by Sarah Blake
Thirty-five
AFTER LUNCH, REG HAD followed the others up the lawn without a clear sense of a plan and continued past the house, to a little graveyard on a hill above it. He could hear Moss on the piano up at the barn. He thought he heard women’s voices through the open windows. Up here, at the center of this compass of sound, he was utterly alone.
The most beautiful place on earth, Moss had said to him that night at the Five Spot. And it was. Reg could see the purity of it, the air and the single trees, the sunlit green and that deep, deep blue. But Jesus, he thought.
And that morning he was called into the principal’s office and told he was going to Harvard, when Harvard was a word that only meant far away, a word that seemed to stick in the mouth of Principal Evans like a morsel he couldn’t bear to swallow—that morning returned. He recalled the vast expanse of the Yard and having to cross it by himself, without Len. He remembered the days in the classrooms up there when he had to grab his seat with his hands to keep himself from bolting out of the room. No one knew what to do with him sitting there. Classmate? Roommate? Checkmate.
He had watched as Len pushed out of the front door of the house and made his way, determined, down to the dock. He had seen Mr. Milton turn and catch sight of Len coming through the boathouse and wave as Len walked along to the top of the gangway and down. After a little, the two men left the dock in one of the larger boats, towing a second slowly out into the cove where several boats were on mooring. They worked in tandem, and it occurred to Reg that Len might never ask what he had come for. He had had the curious sensation watching Len on the dock at lunch, expounding, that he was watching someone so firmly in charge of his part that everything he spoke sounded preordained, like lines written by a master. He had hold of every man’s attention, and more than that, of Mr. Milton’s clear admiration. Len was at the top of a game Reg hadn’t understood until that moment. A game Len wanted to win. And Ogden Milton was the player Len wanted to be—one of those men who stood in the world without question. You could hear it in his voice, an ease, a comfort, as though every room he walked into were his own. He talked as though he had all the time in the world. When what Mr. Milton had, Reg knew, was the world.
Sitting beside her on the dock, however, Reg had felt Mrs. Milton recoil as she listened to Len, had felt the chill quiet pulling itself further into the cold. Though she did not mind him, Reg felt. He wondered why.
The sun burned with a bright fervor, dismissing the fog and sharpening the afternoon. He could just make out Mr. Milton and Len on the water.
He put his hands in his pockets and started back down the hill.
“Where are you off to, Mr. Pauling?” Mrs. Milton called from the green bench in front of the house, snipping the stems of the roses laid in her basket.
He paused.
“Have a seat,” she invited him.
He wandered over and sat down on the bench.
“I’m keeping an eye on Ogden.” She nodded toward the dock. “And Mr. Levy.”
“Len is good with boats.”
She regarded him, the expression on her face unchanging.
“Tell me, how did you and Mr. Levy come to be friends?”
“We’ve known each other since the third grade,” Reg answered. “In Chicago.”
Kitty’s eye fell on Reg’s legs stretched in front of him and crossed tidily at the ankles.
It was peculiar but not uncomfortable to sit here in silence. It would be uncomfortable, she realized, if anyone else were with them. But this man beside her sat as quietly as she sat. This is what could happen, possibly, she thought. We might talk to each other. If no one was watching, a black man and a white woman could talk, after all.
She smiled at him and returned her gaze down the lawn.
“There’s the heron,” she said quietly.
Picking its way down through the thinned trees, the bird appeared, tall and stiff-legged on the flat rock by the boathouse uncovered by the tide. And now it stood. Like a grasshopper on two feet. Looking in that moment like a sentry, or a guard, or something martial. At attention, waiting for an invisible sign to move.
Reg found himself holding his breath.
And then the heron flew. Simply lifted its wings, took a stroke, and off it went. Reg followed it far out in the bay, where lobstermen crossed slowly, toy boats against the low sky. Someone else’s world entirely, whose sound came to where he sat next to Kitty, bringing the world out there beyond this island with it.
“Someone once asked me if I thought there was a story for each of us.”
He looked over at her. “A single story?”
She nodded.
“And what did you say?”
“No,” she said.
He nodded. “And do you think there is one story now?”
“No.” She turned to him. “I could never have predicted you, for instance.”
His rather serious face broke open into a lovely smile, and he laughed. She smiled back at him. She nodded and turned her head.
“So there,” she mused. “Nothing is ever as difficult as it seems.”
Ogden and Mr. Levy had put the Katherine on the mooring, and Len climbed down off her bow and into the smaller boat beside Ogden.
“Or as simple,” she added.
He didn’t reply.
They sat together like that, the woman who had been tended and combed all her life, who had dived off those rocks into the frigid sea and emerged laughing, lightly rubbing her limbs down with a thick towel, who had accompanied her husband back and forth to Europe after the war, who turned at dinner tables, like a smooth beam lighting upon her partner—here I am, here you are—and the black man, the slight man whom she had liked right away, who sat easily beside her, restfully, his feet up on the bottom rung of the garden bench.
She felt the thinking in him, she felt the mind beside her pulling out this thought and that, sifting as he sat, silently, and she saw that he had come here without precisely knowing what he had come for, that he stood on the verge of something, and that he was fundamentally, powerfully alone.
She watched as Ogden pulled the runabout neatly into the dock and Mr. Levy jumped out with the rope. Soon they would walk through the boathouse and come to that spot on the lawn, there at the bottom.
“I could have saved a child from the war,” she heard herself say out loud. “A Jew.”
She could feel him staring.
“His mother asked if I would keep him during the war.”
She did not look at him. She could not. She had to finish it now.
“And I said no.”
He turned his face away from her and looked down the lawn.
It was possible to say, Here is what happened, she thought, but impossible, impossible to explain how.
“It wasn’t because he was Jewish,” she said quietly. “It was because he was alive. Do you see? What was unforgivable at the time was that he was alive.” He sat very still, his hands on the bench.
“And what happened to him?”
She didn’t answer for a moment.
“I don’t know. I expect I’ll never know.”
She shifted, turning toward him on the bench. “And what is one to do with that?”
“Do?” He met her eyes. “What is one to do?”
They looked at each other. And then she looked away.
Ogden and Mr. Levy had come to a stop in the doorway of the boathouse. They were talking about something, face-to-face.
Kitty rose from the bench.
“That man,” she exclaimed, “persists in doing business.”
“Jesus,” Reg exhaled as Mrs. Milton walked away down the hill toward Len and Mr. Milton. “Jesus Christ.”
Thirty-six
EVIE AND MIN SAT together on the green bench at the front of the house. They’d worked through every box they’d pulled from the shelves. Emptied of its stuffing, the closet smelled faintly of salt and paint. Mouse droppings dotted the back of the shelves like chocolate jimmies
. When they finished, the pile of stuff to toss covered three of the beds. The afternoon stretched across the lawn. Across the Narrows the osprey nest beaconed the chicks, circling farther and farther away and then again, home. The wind had shifted, and the salt air moved toward them on the hill.
A motorboat appeared behind the rim of Darby’s Island, coming from the mainland.
“Are they coming in here?”
Its prow settled lower in the flat water of the cove as it slowed, slipping past the empty mooring and taking the last fifty feet with the engine at a low grumble. The driver knew his way around boats, that much was clear.
“Looks like it,” Min said.
A child, a girl, emerged onto the bow of the boat and stood along the gunwale, a painter in hand, ready to leap onto the dock and pull the boat in when they landed. Expertly, the man at the wheel cut a smooth circle in the water as he approached the dock, running neatly alongside the edge. From where the cousins stood, they heard the thump as the child’s feet hit the wooden float and the brief whine as the boat was thrown into reverse, and then the immediate quiet as he cut the engine.
“We ought to go down.”
Evie nodded. Neither of them moved. They waited.
The man emerged into the light patch of green in front of the boathouse, the little girl beside him slipping her hand in his. He raised his hand in greeting.
“Charlie Levy,” he called.
“What the hell is he doing here?” Evie muttered.
“I guess he wants to see the place.”
“But we’re not ready.”
“Don’t wreck it, Evie. We’ll show them around. Then they’ll leave.”
In spite of it all, Evie smiled. Min’s feelings stacked up like plates in a pantry.
“Okay,” she said evenly. “Keep your shirt on. I’m not going to wreck anything.”
Min sighed and they started forward.
“You must be the Miltons,” he said, holding out his hand.
“We are,” Evie answered.
“Charlie Levy.” His thick brown hair was shot through with gray, and his eyes leveled on her as she shook his hand. He wore himself easily, his windbreaker hanging lightly on his shoulders, his pants loosely belted at his hips.
“Evie Milton,” she answered as he turned to Min and greeted her.
“And this is Posy.”
“Hello, Posy,” Evie said.
The girl glanced up at her and put out her hand. She had a long and narrow face with fine, straight hair that hung low over her eyes and down below her shoulders, and she looked like she had spent her childhood undercover. On a ribbon around her neck hung an electric pink Polaroid OneStep. Evie shook the girl’s hand, bemused as Posy sized her up from beneath her bangs.
“I’m sorry to barge in like this,” he said. “But Dick Sherman said you were out here, I thought I’d come and see the place. Talk it all over.”
Evie crossed her arms.
“We’re over at the Stinsons’ for the week, over on Vinalhaven,” he explained. “Do you know them?”
“That enormous new place on the point?”
“That’s right.” He nodded.
“No,” answered Min. “But we couldn’t miss it going up.”
They all turned and walked slowly up toward the house.
“You know how to handle a boat,” said Evie.
“I’ve been sailing since I was little. My dad was crazy about it. ‘If you want to win at the game,’ he told me, ‘you’ve got to know how to sail,’” Charlie said.
“What game?” asked Min, coming to rest in front of the house.
“Well”—Charlie turned to take in the dock, and the boats, and the house on the hill—“this one.”
He grinned.
Evie glanced at Min.
“Mrs. Milton?”
Both Evie and Min turned to look at Posy. She was holding her camera up. “Can I?”
The child was breaking every single rule. No, Evie was about to say, when Min threaded her arm through hers and said to Posy gently, “Neither one of us is Mrs. Milton, but go on—take us.”
“Quick,” said Evie.
Posy nodded and held the camera to her eye. “Dad,” she commanded.
Min and Evie looked over at Charlie, and he ambled good-naturedly into the picture.
“All right,” Min said when it was done. “Come on in.” And led the way up the granite steps.
“The sitting room.” Min pointed into the tiny room, its four overstuffed chairs, each to a corner framing a round rug. “The woodstove gives off a ton of heat.”
“Except if the wood is wet,” Evie said.
“Well, yes, obviously.” Min raised her eyebrows at Charlie, as if including him in a joke.
“It’s not obvious,” Evie countered, pricked by what appeared an unexpected alliance, “but one has to know. When the wood is wet,” she said, “the room will smoke up immediately, and then you’ve had it—”
“Okay, Evie, it’s not that bad.”
Charlie Levy nodded and reached behind him to where his daughter hovered, pulling her under his arm.
“Okay,” he said.
“I’m sorry about the wallpaper,” Min was saying, behind her. “We didn’t have enough time to pick another one and get it up before the season.”
“I thought we didn’t want to change it.” Evie couldn’t help herself.
Min opened her mouth to say something else and then thought better of it and glided past her cousin into the pantry, where their grandmother’s Wedgwood china was stacked neatly on the open shelves—a complete set of the houses of Harvard. Charlie lifted off a soup bowl from the stack and whistled.
“My grandmother didn’t believe in everyday china,” said Min.
“Oh no?”
“Because every day is all there is,” Evie said archly.
“What’s that, Ladies’ Home Journal?”
“Our grandmother,” Min replied. “If you can’t take good care of the finest things, you don’t deserve to have them.”
“Sounds like a challenge.”
“I suppose it is,” Evie agreed. She glanced at her cousin, but Min was moving the stack of plates farther back on the shelf, needlessly, as if they might somehow blow away.
“Here’s the kitchen.” Evie pointed through the doorway at the chairs around the table, the guest book lying open on the waxed tablecloth, the sun glinting off the rock through the back window.
The man was insatiable, irresistible, asking question after question, his daughter following him like an attending shadow. They showed Charlie Levy all over the Big House. They looked in every room, up into the attic, downstairs again, through the living room and the front parlor, out the front door again, where they stood at the top of the lawn. His interest was contagious, and the two cousins grew more and more expansive in their tour. Min was showing off, Evie realized. And found she didn’t mind. Min told the story of Granny K and Pops sailing by the dock one day in the thirties and seeing the For Sale sign.
“Probably got it for a song.” He whistled.
“Fifteen hundred,” Evie answered.
He shook his head appreciatively. “They must have been something, your grandparents.”
“That they were.” Min was dry, looking at Evie.
They had walked up the hill to the barn and paused there as they came over the threshold and into the big room. Charlie took in the faded curtains, the rotting sills, and the threadbare sofa. A slight breeze came through the great crack in the back wall. Whatever it was he was thinking, he kept to himself.
“We don’t, as a rule, like to spend too much money,” Evie observed.
He nodded, his arms folded on his chest, gazing up into the enormous reach of the barn roof.
“In any case,” he said, following Min out the barn door, “the place is incredible.” He turned around, waiting for Evie and Posy to come through the sliding glass door, then pushed it shut behind them, taking care. Posy wandered away, down throug
h the grasses, back toward the house.
“Actually,” Min said, “we’re in a bit of a crisis. That’s why we’re renting to you.”
Levy swung round to look at her.
“No, we’re not,” Evie insisted.
“He might as well know, Evie.”
“There isn’t anything to know,” Evie pronounced, “Min.”
“Listen, I’d take a piece of this place off your hands in a New York minute.” Charlie was earnest.
Min turned to face him.
“I’m dead serious.”
“But you’d have to share,” Min teased uncertainly, glancing at Evie.
“With one other family?” Charlie laughed. “Not too shabby.”
The two cousins were quiet. This was too close to a real conversation.
“Let’s not talk business,” Evie said to him after a minute.
He nodded.
The three of them remained looking down the hill to the boathouse and the water beyond, and Evie imagined what Charlie saw. The field and the white house, the rocks, the sky above, an uncomplicated kingdom. Unweighted. Ready to own.
For the first time, she saw the place without them in it.
Posy had reached the kitchen door and gone inside. The kitchen door slammed.
Wordlessly, Charlie and Min and Evie started slowly back down the hill toward the Big House.
The screen door clapped again.
“Dad?”
Posy was walking up the path to the barn toward them, clearly excited. She had the guest book in her hand.
“Hey, Dad?”
“What have you got?” her father asked.
“The book,” she called. “The book on the table in there. Isn’t this Granddad?” She squinted up at him.
Evie and Min stopped where they were.
“Look at that.” Charlie bent over the book and whistled, glancing back at Min and Evie. “So he was here.”
There on the page Posy held up was written Leonard Levy in blue ballpoint, the L’s quite sharply defined and set off from the smaller letters, and the date, August 25, 1959.
Evie stared at the name, trying to make sense of it. “That’s your father?”
The four of them stood there, outside the kitchen door, toward the end of a summer day. The guest book rested in the hands of a girl whose grandfather had written in it sixty years before. The roof of the house defined the sky. The same roof then as now, the arc of history bending toward them.
