The Guest Book

by Sarah Blake

  “It’s not going anywhere.” He put his hand on her wrist and pushed the fridge door closed.

  “It is,” she said fiercely. “We are going to lose it, lose what it is right now. Lose the place as we know it. As Seth knows it. It’s going to change.”

  She paused. Her throat closed over. The tears welled up and she shook her head.

  “Okay,” he said, “come here.” And he pulled her to him, wrapping his arms around her. She stood against him, his heart beating slow and strong on the other side of his shirt. She wanted to be calmed. She wanted to stand there and be drawn to that slow, tamed beat and be soothed.

  Framed and hung on the wall behind Paul’s head was the child’s map she had drawn with her grandfather of the eight trails lacing Crockett’s Island. He had helped her trace the outline of the Island from the map. He had encouraged her to memorize the angles of the coves, the colors of the trailhead markers, the thick inland forest and its rooted paths. He had nodded when she’d finished it and shown him. He had smiled. As if it were hers, as if it would always be hers.

  “Tell me.” She felt Paul’s voice through her chest. “What happened at Dick Sherman’s?”

  “Granny K wants us to give away Uncle Moss’s share of the Island.”

  “Give it away to whom?”

  Evie shook her head. “No one I’ve ever heard of. Someone named Reginald Pauling. And apparently, I told her to do it.”

  “Reginald Pauling?” He looked at her, incredulous. “Reg Pauling? The writer?”

  “What writer?”

  “If it’s the one I’m thinking of, he wrote for The Village Voice in the fifties and sixties—an African American. He was associated with Baldwin.”

  “That’s impossible,” Evie said. “Granny K would never have even crossed paths with a black man.”

  She could see his brain seizing hold of the idea, she could see the excitement, and it sparked the fuse. It was too ludicrous, and she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of some kind of literary detective story.

  “Don’t,” she thrust. “This isn’t some story. This is Mum. This is the Island.”

  “But—”

  “But then, you don’t care, do you? We are laughable for holding on to it, pathetic, and privileged, and blind.”

  “Evie.”

  She heard the warning, but she kept going, now almost gleeful in her need to hurl it back at him.

  “You said that, Paul.” Her voice rose. “You said it right out there—” She pointed. “Let it go.”

  He didn’t move.

  “You see stick figures when you think of my family. Stick figures and cutouts. You see Chekhov, for fuck’s sake. Or Nazis.”

  She paused, her mind spinning, the anger a dervish in her head.

  “Go ahead,” he said quietly. “Light the match. Burn it down.”

  She looked at him, the rage so high, she couldn’t speak. She did want to burn it all down; she wanted to toss the match and watch it explode and have it all be done. All of this, the uncertainty, the confusion. The sorrow.

  “We have always been a joke to you, haven’t we?”

  “That’s it,” he said quietly, and pushed away from the counter. “I’m done.”

  “You’re done. Done with what?”

  “For a year now, I’ve been listening to this—for a year? No, for longer than a year. For our lives. I’ve listened to you fight the Miltons, be the Miltons, love the Miltons, use the Miltons, and I was just one stick shy of the fire; I was not a Milton—and that was good, that was great—I was first-generation, a Jew with a father who listened to opera after he came home from the office. I’ve watched you, I’ve listened to you, and now you’re leaving—you’ve somehow figured out that I was the worm in the apple all along—how? How the hell did that happen—I don’t know.

  “And you know what?” He shook his head in a kind of stupefied amazement. “For the first time, I don’t care. I don’t give a rat’s ass.”

  They stared at each other.

  “Did we lose something?” Evie asked finally. “Or did the world just catch up with us?”

  “Who’s ‘we,’ Evie?” he said quietly. “What are we talking about here?”

  The gap between them opened, the silence shrouding them. Paul looked at her, waiting. She could choose to put a tear in the shroud right then. She could rip a hole in it.

  “The Island. My cousins.”

  Disappointment flickered and faded on his face. He crossed his arms.

  “Without it—we vanish,” she said.

  He stepped toward her, his eyes on her face. “You don’t, Evie. It’s an idea you have. It’s the mythology. And I’m so goddamned tired of it.”

  He walked past her into the hall.

  “Paul.”

  He stopped. “I’m right here.”

  But she had run out of air, and fire. There was nothing to fight for, anyway.

  “It doesn’t matter, does it?” he said quietly. “At some point, you have to want what you have.”

  “I have to go. I have to see—”

  “What?” He waited, his body tense, barely able to stand still, holding himself, she could see, lidding his own anger.

  What indeed? The silence between them just then was windy and vast.

  “What’s there,” she finished.

  The Island

  Twenty-six

  IT WAS THE SAME. The rocks and the slap of the tide, the high blue sky and the smell of wet wood in the boathouse, the same as Kitty emerged onto the bright green lawn, sloping up to the Big House. The house. The lawn. There before her was the obelisk of Crockett’s gravestone, the crooked ridge of spruce behind the house, and the place, opened up to them, as on that first day. She and Ogden standing, just like this, at the bottom of the lawn, watching Dunc and Priss move forward up the hill. Years ago. Years and years, what did they matter? Time folded and refolded itself here like a shirt.

  Ogden’s arm stole around her shoulder.

  “Yes,” she said to what she knew he was thinking.

  “Poor Priss,” she said, looking at the empty spot in front of the house where the two of them had stood that afternoon.

  He drew her closer. The sun was hot on her skin. It was midday. A dragonfly clacked in the air just past her ear. She patted Ogden’s hand on her shoulder, and the two of them started up the hill.

  The irises had gone leggy in the rock garden. The rosa rugosa had budded out, the pink flowers bursting from their smooth green hips and scenting the air with what Kitty always felt to be the smell of summer. Ogden went around the side of the house. Arriving at the granite stoop, she pulled the bough of the lilac toward her, burying her face in its rich purple, and then, knowing what awaited her, she turned.

  The lawn stretched to the boathouse, and there stood Dunc and Priss. And there beside them stood Elsa in her skirt and cardigan. There down the hill rolled Willy, his laughter rocketing through the air. There they stood at the bottom of the lawn, as they stood every year, though Elsa had been dead all this time. Kitty’s grip tightened on the bough. And Willy? Had he survived? The bright shining blade that held her up inside, the imagined core, bowed as the question found its way in, and bent and crumpled under it—a tarnish on the shine. But how could she have known? How could any of them have known what was coming? She stared at the place where the mother and the child had stood, a dark spot she’d have to walk around, a funeral in her brain she must attend now, alone. One must simply live with that. One does the best one can.

  Same as Neddy. Kitty let the bough go.

  * * *

  THE HOUSE HAD been swept and polished. The surfaces of the table in the kitchen and the long table in the dining room gleamed. There was a fresh coat of paint on the floorboards in the hall, and the rag rugs were tossed down at sharp right angles. Mrs. Ames had left milk and butter and eggs in the icebox. There was a fresh loaf of bread in the box, and wooden matches had been set beside the stove.

  Hullo, old house, Kitty
addressed the room, the chairs, the familiar hump of the granite rock out the kitchen window. She reached for a match, bent, and lit the pilot light. They were here now. Back. Again. Out the window, Ogden was already halfway up the hill to examine the new shingled patch on the lee side of the barn. Above his head an osprey soared.

  Walking through to the front rooms, she took it to herself again. As she did each year. There was the chair she and Ogden had found in the little shop in Damariscotta, there were the two lamps Aunt Alice had given her after Uncle William died. Kitty had meant to switch them all these years, and then Aunt Alice died, and so they stayed. Here was the round hooked rug, a farmhouse rug, all the wrong colors, but Ogden loved it. Why? It irritated her every year, the round dull rug.

  She climbed the steep stairs to the second floor and passed along the hall where the bedrooms stretched one after the other, the pink, the blue, and the yellow, the white doors pushed inward. In every room there were two twin beds, flanking a farmhouse window. Here too the organdy curtains stirred. The salt air breezed with her as she walked, the smell of the sea softened by the deeper damp wood of the old house. At the very end of the hall lay Ogden’s and her room, a corner room, the bed situated so that one could lie there and see down to the boathouse and up to the barn, like the flange of a compass, Ogden had remarked.

  “Flange?” She had wrinkled her nose.

  The room was still. She went to the bureau in the corner, opened the drawer, and pulled out her comb and brush and the hand mirror her mother had given her on her fifteenth birthday. She set them side by side in a row. She sprang the locks on the first of her suitcases and lifted the folded underwear out, ranged neatly on top, and carried it straight to the bureau, sliding it into the top drawer. The suitcase gave its layers up—shirts, trousers, at the very bottom, her boat shoes and a pair of silver slippers. The bureau drawers filled. The sound of Ogden’s hammer reached her as she opened his suitcase beside hers, again lifting the layers one by one, packed the day before on Long Island, and slid them into the other half of the bureau drawers.

  In the closet, their Island clothes hung, embalmed in cedar. She swung the door slowly back and forth on its hinges like a fan to let the sea air break the winter hanging there.

  Then she did what she did, had done, every night of their married life. She laid out the clothes for the evening. She pulled a full skirt off its hanger in the closet and a blouse from the bureau and laid them out on the bed. Beside them she laid a clean shirt for Ogden and his gray flannel trousers. They stretched the width of the bed, his trousers hanging just off the edge. She bent and fingered the sleeve of Ogden’s shirt and then stretched it across the bedspread so that it touched the skirt, just there at the hip. Just there. She crossed her arms and stared down at the cloth couple. Kitty and Ogden Milton.

  When the screen door clapped, Ogden turned from the ladder and saw Kitty striding out the kitchen door with her basket and her clippers, intent on gathering the first bayberry for the dining room table.

  * * *

  “LOOK WHO’S TURNED up on the early boat,” Ogden called the following morning, pushing the wheelbarrow piled with groceries and Joan’s two suitcases out onto the grass.

  Kitty lowered her arm. “What a nice surprise.”

  Ogden started up the lawn, Joan following slowly. Kitty remained where she stood, framed by the door and the tree. In her striped cotton blouse tucked into high-waisted dungarees, her silver hair pulled back in two neat combs, she appeared to her daughter to belong even more to this house and this place, though it was only for two months of the year, than to the whitewashed brick and circular driveway down in Oyster Bay. And even as she walked toward it, the daughter took this image of the mother and made swift corrections, tiny adjustments—she too would be the spirit of the place, but she’d come down the hill to meet her guests, she would fling her arms wide. She smiled.

  “Hello, Mum.”

  “Good trip?”

  Ogden kept on going around the front of the house with the wheelbarrow to the kitchen door at the back. Joan nodded and stepped up to kiss her mother on the cheek. Kitty patted her shoulder.

  “Where’s your brother?”

  “You didn’t get a message?”

  “No.” Kitty frowned. “What message?”

  “He missed the train. Something about working late. He’ll be here tomorrow.”

  “He’ll miss our day with the Pratts, then.”

  Her mother’s beauty, Joan realized, watching the annoyance cross over her face, relied on laughter. “It’s all right, they see him in the city all the time.”

  “Yes, but I particularly wanted him to be here for tonight’s supper—it’s just our two families tonight.”

  “It’s all right, Mum,” Joan said again.

  “Kitty!” Joan’s father called her mother from inside the house. “Where is the—?”

  “Well, never mind.” Kitty turned to go.

  “I brought some samples for the chair up with me,” Joan offered. “Some lovely blues, and a stripe.”

  Kitty shook her head. “No, a stripe won’t do in that room.”

  “Evelyn had thought a stripe.”

  Something was different about Joan, Kitty thought. There was something new. “For the front room?”

  “Well, I know.” Joanie followed her mother into the house and into the small front room whose windows faced out to the sea. She popped the clasp on her purse and drew out the envelope of swatches cut by Mrs. Miller down at Brunschwig. It was clear the stripe was wrong as soon as she laid it on the back of the chair, but the small bluebells against a cream background were perfect. “What do you think?”

  “Kitty?” Ogden Milton called again, and both women could hear the impatience this time.

  “Coming.” Kitty pointed at the bluebells, then looked at Joan. “I’ve put you and Anne in the pink bedroom.”

  Joan nodded. “When do they all get here?”

  “Any minute. All right, Ogden!” she called. “I’m coming!”

  Joan reached and pulled the stripe off the chair, leaving the bluebells lying along the top, gratified. It had been worth the race through the heat yesterday to get to Brunschwig before closing, and now with the room around her, and just outside the sea and sky, she saw how naturally the wish to adorn this place, to keep it and make it shine was part of her, would be part of her. Behind, her mother’s brisk footsteps echoed through the house toward her father, followed by his exclamation, which she couldn’t catch.

  Joan wandered back outside, followed by the thwack of the screen door. Not a boat moved along the tide in front of her or crossed out into the open from one of the coves. She moved out of the shadow of the house into the sunny patch of lawn and lay down flat on her back, drifting into the quiet. The place buzzed and droned in the sun.

  No matter how old she grew, up here the general order of things never shifted. On and on. Nothing ever changed. Sunlight. Twilight. Drinks on the dock. A cardigan sweater thrown over a chair. And though the tumult of the city, the confusion and the excitement that reached her at her desk, came through her very fingertips and out through her smile into the world she was running to join, she belonged to this spot. Here, the girl with the shakes, Miss Milton at the typewriter, Joan Milton holding Len Levy’s hand on the street, fell away. Up here the whole question of marriage, whether she could, what she wasn’t, needn’t come up. Here she was single, clear, her father’s daughter. Joan Milton, the keeper of this place.

  “Joanie!”

  She rolled over and pushed up on her elbow and saw her sister standing in the frame of the boathouse door, waving once before she turned, vanishing back into the dark interior. Evelyn had insisted on traveling up with Dickie and his mother and father and sister, Anne—as though she were already a Pratt.

  Slowly Joan got onto her feet.

  A peal of surprised laughter burst from down the hill, and Joan halted as she saw Dickie grinning ear to ear, carrying Evelyn in his arms and pretendin
g to take a giant step over the threshold of the boathouse onto the sunny lawn.

  “Put me down, you great dope,” Evelyn cried, squirming and laughing. “You have to wait.”

  Dickie hugged her closer to his chest, the big Yale lineman carrying Evelyn as if she were firewood. Behind them, the shadows of his family gathered and emerged past the couple.

  “Hullo, Joanie!” Anne Pratt waved at Joan.

  Dickie dropped Evelyn on the grass, having carried her over the threshold of what was not their house, thought Joan fleetingly, but never mind, and she walked down to the merry group with a smile on her face.

  “Hello, Joan.” Mr. Pratt reached a hand toward her.

  “Hello!” She was pulled into his bear hug.

  “Hello, dear.” Mrs. Pratt smiled. “Take this, will you, Annie?”

  Anne Pratt, Joan’s roommate from Farmington, rolled her eyes over Joan’s shoulder and winked.

  “Joanie, take a look at what Dickie brought!” Evelyn cried.

  “What?”

  “Show her!”

  “Hang on,” Dickie said as he kissed Joan on the cheek. “Hello.”

  “It’s the most terrific pillow, Joanie—you’ll see.” Evelyn was already moving up the lawn toward the house. “So precious and funny.”

  Joan and Anne grabbed the Pratts’ duffel bag, a handle in each hand, while Mr. Pratt carried two satchels full of liquor bottles on his shoulders. Dickie swung two suitcases up in his arms, and the pack of them followed Evelyn.

  “Hello, Pratts!” Ogden came round from the back of the house, beaming, his hand outstretched. Kitty followed.

  Evelyn ran the rest of the way up the hill and threw her arms around her father, and then, laughing, murmured to her mother and turned and called back to Joan, “Come on, slowpoke, I have to show you—” and disappeared through the front door.

  “Lord have mercy,” Joan called after her. The delight of her sister was all the flash and patter, the sheer abundant life burst free from the bobbed head and the smile, the great Milton smile, which promised everything but gave away nothing.