by Sarah Blake
“Everyone these days is so proud of themselves for knowing what they want,” she erupted, “as though that’s a mark of distinction, as though knowing yourself is as easy as knowing what you want.”
She stopped, caught off guard by her own vehemence.
“But knowing what you can’t have seems to me equally useful. And exemplary simply to accept it.”
“Okay,” Evie answered carefully, her eyes fixed on the older woman, waiting.
Anne turned her head. “Your mother was honorable,” she said firmly. “She was the most honorable soul I ever knew.”
“Honorable?”
“A good sport,” agreed Eddie.
“Your mother felt she oughtn’t marry, you know. That it wouldn’t be fair to burden a man with her condition. She’d made a sort of vow.”
“A vow?”
Anne nodded.
“What happened?”
“Well,” said Anne, looking at her. “You came along, didn’t you?”
And Evie couldn’t be certain whether there was an accusation under the smile.
“Let’s have a look at the barn, shall we?” Eddie suggested into the little quiet that followed.
“The barn?” Anne sighed. “All the way up there?”
He nodded. “Come on, love. It’ll do you good.”
Anne brushed the front of her skirt and stood as well, holding on to Eddie’s arm as she rose. The three of them moved slowly round the corner of the house and toward the bottom of the path that wound through the field to the barn set at the top of the hill, the sharp angle of the enormous roof cut sharply against the blue day.
“So wonderful this place will carry on—extraordinary really, isn’t it?” Eddie mused, his elbow tucking Anne’s hand tight against his side.
Evie said nothing. The ground was uneven, though it wasn’t a steep climb.
“Your grandparents had such wonderful foresight,” Anne remarked, her eyes on the path, her arm under Uncle Eddie’s. “But exhausting. They expected the moon, and they got it. And they got it all, all the while impeccably dressed.”
“You and Eddie are pretty natty, I’d say.”
Anne stopped walking, turned, and looked at Evie. “Eddie and I are shades by comparison, dear.”
“I don’t know.”
“There are those who follow the rules, those who break the rules, and those who make the rules. Your grandfather made the rules.”
“And what about Mum and Aunt Evelyn? What about Uncle Moss?”
“Moss,” Anne answered, her attention snagged. “Yes, well. Moss did his best.”
“To do what?”
“To be his father’s son.”
“Now, how will you all run the place?” Eddie mused aloud. “There are just the five of you, isn’t that right? Just you and the Pratts.”
“Yes,” Evie answered, “and I’m not sure.”
“Eddie, darling, what’s that bird?” Anne pointed to a kestrel slicing downward, diverting her husband’s attention.
“A hawk, my love,” he said.
“So it is,” Anne answered. They had arrived at the barn.
Evie took hold of the sliding door and gave it a huge shove. The door groaned and slid a few feet, and then slid a few more with another push. They stepped through. The oak floors with their wide beams, planed smooth by years, smelled of salt and winter’s shut-up air. Mouse droppings littered the wide window seats covered in duck cloth fabric along the windows. Inside, the space rose three stories in the empty air. Cut high in the eaves, on either side, a single large window let the sky come shooting down onto the floor. As children, they’d beg to have sleepovers up here, though the bats flickering overhead in the wide night space, their wings whispering, terrified them all. The barn had begun to list slightly, like an old man leaning at the waist.
“There were such parties in here, do you remember, love?”
“Oh yes!” Eddie grinned.
“We had square dances,” Anne said, and stopped in the middle of the room, as if calling memories toward her, standing there at the center. “Oh my, that piano.”
They stared at the battered upright piano that had stood in one corner of the barn always. And always, Evie reflected, with the sheet music for “Night and Day” or “So in Love” spread open, as if anyone might just sit down and tickle the keys. Though all she’d ever heard played on it was “Chopsticks.”
“It took four men and an entire morning’s work to get it up here, and here it remains,” Anne said. “Rotting, probably. That was for the party, Eddie dear.” Anne turned to him. “The night I met you.”
“Ah.” Eddie smiled at his wife, the love in his eyes so soft, so clear, Evie had to look away.
“When was that?” Evie asked.
“Nineteen fifty-nine,” Anne replied “The last good year, my father always said. Before everything in this country got so—”
“What?”
“Complicated, was what he’d say.” Anne was thoughtful. “But really, I think he meant unfamiliar.”
“Everything happens at a party.” Eddie wandered toward the piano. “Who said that?”
“Austen, most likely,” Anne said. “She said pretty much everything needing saying.”
Evie snorted. “I hate Austen. I’m with the Brontë sisters, banging around in beautiful fury on the moors.”
“My word. And you can’t have both?” Her godmother was mild.
Evie smiled, the question catching her off guard.
Anne nodded at her. “I’d have thought you’d appreciate Austen. You always seemed to me made of cooler stuff. Like your grandmother.”
But I’m not at all like my grandmother, thought Evie a little mutinously, drawn toward the big barn doorway where the grasses waved outside.
“Was that the time the Negro man was here?” Eddie wondered.
Evie turned around, startled. “Pops had a black man working here?”
“No, I don’t think he was working here, was he, dear?”
“No,” Anne said firmly. “He was a guest.”
“Yes.” Eddie sailed proudly back to his wife. “They were quite a pair, your grandparents. Everyone welcome on board.”
Evie saw the flicker of something she couldn’t read, something strong, cross Anne’s face.
“Aunt Anne?” Evie probed.
Anne looked at her, her mind clearly somewhere else.
“Come on, love.” Eddie offered his elbow to take the step down outside. Anne reached for his arm and he snugged her tight. Gently, together, they eased over the wide threshold onto the granite slab that formed the stoop. Evie was left standing, her mind racing. The wide door framed the older couple.
“When was this? Do you remember?”
“Haven’t a clue,” said Eddie cheerfully.
“It was the party, Eddie.”
Evie concentrated on pulling the door shut, not wanting to look at her godmother, not wanting to nudge her out of the place in the past where she had clearly fallen. They stood outside a minute, looking down the hill to the Big House and beyond that to the water.
“Coming, love?” said Eddie.
She nodded, and the three of them wandered slowly down the hill, but when they got to the Big House, Anne sank down gratefully on the bench in front. Evie sat beside her, and Eddie took the picnic basket and their sweaters, continuing on down to talk to Jimmy on the dock. They watched in quiet as he reached the end of the lawn, disappearing through the square of the boathouse door.
“Do you know,” Anne said after a while, “I’ve been going through our family papers, trying to put everyone in order. Not, thank goodness, Eddie’s side, just my own. And it’s been so instructive. There are quite a lot of them, you see, going all the way back three hundred years. And what strikes me, Evie, is just how little difference there is between us all—”
Evie glanced over at her. “But there are huge differences in the way we all live.”
“Yes, of course,” Anne conceded, “of course
, cars and the like. But I mean except for that, really—they were born, grew old, and died just as we are. Over and over and over. And Evie”—she put her hand on Evie’s knee—“dearie, what does it matter?”
“What does what matter?” Evie swallowed.
“Well.” Anne considered for a minute. “This.”
“What is this?”
The older woman turned her head to face down the lawn. Eddie would be waiting, sitting in the shade of the boathouse with Jimmy. Eddie, who used to come to her in the middle of the day, straight from the office, in between appointments, and love her. Sometimes even with the babies awake in the playpen. It would be so quick and urgent and you never know, do you, that that part will be over because it stretches for such a long time, the hot, tumescent quiet of one’s twenties and thirties, even one’s forties. Mornings in the city, scorching mornings when the windows open far above the street can’t keep the street away, or the heat. And the babies are listless, and the children whine, and Mrs. Marstead is cutting carrots in the kitchen for the children’s supper. And suddenly, here you were on a bench beside one of those babies, Joanie’s little girl. Anne’s eyes rested on the dark rectangle of shadow stretching across the wide boathouse door. Poor Joan.
She shook her head.
“Us,” she said quietly. “Not this. Us. All of us.”
Evie searched Aunt Anne’s face. Long ago, stuck in the top carrel in the library stacks, Evie remembered feeling she could hear the voices speaking from the pages she was reading, times when she could almost understand the world below the words, see the eleventh century whole. But she had to skirt around it so as not to scare away what she thought she understood. She had the same feeling just now. There was something she might miss if she thought about it too hard. Something that might pertain.
“Hang on a sec.” She stood and went into the house, letting the screen door bang behind her as she moved into the front room and pulled the Polaroid off the little mantel.
Evie came back out. “Have you ever seen this?”
Her godmother looked down at the Polaroid Evie handed her, in silence.
Joan, Anne thought. Oh, Joanie, there you are.
“Well, they were something, weren’t they,” she said, turning over the Polaroid and seeing what Joan had written.
“What does that mean, do you think?” Evie asked. “‘The morning of—’ What morning, do you know?”
Anne looked up at Joan’s daughter, who believed she knew so much but who had never known her own mother—had never really tried, it seemed—and was exhausted by it all. She knew precisely what Joan must have meant by “the morning of.” But she wouldn’t say. It wasn’t hers to tell.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” she replied, turning away.
Damn it, Evie thought, looking down at her mother’s oldest friend. Here it was again. This quiet. The familiar quiet around her, the quiet she’d grown up in. A quiet that robbed her, that continued to rob her somehow, though she couldn’t see how, or why—or who was the thief.
“How like your grandmother she looks.”
Evie turned and followed Anne’s gaze.
A tall blond woman was coming through the boathouse, pushing Grandfather’s wheelbarrow with her luggage on it and talking to Eddie and Jimmy.
“The spitting image,” Anne said approvingly.
“Min.” Evie’s heart sank. “She’s come early.”
Thirty-one
“IT’S ALL RIGHT, REG,” Len said quietly. “We were invited.”
“In New York.” Reg lifted the strap on his camera and settled it off his shoulders. Moss’s invitation had been tossed out so easily the week before last, so blithely, that the plan had seemed indeed nothing out of the ordinary. They had booked two tickets on the overnight train from Manhattan to Maine, walked the two miles to the ferry landing and into a watchfulness that had felt like another kind of waiting. It was, in part, what he had expected, but he was already weary of bracing for something he couldn’t see coming. Up here, he seemed outlined by the stark light, by the severe angles of the fishermen’s white cottages, the single street rising straight up from the ferry landing to the market at the end. New England. Up here, there was nowhere to hide.
They heard voices coming toward them through the fog. Len took his hands out of his pockets. Beside him, Reg folded his arms over his chest and then in the next motion unfolded them. They couldn’t see past the lip of the dock. To their left a black tar-papered ramp stretched into the mist, ending above them in a pier.
Footsteps sounded on the wood coming through the boathouse and then paused behind the gate above Len and Reg at the top of the gangway down to the dock. Two women stood above them looking down. The one in front was tall and lovely standing there, her long bare legs emerging from a pair of dusty rose-colored shorts, dark hair resting at the neck of a fisherman’s sweater.
“Len.” She hesitated, her hand on the gate. “Len Levy.”
Len was frozen beside him.
“Jesus,” Reg muttered. “You know her?”
“Hello, Joan,” Len answered.
“Len?” Reg asked again.
“This is Moss’s sister,” Len said, raising his voice. “Joan Milton.”
She pushed open the gate and came down the gangway, her eyes on Reg. “You must be Reg Pauling.”
“Yes.”
“Moss has talked about you.” She held out her hand.
Reg took it. Len was stiff beside him. This girl knew him, and except for the slight toss of the chin, she was not going to let on how well. Len fixed his eyes, as steadfast as a drowning man, on the other girl.
Goddamn him, Reg thought.
“Have we met?” The second girl scrutinized Len.
“No.” He shook his head. “Never.”
“I didn’t think so.” She nodded. “I’m Anne Pratt.”
“But how on earth did you get here?” Joan asked Reg.
“By boat.”
Joan looked. The dock was empty.
“A lobsterman dropped us off,” Reg explained.
“A lobsterman?”
“We got a ride.”
“So you are marooned,” said Anne cheerfully. “Castaways. Now you’ll have to stay for the party.”
There was a single instant of intense silence and then a hot blush bolted across Joan Milton’s face. She would be damned, Reg saw, to be seen as rude.
“Yes, yes, of course,” she echoed Anne. “Come and say hello. Moss will be so happy to see you. We are so glad you made it.”
She turned and started up the gangway into the boathouse.
“This is the girl?” Reg said to Len under his breath. Len nodded.
“Let’s go,” Reg said. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s just not go up there. This is a mistake.”
The broad blank face Len turned to him was as clear as a hand put out palm first: wait.
“Reg,” Len said.
“Coming?” Joan stood at the top of the gangway.
“Right behind you.” He reached down and grabbed his bag without looking at Reg.
There was nothing to do but follow the other three through the old wooden building and into the fog on the other side, which was moving, Reg noticed, as though the air breathed. Len was walking in front of him without a word. Since he had discovered the Nazi papers he had been as restless as a cat, anxious, going into work every hot morning hoping, Reg knew, to find something to contradict what he had already found in the files. But there was nothing more. Nothing was there. There was nothing to exonerate Milton, nothing to set Len free of his suspicion. “I have to ask him,” Len insisted.
“Why can’t it wait until the fall?”
“I can’t wait,” Len said.
“Why not?”
“I can’t.”
Because of the daughter, Reg understood. This girl. This Joan Milton, leading the three of them up the hill.
Through a sudden gap in the fog, an enormous white house at the top of the lawn app
eared, a solid through the mist. In an open window, a curtain blew out into the air slowly, like a kerchief waved by a prisoner.
“The most beautiful place on earth,” Reg said quietly. Joan glanced at him, surprised.
“That’s what your brother called it.”
“And he’s right,” she said, liking Reg immediately.
“What kind of camera is that?” Anne asked Reg, barreling forward up the hill.
“A Polaroid,” he answered. “A Land.”
“Will you take our pictures?”
“Of course,” Reg replied.
Ahead at the top of the hill, a loose group of people stood clustered around what looked like a piano, their backs to the lawn. The door to the house was wide open and the screen door tied back against one of the shutters. And, Reg saw, it was in fact an upright piano balanced in a kind of wheelbarrow and towering above the men and women standing there.
Moss was nowhere to be seen.
“Mum!” Joan called. “Dad! We have guests.”
An older man turned around.
“Sonofagun! Levy?” Ogden exclaimed, the surprise on his face mixed immediately with delight.
(And watching the two men walking toward them through the fog behind Joan, Kitty was overtaken by the brief impossible thought that here was that little boy coming toward her. Alive and returned. She shuddered, fixing her smile. Of course it wasn’t him—but here was the mess, here it was, coming.)
“Hello, sir.” Len closed the distance between them and stuck out his hand.
“Kitty,” Ogden said. “This is Len Levy.”
“Levy?”
Reg thought he caught the barest shiver and then the swift correction as Mrs. Milton came toward them with a firm smile on her face, drawing the place with her, her silver hair tucked behind her ears, tiny clippers in one hand.
“Mrs. Milton,” Len said.
“Len hails from Chicago,” Ogden told her, apropos of nothing. But she nodded. Then she turned to Reg.
“This is Mr. Pauling,” Joan pressed quietly.
