the width and the age and the endurance of the sea.
    They caught blowfish and flounder and ate them breaded and fried for dinner. They roasted marshmallows on the beach. They bent to study the stalk of milkweed their father broke to show them and learned from him the names of the easier wildflowers: tiger lilies and black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace. They picked blackberries on his instructions, avoided the wild beach plums. They sat on the screened porch when it rained and listened as he read to them a “Drama in Real Life” from the Reader’s Digest, noticing always, as he instructed them to notice, the way the leaves were blackened by the rain, the way the rain had beaded a spider’s web under the eaves. They burned their cheeks and the tips of their noses staring out across the ocean’s limitless horizon or looking back to the sliver of shoreline and its own endless green.
    Twice a week they