by Sarah Blake
“Why?”
“Well—look at it,” she said. “It’s heaven.”
He wiped his hands and looked at the group around the table. “But it’s not real. It’s not where it all is.”
“It’s very real.” She turned and looked at him. He returned her stare.
“And there isn’t a comfortable chair in the place,” he said lightly.
Oh god, she thought. She loved him. She looked down at his hand on the table and saw with a twist in her heart that she could love this man, but he did not carry over; it would not do. He looked around with that eye of his, that appraising, impatient eye that did not see—how could it? It belonged to a different world, the one past this—he was, like Mr. Rosset, like Moss even, intent on smashing down the trees in his way and carrying us all forward into some new place. When this place was enough. Was everything. She stood and reached for his plate and hers.
And the sun began dropping into the sea.
* * *
PEOPLE CAME TO the Miltons, thought Sally Lowell, and came away more at ease with things, in love a little more—she turned her brown eyes to her own husband, sitting on the other side of the remarkable Mr. Pauling. She couldn’t catch what they were talking about, though by the intent look on each of their faces, she was certain it was political. She was tired of politics. Her eyes roamed over the group again. The Miltons had the knack for throwing a party. Kitty made a man feel proud and a woman understood. Ogden showed you how lucky you were, damn lucky to be alive! She put the emphasis where her father always did, cheerfully profane—damn fine, damn lucky, damn hard. He had died years ago, and she still missed him. The party swelled around her.
Wasn’t this what it all was for?
* * *
SO ROGER PRATT believed, sitting at the corner of the vast table, getting quietly smashed. Isn’t this what it was all for—Groton, St. Paul’s, Farmington—all of them had been sown and seeded in the same ground, and here were the blooms, the heads nodding, the laughter and the bright eyes. Nothing was wrong with being like-minded. Everyone here could be trusted to behave as they had been raised. To be good. To be kind. To think of others. And because you expected to be met with what you gave, those qualities grew.
His eye caught on the Jew pushing back from the other end of the table with a glass in his hand and considered him. Maybe he was a good sort. But this was the trouble. One couldn’t count on it. One couldn’t count on a man like that to do the same as they all did. They agreed on decorum, an ethos, damn it, the right point of view. One couldn’t rely on him to behave as he ought, or even as was expected. One couldn’t prepare.
* * *
THE PARTY LOOSENED after the lobster, and the candles were lit, though the light in the sky still hovered over the hills at the end of the bay.
“Aldo,” Kitty called down the table to Mr. Weld, “let’s have a song.”
“What’ll you have?”
“If He Can Fight.…” She sang and trailed off, looking at him.
“Right you are.” He nodded. “Come on, men,” he called. “Singers, up on your feet.”
Men of different ages pulled themselves up from the table, called to the shoe that was forming in front of the fires. Mr. Weld had been the pitch pipe of the Whiffenpoofs at Yale, and he hummed the first note of the song to get it in his head, then walked it round to the men gathered behind him. Dickie stood beside his father, and Ogden and Moss joined them. And on Moss’s other side stood Fenno. There was Elliot Lamont, and Cy Matthews, and the youngest Rhinelander boy, who’d sung at Harvard and was a scamp, but who nonetheless was going to try his hand at politics. He had always had the voice of an angel.
The rest of the party stilled and turned toward the shoe. Joan found herself on one of the benches beside her mother. She had lost sight of Len in the crowd.
The men in the shoe drew close and tipped toward one another, waiting for Aldo Weld to start them off, their eyes on him.
He raised his hand and opened his mouth, and in a light, irrepressible tenor, he led the men forward into the song.
“If he can fight like he can love.” And Ogden, Fenno, Dickie, Moss, and Elliot went right along beside him, sending the notes of the song into the air. “Oh, what a soldier boy he’ll be.”
And then Moss stepped forward out of the shoe and toward the guests, swinging into the solo with the light step of a dancer, the words less the enticement than the way the tune climbed up the scale and swung out over the second line. Alone he sang above the notes the men behind him held, sang with the sweet longing of a girl for her lover, and when he stepped back into the shoe, each man knew precisely what he was meant to do, they hardly needed to look at one another, bound and in tune as a chorus followed his solo, and then at last the final lines.
“And if he fights like he can love,
Why, then it’s good night Germany…”
Their last note rose into the dusk, and from her spot on the long bench at the table, Kitty watched the men stiffen as they held the last note and then relax in the silence that fell, heavy and sudden, over them all. Here were the inheritors of the earth, Kitty thought; the sense of solidity, of granite, of rightness and the force of permanence was everywhere around them. The world had been theirs so long, it was a given. And they would take it and keep it safe, this world, this dream. No one spoke or moved. The sound, for those moments, bound them. Then the men grinned.
Aldo pulled his pitch pipe from his jacket pocket a second time and blew it lightly and looked at Dickie, who nodded, stepped out of the shoe, spread his arms, and directed his rich, warm tenor straight at Evelyn, singing the first line of the song.
“I’ll be ready when you are—”
She blushed but held herself very proud and did not look away.
“You can count on me,” he sang, “As ready to go.”
He smiled, stepping back into the shoe. And the song swelled as the seven voices joined Dickie, all of them leaning inward to catch the strain of one another’s voice, to catch and to hold it and then to sing.
Standing beside Reg again, Len looked across the fire at the women ranged along the bench. Mrs. Milton stared off toward the water. The Pratts, mother and daughter, leaned together; Evelyn sat rapt. Only Joan had her eyes closed, and her dark head tipped to the side as though she listened for something. More than that: as if she alone heard something in the air. What was it she heard? He stared at her there on her own, and complete somehow. He frowned uneasily. Complete?
He turned back just as Moss stepped into the center of the shoe to sing alone. The men behind him grew softer, letting Moss soar so everyone could hear, there on the rocks, Moss’s single treble, again raised to the sky. He was so good, his voice rich and sweet—and light. All light.
Reg watched the glow on Moss’s face as he sang. How music filled him, how Moss believed with all the breath in him, in every note he sang, note by note as if the world could be built on air and sound. As if the problems of the world might be solved by men like these, ranged in a tight circle, leaning into the notes sung together, swelling upward into the twilit sky. He knew that this was Moss’s dream. And he remembered that night long ago when he’d stumbled on Moss singing just such a song, sending note after note into the air and believing that was enough, and yet Reg’s life, Reg’s parents’ life, were nowhere in those notes, not even buried.
Here on this island in the middle of the Atlantic surrounded by the best and the brightest, the men who ran and who would run this country and who would never lay a hand on him, but who could change the laws, if they could see. And they wouldn’t. Reg saw the limit fully in this singing. Moss sang as if the gates of the world could open with him, believing with all his heart that they could. But here on the island, the care with which Reg was being handled, the pronounced attention was merely the opposite face of the face that gave the hard stare, or the push between the ribs, or the whip. Both faces turned to the black man as though to a wall that had to be climbed or knocked down—and always with th
e infinitesimal moment of wariness that slid immediately into anger or polite regard. As if to say, Ah, you again.
This was what he wanted to rip in two. This was why Reg thought he’d come. Why he’d made this trip over in a lobster boat in part for this—to hear what always went unvoiced and to make Moss see that. To make Moss see. But watching Moss singing, the vast uselessness of what he was after caught him there around the fire. Seeing was not enough, speaking was not enough, doing, even, was not enough. He could tear it down for Moss—and for Len, he thought, as Len moved restively beside him—and there’d be satisfaction in it, but little joy.
Joy? The word floated up as Mrs. Milton caught his eye.
He held her gaze a moment, and she nodded at him and looked away.
He shuddered. She was, perhaps, the worst of them all.
Dickie stepped forward once more, holding his arms out again and singing the solo for the last verse right to the end, when he took a breath to sing the last line above the four men behind him, who held the last notes in a single swelling chord.
“I’m ready to go.”
And his voice held across the quiet that fell on the group and carried as clearly as the vow he would utter a month later in the white church in Oyster Bay, his promise. I’m ready to go.
Evelyn looked straight back at him. And when the last note vanished, she stood from the bench, ran forward and into his arms. Everyone, delighted by the simple declaration on either side—the big, broad singer and the slight wisp of a girl in blue silk—clapped, and there was a little cheer.
On the tide of this feeling, Ogden stepped out of the shoe and raised his glass. “When you are young,” he said, “you dream of what you want.”
The party turned to listen.
“And twenty-five years ago, when Dunc and Priss Houghton, and Kitty and I sailed into the cove down there and saw the For Sale sign on the dock, I had never wanted anything more than this rock in the middle of the ocean in my life—except perhaps”—Ogden smiled at Kitty—“for my wife.”
Laughter petaled around him. The moon was rising slowly.
“A little further along, in the middle of your life, you find you dream of what you have. You look around yourself, your children, your home.” He nodded at Evelyn and Joan in front of him and turned back to glance at Moss.
“But the dreams of the old,” he said, slowing, “are of what we will lose.”
He smiled and then included the whole party in his gaze.
“And tonight I see I will not lose. I cannot. Tonight it seems there will always be a party on these rocks. All of us here, all of us gathered. It’s a night to carry forward. And—” He chuckled and turned round again, raising his glass. “Moss will see to it. Moss will carry it on.”
Moss turned a dazed smile toward his father and, understanding what was needed from him, bowed—as if to take the crown handed him with his father’s words, and set it on his head.
“Now.” Ogden turned back to the crowd. “I have had the great good luck of being able to age with my dreams, to want, and then to have, and now not to lose, but to pass along. But it is all because, thirty-one years ago, I chose Kitty.
“Every one of you knows the key to life is in whom you marry. If you set your sights on the right girl, you need never look back. Nothing is more important in a man’s life than the girl he chooses.
“So, Dickie.” Ogden reached behind him gracefully, drawing his future son-in-law forward. “In all honesty, and with the requisite degree of humility”—he paused and raised his eyebrow, gathering another laugh—“you have chosen well.”
He raised his glass.
“To Dickie and Evelyn.”
“Hear, hear! Dickie and Evelyn!” The glasses, the cups, and the bottles were all held high.
Joan raised her glass with the others, a fixed smile on her lips. Moss would carry on the Island. Evelyn would marry well. Dickie had chosen right. Her father hadn’t meant to set her outside, she was sure. But where was she? Why wouldn’t they all carry on the Island? Why couldn’t she? She looked for Len in the crowd but couldn’t find him, and turning back, her eyes caught Moss’s. He looked sick, somehow, she realized. Heartsick.
“All right, everybody.” Evelyn clapped her hands and pulled out of Dickie’s arm. “Up to the barn!”
“Take my arm, Moss Milton.” Mrs. Cheever appeared beside Moss. “If I fall, I’m done for,” she confided, taking hold of his arm.
“All yours.” Moss straightened graciously.
* * *
RELEASED BY THE toast, the party streamed up the hill toward the barn in the dusk, carrying bottles and cans, pulling chairs from inside the dining room in the Big House, even the small sofa from the front room. In honor of the party Ogden had purchased two of the new Coleman coolers lined with plastic, adding to the galvanized coolers they’d had for years, and set them on the rocks outside the barn. Everything had been thought of, and everything was possible. Moss led the way, and Evelyn seemed to be everywhere in the crowd, a lovely flash of blue and white, her wide skirt floating around her legs. And Dickie followed, faultless in form, polite, and gracious, carrying a chair in either hand up the hill.
“Heavenly!” Oatsie Matthews cried, coming over the sill.
They had hung hurricane lamps from the rafters, on nails along the great walls, and Evelyn and the Matthews girls went around lighting them. Moss sat down at the piano, feathering the keys, not wanting to break the silence just yet, hesitating inside the delicious cavern of the moment before the music began.
“Moss!” Evelyn begged.
“Oh, all right.” He grinned and started in with a Joplin tune, catapulting notes into the air, fast and furiously, and the mood around him was gay and warm.
Aldo Weld came over the threshold with Ogden and Kitty, followed by the Pratts, and then the Lamonts and Goulds, and the barn began filling. Moss heard the pitch of the room shift slightly as people came in.
“Start us off, Aldo, will you?” Kitty cried. And immediately Aldo began the calling, “Grab a partner, grab your dancer. Off we go,” and with a nod at Moss, who shifted straight into “Turkey in the Straw,” the room sorted itself into pairs and then into squares and then into the dance itself. Aldo Weld had a great booming voice that skiffed across the top of the music, calling the changes, first to the right, then to the left, now do-si-do, and around you go.
The room was in full swing when Joan and Anne arrived into the throng and felt the heat of the dance on their faces, and the two women stood in the doorway, smiling. “Come on,” Mr. Weld called, seeing them pause. “Come on, another square! There’s four of you right there.” And Joan found Len’s arm at her waist guiding her to a spot on the side of the room, and looking over her shoulder, saw Anne being led out by Reg. “Two more couples? Two more?” Fenno Weld and Babs Matthews slid over, as well as Maisie Cunningham and her brother, Bill. There was no time to think. Joan was in the curve of Len’s arm, stepping in a round to Moss’s piano, her whole being concentrated on the surprise of those thick fingers curled around her ribs, not simply resting there, but holding her. She didn’t dare look up at him. The tune went round and round, over and over first one pair, then the next, then the third, then the switch, and Joan was moved from Len’s arms into Bill’s and from there to Reg, who held her loosely, never pulling her toward him. There was no chance for words, or even a glance at him, and then she twirled from his arms into Fenno’s.
Fenno took charge of her in a way the other three hadn’t. He had always been a great dancer, lithe and lean, his awkward height made graceful by motion, his hand at her waist rested courteous but firm. They had danced many times together, and his hand reminded her. She flushed.
Then the last change was called, bringing the girls back to their original partners, departure and return, change and change, and come again home. Joan swirled off Fenno’s arm and into Len’s and this time she did look up at him. The music stopped.
He pulled her close, and she felt him ag
ainst her chest and thigh. The blood rushed straight up into her face and she looked quickly down.
“May I?” Fenno’s hand was on her elbow, but he was speaking to Len.
“Sure,” Len said, and released her. She gave herself into Fenno’s arms for the Virginia reel. She didn’t check to see where Len went, though she caught sight of him above the crowd, at one turn, making his way toward Moss and the piano, where Reg stood leaning, watching the dance. Moss looked up at Reg, as if to make sure he was still there. But they didn’t speak to each other. And the music wound and wrapped them all.
* * *
AT THE THIRD dance Kitty came outside beyond the perimeter of light cast by the windows. She walked into the dark and turned around. Through the wide frame of the barn doors, couples dipped and spun, appearing and vanishing. Moss was playing well, and the piano threw music into the cavernous room, the notes tossed high and shivering down between the couples, onto the hair of girls and the shoulders of the men. This was one of those nights everyone would remember, it was clear to her even from here in the dark, one of those nights that spring, glistening and electric, upward through the surface of ordinary days: We were here. She and Ogden had made a night for all of them. His toast had been wonderful. He had said exactly what was needed. She looked up into the black dome of the sky, waiting for the pattern to break. We are here, she corrected. A star dropped swiftly off to the side.
She followed it down as it vanished below the roof of the barn, and her gaze stuck on the great figure of a man standing in the doorway, not dancing. Leonard Levy. She knew it was him, though she couldn’t see his face. It was because he was the biggest man in the room. Bigger and louder than any of the others. Not just tall. Fenno Weld was tall, though spindly, like a bug whose long legs and slight bowed shoulders called to mind a minister, born in a frock coat. No, this man was massive, with his broad chest and thick, solid legs. He was the kind of man one might find chopping wood, or digging coal, or under a sink, not in the world. Not in this world, anyway. She turned away from him, pulling her coat around her shoulders, seeking Ogden.
