The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken (acx book reading txt) 📕

Let the wind blow high, let the wind blow low.

Through the streets in my kilt I’ll go.

All the lassies shout, Hello!

Donald, where’s your troosers?

It had never been about the kilt, of course. He was the youngest of seven brothers, none of whom ever married, except him, at the age of forty-seven. Before that, and for years, he and his brothers had run the family department store in Montville, Massachusetts. Back then, their parents dead, the brothers went every year down the Cape for two weeks’ vacation, crammed into a cottage called Beach Rose, until Arlene MacLean met Louis Levine in Wellfleet and took him away. He had deserted one family and only wanted to belong to the next. He’d thought he might wear a kilt to their wedding. “Oh no,” said Arlene. “No kilt.” “But your uncles—” “No kilts anywhere.” “Bagpipes?” “I hate them.” What could be sadder in a marriage than incompatible feelings about bagpipes? Ought they still marry? They eloped, and had a child, and never argued, except for the one thing. It became a running joke: the man wanted a kilt. “I have fine calves,” he said. He immersed himself in everything Scottish: his favorite movie took place on the Isle of Mull, in the Inner Hebrides. “Look at that light,” he would say to his family, who didn’t care for the black-and-white light of the 1940s, not when modern times were right outside the door, and plenty well lit.

Now Arlene MacLean Levine was two months dead, and his son had taken him to Scotland, to tour Mull, its castles and coastline, its birdlife: today they would take a boat to an uninhabited island that promised puffins. David himself didn’t like birds, couldn’t tell them apart, didn’t want to: it struck him as feeble-minded, to stare at the throats and tails of birds for a flush or flash, just so you could name them. Seagull, pigeon, chicken, hawk, that was all you needed. All other birds were sparrows to him. As a child he’d found his father’s ornithological obsession a moral failing: his father had never asked a single question about his son’s life, or any other living human’s. Louis loved animals, ate them; the mass grave of the local natural history museum had made David a vegetarian at age thirteen. Study me, he’d wanted to say to his father: the narrow-footed David, the bearded Levine, the flat-bottomed vegetarian. Write me down in your book.

He’d brought his father to Scotland, paid for everything, in attempt to ease the guilt he felt for living so far away, for having preferred distance all his adult life. He’d given his father birds and haggis and properly smoky, properly spelled whisky. A kilt, if it came to that.

He missed his gloomy mother. Together they called Louis the Infernal Optimist. He’d burn the house down looking for a bright side.

They boarded the boat in brilliant Tobermory. One of the men who worked for the tour company helped Louis down with a gentle hand. Poor old Dad, thought David. Then the man offered him the same courtly assistance. “Down you go,” said the man, in the analgesic voice of a nurse. The boat was filled with the particular anxiety of paying customers who all wanted the best seat.

“Here, Dad,” said David. He gestured to the bench along the gunwale.

David was not superstitious except in this way: he liked to feel lucky. No black cat or broken mirror bothered him, he never crossed fingers or made wishes, but every day was an omen for itself. He oscillated between his father’s cheer and his mother’s dolor: everything was perfect, unless it went to shit. The sun was shining in Scotland, clouds like storybook sheep above them though the local sheep were goatish, angular, weird. It was a good day, which meant it would be a good day, which meant every day for a while might be good. He’d packed the plaid picnic tote provided by the house they’d rented: bottle of water, bottle of wine, truckle of cheese, bread, cookies, fruit. They would picnic among the puffins.

Over the PA came the voice of the captain, the voice of God.

“Beautiful day,” he said. “This is our one day of Scottish summer, and you’re lucky to have it. Should be a nice trip to the Treshnish Isles, little more than an hour’s journey. First stop is Lunga, where we’ll have two hours, then to Staffa and Fingal’s Cave. If you have any questions, Robby will answer.”

Robby was the man who’d helped them into the boat. Now that he had a name, he became particular, a smiling man in oilskins, one starboard dimple, a boxer’s nose. David tried to decide whether to dislike him.

“Finkel’s Cave?” said Louis.

“Fingal’s,” said Robby.

“Finkel,” said Louis.

Robby shook his head, smiling uncertainly. “Fingal. Guh-guh-guh. Scottish giant. Same hexagonal rock formation as the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland. Basalt pillars.”

David said to Louis, “Finkel’s Cave sounds like one of your competitors.”

Levine’s of Montville had closed the year before David’s birth; his father was already managing the benefits office of the hospital. The escalators, the layaway counter, the sliding oak and iron ladders in the storeroom, all gone, the Levine brothers dispersed, dead, buried in a line in the Jewish section of the Montville cemetery. Louis Levine, in the back of a boat headed to the uninhabited Treshnish Isles, was the last bit of equipment: a blinking man, a blinking sign, LEVINE’S, LEVINE’S, LEVINE’S.

All shipwrecks begin with a ship. David assessed the other passengers. Who would be saved and who lost? His father still went to the Y most mornings to swim laps, could save himself, but David was sturdy and without children and was certain that Robby would deputize him in case of catastrophe. He decided he would rise to the occasion.

A group of tall Swedes carried their lunches in waist packs and would not sit down, a hale septuagenarian English couple wore matching sensible