by Sarah Blake
She nodded into the phone.
“Anyway,” Paul went on, “this Reg Pauling, the one I’m thinking of, is still alive, you know.”
She tensed. “I would have thought Dick Sherman would have found that out.”
“Probably so,” Paul allowed.
She nodded against the phone.
“Why don’t you check the guest book?” he asked.
She had forgotten all about Granny K’s guest book. She felt a tug of excitement, the pull toward research, of digging into a question. The pull toward Paul, she realized.
“Evie,” he said. “Are you there?”
“I’m here.” She nodded.
There was a pause.
“Evie,” he said again, more softly. And she heard what he didn’t say. All the distance and all the time they had traveled together, their past. The nights and the mornings, the long afternoons. She heard Seth’s wail and his small boy’s voice in the night. In Paul’s voice just then, she heard all the years that were gone, and were still there, between them. His love.
“You’re okay?”
“I’m okay.” She smiled.
“Dad?” Seth called.
“Go on.”
She turned around, still smiling, and started back up the lawn. Ahead of her, Min emerged from the side of the house with the copper vase from the dining room and gave it a great heave. The bayberry sailed out of its pot and into the grass by the side of the kitchen door.
“Min!” Evie shouted.
Min looked up.
“What are you doing?” Evie was charging up the hill.
“Mum hated that stuff,” Min said.
“But Granny K loved it, and Mum did too.”
“The lilacs are in bloom,” Min answered. “We’re never here when they are in bloom.”
“But Granny K always filled that vase with bayberry.”
“So? That doesn’t mean we have to.”
“Yes. It does.”
“For Christ’s sake, Evie.” Min laughed in disbelief.
They stared at each other.
“Why did you come anyway?” Evie blurted.
“I told you. I thought you might need some help.”
“No, you didn’t,” Evie saw suddenly. “No, you didn’t. You just didn’t want to let me be here on my own. You’re exactly like Aunt E. You just take over.”
“Evie.” Min turned away, disgusted, and yanked open the kitchen door. “You’re no better than Henry.”
The door slammed. Evie stood a minute and then pulled the kitchen door open, furious.
Min was pulling fixings out of the fridge to make sandwiches. Evie’s breakfast dishes lay stacked to the side of the sink. The coffeepot squatted on the stove. She should have put everything away first; she should have tidied. Mum and Granny K would have cleaned the kitchen before going outside. The breakfast things on the counter were a reproach. Automatically, Evie took the jam jar, tightened the top, and put it in the fridge. Min wouldn’t look at her.
She was laying out soft brown bread, Hellmann’s, and a thick cucumber she must have bought at the farm stand along Route 1. Evie had forgotten about cucumber sandwiches, but now, standing there in the kitchen, Min busy peeling the green skin off in long strips, all the lunches at this table with her cousins and the impatient efficiency of Granny’s cook, Jessie O’Mara, returned.
A dragonfly bounced off the screen door and then nattered by in the heat, its castanets vanishing.
“Can I have one?” Evie asked, her anger cooling.
“Sure,” Min answered tightly, and set out two more slices of bread.
Evie leaned on the counter and folded her arms. “Why are we stuck in this fight?”
Min spread a thick swath of mayonnaise on two of the pieces of bread and began to lay down the slices of cucumber like tiles.
“Because they were stuck in it.”
Evie went to the kitchen table and pulled out a chair.
“Do you know your mother never thanked my mother once?” Min said, her back still to Evie.
“For what?’
“For protecting her.”
“Protecting her? She obliterated her.”
Min turned around.
“You never see what is right in front of you, Evie. You never have. Mum protected Aunt Joan all the way through. Without my mother yours would have died from her seizures.”
Evie frowned. “I never heard anything like that.”
“Exactly.” Min put the knife down. “That’s exactly my point.”
“Listen, Min, I didn’t even know she had seizures until just before she died.”
Min stared. “How can that be?”
Evie nodded.
Min cut both sandwiches in half, put one in front of Evie, and sat down herself.
“I hated how our mothers fought up here,” Min said. “I hated who they all became. There’s no such thing as the past here—I mean, look at us; the minute we’re here, we’re our mothers fighting over flowers in pots, over what goes where, over who gets what. Nothing is ever finished, it’s just carried along, carried onward. No offense,” she said, glancing across the table, “but that’s why history always seemed to me so—”
Evie narrowed her eyes. “Useless?”
“Silly,” Min said quietly. “As if things that happen could really be put in a box or a book and let rest. What’s over is always under. And that goes double up here.”
“How do you move forward, then, without seeing the past for what it was?”
Min shrugged.
“So who cares what happened?” Evie poked.
Min folded her arms and looked at her cousin. “You know, Evie, lots of people finish my sentences for me. I’m used to it. But you are the only person on the planet who finishes them wrong—every time.”
Evie tucked her chin, watching her cousin warily.
“It’s not who cares what happened,” Min went on, “but who knows what happened. After a while, I don’t think even they did.”
Evie shook her head. “But that’s not what Henry thinks, or Harriet—they think Mum did something to your mum, and that’s why they won’t let Mum have her rock.”
“Mum was saying all sorts of things at the end. But the fact that Aunt Joan wanted to put a rock down—some marker—drove her wild.”
“But it was where she wanted to be buried, that’s all. It was something about her life,” Evie protested.
“It was more than that, I don’t know what. But for Mum it would be as if Joan had had the last word.”
Evie stared. “On what?”
“I don’t know.” Min shook her head. “But we’re stuck like this, Evie—I know you know it. And I can’t stand it. I don’t want this place. I want out. I want to be free of it.”
The two stared at each other.
“But—” Evie said. “This place. Look at it, look at that.” She pointed to the sunlight divided into the nine squares of the old kitchen window, stretched and held against the faded wall. Time stopped. Light. Sky. Nothing changed here but the light of day. The tap in the pantry dripped single notes into the sink. A cloud crossed the sun in the sky and the light dropped in the room.
“Yeah.” Min shook her head. “I’ve had enough. It’s sad. It’s broken. It’s a shell—why hold on to a shell?”
“It’s where everyone is.”
Min exhaled. “Really? What about Paul? Seth? Aren’t they everyone too?”
“Of course,” Evie replied uneasily. “You know what I mean.”
Min nodded, picked up her sandwich, and took a bite.
They had reached a kind of truce. They ate in quiet, and it seemed to Evie that she had sat in this chair, her bare feet flat on the blue linoleum, eating with Min for years and years and years.
“Poor Mum,” Evie said at last. “This was the only place where she was happy.”
“What made you think she was unhappy?”
“She never got out of the gate, somehow.” Evie was thoughtful. “She and
Dad always seemed to be living just to the side of their own lives.” She shook her head, rueful, and looked at Min. “Whereas in your house, everything added up. I used to study your Christmas card, you know—”
“Oh god.”
“I’m serious.” Evie smiled.
There was a certainty there, a rightness that Evie never felt anywhere else. And it created great calm. One went to Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Dickie’s enormous house in Greenwich, Connecticut, overlooking the sound, where the silver was polished, drinks were at six and dinner at seven and everything had its place. There was a right way and a wrong way to do things, and at Aunt Evelyn’s it was right. In this spirit, she had borne four children, all of whom knew how to ski, play tennis, speak French, decode Latin, throw a good party, drive a boat, a car, and, if need be, a tractor.
“Everyone else had mothers who talked to them, fought with them, took on the world. Not mine.”
Min listened.
“Why does someone retreat like that?” Evie asked her. “Say no to the world? Pull back, raise the drawbridge, turn away?”
She looked at Min. “It was as if Mum had ceded the field to Aunt E and Granny K—”
“Granny K was a big bully,” Min said crisply. “If you didn’t do as she liked, if you didn’t sit up, speak when you were spoken to, adore lobster, blueberries, and wildflowers, speak French easily, go to Yale or Harvard, or marry a man from Yale or Harvard—you simply didn’t exist.”
“That’s a little exaggerated,” Evie protested, but it made her smile.
Min raised her eyebrow and said nothing.
“Anyway,” Min said after a little, “Aunt Joan never seemed unhappy to me. She seemed—”
Evie looked over.
“Devoted,” Min decided. “She was a devotee.”
Min reached for Evie’s plate, stood up, and carried both to the sink.
“Of what?”
“The Island,” Min answered. “Everything always had to be right where it belonged. The geraniums in the barrels at the front of the house. The marguerites, the cosmos, and the phlox. She was a stickler for details. Don’t you remember, in the eighties, when Granny K got too frail to go down to the picnic grounds for drinks, Aunt Joan rented a golf cart from the mainland to carry her up and down the lawn. ‘We always have drinks down there,’ she insisted. ‘Why stop?’”
Why stop? Evie’s throat caught.
“It drove Mum crazy. She hated it up here, you know,” Min said.
“No, she didn’t.”
“She did. The older she got, the more she hated it. At the end of every summer, she’d say to me, ‘There, that’s done.’ Like a test she had passed yet again.”
“But I thought Henry was carrying on the way she wanted. She always wanted to be in charge.”
“They were sisters.” Min wrinkled her nose. “She just didn’t want Joan to be in charge.”
“But”—Evie was incredulous—“Mum was never in charge; your mother always made all kinds of decisions without telling Mum.”
“She had to,” Min answered. “I loved her, but Aunt Joan was the most stubborn person on the planet.”
Evie snorted. “Mum?”
“‘Unforgiving,’ according to Mum.” Min nodded. “Both of them. Joan and Moss. And Mum always seemed to feel it more up here.”
Moss? Evie thought.
“What had your mother done that needed forgiving?” Evie started stacking the breakfast dishes in the drainer back up on the kitchen shelf.
Min paused so long, Evie turned around.
“I’m not sure whether I believe this, but apparently there was a man,” she said cautiously.
“A man?”
“Between them. Somebody—”
“How do you mean, between them?”
“I’m not sure. I think in the obvious way.”
“Someone who came here?”
Min shook her head, mystified.
“Wait a sec.” Evie remembered what Paul had asked. “Hold on.”
And she walked to the front room where the row of leather-bound guest books sat on the little bookshelf beside Granny K’s chair. The embossed gold of CROCKETT’S ISLAND still held a faint glow on the oldest one in front.
“Evie?”
“Hang on.” She pulled the guest book marked 1959 and walked it back into the kitchen, laying it down on the table between them.
“What are we looking for?”
“Reginald Pauling.”
Min was startled. “The man Granny wants Moss’s share given to?”
Evie nodded.
“But who is he?”
“Well, the one that Paul knows of is an African-American writer.”
“A black man? Here? That would never have happened.”
“We’ll see.”
Evie slid her hand across the smooth green leather cover before opening it. The musty smell of old paper rose up, mixed with something else. She leaned down. Camphor? The thick paper of the pages cascaded in her hand, stray words and phrases in various inks and handwritings cast up like jetsam. Marnie … true friendship and … without ovens or time … picnic … more time in your company. She riffled them all the way to the end of the book and then, more slowly, started at the beginning again, paging through the names in the early part of the summer, slowing down as she neared the end. There was nothing, no one named Reg, not even an R. Pauling appeared on any of the pages.
“He’s not there,” she said, disappointed.
The last name in the book was Leonard Levy. She flipped through the rest of the pages to be sure.
“That’s weird—it ends on August twenty-fifth—” She looked up. “Shit.”
“What?”
Shit. Shit. Shit. Evie walked back into the front room, pulled the Polaroid off the mantel, and then brought it back to Min, tossing it across the table at her.
“Where did this come from?”
“Mum had it.”
“God.” Min studied it. “Look at them.”
Evie nodded.
“Who took it, do you think?” Min looked up.
“No clue.” Evie reached and turned it over and pointed to her mother’s note. “But look at that.”
Min looked down again.
“I asked Aunt Anne about it,” Evie said. “But she didn’t have any idea what it might mean.”
Min shivered and looked up at Evie.
“I don’t know what ‘the morning of’ means either, but look at the date.”
“So?”
“I’m pretty sure that’s the day Uncle Moss died.”
Thirty-three
“WHERE’S YOUR CAMERA, REG?” Moss asked, coming around the corner of the house. Reg pointed to the Polaroid, sitting where he had left it on the green bench at the front of the house. Moss turned and shouted back to Evelyn and Dickie, “Come on, you two, come get documented—it’s the morning of your big party!”
Evelyn and Dickie walked toward them all and stood a little awkwardly together. “Where?”
Moss pointed. “Up there, on the steps of the house.”
So the two lovers stood very straight together in front of the Big House and looked politely into Reg’s camera as he lowered his face into the visor and shot. The flash went off, and the film whirred its way through the machinery to the light. Reg rolled the image out of the back of the camera and laid it on the green bench to dry.
“My turn.” Joan pulled Dickie away, smiling, and slid in beside Evelyn. The two sisters stood arm in arm together, and when Moss said, “Come on, Evelyn, smile for Reg,” the wary expression on her face softened just a little. Joan allowed herself a glance at Len standing off to himself behind Reg. At the last minute, Moss jumped into the frame, cupping his cigarette and giving Reg a look that was part sweetness and all dare.
“Take me,” he said. “Right here.”
Everyone laughed.
Slowly, Reg pulled the camera up to his eyes and held it steady. Through the viewfinder, Moss looked back at him, and
there was no mistaking the look. Reg closed his eyes and snapped.
“Christ,” he heard Moss chuckle. “That’s bright.”
Reg lowered the camera and looked at Moss.
And Moss nodded slowly back.
In a little while, it would be lunch. The sisters went inside to help their mother. Dickie brought out a football and tossed it to Reg, who threw it to Len. Moss lay back down in the shade of the house, listening to the slap and tuck, the sound of skin on leather. The flag hung listless on the pole. The ball tossed back and forth. Slap and tuck. Behind the men, through the windows at the front of the house, there was the murmur of women’s voices.
Joan had stalled at the window in the front room, watching Len twenty feet from her on the other side of the glass. And though she was staring, though she was a figure at the window anyone could have seen, she didn’t care. She wanted him to see her. If he looked up and saw her, he’d know.
But he hadn’t looked up. He hadn’t stopped from his game. Aside from that one look he had shot at her on the dock, he hadn’t looked at her again. He seemed determined about something, as though he had a job to do before he could catch her eye again. He had thrown the ball, round and around, and then, uncomplicated as a dog, had thrown himself to the ground, laughing. Then gotten up to throw again. Men could do this—lie around, bat words up and down, or say nothing. Even through the glass she could feel the slack good humor, the fellow feeling that bound them. Four men on the grass.
But why had he come?
“I’ve just realized who he is.” Evelyn was watching them, beside Joan, her hands on her narrow hips.
“Who?” Though Joan knew full well. “Reg or Len?”
“Not Mr. Pauling.” A hard expression settled on Evelyn’s face. “I have no idea who he is. And anyway, I don’t like him.”
“Evelyn!”
“I don’t. And Dickie doesn’t either.” She frowned. “He is watching us all the time, making judgments about us, I’m sure. What does he think? That we’ll behave badly? Of course we won’t. None of us would say a word to offend him. He’s welcome here.”
“No, he’s not,” Joan protested. “I don’t think that’s right at all.”
“Pay attention. You’ll see.” Evelyn leaned her arms on the sill. “No,” she said quietly, “I meant Len Levy. He’s the man who helped us that day in Penn Station at the beginning of this summer. I’m sure of it.”
