by Sarah Blake
“You were a guest.”
Dripping wet and bleeding, Len stared at her.
“You came as a guest here,” Kitty said to Len again, her breath catching in her throat. “You were invited. And you took advantage—”
Len pulled his trousers swiftly on and stood up, blood streaming from his nose.
“Come on, Len,” Reg said. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. They don’t want us. They don’t—”
“Shut up, Reg,” Moss pleaded quietly. “You’ll only make it worse—”
Reg wheeled around. “I’ll make it worse?”
“Don’t you dare call us ‘they,’” Evelyn spat. “Don’t you dare. Who the hell do you think you are, coming here, stirring things up—”
“Evelyn!” Moss cried.
“And you.” She turned on her brother. “You can ride your high horse straight to hell, I don’t care. This isn’t some experiment. This is life, Moss. And Joanie almost died. This—”
“Evelyn,” Joan said weakly. “Stop.”
Her sister turned around.
“Stop it.” Joan put her hand up to her forehead and, holding her shirt to her chest, she pushed herself up to sitting. Kitty sank down beside her, and Joan looked first at her mother, then at her father.
Her eyes rested at last on Len standing above her, and she simply started to cry.
He crouched down beside her. “Let’s go,” he said softly, as if they were entirely alone.
Her tears slid down her cheeks.
“None of this matters.”
“Len.”
“Remember that. What happened is the only thing that matters.”
“Len,” she whispered.
He stopped.
She knew that he had heard her. He had heard her, and refused to hear.
“Joan,” he said. “It’s so simple.”
His voice on her name brought back the dark and his lips on her lips, and she shuddered. Her name, the single syllable of her name uttered with such precision, such care, was his proposal. She looked at him and tried to memorize it all. The man in the moonlight, the water, Moss and her mother beside her. It wasn’t simple at all.
“I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t give you what you ought to have—”
“You love me.” He spoke low.
She nodded, looking up at him. “I do, Len. I do. God, I do—but you need more than this. More than me. It’s so clear—”
The expression on his face stopped her.
“I’m a Jew,” he said slowly. “That’s it.”
Her eyes widened. “A Jew? No. It’s because of me. Look at you, Len—you are big and wide and—”
He gave a short amazed laugh. “Reg was right.”
They stared at each other.
“Len.” Her voice broke.
“Come on.” Reg gave Len’s arm a tug.
Len couldn’t move.
“Get in, man. Get in the boat.”
“This isn’t what I meant to happen.” Moss was urgent. “Go on.”
Reg looked at him in disbelief.
“Go to the Welds’ dock,” Moss said to Reg. “It’s straight across. I’ll meet you there.”
“Meant to happen?” Reg repeated.
Moss straightened.
“Do you know what you said back there in the boat—”
Moss looked at him.
“The first thing you said?”
Moss frowned, trying to remember.
“‘Get off,’ you said,” Reg whispered. “‘Get off her, asshole.’”
Moss went white.
Reg shook his head. “You’re just like the rest—when push comes to shove, you see just what you want to see, like all of them. Just like them—only kind.”
“Reg!” Moss cried.
“Enough.” Kitty rose from Joan’s side and moved toward Reg. “How dare you? How dare you paint us blacker, meaner than we are!”
“Blacker? Meaner?” Reg stood his ground. “How dare I? Tell them, Mrs. Milton. Tell them what you told me.”
She froze.
“Go on,” Reg said, his heart pounding so hard he wanted to shake it free. “Go on. Tell them what you told me up there on that bench—”
Ogden wheeled around to look at Kitty.
“‘The bill is due,’” Reg pushed. “It is not coming due. It is due. And it must be paid—or this shit will go on and on and on.”
No one moved. Shaking, Reg heard himself and saw the stunned white faces as he unleashed the words that anywhere else would have gotten him shoved, knocked down, knocked out—killed. But they wouldn’t say a word. These wouldn’t. Years and years of the leash, he got it. He got it now. They wouldn’t, they couldn’t, they were too good. So good.
“And why did you tell me, Mrs. Milton? Why me?” He leveled his gaze at her.
“Reg,” Len said.
“You thought you’d bury your memory in a deep, dark place? Bury it in me?”
Kitty took the three remaining steps and slapped Reg hard across the face.
“Mum!” Moss cried.
And the slap rose up in Reg like a smile given to a chuckle, and he simply started to laugh. A great laugh that began in his chest and erupted from him, and he found he couldn’t stop. He laughed and laughed into the stunned silence. He laughed. Goodness. Kindness. What a tribe. They were already dead. Already ghosts.
“Come on,” he said to Len, and turned his back on all of them and climbed down into the boat.
Len stood a moment longer, his eyes on Joan. And very slightly, but clearly, she shook her head.
With one sudden violent motion, Len turned and threw himself into the bow of the dinghy, pushing off from the rocks, and moved to the middle seat, grabbing hold of the oars and shoving them out and into the water. Reg had to grip the gunwales in the stern so as not to fall out as Len stroked, the wooden shafts solid in both hands.
Without a word or a glance, Len reached and felt the water under his oars pull against him, tense and dark, and took another stroke against the Miltons on the rocks. A stroke away from Joan. And then another and another, and a fury washed over him in waves. The idea he had had, that there could be clear sailing, that you could set your sights on a point and simply go toward it, and get there just like anyone else—what had he thought? Think Yiddish, dress British. It was a game, wasn’t it, after all. Come and visit. If you’re up there anyway, come and see us. Visit. You went to Columbia, you went to Wall Street, but you were a visitor. How could he have missed it? He was a guest. He had wanted to keep the rules and best them, not break them. Well, fuck them, he thought. And fuck that house. He was done. He would never pull his punches again. He took furious, heartbroken strokes across the smooth water and felt his heart would burst. He rowed and rowed until at last, in the middle of the Narrows, the sob beneath the fury pushed up and burst free at last, and he cried. He cried for Joan, he cried for himself, and for the dream he had had. But the Jew was dead. Long live the Jew.
Forty
THE ROWBOAT PULLED INTO a shaft of moonlight on the water, just for a minute. And Joan saw Len bearing down on his oars, reaching forward and pulling back, easily sliding across the surface. Then gone into the dark. The oarlocks sang across the water. She knew she would never see him again. His lips and his mouth and the weight of his body were gone. And she had sent him off. She turned her head and closed her eyes.
Moss watched the boat disappear. You’re just like the rest, only kind. Reg had damned him far more than he could know. Water splashed in uneven drops on the rocks in the single beam of Ogden’s flashlight, and Moss found himself counting them. The sound of the oars turning in the metal locks kept time. Away, they turned. Away. Reg was going. Everything Moss thought he had been listening to, all he had been listening for, was rowing away in the dark.
In the distance they could hear the party breaking up, the sound of the guests coming down the hill, singing. Lanterns began emerging from the boathouse and moving toward the dock. The stars were out; i
t was time to leave. Lights on the boats wobbled in a long line speeding away over the water. Everyone would have a smooth ride home.
The boat carrying Len and Reg had vanished around the point across the way and into the Welds’ dock on Vinalhaven’s cove.
“Come on.” Moss tenderly gathered Joan in his arms and carried her up the path through the trees and out onto the broad path up the hill to the house. She was still dazed, and she leaned her head against her brother’s shoulder.
“Are you all right?” he whispered to her.
She reached up and touched the bottom of his chin.
He walked forward.
“They’ve gone,” she said.
He nodded.
A tear escaped and slipped sideways into her hair.
* * *
“WHAT HAPPENED!” ANNE cried as the little group made its slow way up the lawn in the dark. “Where have you been? Dickie and I have been looking all over for you.”
“There was an accident,” Ogden said quietly.
“What accident? Where? Where have you all been?” Dickie went to Evelyn’s side.
“It’s all right, Dickie.” Evelyn looked up at him wearily as he put his arms around her. “I’m all right.”
Kitty took charge. “We need to get Joan into bed. She’s had one of her spells.”
Moss helped Joan up the stairs. The lights were put out at the barn. Downstairs, the front door slammed, and the sound of voices drifted up.
The party was over. Joan lay on her bed in the pink room. Her eyes followed her mother pulling down the shades. I loved him, she wanted to say. I love him. But her mother was the last person who could understand.
For Len had been right. Something happened. Something had happened that could never be dislodged. Ask me, she wanted to say to her mother’s silent, tending form. Ask me something, anything about him. But she knew that nothing would be said, because what good could come of flushing everything up to the top. Then there it would be, floating between them, requiring attention. Requiring address. Hurtful to draw attention to what could not be fixed. Better not to mention it. For the heart, that way, could heal. It was best for all of them to put one foot after the other and go on.
And she wanted to go on, she realized. She badly wanted to go on in this room in the place where she knew precisely who she was, the edges firm, the corners strong.
“Mum,” she whispered.
“Try to sleep.” Kitty turned to her, leaned forward, and touched her cheek. “You’ve had a shock.”
“Where is Evelyn?” Joan asked. “What about Evelyn?”
“I imagine she’s with Dickie.” Kitty was even.
“And Moss?”
“Moss is downstairs with Dad,” Kitty soothed. “I can hear them both.”
Joan nodded, closing her eyes.
* * *
KITTY WAITED FOR Joan to fall asleep under the pink coverlet, sitting in the chair at the end of the bed, her exhausted mind crouched and waiting. All of them there, all of them waiting, brought back by that black man’s words: Elsa’s face on that porch, and Willy shaking her hand, and Neddy turning in the moment he fell, and—
“Joanie?” Anne Pratt poked her head in the door and Kitty put her finger to her lips and shook her head. Anne disappeared round the corner. A few minutes later, Kitty heard her passing with Evelyn down the hall to Evelyn’s room. Then the door closed.
When Joan’s breathing began to slow and steady itself, Kitty rose and went into her own bedroom. The room was just as she had left it before the party, the bed tucked tight. She walked to her bureau to look at her face in the mirror. She could hear Moss and Ogden talking in the room below. Her girls lay in the rooms on either side of her. Everyone was safe. No one was hurt.
She went slowly down the stairs toward Ogden’s voice, urgent and low, though she couldn’t make out the words and stood a moment in the dark hall outside the door to the front room adjusting her eyes.
“No, Dad,” she heard Moss answer as she put her hand on the knob, listening.
“You passed the baton to me tonight, Dad,” Moss was saying. “But I’m not the man to take it. It’s a lie. This idea of the Miltons, better than anyone, righter than anyone, the Island as the sign of having gotten it right. We can’t pretend. We’re not better because we own a place like this.”
“No one thinks—”
Kitty opened the door and stood on the threshold. Ogden’s face was drawn but resolute. Moss was on his feet and standing in the middle of the room, his madras jacket crumpled in one hand. He seemed broken, as if something inside had snapped. And he was still wet from having carried Joan.
“Moss.” Her worry made her sharp. “What is going on?”
Ogden didn’t look at his son and didn’t move from where he sat.
Wordless, Moss turned, walking past her and making for the front door.
“Wait.” Kitty put her hand out to catch him, following him into the hall. “Moss.”
He pushed through the screen door into the dark outside, where he turned and stood on the granite stoop, looking back at her.
“It’s poison, you know, Mum. This place.”
“Shush,” she pleaded. “You are soaking wet. Come back inside.”
“Mum, listen.”
“Stop it, Moss. You are drunk.”
“I’m not.”
She quieted.
He studied her, then looked down the hill a minute, as if gathering strength from the dark, before facing her again.
“Somehow, Mum,” he began softly, “no matter how old I get, no matter how far I go from here, there is always this image in my head—of a boy following after his father, knowing he can’t catch him, the father carrying a girl he’s just pulled choking from the water. That day Joanie had her first fit down there by the dock, I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t do anything but watch.”
“Moss,” she protested.
“And it comes to me swiftly and from nowhere, and it is an image of immense loneliness, of futility. No matter how fast I trot behind Dad, no matter how fast I swim toward her, I will not catch up. I will not get her, and there the helplessness is run through with fascination.” He paused. “I can’t simply watch anymore. I’ve got to go do something. Somewhere else.”
She came through the door and stood beside him on the stoop, putting her hand on his arm.
He looked down at her hand.
“No matter what I do, Mum,” he said quietly. “I can’t change it. This place is a pile of lies. If we are not good or right, we are wrong. And that—down there on the rocks”—he paused—“was wrong. And you know it. You must know it.”
Kitty could not bear the look on Moss’s face. She couldn’t bear it. Even as he denounced them all, she saw how badly he wanted her to comfort him, prove him wrong, save him from some wide-open idea he had—and his broken voice made it easy.
“Nonsense,” she said to him.
And standing there in the threshold looking back at her, Moss remembered her standing in a doorway, long ago. He didn’t know where it was, but he was very small, and was sitting on a chair, he thought, and she was standing in the doorway looking at him. At him and not him. At a place beside him. And she was tall and green. And staring at him. Something had happened. And then, he remembered, she had simply shut her eyes.
A sound like a sob rose in him, and he shook his head against it. “Make it right,” he said softly. “Write to Reg, to Len, and make what happened down there right. Do something that shows the good.”
She held out her hand, as much to grab hold of him, to draw him toward her, as to stop him from saying anything more.
“Promise me,” Moss said. “Otherwise all the rest is just words.”
“Of course it’s not just words,” she said.
He held her gaze a long moment and then finally nodded, turned from her, and walked away. She watched his figure down the lawn, his white shirt vanishing to gray, and just at the edge of the perimeter of light cast by th
e house, she caught the lift of his arm in a backward wave, the jacket hanging from his fist like a flag.
And even up to the morning she died, years later, she’d wake from the usual nightmare, thinking she held Moss’s hand in hers. Thinking he had taken her hand, instead of walking away in the night. Thinking that she had stood on the step of the Big House and called her son, her only son, back.
She drew back into the front room and sank down into the chair under the window, sitting with Ogden in quiet by the light of a kerosene lamp on the table between them. The generator had stopped, and the only sound was the foghorn in the bay. Ogden raised his eyes and finally looked at her.
“What was Pauling talking about out there on the rocks?” Ogden asked slowly. “What did you tell him?”
Kitty returned his gaze. All right, then, she thought.
And so at last she told him. She told Ogden about Willy and about Elsa and how he had seemed so set against the woman on that afternoon long ago. How it seemed to her that Elsa had pushed and pushed, and Kitty had stepped in to help. She had thought she was helping him. In the quiet house, her voice threaded back and forth between them, between the time past and the present, trying to make some kind of sense. And when she had finished, Ogden was silent for a long while.
“We couldn’t take him,” she pleaded. “How could we have taken him, Ogden?”
He sat forward in the chair and reached for her hand. She looked at him, uncertainly at first. And then, when he kept his gaze steady on her, she gave him her hand, and he held it.
“I thought I was helping,” she said again.
He nodded.
She looked down at their clasped hands.
“We won’t speak of this,” he said to her. “We needn’t speak of this, ever again.”
“But Moss thinks—”
“Moss is young.” Ogden paused. Moss had not yet run into the wall inside that waits for all men, no matter the era, the wall inside where a man runs into his own aging face. The wall Dunc was hurling himself against, the wall Ogden recognized himself. He looked back at Kitty.
“He thinks he can change the world—” He sighed. “But the world does not change. Only you do—”
