by Richard Ford
Boyce had put on the terry-cloth robe he’d found behind the bathroom door. A woman’s.
“I’ll leave you a tautog, if you’d eat it.”
“What’s that? A tautog,” Boyce said.
“A blackfish,” the man said and grinned in an unfriendly way. They never told you their names. “A rare Maine maritime delicacy,” he said. “Not really.” His teeth weren’t as bad as some.
“I’ll eat one,” Boyce said, feeling stunned.
“Oh. Okay. So will I.” The man kept grinning, then started across the yard as if something had been determined, leaving his tracks in the dew, heading toward the beach path. Tink, tink, tink, tink.
“And thank you, by the way,” Boyce said.
“Hm-hm,” the man might’ve said, but nothing else.
POLLY CAME AT THE END OF THE SECOND WEEK. SHE HAD LAWYER business in Boston and drove up in a rental. There was a new “friend” now, in Boston. She was thinking of moving there. Terry had decently given his permission to take Phoebe with her, out of Chicago. Things in her life appeared to be brightening. There was no mention of New Zealand and of arts administration.
Polly, however, was instantly disagreeable. She didn’t like the little house, though she’d insisted he abandon the red house. The fact that her mother had never visited or even been inside the little house made her for some reason resentful—as if Boyce were having an easy time coping with her mother’s absence, was luxuriating in giving up on Mae’s memory, re-inventing himself already, which she’d advised that he do. No one grieved the same, he thought. Which was good. But everyone grieved. He felt tolerant toward her. Though, in fact, he didn’t feel lonely—not in any way he comprehended lonely to be. He felt only underused.
Polly did like the little beach when they walked to it at dusk. Boyce wore old green cords, a denim shirt, and sneakers to make himself less like her father than a friend. Polly’s mother was dead. He was the surviving parent. Possibly his life was unknowable to her now. Which he didn’t wish.
Polly smoked a cigarette—which was new—and toed the sand for sea glass while Boyce sat on a rock and watched. It was chilly, and the beach stank. Millions of tiny bugs thrived in the caked seaweed. There was a milk carton, bits of charred wood, a green-striped lobster buoy broken in two. The ocean was full of crap. When he came down to read and have his morning coffee, he always expected to find a body washed up.
Polly’d added more weight. She wore very tight blue jeans that weren’t helping. She’d sprayed a streak of metallic red into her hair, which was pulled severely back. Across the water somewhere, a nail gun popped, then the whine of a power saw. A new house going up out of sight. A Coast Guard buoy-tender sat at anchor a mile out. The two of them waited and looked at the horizon and the open, still-bright ocean. The water was already too cold to swim—which Polly wouldn’t have done, though once she’d swum and loved it.
On the walk back, Peter picked a capful of blackberries for dessert and showed Polly the old stone wall in the undergrowth and the lost road that led to the concrete pillbox from when U-boats had surfaced on moonless nights and put spies ashore to disappear into America. The pillbox interior was cold and piss-smelling when they stepped in, and had been used for sex. Polly turned away in the low door opening and drew a breath. “Why would you show me this?” she said and was angry.
“I expected it to be different,” Boyce said. “I’m sorry.” He’d meant to come and look inside before he brought her but had forgotten.
HE SERVED THEM DINNER AT THE METAL TABLE, UNDER THE DIM kitchen globe—steaks, squash, tomatoes off the truck. He had Sancerre, which he thought she liked. He was trying to display for Polly his adaptability, which would argue for his presence here. That he was not unknowable—only a layered, privacy person as her mother had said. What was wrong with it? Grief needn’t be any more natural for him than for her. Did everything have to occur on the visible surface?
Polly sat with her elbows fixed on her chair arms, turning occasionally to look out the window through which light shone on the lawn and the rose thickets. She pulled at strands of her brown and red hair, drank the Sancerre. She’d pulled her hair as a little girl. Mae had judged this unattractive, like standing with your mouth agape or going in your nose. “You’ll soon go bald as an apple,” she’d said.
He was prepared for Polly to voice displeasure—over something—yet went on eating his steak. Polly spoke guardedly about her new boyfriend, Hugh, whom she’d met through opera acquaintances. He was forty-eight, lived in Truro, played clarinet in a Dixieland band, kept a boat in Eastham. She talked warmly about Terry, whose parents lived in Winnetka, were retired Navy with time on their hands. They had seen more of Phoebe than he and Mae had, which Polly resented. He and Mae were not good grandparents. Phoebe was sweet and smart, looked like Boyce’s mother as a child. He said he wished Polly would bring her up. Next year, possibly.
Boyce looked at Polly across the table—charitably, he hoped. Pauses had become ringing. Polly was acting as if her point of view were being ignored—which it wasn’t. She drank too much, that was clear, which added pounds. So odd, he thought, to have raised an unhappy child, when he and Mae had been happy throughout. What could you say? “If you aren’t careful, being disappointed will become your whole character.” Mae might’ve said that—like pulling her hair. He wished she’d stayed married to Terry, whom he liked.
Eventually, Polly put her wineglass down on the table a little too hard. She could be what she wanted. But he’d liked her best as a pretty, chatty college sophomore in a sorority.
“So, what interests you, Peter?” she said—meanly he felt. He didn’t wish to think about his interests, which were finding a way to live that didn’t seem stupid or implausible or heartbreaking. Though why talk about it? “I’m reading Mrs. Dalloway,” he said. “And I’m pleased being in this house because there’s so little to do that’s difficult.” He had an urge to laugh, but laughing would’ve accused Polly. Which he also didn’t wish to do.
Her eyes snapped at him. “Doesn’t it seem strange that my mother, your wife, killed herself right down the road, and you’re here all by yourself, renting this shitty little house like some old queer bachelor? What’s wrong with you, Peter?” She’d never called him Peter. But for so long she’d never called him any name.
“Why does it make you angry how I am?” he said.
“I’m just curious.” She was angry at everything.
Then the words did find a way to his lips, like speaking in Mae’s voice. Everyone contained the voice of their spouse. Spouse Mouse. “I’m just learning how to get along, darling. Like you are. It’s only been two years. There aren’t any books to tell you specifically about two years. Maybe Mrs. Dalloway.” He didn’t know why he said that. He heard Mae say it. Like an instruction.
The muscles in Polly’s jaw rose and subsided, then rose. Why would she drive up here to punish him? “What does that mean?” she said stiffly.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Your mother and I were married such a long time. We loved each other very much. You mustn’t feel excluded.” Polly stood abruptly, picked up her plate and his, carried them to the porcelain sink, and again made too much racket setting things down. “What would you like me to do?” he said. He wanted this to be over. Death cast a too-long shadow.
“Be normal. Does that seem strange?”
“This is normal. I’m just not doing what you’re doing. Just not your way. That’s all. I’m not angry.”
She ran the sink water to hot. “I’m sorry I asked you anything.” There was the cruel mouth her mother lamented. The shopgirl.
“Don’t be sorry,” he said. Then he almost said, “I’m your father.” Or possibly, “I’m still your father.” But didn’t, though at some prior moment, he supposed he should’ve.
“I am sorry,” Polly said, her back to him.
And that was the end of it. They didn’t eat the berries he’d picked. He wondered, later, as he climbed into
a cold bed, if every single thing between them would always be about Mae, who’d left life because she wished to stay no longer—having things her way. They weren’t betraying her by living—a thought that did fit. Polly, who’d brought nothing to give him, had brought a small bit of clarity.
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, HE LAY LISTENING TO SOUNDS OUT OF doors. Polly was moving around the downstairs. The front door opened, the hiss of her feet in the grass the way he’d heard the tautog man. Polly was phoning—the musical little beeps ceasing at ten. He smelled her cigarette. She spoke in a tired, sad, defenseless voice: “Hi. It’s me.” A pause. Then, “Of course. No.” Pause again. “I just needed to hear you.” Pause. “You know that. I do. Go to sleep. He is. Yes. Typical.” Then a beep, followed by her feet moving in the grass again, pushing back into the house—a different woman from the one he’d had dinner with.
In the morning, Polly said little. Just some details about Phoebe’s school. A word about her work with insurance clients. He cooked breakfast. Then, the moment she was finished, she left back to Boston. He wondered if he could’ve done something to please her. Possibly not.
SUMMER, HE NOTICED, WAS DEPARTING. AUGUST WAS THE BEGINNING of autumn in Maine. Afternoon light bent through the spruces from changed angles and warmed the scrubbed wood floors. Clouds grew large, the euonymus redder. The hydrangea tree bloomed suddenly, and the last of the daylilies dried on their stems. He liked it. So different from the south, though of course it had happened every year they’d been here. The breeze was already cooler—a vein of cold to come. When, he wondered, would it be winter? Things he hadn’t noticed.
The caretaker-agent, Fenderson, came to mow the grass and put plastic geraniums in the window boxes. He was tall and gaunt and wrinkled, with dense white hair and reckless teeth. Some impenetrable deceptiveness was in him—same as the lobstermen, the hardware clerks, the librarian. One thing had made them all. He’d been a coach, gone to Dartmouth on the GI Bill, was a selectman in the village.
They talked a moment in the yard, then without asking, Fenderson walked straight into the house, brought out a red-lettered FOR SALE sign from the cellar and, sparing more comment, hammered it in the ground at the driveway turn-in. The owner, he allowed, had been married a number of times in her life. He smiled about this. Sometimes, for reasons to do with her unconventional life, she experienced the need to sell. This, at least, was his belief. Having a renter had possibly encouraged the urge. Though in a while the sign would come down. You’d need to raze the place and start over on bare ground, Fenderson said, climbing back in his old Ford. A tiny white poodle took up its place in Fenderson’s lap. For some reason, Fenderson said then that his family had immigrated from County Cavan. Ballyhaise. “Scotch Irish,” he said through the window and leered as if something was uncouth. “They die clutchin’ their first penny.” Fenderson had forgotten he’d said that to Mae when she was alive.
IT RAINED FOR THREE DAYS AROUND THE EIGHTEENTH, AND WHEN it stopped and turned humid and warm, Boyce decided that the house now being for sale was perhaps a communiqué—of a sort. Another piece of evidence. He hadn’t asked the price—though nothing went cheap by the ocean. If you elected not to bull-doze the house, much would be required. Floors. Drywall over the rotted laths. Windows needing replacing. Footings restored. All the ceilings had brown continent-shaped stains from the leak-through. The roof would need to go. The inside had smelled of cats when it rained.
Down in the corner of the half-dirt cellar, among old FOR SALE signs, he found an ancient Wehrle beside a riddled oil-burner disconnected from the registers, plus a scuttle box holding coal. There were dusty bicycles, assorted moldy luggage, telephones of all vintages, two doorless refrigerators, abundant signs of animal activity, boxes of canning jars, oily tools in a metal cabinet, a bassinet, several boat oars, plastic Christmas trees, a stack of tattered American flags once flown from the metal pole in the yard. There was also a padlocked closet, the hasp of which was loose so the screws slid out. Inside it was an old bolt-action .22, and a stack of Joan Baez songbooks. He thought, standing in the gloom, it would all go. The house had carried distinction, was acceptable (merely) to a much-married woman’s family—the Birneys—but not enough for them to stay. Unlike his great, columned house on Sixth, the meaning of this little house had been exhausted. To think of caring for it was only a spasm, a displacement for something ineffable. Means something, means nothing.
BOYCE CALLED THE PARKERS TO ASK THEM FOR SUPPER. THE TAUTOG man had left a second slab of fish on the step—there, when he’d waked up, its gills still pulsing. Parker’s wife was formal on the phone, as if his having married a suicide—who’d performed her odious, unchristian savagery right next door—was a badge of degradation. They still “had” her family—until after Labor Day, she said—when, she supposed, he’d be turning back to “where was it? One of the ‘M’ states.” Boyce said—without meaning it—that he was weighing buying the Birney house. “Oh, you should, definitely,” Patty Parker said brightly. Then, abruptly, she asked how he was doing—as if he’d been ill. When the ambulance arrived to take Mae, she and old Amory had stood beside their mailbox watching, looking pinched. They’d never said a word to console him. New Englanders. He had no idea why he’d have dinner with them. Mae had said they were ghouls. “High-drawer Anglicans. Worse even than Catholics for not being Catholics.”
Patty informed him that the people who’d taken the red house were from Maryland. They were also black. “Well-spoken. Polite.” “. . . some strange Scottish name.” McDowell. They seemed happy to be left alone, she said. “Well . . .” with finality, “. . . it’s just all strange, isn’t it, Peter? Life. It goes on. ‘The nearest friends go with anyone to death comes so far short,’ doesn’t it? It’s Frost. I love him. Don’t you?”
“Yes,” Boyce said and did not know that poem. She was being self-justifying.
“Didn’t you go to Princeton?”
“I did,” Boyce said. “Class of seventy-two.”
“I thought,” she said. She imagined she was smiling, he knew, but wasn’t. Patty Parker had been an English teacher in Darien or some such monied sanctum. Had gone to Storrs. He didn’t need to talk to her again. They managed good-bye.
ON THE TWENTIETH—THE SECOND ANNIVERSARY OF MAE’S DEATH—Peter Boyce went down to the beach with his coffee, intending to read deeply into Mrs. Dalloway before the morning tide. He didn’t find Clarissa Dalloway intriguing, if he was supposed to. Petty and not particularly smart—even if not completely un-interesting to read about. He liked the once-handsome suitor, Peter Walsh better (not surprisingly), although he seemed to be a great narcissist. Clouds were lifting off the bay where there’d been grainy August fog before. A breeze had materialized. A single-hand lobsterman sat a quarter mile out in his skiff, his wife in the stern reading her own book. And farther—fourteen miles—Monhegan, its western cliffs white in the sun.
They’d all gone jollily there, once, with Mississippi friends—the Clubbs—who got seasick both ways. Madeline Clubb found a deer tick on her inner thigh on the way back and demanded to go to the hospital. They’d never gone again. “Art colonies on islands,” Mae said, “were always rubbish.” Non-hegan, she’d called it. Boyce thought islands were mostly inconvenient. The mainland almost always better.
He took out a Toscano and lit it so its smoke mingled with the fog clinging to the beach, where tide had carpeted the sand with vegetation and chunks of wood from a storm at sea. He thought, then, of just odd things—nothing anchored to coherence. You really needn’t think about things always head-on, Boyce believed, and put his book on a rock, almost finished with his coffee. Mae’s dark-day anniversary required some observing. Give sorrow words, etc. But it was one other lasting lesson of the law that one shouldn’t search for answers. The needle was never in the haystack; the needle was the haystack. Old Timmerman had written that on the board in torts. Eliminate everything something’s not, and there the solution will be—death being the sovereign
knot. That’s what he felt he was doing being here. Eliminating what Mae (and Mae’s death) was not. It’s what Polly wouldn’t see.
His mind ran on . . . Mae had been a poor housekeeper. Over time she’d let herself get fat—her winteridge. She’d been the one who shouted “Woo-hoo” at poetry readings and recitals, which always embarrassed him. She was never confident he—“Lawyer Boyce”—was living life fully enough. (Which she clearly also thought about herself.) Though he felt he was and always had. His firm was the top one. The learnéd firm. White shoe. Just five of them, to keep things sleek; each with a strong book. All good schools. Any one of them could’ve been something extraordinary—a classicist, a concert musician, a war correspondent, a famous architect—but had chosen the law, with its great subversive allure. He himself wrote the occasional bittersweet Cheeveresque short story, which he only showed to a few. He loved New Orleans. Either you did or you didn’t. Which had never been simple for Mae, who’d never connected. “A simple Irish girl amongst the pinks,” she’d said. Being married to her had also never been simple. Though they’d made the most—she, teaching piano spiritedly, raising a daughter less well. Being his interesting, unexpectable, out-of-the-ordinary Irish wife. All in all they’d made a life that sheltered them. What else was there?
Why think of that now, though? Things happen that seem life-altering, then everything grinds down to being bearable—sometimes slightly better. Which could be a formula for doing anything you fuck-all wanted; or that nothing ever meant much—which he did not accept for an instant. Estates, real property, wills—they meant things, were the deep heart of the law. Still. Who ran their own brain? Your brain ran you. He should’ve told Polly that. It would’ve relieved her. It’s what “normal” was. Perhaps he had said it.
Down the beach—far down where rocks formed a prominence, close to where the red house sat just above—someone (a man and a boy) were fishing in the slack tide. The man, tall, in yellow Bermudas, was showing the boy how to fling the bait, demonstrating it clumsily, then letting the boy take the rod—who did it with more grace and success, the bait arcing through the misty air and plopping down. The man stood back and watched as the boy reeled in, then cast again with the same ease. A large woman in a big white hat sat beside a little girl on the rocks behind them. She was pointing and talking with approval. These were the black people who’d rented the red house and wished to be happy alone. Reasonably enough. Doubtless they knew nothing of the prior tenant’s wife’s taking a hundred Vicodins in the same bed where their children were sleeping. Patty Parker could always inform them as they were departing to assure they wouldn’t return. He would’ve paid them a call, walk down, attempt a rapport. But it wouldn’t be fair. The story would have to come up.
