Summerland. Michael Chabon
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bed, pulled on a pair of underpants under the extra-large Hellboy T-shirt he slept in, and followed his father out to the kitchen, to confront the weekly sadness of flannel cakes.
His father set a tall stack in front of him and then sat down with a stack of his own. They were enormous things, Mr. Feld’s flannel cakes, each nearly the size of the plate itself, and there were invariably five or six of them that Ethan was expected to eat. During the week Ethan fixed his own breakfast – cold cereal, or an English muffin spread with peanut butter. This was necessary because Mr. Feld stayed up till all hours in his workshop. This in turn was because the night-time was when Mr. Feld felt the most inventive. Or so he said. Sometimes Ethan suspected that his father simply didn’t like to see the light of day. When Ethan got ready for school or, now that school was out, for a morning walk in the woods or a bike ride over to Jennifer T.’s, Mr. Feld was usually asleep. But on Saturday mornings, no matter how late he had worked, Mr. Feld always woke up, or stayed up, as the case might be, to cook a pancake breakfast for him and Ethan. Pancakes – she called them flannel cakes – had been a specialty of Dr. Feld’s, and the Saturday breakfast was a Feld family tradition. Unfortunately, Mr. Feld was a terrible cook, and his own flannel cakes never failed to live up to their rather unappetising name.
“Well,” Mr. Feld said, tipping the bottle of maple syrup onto his stack. “Let’s see how I did this week.”
“Did you remember the baking powder?” Ethan said, with a shudder. He was still feeling unnerved by the memory of the ugly grey face, with the pointed nose and wicked grin, swimming in the lens of the magnifying glass. “The eggs?”
His father nodded, allowing a large puddle of syrup to form. One of the unspoken but necessary ground rules for eating Mr. Feld’s flannel cakes was that you could use as much syrup as you needed to help you get them down.
“And the vanilla?” Ethan said, pouring his own syrup. He preferred Karo; he had seen a movie once of men in fur hats driving long, sharp steel taps into the tender hearts of Canadian maples, and ever since then had felt too sorry for the trees to eat maple syrup.
Mr. Feld nodded again. He cut himself a fat wedge, pale yellow pinstriped with dark brown, and popped it, looking optimistic, into his mouth. Ethan quickly did the same. They chewed, watching each other carefully. Then they both stared down at their plates.
“If only she had written down the recipe,” Mr. Feld said at last.
They ate in silence broken only by the clink of their forks, by the hum of the electric clock over the stove and by the steady liquid muttering of their old refrigerator. To Ethan it was like the tedious soundtrack of their lives. He and his father lived in this little house, alone; his father working sixteen hours a day and more perfecting the Zeppelina, the personal family dirigible that was someday going to revolutionise transportation, while Ethan tried not to disturb him, not to disturb anyone, not to disturb the world. Entire days went by without either of them exchanging more than a few words. They had few friends on the island. Nobody came to visit, and they received no invitations. And then, on Saturday mornings, this wordless attempt to maintain a tradition whose purpose, whose point, and whose animating spirit – Ethan’s mother – seemed to be lost forever.
After a few minutes the humming of the clock began to drive Ethan out of his mind. The silence lay upon him like a dense pile of flannel cakes, gummed with syrup. He pushed back in his chair and sprang to his feet.
“Dad?” Ethan said, when they were most of the way through the ordeal. “Hey, Dad?”
His father was half dozing, chewing and chewing on a mouthful of pancakes with one eye shut. His thick black hair stood up in wild coils from his head, and his eyelids were purple with lack of sleep.
Mr. Feld sat up, and took a long swallow of coffee. He winced. He disliked the taste of the coffee he brewed almost as much as he hated his pancakes.
“What, son?” he said.
“Do you think I would ever make a good catcher?”
Mr. Feld stared at him, wide awake now, unable to conceal his disbelief. “You mean… you mean a baseball catcher?”
“Like Buck Ewing.”
“Buck Ewing?” Mr. Feld said. “That’s going back a ways.” But he smiled. “Well, Ethan, I think it’s a very intriguing idea.”
“I was just sort of thinking… maybe it’s time for us—for me—to try something different.”
“You mean, like waffles?” Mr. Feld pushed his plate away, sticking out his tongue, and smoothed down his wild hair. “Come,” he said. “I think I may have an old catcher’s mitt, out in the workshop.”
THE PINK HOUSE on the hill had once belonged to a family named Okawa. They had dug clams, kept chickens, and raised strawberries on a good-sized patch that ran alongside the Clam Island Highway for nearly a quarter of a mile in the direction of Clam Centre. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Okawas were put onto a school bus with the three or four other Japanese families living on Clam Island at the time. They were taken to the mainland, to a government internment camp outside of Spokane. The Okawa farm was sold to the Jungermans, who had neglected it. In the end it was the island itself, and not the Okawas – they never returned – that claimed the property. The strawberry patch was still there, badly overgrown, a thick black and green tangle of shadow and thorn in which, during the summer, you could sometimes catch, like a hidden gem, the glimpse of a bright strawberry.
When Ethan and his father had arrived on Clam Island, they had chosen this house, knowing nothing about its sad history, mostly because Ethan’s dad had been so taken with the glass and cinder-block hulk of the old Okawa Farm strawberry packing shed. It had wide, tall doors, a high ceiling of aluminium and glass, and ample space for all of Mr. Feld’s tools and equipment and for the various components of his airships, not to mention his large collection of cardboard boxes.
“It’s got to be in one of these,” said Mr. Feld. “I know I would never have thrown it away.”
Ethan stood beside his father, watching him root around in a box that had long ago held twelve bottles of Gilbey’s gin. It was not one of the boxes left over from their move to Clam Island, which were all stamped MAYFLOWER, with a picture of the Pilgrims’ ship. There were plenty of those still standing around, in stacks, up at the house, corners crisp, sealed with neat strips of tape. Ethan tried never to notice them. They reminded him, painfully, of how excited he had been at the time of the move; how glad to be leaving Colorado Springs, even though it meant leaving his mother behind forever. He had been charmed, at first, by the sight of the little pink house, and it was enchanting to imagine the marvellous blimp that was going to be born in the hulking old packing shed. He and his father had rebuilt the shed almost entirely themselves, that first summer, with some occasional help from Jennifer T.’s father, Albert. For a while the change of light, and the feeling of activity, of real work to be accomplished, had given Ethan reason to believe that everything was going to be all right again.
It was Albert Rideout who had told Ethan, one afternoon, about the Okawas. The son, Albert said, had been one of the best shortstops in the history of Clam Island, graceful and tall, surefooted and quick-handed. To improve his balance he would run up and down the narrow lanes between the rows of strawberry plants, as fast as he could, without crushing a single red berry or stepping on a single green shoot. After the Okawas were interned, the son was so eager to prove how loyal he and his family were to the United States that he had enlisted in the Army. He was killed, fighting against Germany, in France. It was just a story Albert Rideout was telling, as they put a final coat of paint of the cement floor of the workshop, punctuating it with his dry little laugh that was almost a cough. But from that moment on, especially when Ethan looked out at the ruins of the strawberry patch, the sky over the old Okawa Farm had seemed to hang lower, heavier, and greyer than it had on their arrival. That was when the silence had begun to gather and thicken in the house.
“It’s really a softball mitt,” Mr. Feld was saying. “I played a little catcher in college, on an intramural team… hello!” From the box he was digging around in, he had already