The Guest Book

by Sarah Blake

  Seth raised his eyebrows, elaborately unconvinced.

  “Atom bomb?” He smiled.

  She snorted. Her eye fell on his plate, the knife and fork tossed down as though he were a plumber, rather than lined up side by side, correctly, at the four-twenty spot. “For the nine thousandth time, can you put those together, please?”

  His smile dimmed. “It doesn’t matter, Mom.”

  “It does.”

  Seth rolled his eyes. “Dad. Tell Mom. It doesn’t matter where the fork and knife are. They’ll get to the sink one way or another.”

  “There is a right way and a wrong way,” Evie persisted. This wasn’t what she meant to finish with, but she couldn’t help it. “That’s all.”

  “Dad,” he appealed to Paul. “It’s not logical.”

  For answer, very slowly, Paul moved his own fork and his knife together, so that they lay side by side. And, equally elaborately, Seth rose from his spot, cleared his own and his father’s plate, took them into the kitchen to the sink, and put them down.

  Then he slid out of the kitchen and back to his room. They heard his door close.

  Evie stood up abruptly with her plate, feeling like a foreigner at her own table, and knowing she was absurd for feeling so. She walked through the door into the kitchen and turned on the tap, letting the hot water run the grease off the plate.

  She heard Paul get up from the table and follow her in.

  “I hate that Seth doesn’t really have a sense of manners.”

  “He’s a teenager.”

  “But he thinks it’s funny, he thinks manners belong to someone else.”

  Paul didn’t answer.

  “He comes from generations sitting around a table knowing which knife to use, when to turn to the person on your right, when to ask a question, how to tip the soup bowl away—” She stopped. She scooped the hamburger meat and peas that had caught in the drainer, letting the water from the tap run hard in the sink. The aluminum shone. She could hear so clearly her grandmother’s voice instructing all of them around the table up at Crockett’s. She could conjure them all exactly. And Seth had no idea who any of them were. I’m a Schlesinger, he said.

  How quickly the world plows us under, she thought with a pang. For two generations, maybe three, we lived on. After that, we’re nothing more than a name, or—her eye fell on one of Great-Aunt Minerva’s chairs standing like a sentry against the wall—a part of the furniture.

  “God,” she said aloud. “Listen to me.”

  “I am.”

  She turned around and saw he had been watching her, standing there very still, waiting while she thought things out.

  “I’m not the enemy,” he said quietly.

  “But you don’t see what I see.” She was sad. “You always used to.”

  He looked at her. “You used to be in a fight with the world, with your world,” he said. “What happened to Evie on the ramparts?”

  She shook her head.

  “You were fighting it, Evie, and now—”

  “Now?”

  “You’re leaving, Evie—and I don’t know how to stop you.”

  “What? No, I’m not.”

  “You want to disappear into the past.”

  “Oh.” She narrowed her eyes. “I get it. This is about the Island again.”

  “It’s not,” he said. “It’s bigger than that.”

  She watched him a moment.

  “It is, though,” she said.

  “You want to talk about the Island? Aside from how you got it, we can’t afford it, for starters,” he said quietly. “We can’t.”

  “Then we failed. I failed.”

  He groaned.

  “You don’t get it,” she said helplessly. “That’s how it seems. We have to hold on to it, otherwise—”

  “What is there to get?” He looked at her. “Your mother died, and you miss her. That’s what this is about.”

  The blood pounded in her chest. “It’s more than that.”

  “What, then?”

  “You heard Seth.” She crossed her arms. “You heard him.”

  “Heard him say what?”

  “We’ve got the Island,” she repeated. “He said it like it was a badge or something. Like a talisman.”

  “He’s a kid. It’s paradise up there for a kid. He’s oblivious.” He shook his head. “But you remember how it could be? Your grandmother at one end of the table watching your father’s steady pour. Your mother and your aunt Evelyn determined to keep the chatter going. Everyone under the weight, the steady weight of being Miltons. We do this, we don’t do that. And your father kept right on drinking until he fell out of his chair. If you want to rewrite that place for yourself, go ahead. But I’m not paying for it. I’m not going to ‘beggar’ Seth to keep it. I refuse. That place has a worm in it. That place is everything you’re not—it’s the wrong fight, Evie.”

  “Fuck you,” she said tiredly.

  “There you go.” She heard the relief in his voice.

  “What if it’s the right fight?” she said quietly. “Mum’s fight.”

  Paul shook his head. “Your mother wasn’t in any fight that I could see. When I think of your mother, I think of someone facing into a stiff breeze with a smile on.”

  Evie knew exactly what he was thinking of. Her mother stepped into every room with her head tipped and her chin raised, a smile on her lips. Resolute. Forward-looking—fully armored.

  “Anyway, I can’t let it go right now. You know I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because of Mum,” she said. “Without the Island—she’s vanished. Just like that. Smoke. And I owe her something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.” Evie shook her head. “All I know is that Mum came alive when we were on the Island. She was her best self up there.”

  She paused.

  “And she slipped through my hands. I spent all my life determined not to be her, not to be mistaken for her, and now that she’s gone, all I want to do is sit her down and ask her.”

  “What?”

  “What happened?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “What?” She pushed back at his silence. “Her life just got quieter and quieter and then just dimmed for years, almost extinguished. It’s as though it never really caught.”

  “Well, no; she married. She had you.”

  “That can’t be all,” she said, tears thick in her throat.

  “Evie,” he groaned, “why not? Why must there be anything else? You miss her. Her, not the Island. How does keeping it keep her?”

  Evie shook her head in frustration. The reason was just out of reach, just on the other side of a shadow, just there, ungraspable but perceived. The Island held it. The place held her, all of them. It was what she couldn’t explain to Paul, because it made no sense.

  “I can’t sell the Island until I know what happened.” She was firm.

  “Jesus. You want the story?” He shook his head. “It’s the oldest one. You lot ran out of money. You ran out of juice. The fire in the keep went out. And the people took over the castle.”

  “‘You lot’?” she repeated. “You are talking about my mother and my grandmother. Both of whom you knew. Both of whom knew you.”

  “And both of whom,” Paul said, “were expressions of their time.”

  “So you’ve said.” She nodded tightly. “So you’ve told me. But unless you truly believe that we are no more than the sum of our times—something happened. Something must have happened.”

  Paul shook his head.

  Evie looked at him. “Do you think something is happening now?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Between us,” she said.

  “What’s your point?”

  This, she wanted to say. This moment no one sees. That tells it all.

  “Listen,” he said. “There is no story until we’re dead, and then our children tell it. We are just living. Your mother was living. Stop look
ing for what’s not there. Nothing happened—life happened. Reality is not a story.”

  “So the only people with stories to tell are those on the stones?”

  He froze.

  She shook her head and turned around. “My mother wants a stone. Why does she want a stone?”

  “Evie,” he said. “Don’t.”

  “‘Here’?” she reminded him. “She wants the word, here. Not here, meaning anywhere. Here, meaning on the Island.”

  “Evie—”

  “Isn’t that your theory?” she snapped. “Isn’t that your big idea? A place holds what happened, a stone marks that fact. And facts like that, grounded facts, free us to leave them behind, to move on.”

  She was tinderous, flaming. Goddamn it.

  He stared at her a minute, and then a great grin spread across his face. He leaned forward and took her by the shoulders. “Evie, that’s it.”

  “I know,” she said hotly. “I’m not an idiot. I was listening.”

  He pulled her against him, and she let him hold her, feeling herself slowly uncurl and open. They stood together in the kitchen.

  “If Henry offers to buy you out and lets you—lets us—come up and stay?” he asked.

  She pulled away. “It wouldn’t be the same.”

  “Owning it is more important than just having it?”

  “Yes.”

  He considered her. “Why?”

  “If I let it go, then I’m not a real Milton.”

  “You don’t want to be that—you’ve never wanted to be that.”

  She crossed her arms. “Haven’t I? I feel perhaps like I’ve been living under a cloak.”

  “Listen to me,” he said urgently. “You are not a real Milton.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because you married me.” He reached and put both hands on her shoulders and shook them. She stared up at him, startled. “Me.” He held her a minute, looking at her, and then he kissed her.

  Twenty-two

  JOAN AND LEN WALKED. They sat in booths. They talked. Of the trial. Of the men she watched and worked for. Of the men he did. When the ruling came down in favor of Mr. Rosset, Joan told Len how her boss had picked her up and shaken her, laughing, everyone laughing. “The genie is out of the bottle,” he’d cried. “There is no turning back.” Len told her about Jack Higginson and Jack Slade and the wide berth they gave him. He told her about Dickie Pratt, hired last year and engaged to Joan’s sister, Evelyn, who was not too sharp, he said to her regretfully.

  “I had an idea to show him how to quicken his commissions,” he said. “I could show him; no one would need to know.”

  “Some things are better off left unsaid,” she warned. “Especially with someone like Dickie Pratt.”

  “Someone like Dickie?”

  She’d nodded her head, but that was all she’d say.

  She knew most of them by name or by reputation or by the small asides she had heard her father bring home. She knew nothing about business though she was in clear possession of how things worked, of rules that didn’t matter but were ironclad all the same.

  And yet she broke every rule he knew for a girl of her kind. She wanted him. It took his breath away. There were no games, no hidden traps, nothing at all but her mouth beneath his, her hands on his back, pulling him to her. Pulling him down, the rich chuckle rising from deep in her, exploding.

  On the other side of this time, at the beginning of August, she was going to Maine. And on the other side of that, he couldn’t think. In neat compartments, like berths on a ship, he put these weeks with her. Their own ship. “We are,” Joan said to him, “like members of a foreign legion.”

  “An occupying force?”

  “No,” she said, and leaned against him, “from a distant land—”

  “Isn’t this your city?”

  It is, she thought, and nodded at him. “But not with you—with you it’s somewhere else.” Somewhere on the front, she thought, somewhere on the border of a recognizable life.

  He looked down at her.

  “Hello.” She smiled up. He reached and pulled her up off the bench and into him.

  “Let’s walk,” he said, holding her.

  There was something different tonight, something urgent beneath the lips he bent to kiss her with, some trouble in his eyes.

  “What is it?”

  He pulled her closer at the same time as he shook his head. They walked through the trees and up the broad esplanade at the center of the park.

  “I can’t figure your father out.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Your father doesn’t press advantages,” he said, bemused, thinking of that morning’s meeting with a client. Ogden had specifically asked for Len to watch the client’s face as they went through the working of the deal. “I can’t understand it.”

  She nodded. “He wouldn’t.”

  “I would,” Len vowed. “We could have nearly doubled what the guy conceded.”

  “We’re different,” she answered simply. “We don’t believe in taking advantage of a situation. In grabbing for money.”

  We? He stilled.

  “Grabbing?” He was deliberate. “I’d call it earning.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “And what about the first Miltons? Someone somewhere along the line had to grab.”

  She considered this. “I don’t think we are a grabby people.”

  “You haven’t had to grab; you’ve had it all in your hands all along.”

  “My point is,” she said thoughtfully, “we wouldn’t grab even if we had to.”

  “You really believe that?” Len was careful.

  “Of course,” she said firmly. “We are above all that.”

  “All that.” His voice trailed as he shook his head. “What is ‘all that’? Money?”

  She frowned. “It’s not about the money. It’s more than that—it’s who you are.”

  “I’d say it’s all about the money.”

  She poked him. “When one has money, one never talks about it, and one thinks about it as little as possible.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Half.” She looked up at him with that dare in her eyes. “We think past money.”

  He snorted.

  “We do,” she protested.

  “You think you think past it.” He pulled her close.

  But it was the kind of comment that gnawed at her, even as it made her think. What he had said about the Jews in the bar at the Algonquin with Moss had struck her and stuck deep. Listening to him, Joan had felt that his vision of the world could not be wholly trusted, it could not be the whole truth, though she felt, too, that it must be right. Jews were set apart, she knew that. Everyone knew that. But why? They didn’t play by the rules. They didn’t know how to walk into a room and be quiet, first. Yet how could they know the rules? How could they know the rules if they were always set outside?

  And she wanted to give him something more than herself, wanted to come to him carrying it in her hands. Ever since she had opened her eyes in Pennsylvania Station and seen him crouched above her, she had wanted to give him something. The more she listened to him, the more she walked with him, she wanted to give him the rules. To win. Though win what exactly—her? She wasn’t sure.

  “You know, your father has me looking in the firm’s archives,” he said after a while.

  “Sounds riveting.”

  He smiled and shifted his hand farther down her arm. “It is, actually.”

  “But?”

  Len shook his head. “Why me? Why have me digging around? Organizing.”

  “He trusts you.”

  He shook his head. “What does he want me to see?”

  She laughed. “What could there be to see?”

  “How to run a firm, I suppose.” He slowed. “Or how not to.”

  “He likes you,” Joan said. “That’s why. He doesn’t like just anybody.”

  He glanced down at her, vaguely troubled.
<
br />   They had reached the coffee shop downstairs from her apartment. She pulled open the door without looking up at him, and he put his hand on the small of her back and propelled them both through.

  “He saved my life, you know.” She glanced back at him.

  He slid into the booth beside her. The air in the diner was greasy and hot around them. “What happened?”

  She turned and looked at him. “Moss and I were diving for starfish, and I had just pulled one off the rock and was kicking up to the surface—”

  He waited.

  “It was my first attack.” She shuddered. “I couldn’t breathe—”

  “He dove in?”

  She nodded.

  “Where was Moss?”

  She shook her head. “In the water. He couldn’t move. He was paralyzed with fright.”

  “Poor guy.”

  They were quiet.

  He leaned forward across the table and took her hand. “If you have another fit, what do I do?”

  She went still. No one outside of her family had ever spoken to her about her fits. He talked about it as if it was as ordinary as fixing a headache or even a tire. He must have wanted to ask that question for a long time. She looked at him, and he kept hold of her hand.

  “When it happens, put a spoon in my mouth,” she said quietly.

  He nodded. Their hamburgers came. They passed the ketchup to each other, salt. She sipped her Coke. He ate. The room chattered round. For an instant she saw the two of them together, past this moment, him knowing, him being there whenever she fell away from the world. She bent her head, flushing, and ate. When they were finished, he asked for the check, and she rose and wrapped her scarf around her head, making for the door, walking through it and into the night air, turning to wait. And when he leaned to put the bills on the table, she saw him pocketing one of the spoons.

  Later they lay in bed, drowsing in the heat, the sheets kicked off, and a tiny breeze crossed the ridge of his body, and the hair on his chest bent and waved as it crossed in the faintest whisper like the ripple of air upon the moss at the Broads, and without thinking Joan started to describe the path on the Island, walking it in her mind’s eye all the way past the old foundations, the bent spruce, the moss so deep all footfalls vanished. “When you look behind you,” she said into the dark without looking at Len, “it’s as though you’d never been there.”