by Sarah Blake
And she recalled an instant years ago, coming into the living room to switch off the television, Seth looking up at her and asking about the cartoon family on the television, “Do they know we are watching?”
She shivered.
“Your grandfather gave my father his first job,” Charlie said.
“At Milton Higginson?”
Charlie nodded. “He called it his finishing school.”
“So your being here is not a coincidence.”
“Coincidence?” Charlie considered Evie. “Not at all. I’m here because I made a promise to my father. I thought Dick Sherman had made that clear.”
“But you were surprised to see his name in the guest book.”
Charlie was quiet a moment. “Toward the end, my father was saying some crazy things.”
“But how did he come out here?” Min asked. “A picnic?”
Charlie shrugged. “No idea. He was a friend of your uncle’s.”
“Uncle Dickie?”
“No, I don’t think that was his name.”
“Uncle Moss?”
“That’s it.”
“But he died years ago,” Evie said to him, looking at Min.
“After a party.” Charlie nodded. “My father told me. He said a Jew died too.”
“A Jew?”
“That’s the way Dad said it.”
“What Jew?” Evie asked.
“I don’t think so.” Min shook her head. “Or at least, we’ve never heard that. Granny K always told us Moss drowned trying to save someone.”
“Who?” Charlie asked.
Evie looked at Min. No one had ever gotten an answer from their grandmother on that question, though it would have burnished the shine on the story of their uncle Moss, who otherwise went largely unmentioned. Granny K had always managed to flick off details like bugs, specifics that might prick the smooth surface of a moment.
They walked Charlie Levy and his daughter down to their boat and stood on the dock as Charlie hopped in and turned on the engine, Posy untying the lines.
“Listen,” he said. “I have to give you something.” He hesitated.
“Go on,” Evie prodded.
“Before he died, I told you my father was saying lots of odd things. He told me about an island. And about a point on that island. He made me promise I would find that point—”
Evie raised her eyebrows.
“Find that point,” Charlie went on, “find those rocks, he told me, if you can. And when you do, put this there.”
Out of his pocket he took an ordinary kitchen spoon.
Evie looked down at it and then back up at him, mystified.
“I know.” Charlie was bemused. “It’s nuts. But now we know that he was here, I’m pretty sure he meant those rocks off the end there.”
Evie looked at Min, who shook her head, puzzled. Evie felt like she was in the grip of a fever, as if something hovered just out of sight, something that she might understand if she didn’t look at it straight.
“Could you put it there?” Charlie asked. “It’s not my place.”
“Sure,” said Evie, taking it. “Sure thing.”
Charlie nodded at Posy, and she tossed the line into their boat and then hopped after it onto the bow.
Evie leaned and gave them a push off from the dock, out into the Thoroughfare.
“Come back,” she said as the boat slowly pulled away. “Tomorrow or the next day. Before you leave.”
“Do.” Min smiled. “Come for tea. We’ll use the china.”
Charlie turned to them. “I’d like that.”
They nodded at him and waved him off.
The two cousins stood a long while on the dock watching the boat speed toward Vinalhaven, disappearing at last around the point. In the emptied space, a solitary kayaker sliced the water with his paddle like a baton twirler, making headway up the Narrows toward the darkening band of the horizon.
“You’d think we’d have heard the truth about Uncle Moss.”
Min snorted. “Our family? You think we ever heard the truth about anything?”
Thirty-seven
LEN LEANED ON THE wooden railing of the pier, looking down onto the empty, sunny dock, trying to make sense of what had just happened. Mr. Milton had left him there, walking away through the boathouse and toward Mrs. Milton when she’d called. He wasn’t sure how to feel—he pushed up off his forearms—or even what to feel now. The Pratts were coming in around the end of the cove, the father and son side by side, the two sculls gliding easily forward.
Roger Pratt stroked effortlessly into the dock, leaving Dickie out on the water, rowing in what now looked like laps.
“Need a hand?” Len called out to the father.
“I’ll be fine,” Mr. Pratt called back. The two men stood in silence as the sculler hugged the one oar tight against him, stirring the water with the other to bring the craft swiftly around and alongside. He sat there, clearly winded, watching Dickie still out on the water.
“What did Mr. Milton say?”
Len looked over his shoulder and saw Reg coming toward him. He shook his head ruefully.
Reg came to stand beside him along the railing.
* * *
WHEN LEN HAD come through the boathouse onto the pier, half an hour ago, Ogden Milton was standing down at the edge of the dock handing one of the oars to Dickie, sitting in the scull. On the water, twenty feet or so out from the dock, Roger Pratt was sculling slowly forward against the tide, and though his oars skimmed the surface of the water as he took a stroke, the boat appeared stalled.
“Give it up, Pratt!” Ogden crowed cheerfully. “You’ll never make it around the Island in under an hour. This is what separates men from New Yorkers.”
He gave Dickie a push off and stood, hands on hips, observing.
“Why then, I’ll be fine,” Roger Pratt called back, catching water at last, “as I’m from Connecticut,” and started stroking cleanly away. Within moments, Dickie had come abreast, and the father and son moved in unison into the break in the fog.
Ogden chuckled and turned around, seeing Len standing at the top of the gangway.
“Levy!” He smiled. “You’re just who I need at the moment. I could use a second pair of hands.”
Len hesitated. “Why’s that, sir?”
“I want to get the Katherine off the dock and out onto the mooring, and those two have deserted me, promising they’ll row round the Island in half an hour.”
He looked down the Narrows where the two sculls had disappeared. “They’ll never make it back in that amount of time.” He grinned.
“Where is the mooring?”
Ogden pointed to a spot dead in the middle of the Thoroughfare between Crockett’s and Vinalhaven across the way.
There didn’t seem to be anything else to do but simply climb onto the Katherine with the towline Mr. Milton gave him, cleat it to the bow, and then stand with one of the long oars to fend off any buoys as the runabout slowly pulled away from the dock, towing the Katherine through a hole in the fog.
Mr. Milton navigated without slowing down, picking his way through the dank mist unerringly toward the white mooring, which appeared suddenly out of the gray ahead of them. Len reached down and caught the mooring, then tied the Katherine on, Milton idling the engine. Within a few minutes it was done.
When they turned back toward the dock, the fog was lifting, and the house and the boathouse stood solid grays against the green. At the top of the hill, Len thought he saw Reg sitting beside Mrs. Milton.
“See that?” Ogden said quietly.
Len glanced at the older man.
“My refuge,” Ogden said. “Always has been.”
Len turned away, staring forward straight in front of him at the house on its hill. Refuge from what? He swallowed.
They docked and tied up in silence.
“Sir,” he said at last, “what are these?”
He pulled out the two contracts from his pocket and handed them to Ogde
n, who looked at him, unfolded them, and stared down. Then he nodded and looked back up at Len.
“A bad call.”
“A bad call.” Len’s eyes widened. “As investments?”
Mr. Milton shook his head. “The whole damn thing. Though it wasn’t about the money.” He turned to Len. “It was never about the money, about profit.”
“What was it about?”
Ogden frowned, though Levy had landed lightly on that word, was. It was so easy to ask from here, so easy to see what this young man must think he saw. As if all of us could see what history will tell, when instead all we see is the present, what’s around us. He had seen Elsa, he had seen Walser. He had not looked past them. For that, he could be faulted. But no more.
“Order,” he answered squarely. “Stability. Old friends.”
Len watched him.
Ogden looked up. “In the end we lost everything. We lost our shirts in ’forty-two.”
And until then? Len thought, looking at his boss. All the years until then that the money silted solidly up. Money the man before him didn’t see, didn’t seem to count. Money that was everywhere around them, here in this—refuge.
“But it was a good call until then?”
Ogden held Len’s gaze, pocketing the pages. It was clear he understood what Len was asking.
* * *
“AND?” REG ASKED.
Len turned and looked at Reg. “He didn’t answer me.”
“Ha.”
Len looked back out over the water.
“And you let him off with that?”
Beside him, Len was quiet.
Reg saw there was more. “And?”
“He asked me if I loved his daughter.”
“Ha,” said Reg, more softly. “And do you?”
Out in the Thoroughfare, Dickie turned, making straight toward them, his aim for the dock unswerving.
“Yes.” Len nodded. “I do.”
Roger Pratt had pulled his own scull up onto the dock and seemed to have fallen asleep down there, in the sun.
“What were you and Mrs. Milton talking about?” Len asked.
Reg shook his head and whistled.
Len looked at Reg. “What?”
Reg glanced at him. “She doesn’t like you. She’ll never like you.”
Len straightened.
“I’m doing fine,” he said, though the look Joan’s mother had given him there in the front room after lunch had been clear.
“She doesn’t like you,” Reg repeated.
“In general?” Len refused to take Reg’s tone, refused. “Do you think it’s general, or more specific?”
Reg didn’t answer. In three last strokes, Dickie had come into the dock, pulling the oars in and gliding alongside. In one bound he was out of the boat and pulling the craft straight up and over his head, the water streaming from its wooden flanks. He was remarkably, easily strong, Reg thought, watching him set the boat down.
“What about you? Does she like you?” Len asked.
“Me?” Reg shook his head, smiling up at Len. “I am so far out, I’m in.”
Len snorted.
“Let me put it this way,” Reg said. “She’s suffering you. Isn’t that right, Dickie?”
Dickie had come up the gangway and was listening, his hand on the gate to the pier.
Len turned his head. “But you like me, don’t you, Dickie?”
“I like you fine.” Dickie pushed the gate open and came through.
“See, I told you Dickie was open-minded,” Len remarked slowly.
Dickie looked from Len to Reg and flushed. “Listen, you won’t find any of that stuff up here.”
“What stuff?” Reg was calm.
Dickie looked at him stubbornly.
“You boys ready to dig holes?”
They turned and saw Mr. Milton coming through the boathouse onto the dock and holding two shovels. “I could use you down at the picnic grounds.”
“Ready.” Dickie came forward. “Ready and waiting.”
“Terrific.” Ogden smiled as Dickie headed through the boathouse, walking quickly away.
“Come on, boys,” Ogden said to Len and Reg.
Len glanced at Reg and fell in behind Ogden without a word.
* * *
HAVING TAKEN ALL day, when it happened, it seemed like it had happened in an instant. The fog had completely vanished and the day pulled off its hat. Bright blue and lilting, the afternoon greeted them with open arms. The water stretched off the end of the rocks in a still, straight line. A cormorant dove straight down into the water after a fish, coming unseen from the sky. The splash hit the flat calm like a bomb.
There were sixty people expected for dinner and a lobster to boil for each of them, so the two firepits needed deepening and widening to fit the crowd tonight, explained Ogden as he led the way toward the clearing at the picnic grounds.
“And if you two could shore up the rocks around the edges,” he instructed Len and Reg, “we’ll be done in no time.”
Len nodded. “Sure thing.”
“The weather’s cleared entirely,” Ogden said, satisfied.
The farthest row of spruce just at the waterline needed pruning, and Ogden shouldered the clippers and went down through the trees. A caravan of pleasure boats came racing around the point as if released, like arrows shot free by the glorious and sudden afternoon. He reached for the overhanging bough and snapped it, stepping aside as it fell with a thud to the needle-strewn ground.
When Ogden looked up after a little, Moss had appeared in the clearing and had hold of one of the shovels and was pointing out to Dickie how much wider the pit needed to be, taking charge. Beside him Len and Reg pulled the rock borders away from the pits and rebuilt them farther back as the shallow holes extended across the mossy surface. One of them said something, and he heard Moss laugh. There was an ease between the three men, which made Ogden glad. Len Levy and Moss had their backs to him and were bent over their shovels, but just then, Mr. Pauling stood and straightened between them, looking out across the water, his figure black against the blue.
Ogden’s gaze returned to Levy. That Len Levy had landed here at the dock, and through Moss’s auspices, boded well. Perhaps that was what Moss had been trying to get at last night in his inscrutable toast. Infinite variations. Rooms of possibility? Yes—Ogden turned and set the clippers on the near joint of the spruce and snapped it—that showed a sense of the future he hadn’t suspected Moss had in him. It would carry on. This place would carry on. And though Levy may not understand fully what he held in his hands with the Walser contracts, Ogden felt certain he had defused the man. It was not black or white. He hoped Levy might learn to see that. He set the clippers again. Especially if he loved Joan, precisely because he loved Joan. He snapped the branch. And did she, he wondered, love him? The branch fell away.
When he looked again, Kitty and the girls were moving through the trees toward them, carrying tablecloths in their arms, and buckets of roses.
“Ogden,” Kitty called. “Come and take some of these from Joanie, will you?”
Len put down his shovel and turned around.
“Ogden,” Kitty repeated.
Len stopped at the tone in her voice.
“We need firewood, Levy, and lots of it,” Ogden directed as he passed. “Take these, will you, and finish clearing the branches down at the edge there. Joan, you can go with him and collect what drops.”
“Sure,” said Len, taking the clippers that Ogden handed him, flashing a tiny grin at Joan, not bothering to hide how he felt. And the straightforwardness, the simplicity of his purpose, his desire, struck Joan. He was too much, too big—he burst over the lines here. He couldn’t see it, but there it was. So small she hadn’t seen it waiting there for her, the limit of what she could imagine for herself and for him. Oh god. He didn’t want here. He only wanted her. That girl on the rocks. She moved beside him through the trees, away from the others, struck silent with her longing and her dread.
<
br /> “Are you all right to tend these?” Ogden said to Reg Pauling as he was rolling newspaper and shoving it in under three enormous logs in the first firepit.
“I am.” Reg nodded.
Ogden paused.
“Good man.” He clapped Reg on the shoulder. “Thank you.
“And Evelyn.” He turned to his daughter. “You are in charge of the tables. Your mother and I will get the rest ready.”
And with that, he and Kitty walked back up the path toward the house to meet the six girls due from Vinalhaven to help Jessie in the kitchen—and in the same boat, the gin, the tonic, and the limes.
“How about a swim?” Moss wandered over to Reg. “Come and clean off.”
Reg shot a look up at him, standing on the side of the pit. And the promise Reg had caught on Moss’s face in his camera—the promise Reg wanted with all his heart to collect on—was clear.
But how could he not tell Moss what his mother had just told him?
“No way.” He squinted at Moss. “I put my hand in there at lunch. That water is arctic.”
“Even to rinse off?”
Reg shook his head.
“Your funeral,” Moss teased. “Come on, Dickie.”
And the two men moved off.
Evelyn listened in silence as she unfolded the tablecloths on the long tables, anchoring them with the bricks Joan and she had covered in mattress ticking during the war, used now for doorstops against a banging wind. After a little while, Reg joined her, setting out the knives and forks. She smoothed the cloth down all the way to the end and moved the bucket of roses to the center.
Down on the rocks, Joan and Len stood with their backs to them, facing the water and looking out.
“It won’t work, you know,” Evelyn said quietly.
Reg set a spoon beside the knife and didn’t answer.
“It can’t,” she went on.
Evelyn glanced across at him. But he wasn’t looking at her; he had his eyes on Joan and Len bending together now, gathering wood.
“Have you watched them?” he said. “There isn’t an inch of air between them, though they are standing five feet apart.”
