The Guest Book

by Sarah Blake

  She couldn’t answer. She stared straight ahead out the window.

  “Okay.” She nodded and then looked up at him.

  “Okay,” he said. And patted the open window of the car.

  Inside, the hall floor had been freshly painted and the gray boards shone straight back to the dining room, the battleship-gray floors familiar and necessary to the rightness of the place. It was as spare and as pure as a church—about as far from Nazi gold, she decided, as you could get. Here was the front room with Granny K’s chair, the china shepherdess on the white mantel, there at the end of the hall was her grandfather’s soft-visored sailing hat on its hook. In the kitchen, in the cookbooks, Granny K’s script wove in and out of Aunt Fanny Thompson’s recipe for oysters in cream, beside William Alfred’s Roman punch. It was simply the place they all were. The place they all belonged.

  She pulled the Polaroid of her mother and Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Moss standing in front of the house out of her satchel, and leaned it up on the tiny white mantelpiece.

  Then Evie walked through the dining room into the kitchen, setting the box of groceries down on the table. The evening sun planed the kitchen linoleum, mopped and clean. She reached to push up the old wooden frame of the kitchen window, having to give it two sharp knocks to loosen it from the winter warp. Slowly it gave, and she smelled the salt air on the breeze.

  And why should she be ashamed, the protest in her head aimed at Paul continued. Why make a rueful joke out of the place as she always had done? Why not simply say yes. Why not take it on? Even the lies, the handshakes, and the deals he was so certain of. Why not?

  Evie turned around and tried to see with the eyes of someone renting, and saw the mismatched kitchen chairs, the spindles broken on some of the backs and taped with silver duct tape, chipped china—Wedgwood or no—and fifteen wineglasses that Evie had never seen before but had clearly been pulled from the attic by Polly. Crystal bowls on squat pedestals, they were shapes from another era, designed to be cupped in the palm of one’s hand, taken out onto the green close-cropped lawns of the twenties, where laughter beckoned on a string of pearls. Something her grandmother must have brought up from Long Island.

  She touched the rim of one of these. The house, as Paul had said, was still here. Evie turned round and looked through the pantry to the dining room, a woman at the end of a long line of women in a house full of ghosts. Polly Ames had polished the dining room table, and the high backs of the twelve Hitchcock chairs were pushed in and ready, looped one after the other around its polished oval. Through the organdy curtains, the new green grasses waved high in the back field.

  The copper vase stood at its usual spot in the center. Granny K used to get off the boat and walk directly up from the dock to the patch of bayberry behind the kitchen and start cutting, her city coat still on. Filling the vase was the first thing she’d do on the Island. The cut bay on the dining room table was the announcement: summer had started. The Miltons had come. Evie walked forward onto the threshold, noticing the organdy curtains were tattered, and two of them were missing their ties. A new yellow stain rippled down the far corner of the dining room wall, the paper buckled and hanging.

  Never mind. Evie lifted the empty copper vase from the middle of the table, opening the screen door to the back garden. Never mind.

  She grabbed for the rusted scissors hung on the nail by the door and climbed to the top of the hillock behind the house where they all lay. The sky ricocheted blue above her head, filled with the motion of gulls. The humps of granite were so much smaller than in the dream.

  Ogden Moss Milton

  Nov. 11, 1899–Oct. 4, 1980

  Katherine Milton

  May 4, 1905–Sept. 10, 1988

  Ogden Moss Milton Jr.

  March 17, 1930–Aug. 22, 1959

  Evelyn Milton Pratt

  April 18, 1937–March 24, 2017

  She stared down at the names and the dates. The picnic grounds were far from here. Why, Mum? She turned.

  Bayberry branches scratched her legs as she waded right into the center of the big patch and started cutting the silver-green stalks. An airplane crossed, and she followed its vanishing, soundless above her, into the blue heaven. If her grandmother were looking down, she’d see Evie filling the vase as it had always been filled and approve.

  Evie cut an enormous bouquet of bay, jammed it into the mouth of the vase as she backed out of the bushes, and went into the house, the screen door clapping behind her. She set the copper vase in the center of the dining room table, The smell of the cut bay mixed with the salt breeze through the open windows. There. The evening shone and slanted along the wooden surface. The flap of the flag on the breeze beat time.

  She was back on the Island, one of the Miltons. Acolyte. Priestess. She would do what had always been done.

  And the peace of this place descended, a sense of order that Evie hadn’t felt for a long while. There was nothing more to do this evening. No one else to distract her. It was the kind of peace she associated with days in the library stacks, surrounded by scraps of paper, piles of books. Through the old window glass, warmed by sun and waved by age, the lawn down to the boathouse shivered from this angle. The past walked, and had always walked, up and down this green fairway, and she had grown up watching without knowing that she watched. If a historian is trained by hours in a library, the longing to be trained like that, to keep your eyes seeing backward surely comes from the child’s watchfulness, the need to chart the family seas, put signs upon the water, divide it up between navies and quadrants and coastal routes and understand the quiet.

  In the front room, she shifted the chairs so they tipped slightly toward one another, filling them: Granny K in her Morris chair, her mother sitting opposite in the faded wingback with the bluebells.

  The room waited. Dinner could be in an hour. Someone could be in the kitchen. The bell outside the back door would ring and pull them, the children—Evie, Min, Shep, Harriet, and Henry—up into the evening hour, pull them from their games, out of books, or from low tide down at the cove. The first bell warned them. The second bell summoned them down to the dock. On the third bell, they knew Granny K had set her Dubonnet on the cocktail tray, walked back up the lawn, and come through to the dining room, taking the head of the table, where she waited for her daughters, their mothers, to come take their places.

  Twenty-eight

  BY SIX O’CLOCK, EVELYN had organized them all, and the families wandered through the woods to the natural clearing where Ogden had dug firepits and built benches along an old stone table. At high tide, the grassy spot ran down to the granite boulders and from there to the water in one long, even line. At low tide, the water pulled way out leaving bare the massive granite ledge that lay just below the surface.

  Kitty deposited the bowl of nuts and the block of cheddar cheese on its plate and turned around. Ogden was already pouring drinks, and the little party ranged upon the grass. Evelyn had taken Dickie by the hand to walk all the way out to the last boulder, and there they stood, hands clasped, alone for an instant. Kitty remembered that feeling, when the whole world beat in the clasp of your two hands.

  She smiled and sought out Ogden, who was laughing with Roger Pratt. Though they were roughly the same age, Ogden seemed much younger, having taken the turn for the better that happened for some men as they aged. The sleeves of his broadcloth shirt were rolled, navy style, revealing arms tanned by work out of doors on the Island—an older man at the height of his power, she thought. A man one approached with a full deck of cards in one’s hands, or not at all.

  Priss was standing beside the two men, gazing at Ogden with an unprotected wistfulness that cut Kitty to the quick.

  Anne and Joan sat against the rock ledge with their knees up, drinking their bourbon in the paper cups Joan had brought from the city. Paper cups made life so much easier, Joan had pointed out to her mother, and when you were done with your drink, you can just toss your cup into the ocean. Like a Russian, Joan though
t now, tossing hers forward off the rock. It floated away on the outgoing tide, heading for the middle of the Narrows, the channel of water between Crockett’s and Vinalhaven, the neighboring island, where, over the years, several friends of the Miltons had bought summer places, among them the Welds, whose dock Joan could just see at the lip of the opposite cove. She stirred uneasily. She hadn’t seen Fenno Weld in weeks. Since Len.

  Dick and Evelyn were still standing at the edge of the long rock sloping down into the tide, now listening to Roger Pratt, who had ambled over to join them, the navy blue of Dick’s Shetland sweater beside Evelyn’s lemony-yellow blouse making them a primary pair, thought Joan.

  “I wonder who I’ll marry,” Anne mused, her eyes also on the couple. “It’s so strange, really, to think about.”

  “What is?”

  “That unknown someone, that something else, ticking away. Somewhere out there in the world is the man I’ll marry. Somewhere right now, he is turning his head to listen to something someone is saying and laughing.”

  Joan smiled. Prattle, they had nicknamed her early on at Farmington. And the funny thing was she always managed to get something substantial in between a torrent of words.

  “I could meet him any minute, or in a few years—that’s what is so odd about things: you never know.”

  “Maybe you’ve met him already.”

  “God, I hope not,” Anne declared.

  Joan considered telling her just then about Len, but if she said it aloud, he wouldn’t be just hers anymore. Right now, he was a secret she wanted to keep a little while longer. He could be, like her apartment, something only for her, with a lock only she could open.

  “I’m not going to marry.” She took a drink. “It would be unfair.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Joan looked over at Anne. “I’m not. I don’t think one should marry a man if you can’t have his children. It wouldn’t be right. It’s not fair to him.”

  Anne frowned. “That’s a bit puritanical. What if you love him?”

  Joan sat up on her heels. “If you love him, you would give him what he wants—what all men want.”

  “Really? What is that?”

  “A home and a hearth and a child.” Joan chuckled and stood.

  “Oh please,” said Anne, rolling her eyes.

  * * *

  THE EVENING PINKED, stretching long clouds across what had been a clean blue, leaving traces and trails, extending with the gin and the bourbon through the little band.

  “Tap, tap,” Dickie called out.

  “Look,” Anne drawled. “Dickie is going to make a toast. Go on!” she called.

  Slowly and wordlessly, her brother raised a pole he had in his hand and carefully, happily unfurled the fabric around it, then held it high and waved it.

  EVELYN, the flag proclaimed.

  “Oh!” Evelyn cried, delighted, and laughed. “Oh, Dickie!”

  “Today—” He stopped, his throat closing suddenly. “On this day,” he tried again.

  How extraordinary, Joan thought. She’d never thought Dickie had it in him to be undone.

  “I am—” He cleared his throat and then looked directly at Evelyn, who slipped her hand again into his. He looked down at her, and the face she raised to his gave him everything, all of it, all of her.

  “Evelyn’s!” he cried, his right hand lifting the flag in the air, his left lifting Evelyn’s. “I am Evelyn’s! And I claim this land for her!”

  She laughed again. He turned and thrust the pole between the slit in the two rocks at the end of the picnic grounds.

  Joan raised her eyebrow and glanced at Anne, who nodded, aware of Joan’s gaze. Anne had grown up in the shadow of her brother’s princely self-regard and long ago determined not to play the scullery maid.

  And now, where the water stretched its widest, a deep purple where the sky and sea collided, a single rowboat was setting out from across the way on the opposite shore.

  “Milton!” a voice cried out from the boat coming toward them. “Any Scotch?”

  Ogden Milton chuckled and went to stand at the water’s edge. “Not for you, Weld. But if you’ve got your bride on board, there’s plenty for her!”

  The oars crossed silently back and forth, and they all heard the silvery ripple of a woman’s laughter. And as they drew closer, it was clear there were four people in the boat, and a dog.

  “I have mussels to cook,” Fanny Weld called across the water.

  “I have butter!” Kitty answered. “Who have you got there?”

  The rowboat had crossed the halfway point of the channel, and the last sun slid across the backs of the two young men in the bow.

  “It’s Fen, Mrs. Milton,” Fenno Weld’s deep bass sounded across the water.

  “And me, Mum!” Moss Milton turned, and they all saw him. “I’m afraid they’ve got me.”

  “Moss!” Kitty cried. “Moss Milton, you’re here!”

  * * *

  THE WELDS HAD brought two buckets of mussels, “having been left at the altar,” crowed Fanny Weld. “Yes! That is what I mean,” she said, climbing out of the stern of the rowboat gracefully and nodding hello to everyone, being handed up to dry ground. “It is what I mean, Ogden, don’t tease. We had guests due for dinner and they missed the last ferry.”

  “And then I showed up and needed a row across,” called Moss, kneeling in the bow to fend off from the rocks. “And here we are. Hello, Pater,” he called to Ogden.

  “Here we are,” Kitty repeated, smiling.

  Yes, thought Joan, her eyes on Fenno as he leaped from the bow with the rope in his hands and clambered up the rocks easily, handing it to her.

  “Joan,” he said.

  And she took the end of the rope and climbed to the tie-up tree, looped the rope in a half hitch, and turned around. Fenno was helping haul the mussels out of the boat, saying something to his mother Joan couldn’t catch.

  Of course, now there could be no talk at all of the Welds leaving; they had to stay for dinner. Joan and Anne were dispatched to get the big steamer pot and a stick of butter from the kitchen and tell Jessie there would be four more. The grate was put on the fire and water set to boil. What had been a loose clumping of two families soon to be joined became something closer to a party, and the spirit of an evening suddenly pulled together colored the fun. Fenno had brought his ukulele, and along with the mussels, there were green glass jugs of the new California wine, chilling now in the water just off the rocks.

  Ogden was gay tonight, fueling the fire with the driftwood boughs, stirring the flames higher so the broth boiled around the mussels, directing Kitty to line the paper cups up to receive the butter. Joan felt the heat of the fire on her sunburned skin. The sky lowered from its pink to the deeper curtain of dense blue, and the fire made a room around them all, gathering.

  Aldo chaired the philosophy department at Harvard, and Fanny was a lecturer in classics. The minute the spring term ended—the second it ended, said Fanny—they decamped up here. Not long after Kitty and Ogden, the Welds had bought a boathouse across the Narrows from Crockett’s Island and refurbished it with two studies, a kitchen, and a long dining room that faced the water. Fanny was English, had won a first at Oxford, but when she had first met Kitty Milton, she told Joan one summer, “I was terrified. American girls seemed capable of doing everything—they were smart, had gone to college, and could speak French, play tennis, ski, sing. Unlike me”—she paused—“dull as pond water, able to do nothing at all but turn a phrase.”

  “But Mum didn’t go to college,” Joan had pointed out.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Fanny Weld pronounced. “Look at this place. Your mother creates worlds out of air.”

  “Good trip up?” Fenno arrived beside Joan on the rocks.

  “It was all right.”

  “Hot?”

  She tossed her paper cup off the rock. “Come on,” she said, turning and squinting up at him, “you can do better than that.”

 
Her teasing broke the wary hold he was clearly keeping on himself. His shoulders loosened, and he looked down at her and smiled.

  And then she found it easy to smile at him, after all. Easy because he was familiar, and having him there beside her made it clear that that was how it would always be. She needn’t say anything at all. He was as much a part of this place as she was. Nothing more.

  “Look,” cried Evelyn. “Oh, look, everyone. It’s going—”

  The pink-and-orange orb hung above the evening sea, and the color stretched across the sky and touched the granite at their feet into a white glow.

  Kitty glanced over at Ogden. There, he seemed to say, holding her gaze. Her eyes softened, and she nodded.

  No one spoke. The sun lowered slowly into the black below. And then in an instant it was gone.

  “There,” said Kitty, pushing her long body up to standing. “We can’t keep Jessie waiting.”

  “Come on, then.” Ogden crossed to her and offered her his arm; she cocked her head and slipped hers under his. The two of them led the way up the path through the woods, leaving Fenno and Moss to gather the beers and the wine, and as Joan trailed her mother and father, the laughter of the two men on the rocks curled after her. Fenno’s low, deep chuckle clapped against the higher notes of Moss’s delight.

  * * *

  THERE WERE CANDLES stuck in driftwood candelabras. There was bread, butter, the jugged wine. And lots of it. There was the genial quiet brought on by food. And when Jessie poked her head round the swinging door with the Irish stew, a cheer went up. Though the Miltons were possessed of one of the most uninspired cooks on the Thoroughfare, Jessie made up for it with a sense of ample portions. Unlike the Lowells, or the Hunnicutts, the Stinsons, or even the Welds, at Crockett’s there was always enough to go round for dinner.

  Jessie nodded her thanks without so much as the trace of a smile, put the pot down in front of Ogden, handing him the ladle, and vanished back into the kitchen. Kitty followed the swing of the door behind her cook. Jessie had come up with them every summer since the first, complaining bitterly about the difficulties of preparation on an island, she’d sniff, an island, for the dear lord’s sake, but was the very first to have her bag packed and ready to be shipped up waiting in the back hallway each June.