by Sarah Blake
Evie froze.
(What is Joan doing? Evie remembered hearing her aunt’s feverish voice calling from the front bedroom in her last summer. Where is Joan?)
“Hello, everyone.” Dick Sherman pushed through into the conference room, handsome, white-haired, impeccable in a tweed suit, his hand outstretched, either ignoring or not perceiving the evident tension in the room.
“Shepherd, hello. So sorry to keep you all waiting. Henry—” And he made his way around the table, handing round his greetings and his general cheer.
“Looking more like your mum every day,” he said to Evie.
She gave him a tight little smile.
He nodded, moving away, ready to begin. “All right?” He remained standing. “Everyone settled?”
There was a collective pause.
“Why don’t you get us down to business, Dick,” Henry invited, his gaze resting lightly on Evie and then upon the lawyer.
“All right.” Dick Sherman nodded and moved the folder in front of him slightly closer. “We are meeting in accordance with your grandfather’s wishes that six months to the day the last of your parents had died, you would gather to assess.”
“Assess?” Henry asked. “How do you mean?”
The lawyer cleared his throat. “Do you plan to hold on to the island?”
“Of course,” said Evie firmly.
“Why?” Henry asked the lawyer cautiously.
“At the rate the island costs are going,” Dick Sherman said, looking around at them, “the monies in trust will run out the first of next year.”
No one spoke. Evie looked across at Min.
“Run out?” Shep broke in. “Entirely?”
Dick Sherman nodded.
“How much remains in the trust?” Henry asked.
“I’m not at liberty to say. Your grandfather was clear about this.”
“Why not?”
“I imagine, knowing him,” Dick said smoothly, “he wanted you to enjoy the place without worry.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Henry groaned. “We’re not children.”
Dick Sherman made no reply.
“Now give us the bad news,” Min joked. “What are the annual costs?”
The lawyer slid a sheet of paper out a folder, checked it, and answered, “About a hundred thousand a year. Give or take.”
No one spoke. That was serious money.
“Can you elaborate on that number?” Henry asked dryly.
“You’ve got the costs on the houses, the boats—and your caretaker. Roughly twenty thousand for each of you.”
“We all have that much, certainly,” Henry prompted, it seemed to Evie, a little gleefully.
“Not for this.” Min shook her head.
“It’s a stretch,” Shep said.
Evie didn’t answer. It wasn’t realistic, but it was almost affordable.
Dick Sherman folded his arms and leaned on the table.
“If we decided to sell the whole place now—this year,” Harriet said, “would we get whatever is in the trust, plus the proceeds of the Island?”
“Correct.”
“How much?” Harriet asked.
“A conservative estimate?” Sherman considered. “I’d place it at three and a half million.”
Harriet sat back in her chair.
With rising alarm, Evie sat forward. “But we’re not thinking of selling.”
“This is precisely why your grandparents wished you to meet.” Dick Sherman looked at her. “And I have to remind you that whatever decision you do come to, the will says you must come to it unanimously. I’m afraid there can’t be a sale unless all five of you agree.”
“But we have until next year before the money runs dry.” Shep tapped his fingers on the table.
“Why wait until the money runs dry?” Harriet pressed. “If we are going to lose it anyway, why not sell now—we’d each get at least half a million dollars. If we wait until the money runs out, we might end up paying for it while it’s on the market; then we’d only get—”
“The Island,” Evie broke in. “We’d get the Island for another year, and we’d gain time to figure out whether we can hold on to it.”
The cousins were quiet, considering.
“Okay, so where are we?” Harriet asked. “What should we do?”
“Well, clearly, we shouldn’t make a decision right now,” Shep countered. “Isn’t that the point of this meeting? Pops and Granny K wanted us to start thinking, that’s all.”
The mention of their grandparents calmed the waters somewhat, and there was an almost imperceptible settling in the room. Shep looked across the table and smiled at Evie, marking her, she realized with a start, as an ally in the as-yet-unnamed battle ahead.
“Can we buy some time?” he asked. “Rent the Island?”
Harriet grimaced but said nothing.
“Sounds like an awful lot of work,” Henry put in. “And I’ll bet the insurance on the boats would run steep.”
“It’s a great idea, Shep,” Evie said. “It gives us some wiggle room, anyway.”
“Delays the inevitable,” Henry drawled.
“Nothing is inevitable,” Shep retorted.
“Making a plan is inevitable.” Henry shook his head at his brother and turned to Evie. “Now might as well be the time to bring up your issue.”
The band across her chest that had been tightening all through the meeting swelled now so she could hardly breathe.
“And what is that?” Dick Sherman asked.
“Mum wanted her ashes buried at the end of the picnic grounds,” Evie said.
“Which might get in the way of my mother’s plan to help us with our costs,” Henry explained.
Dick shrugged, looking at Evie. “That should be fine. There is nothing in the state mandate that prevents a burial on private property.”
She flashed a grateful smile at the lawyer.
“Aren’t I right, Dick,” Henry said, “that all the owners need to agree about something like that?”
Evie turned to look at Henry, sitting at the end of the table.
“Shut up, Henry,” Min said swiftly.
“Bear with me here, Dick. We were talking about selling a portion of the Island, a small portion. And Joan’s wishes might scotch a sale.” He was stubborn. “A sale we might need. A sale that might help us to pay for the Island—to keep it.” He looked at Evie. “That’s all. We ought to think about that. I am thinking of the long term.”
She looked back at him, speechless.
“Be that as it may…” Dick Sherman cleared his throat carefully. “In the short term, Shepherd’s idea might be realizable.”
They all looked up.
“I’ve been approached by a man about whether he might rent the property sometime late in the month of August, perhaps the week before Labor Day—”
“It’s not a property.” Evie couldn’t keep herself from interrupting. “It’s the Island.”
“Apparently he was sailing by at the beginning of the summer. Passed the place with some friends.”
“What’s his name?” Shep asked.
“He’s a banker up in Boston, I don’t think you’d know him.”
“What’s his name?” Shep asked again.
“Charles Levy.”
“Charlie Levy?” Min said. “How old is he?”
“About your age, I should think.”
“Did he go to Harvard?”
“I don’t know,” Dick admitted.
“If it’s who I think it is, he was in my class.” She turned to the table and grinned. “Granny K would die.”
“Why?”
Min paused, clearly relishing the news. “Well, he’s new money.” She was ironic. “And Jewish.”
“But clearly he has money,” Harriet said.
“Oh yes,” Min answered dryly. “Pots.”
“Why don’t we sell him the picnic grounds, then—kill two birds with one stone,” Harriet suggested, a little smile playing on her lips. “Assuming h
e falls in love with the place.”
She looked around, satisfied. “As everyone always does.”
“I doubt he’d want it. It takes a certain kind of person—he may not even know how to sail,” Henry pointed out.
“A certain kind of person?” Min asked.
“Aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves?” Shep put in. “We don’t have to decide all this now.”
“We should, though.” Henry shook his head, turning to Evie. “I’ll agree to Aunt Joan’s burial at the picnic grounds on the condition that you consider Mum’s idea to sell that portion, next year.”
“Henry, don’t be an asshole,” Shep said.
Henry didn’t look at Shep.
“Evie, be realistic.”
“To sell the part where Mum wants her ashes to be buried? To a stranger? Who has no idea what it means? To us—at all?”
“If Levy buys it, he might not care if Aunt Joan is outside the graveyard,” Harriet said. “He’s Jewish, isn’t he?”
Paying no attention to his younger sister, Henry folded his arms and leaned them on the table, looking at Evie. “What are you going to do?”
Evie looked at him, and took in a great breath and stood up. “Nothing at the moment.”
“Damn it, Evie—”
“Are we finished?” Evie looked up at Dick Sherman.
“There’s one more thing,” he said.
The gravity in his voice sank Evie back down in her chair.
The five of them watched as he retrieved a familiar moss green envelope from the folder in front of him, which Evie recognized with a pang as her grandmother’s Merrimade stationery.
He slid a single sheet of paper out of the envelope, and read: “‘After all, Evie may be right. What’s past can be revised. I should like Moss’s share of Crockett’s Island to go to Mr. Reginald Pauling, of New York City, as he wished.’”
Dick Sherman pulled off his glasses. “And it is signed, Katherine Houghton Milton.”
All eyes turned to Evie, who sat there stunned.
“Who the hell is Reginald Pauling?” Henry exploded into the silence.
“You told Granny K to give it away?” Shep asked.
“No,” she protested. “I have no idea what she’s talking about.”
“Granny K wrote this?”
The lawyer nodded and reached forward and handed Min the piece of paper. Evie leaned over. It was a scribbled note, but it was clearly her grandmother’s handwriting, and it was dated the year she died, 1988.
“It’s in pencil.” Henry was standing behind them. “It’s not legal if it’s in pencil. Is it legal?”
“Well,” said Dick Sherman carefully, “it’s a request, not legally binding, but her wishes are clear.”
“This makes no sense whatsoever,” Shep declared. “Pops would never have given away some of Crockett’s. Why would Granny K?”
“It’s Uncle Moss who wanted to give it away. It was his share.”
“Wasn’t Uncle Moss a little unhinged?”
“Moss?” Dick Sherman turned in his chair and looked at Shep sternly. “Not in the slightest.”
“Did Mum and Aunt Evelyn know about this?” Evie asked.
“Not as far as I know.”
They were quiet.
“But who the hell is Pauling?” Henry asked again. “Is he still alive?”
“We’d need to ascertain that,” Dick Sherman answered.
“So the whole thing was never fully ours.” Harriet spoke up. “All this time.”
“Yes, it was. It is—it still is,” insisted Henry. “It’s up to us to consider, as Granny K said.”
“No.” Harriet laughed. “No, it never was fully ours. It wasn’t meant to be ours to begin with.”
“How is that funny?” Henry snapped.
His youngest sister widened her eyes at him. “It just is, Henry.”
Henry shook his head in disgust.
“Today’s meeting might be an opportunity,” Sherman said carefully, “for you to begin to decide if you wish to honor your grandmother’s wish.”
“Why should we honor it?” Henry shook his head. “Do we need to even tell him?”
“Granny K wanted us to do it,” Min retorted.
“But are we required to do this? Look at the language, ‘I should like’—”
“It’s not up to us to parse like that, Henry.”
“Crockett’s is ours. It’s ours to take on, and to run. Not someone else’s. If we bring somebody in—some other person, it will—”
“Cheapen it?” Harriet said quietly.
“Don’t twist my words.” Henry flushed. “I refuse to be the agent that resolves some inscrutable issue of my grandparents’ generation. Why should I? Why should we? What about our own children? What about the next generation?”
“When one has,” Harriet said, standing up, “one gives. Isn’t that what we were taught, Henry? Isn’t that what we ought to remember?”
“Not an island,” Henry protested. “Not the Island. I mean, who is this guy? We can’t just give it away. It’s worth millions.”
“Millions we don’t have,” Min pointed out. “If you recall. Money.”
“But it’s not about the money,” Evie burst out. “It’s never been about the money. It’s the place. It’s our place. Our place”—she looked at her cousins—“and our mothers’ place, and all our children’s, too.”
“All right.” Min shook her head. “But the fact remains that we could still use the money from a renter. So what should we do? Offer two weeks to Charlie Levy? We’d need to get the house ready for him, if so.”
“I’ll go,” said Evie swiftly. “I can do that.”
“That’s all right,” said Min. “You’re teaching, aren’t you? I took the next two weeks off. I can do it.”
“We’ll do it together.” Evie was firm. “It’s the Fourth of July break next week, and both of us should be up there.”
Min opened her mouth and then thought better of it and nodded.
“And what about Mr. Pauling?” Dick Sherman asked.
Evie and Henry looked at each other. Harriet rolled her eyes and looked down at her hands. Min and Shep were quiet.
“It’s a moot point at the moment,” Evie finally said, “isn’t it? We don’t even know if we can hold on to the Island ourselves.”
“I think we do nothing,” Henry said slowly. “For now. We wait. We consider what to do.”
The lawyer looked round the table. Slowly, each of them nodded.
“Agreed.”
“Very well.” Dick Sherman rose to his feet, signaling the meeting’s close.
* * *
IT WAS RAINING when the meeting broke up, in the hard bursts of early summer that forced a quick think. Wait it out under an awning, or make a dash for a taxi and risk getting soaked? Evie took furious satisfaction in the fact that she lived at this end of Manhattan; she could and would walk. It made her feel somehow better than the rest of them. Walking, getting soaked, and not minding—smiling as she waved goodbye—proved something. Her grandmother had routinely pooh-poohed the rain. Turned a deaf ear to complaint of any kind. It was weak. Weak to suggest one put on a raincoat, weak to wonder whether one ought to wait it out. And weakest of all to look miserable.
The luggage shops along this block had thrown plastic down over the suitcases and the shop owners had all retreated just inside their doorways, where they stood, smoking, framed by the warm light of the deeper interiors, cozy, calling to one another over the rain in Cantonese. No one walked as she did straight down the block into the pelting rain. It may, in fact, have started to rain even harder. Her shoes were sopping wet.
The light turned green, tripping the next one, then the next, all the way up Broadway as far as Evie could see. The rain poured down and the dark stone of the buildings was punctuated by windows in which the lights of an office, a studio, the smaller lamp of someone’s apartment glowed and shivered.
“Paul!” Evie shoved open the apar
tment door. “Paul? Are you home?” She started pulling off her clothes right where she stood, dripping onto the front mat. “Paul?”
He came around the door of his study. “Hey,” he said, his eyes widening. She had stripped off her shirt.
“What’s happening? What’s wrong?”
“The Island,” she said. And peeled her skirt off her wet legs and kicked at it to get free. “It’s—” She walked past him in her bra and underwear into her study. “Hang on.”
She reached for the photograph of her mother and her aunt and snatched it down.
“Evie?”
She stared at the two of them. And turned away, unable to think straight, nearly walking into Paul, who was standing in the doorway.
“Evie?”
“I can’t,” she muttered. “I can’t—”
Shivering, she made for their bedroom and pulled on the top drawer of the bureau. It wouldn’t budge. It was sticking in the humidity. She pulled again. And then, defeated, turned and yanked open the closet door. Caged, in great distress, she batted from one place to the next.
“Stop.” Paul was sharp. “Stop it, Evie. What’s going on?”
“The Island,” she said, and pulled a sweatshirt from the shelf.
“What? What’s happened?”
She couldn’t think straight. Which part was the worst?
“Henry wants to sell the land around the picnic grounds.”
“Okay,” Paul said again.
“It’s not okay. That’s where Mum wants her ashes.”
“Right.”
“Henry made me agree to consider the sale.”
“How?”
“By making Mum’s burial there contingent.”
Paul was quiet.
“There’s more.” Evie looked away. “It’s worse than that. It’s not even ours anymore.”
“What?”
“The Island.”
“What do you mean? How? Why?”
“I don’t know,” she said again, desperate to move, to fly straight there. To erase time and distance and step off the boat onto the dock, to check it, to see that it wasn’t going. It couldn’t be going.
“Hold on.”
“I’ve got to go.” She looked at him, pleading. “Paul.”
“Stop, Evie.” He followed her back into the kitchen, where she opened the fridge and closed it without looking in. Then opened it again.
