by Sarah Blake
“Fog is thicker than ever!” he called to the house.
The opening chords of a song reached through the house to where the three young women stood, and the slow, bewildered strains of “So in Love” climbed as Moss sang above the notes he played. “Strange dear, but true dear.” Joan smiled at Anne, who had sunk down onto the folded sheets to listen. It was something about how slow the song was, the mood of it perplexed and thoughtful, not gay, not the usual Cole Porter. “When I’m close to you, dear.” The low thread of longing that ran through it suited the thick air, the sense of a party coming, of something about to happen. Joan folded the blanket in her arms and then hugged it.
Her father’s voice cut in, and Moss’s hands came abruptly off the keys.
“Joan?” her mother called from another part of the house. “Joan?”
“Coming!” she called back.
The bell on the dock clanged down in the cove.
“Girls,” Kitty Milton called to them as they rounded the top of the stairs. “Go and see who that is, will you, and then bring them up here.”
Joan nodded, and she and Anne came down the stairs and out the front door and into the fogbound morning. Somewhere out in the Narrows, the low thrum of a boat’s engine flared and caught and pulled away into the invisible ocean. The scattered gray humps of the granite in the lawn vanished into the air, even the bright green of the grass seemed to have turned its color down.
“Who on earth got through this pea soup?” Anne wondered aloud.
“I’m telling you, these sailors up here are mad.” Joan smiled and walked forward into the gray.
“Anyhoo,” said Anne, “I meant to ask. Do you have your own checking account?”
“Yes.” Joan glanced at her. “Of course.”
“Well, of course nothing. Mum thinks it’s dangerous to give me one, that I’ll have one soon enough when I’m married, and I’m not sure, but I don’t agree. Maybe it’s best to leave it with the men,” she mused. “We don’t ask them to make hollandaise.”
Joan snorted. “For god’s sake, Prattle. It’s 1959. We’ve got washing machines and dryers. We’ve got no-wax vinyl floors. You ought to have your own checking account. Don’t you want to be practical?”
“Of course I want to be practical,” Anne returned cheerfully. “I want to be more than that. I think marriage ought to run on two rails. His and Hers. Without dipping your finger into each other’s pots. That way you can concentrate on loving each other.”
“Love involves pot-dipping,” Joan tossed back, smiling. “At least the love I want.”
Other than Anne’s feet right beside hers in the moss, there wasn’t a sound. It seemed they were walking straight through a cloud. It was impossible to see farther than five feet in front of them, and when the gray shadow of the boathouse loomed ahead of them, Joan almost started.
“En amour, moins on se parle, mieux on se comprend,” Anne pronounced grandly.
“That makes no sense to me whatsoever,” Joan retorted, smiling. “I would think you’d want to be talking all the damn time—otherwise you’d bore each other to tears.”
They had passed through the gray wooden room and out again into the vapor on the other side, making their way to the end of the pier and looking down.
And there, standing at the end of the dock with his back to them, was Len. Beside him stood a black man with a camera.
“Oh.” Joan stopped, weak at the sight of him. No, she thought, not here. Not here. I’m not ready.
“A Negro?” whispered Anne.
“Come on.” Joan walked forward as naturally as she could. “And put a smile on.”
Thirty
THE WIND HAD COME up suddenly, and the waves crashed over the dinghy with its one little sail, skimming across the water at a terrifying clip. She wasn’t sure how long she could hold on to the main sheet if the wind kept blowing across the bow this strong, and at the same time she couldn’t let go. She had fallen behind the rest of the sailing class at the turn of the race, tacking badly, the lines getting caught through the pulleys. The water was pooling in the bottom of the dinghy and the seat was slippery and wet and the pitch of the boat was so steep, she knew she couldn’t stay on the bench for much longer. “I thought you could sail,” the sailing instructor cupped his hands and taunted her from a dinghy beside hers, his hair wet from the spray, his slicker open.
“I can sail,” she cried, “I’m just tangling all the lines.”
* * *
EVIE WOKE, FURIOUS. I’m a good sailor, she protested to the bedroom around her. I won my class.
The shade pull tapped on the glass of the window in the dense silence of dawn. The grumble of diesel engines circled far out in the bay; the first lobstermen had gone to work. The morning had started. Someone else was out there, threading the day into cloth. She lay back on the pillows, listening to the engines. Lay there like the child she wasn’t, her knees poking the top of the blanket up like a tent pole.
God, she thought. Sailing dreams?
Though at least it had been a new dream, something other than her mother coming and standing at the foot of this bed, waiting for her in this room that was the room in the dream, and where she had always slept, the twin four-posters with the pink quilts, lined firmly one against each wall, a window above a nightstand, with the shade pulled down. In the space between the beds lay a metal grate, cut into the floor to let the heat into the upstairs rooms from the fireplaces down below. The dining room lay directly below this bedroom, and all through her childhood, night after night, Evie would wake up in the dark, having fallen asleep chin in hand, and catch the low, incomprehensible adult world in murmurs and bursts of laughter, spooling outward down below.
She turned on her side and rose on her elbow, lifting the shade to see the weather. The wide lawn down to the boathouse shimmered in dew, a shining path to the dark perimeter of spruce at the water’s edge. It was a clear morning, no fog, not a cloud. She dropped the shade again.
Downstairs, the morning filled the house with light. She tugged the Chemex coffeepot out of the cupboard and gave it a rinse, filled the kettle, and set it on to boil. Around her, it was as quiet as prayer. Framed by the doorway, the dining room table stretched, crowned by the vase of bayberry. Dogs piss, men argue—and women put flowers in their grandmother’s vases. She smiled. She had carried the torch. She had taken Granny K and carried her forward. For the next couple of days, until Min got here, the Island was hers alone to get ready. Hers alone.
Someone had moved the china cow from the windowsill in the kitchen. Evie looked on the pantry shelves. It must have been put in with the daily china. The cupboards had just been lined by Mrs. Ames’s granddaughter, who did the cleaning now, and the smell of Lysol undercut the old wood.
The kettle gathered its steam and blew. She flicked it off and poured the water through the coffee in the filter, and the smell of the grounds rose sharp and rich in the air. The wooden corset around the Chemex was cracked and missing its leather tie. It had been that way for as long as Evie had been drinking coffee, and the idea of buying a new one had never occurred to her. In this, she was her mother’s daughter.
Always the first to arrive on the Island in June and the last to leave in September, Joan sat in Granny K’s Morris chair, her face turned toward the lawn, staring down to the dock. On sunny days, Joan would set up outside on the green bench with a pair of binoculars, a box of Triscuits, and a thermos of tea. You go on, she’d say if anyone asked if she’d like to walk. I’ll man the fort.
For some reason, this drove her aunt Evelyn wild.
Evie would come in June with her mother and follow her around the rooms as Joan removed a snapshot of Evelyn and Uncle Dick left upon the mantel the previous summer, one of the Pratt grandchildren’s drawings on the shelf in the front hall, a collection of periwinkles along the rim of a bench, and put them in the kitchen, or along the windowsills in the pantry. Then she would move the things that “ought to be there” back into plac
e. The china shepherdess on the white mantel. The brick doorstop covered in mattress ticking out from where it had been shoved under the sink, to the pantry door. The organdy curtains up again in the kitchen windows.
“Evelyn always wants to change everything,” her mother muttered. “Always adjusting, always moving things around.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Evie had ventured one summer. She was perhaps eleven.
“Then you forget,” Joan said.
“Forget what goes where, you mean?”
Her mother’s eyes rested on her.
“Yes,” Joan said, and Evie understood that was not what her mother had meant at all.
“Well.” Evie had flushed, hot and confused. “That thing”—she pointed to the doorstop that held the pantry door open, its cloth cover stained and tattered—“could be forgotten. It’s so ugly.”
Joan turned and looked. “Yes,” she agreed. “It is.”
But it remained right where it belonged, keeping the pantry door from swinging shut by Joan, and pushed under the sink when Evelyn walked by.
Enough. Evie pulled a mug off the kitchen shelf and poured her coffee. Enough, she thought as she crossed through the pantry and into the dining room, kicking at the doorstop brick on her way. That’s enough. The door, unmoored by the brick, banged against the jamb.
She would start in the bedrooms, she thought, clearing out closets and drawers, and climbed the stairs to the pink room, where she was sleeping. The closet there opened on to shelves to the left piled high with games and the tea set her mother had found at the Rockland Ladies Auxiliary one afternoon while they waited for the ferry some weekend in the sixties. The stack was exactly as it had been left and made its own pattern of color and memory, seen and disregarded every intervening summer as Evie hung up shirts on the hangers to the right, slid her shoes below, and threw the duffel bag in the corner.
She began on the top shelf, pulling the games off one by one and stacking them on the bed. Behind where the games had sat on the shelf was a single child’s sneaker, some cutoffs Evie vaguely remembered—had they been hers? Min’s?—and a pair of binoculars whose rotting leather strap came away in her hands. Each of these she placed next to the games on the bed, and then on tiptoe reached with her hand for the spot she couldn’t see, for the farthest back corners, to sweep them clean. Something rolled from her fingertips and she reached again and closed over a bottle, like a film canister. A pill bottle, she realized, looking down at it. DILANTIN, the label read on the outside. MISS JOAN MILTON. 460 EAST 81ST ST., NEW YORK, NY. MURRAY HILL 3467.
She moved out of the closet, carrying the tiny vial into the light cast by the dormer window, and pulled off the top, shaking it, releasing a faint odor like chalk, followed by the rim of a tiny scrap of paper.
Ask Fenno—
What? She stared at the piece of paper, her mother’s handwriting—its tiny, careful lettering, clear and sharp.
Evie sat down on the bed, the memory of her father so strong, she had to close her eyes. It wasn’t even a note, it was a dash in Morse code—Ask Fenno—a stitch made in the fabric of their marriage, a girl risen from her seat to say something, halfway out the door and then stopped. Ask Fenno what?
The picture of her father, spindly, standing to the side, always extra, came to mind. It was clear that her father adored her mother, though why her mother had married him, Evie couldn’t fathom. She had grown used to the silence in their house, her mother in the kitchen, her father seated in a chair in the living room, joined by the music he had put on the record player. The biggest extravagance he had ever allowed himself were the shiny square speakers he had bought and installed for the kitchen in 1975.
Her father had been one of the editors of the World Book Encyclopedia. “Good for nothing,” he’d say lightly, and smile—“except the B’s the D’s and a smattering of the R’s.” He knew a hell of a little about a lot. A generalist—he’d stress the word, bemused. A man marooned by time.
“Meaning what?” Evie had asked once.
“Meaning”—her father looked at her—“better for me the nineteenth century; even better perhaps, the eighteenth. Encyclopedias. Lists. Maps. Codes. But this—” He’d gestured out the window of their apartment in New York.
Evie had turned her head as if he were pointing to something she could see. She looked back at him.
“Take me out, Coach,” he finished helplessly, sitting as he always did, with a drink in one hand and a Kent cigarette in the other, smoking the evenings away. Taking it easy, he’d answer if anyone asked. Man of leisure, he’d chuckle as though it hurt. Gentleman. Whiffenpoof. Drunk.
Hapless drunk, she thought, adding the word he had given her one afternoon when she’d stolen into his study looking for the dictionary, thinking he was out. “Aimless?” she’d wondered aloud. “Hapless,” he’d said, looking up from the chair in the far corner. It was the only time she could remember her father looking straight at her. The following morning she had gone back to graduate school.
Two months later, he was dead.
She shook herself. She had been twenty-eight.
The bell rang down on the dock, and Evie sprang up, as though she’d been caught doing something. She crossed the long room to the front window that gave onto the lawn. The bow of a boat stuck out off the end of the dock, but the boathouse sat between her and whoever it was. When her grandmother was alive, people were always just showing up at the dock, ringing the bell and marching gaily up the lawn to the Big House, in search of a cup of tea, or a good Scotch, depending on the hour.
She climbed down the narrow stairs and passed through the kitchen. Ahead of her, the open door at the front of the house showed the flag listless on its pole. She pushed through the screen and stood in the doorway on the top stair, looking down the lawn.
Anne Fenwick (née Pratt, as Granny K would say), her mother’s oldest friend, and her husband, Eddie, emerged through the boathouse into the sun at the bottom of the lawn. Evie caught her breath. They had outlasted them all. Aunt Anne had gotten smaller, Evie thought, though at eighty-four she was as tidy and crisp as ever, her straight fine hair parted sharply on the side and pulled back in a barrette, as she had done ever since Vassar. She walked beside her husband in Keds and a wraparound skirt, festooned with purple seahorses set upon a sea of navy blue linen. Uncle Eddie carried the canvas bag, trim, tall, and impeccable in his khakis and a sky-blue Shetland sweater.
She could hear Eddie Fenwick as the two climbed slowly up the hill.
“What’s that you say, dear? What, love? What, sweetie?”
“Hello, dear,” her godmother called up the hill.
“Hello.” Evie smiled, waiting, her hand on the lilac by the door.
“We saw you come in yesterday,” Anne explained, still walking.
Evie stepped down the stairs.
“How like your mother you look.” Anne folded Evie in a big hug, bringing tears to Evie’s eyes. Eddie patted her quietly on the back.
Anne pulled away, her gaze resting lightly on Evie, like a hand testing for fever. “How are you?”
“Fine,” Evie answered, a little dazed by the two of them. “Other than being haunted by ghosts, racketing around in the Big House by myself.”
Anne wrinkled her nose. “Well, of course you are. Ghost stories belong to the middle-aged, though it’s always the young who play the dramas. All our memories crowding one on top of the other—thronging. Especially up here.”
Evie didn’t say anything.
“Now, how old was Odysseus, do you suppose, my love?” Eddie mused beside her.
“How’s that?”
“Odysseus—you remember,” Eddie answered. “Down in Hades, and all the shades thronging, coming toward him, so many he couldn’t speak.” He raised his eyebrows jovially. “That was middle age, I’ll bet.”
Evie wanted to hug him, hauling the ancients around and pulling them out of his pocket. It was just this playful wearing of the classics on one’s sleeve
that Evie had grown up with. Useless, erudite, familiar.
“In Greece, in the sixth century BCE?” she answered. “Middle age would be around thirty.”
“Ha!” He was delighted, and pointed to the green bench at the front of the house. “Let’s sit where your grandmother liked to.”
They had brought their own orange juice in a thermos, and Eddie, always elegant, poured his juice into a paper Dixie cup—a thimble really, Evie thought to herself as she took his offering.
“What’s that you’ve got in your hand?” Anne asked.
Evie looked down and saw she still clutched the pill bottle. She showed it to Aunt Anne, who looked at it and nodded.
“Your poor mother.”
“I never knew anything about Mum’s epilepsy until the week she died.”
“She never told you?”
Evie shook her head. “She never told me much of anything.”
“She was ashamed of it. One was, you know, in those days. We never spoke about things like that, about sickness and the like.”
Evie smiled at the older woman. “I can’t imagine you were ever quiet.”
“Heavens, no,” Anne agreed, “we talked all the time. But we didn’t blow on about ourselves if that’s what you mean. We didn’t protest so much about this and that.” She landed lightly on the word and pushed off. “And we were all so hopeful then—though perhaps it was just that we were so young.”
“I’ll bet Mum never said much, though.”
“Not true at all,” Anne said swiftly. “Your mother had plenty to say.”
Evie stretched her legs out before her. “Not to me. To me she was lovely and vague—and silent.”
Children believed they knew so much, thought Anne, considering her old friend’s daughter, and looked away down the hill.
But what did they know, the proud men and women who were still strong in their middle-aged youth, though they complained of needing glasses, of fatigue and irrelevance, complained because such things were still so new, so remarkable. They had no idea. There they were at the middle of their lives, at the tipping point, when their strength could be in the seeing. And they thought they saw. And they saw not at all.
