Cape Cod

by William Martin

  He tenderly brushed the droplets of mist from the hair around his wife’s face. “I’ll sign if the master and me wife thinks it’s wise,” he said. But I’ll obey, he thought, only if I think the same.

  And Elder Brewster lost no time completing the reading. “ ‘In witness whereof we have hereunder subscribed our names at Cape Cod, the eleventh of November, in the Year of the Reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth. Anno Domini 1620.’ ”

  CHAPTER 3

  July 4

  The Glorious Fourth

  Whatever the Pilgrims faced, they never had to go through this: driving to Cape Cod on the Fourth of July.

  And not in a million nightmares could they have seen themselves as wellspring of faith for this cataract of tourists, vacationers, weekenders, day-trippers, campers, swimmers, boaters, fishermen, artists in oil, in water, in Day-Glo on velvet, and lovers… of seafood, sun, surf, sex in the sand, art in oil and Day-Glo on velvet, antiques and old houses, condos with clay courts and pools by the beach, tide flats and salt ponds and sunsets at sea.

  The first Pilgrims crossed an ocean in misery. Their successors came from every corner of the continent in every kind of conveyance and convenience. And Geoff Hilyard often wondered if they hadn’t all been seeking the same thing. But on summer holidays, sitting in traffic a mile north of the Cape Cod Canal, watching through the heat waves as the cars crossed the Sagamore Bridge like ants on a distant log, he couldn’t quite remember what the “same thing” was, because these latter-day pilgrims created a steaming, smoking, vapor-locked misery all their own.

  “We could have come yesterday and missed this.” Janice did not look up from her book.

  “I had blueprints to finish.”

  The Winnebago ahead of them rolled forward. Geoff inched up to close the space so that none of the smart guys sneaking along the breakdown lane could cut in front of him.

  “You could’ve finished down here. Boston’s only a two-hour drive… unless you go on the weekend.”

  “From now on I want to be like the old Cape shipmasters. They knew the sea route to Hong Kong better than the land route to Boston.” He shut off the air conditioner to keep the engine from overheating. He rolled down the window and was hit by a blast of rock and roll and exhaust from the Ford pickup idling beside him.

  “The shipmasters had to go to Boston to get their ships.” Janice turned a page.

  “They went by boat. Open your window.”

  A car zoomed by in the breakdown lane.

  “Look at that bastard,” said Geoff.

  “In a hurry to get to the promised land,” said Janice, so calmly that the sarcasm seemed to float on the surface of her voice like duckweed.

  He glanced at her book. “Joan Didion or P. D. James?”

  “Improving Your Sales Approach. To keep us eating.”

  In the backseat, eight-year-old Sarah told six-year-old Keith to cut it out. Keith told Sarah to cut it out herownself. Geoff told them both to cut it out, whatever it was.

  “They’ll be happier on the Cape,” said Janice.

  In the bed of the pickup beside them, a kid in a B.C. baseball cap was sitting on a lounge chair. A girl in a Body Glove bathing suit was sitting on his lap. They were, as the college students said, swapping spit. Later they’d be swapping a lot more, which made Geoff a little envious. Of what? he wondered. Their freedom? Their youth? After riding out a traffic jam in a flatbed, they’d be too sunburned to swap much of anything. The way they were going at it, even their tongues would be sunburned. And Geoff was about to remake his life, or so he told himself.

  “Our kids will be happier,” he said, “and if things get bad, I can always sell my piece of Jack’s Island to your father.”

  “Which would kill your uncle Rake.”

  “Nothing could kill him.” Geoff tuned the radio to the same station playing in the pickup. The group was U-2, and they still hadn’t found what they were looking for.

  “Neither have you,” muttered Janice.

  Sarah told Keith that eight-year-olds knew everything and six-year-olds were dumb.

  “Last summer,” said Janice, “it was seven-year-olds who knew everything and five-year-olds who were dumb.”

  “I thought we were finished with this,” said Geoff.

  “You mean dumbness?”

  He tightened his grip on the wheel. Her calm voice and serene expression reminded him of a martyr. And her short blond hair made a good halo. It always had. The first time she smiled at him, he thought she looked like an angel. But she hadn’t been smiling much lately.

  In the rear window of the Winnebago, an old woman tied a ribbon on the head of her miniature poodle.

  “Now, that’s dumb,” said Janice.

  “What, Mummy?” said Sarah. “What’s dumb?”

  “That lady is kissing her dog on the mouth.”

  “Yech!” shouted Keith. “That’s worse than kissin’ Sarah.” And he began to laugh.

  “I wouldn’t let you”—Sarah laughed right back—“ ’cause your breath smells like farts.”

  “Ma-ah!” cried Keith, but Ma was laughing, too.

  Dad said a dog’s mouth was cleaner than a human’s, which made everyone laugh harder, and the laughter rolled from kissing dogs to bad breath to Dad’s dumb theories while their Voyager rolled on to the Sagamore rotary, where three strands of traffic met and snarled under the sunglasses of the Massachusetts State Police. The silver framework of the Sagamore Bridge seemed close enough to touch, but it was still ten minutes away, and the laughter faded again.

  Geoff and Janice had been crossing the bridge when he asked her to marry him. It was 1973, the first warm day of spring, which meant late May on Cape Cod. They had cut classes to sip wine and make love and read Victorian novels in the shelter of some sand dune, and he could still remember the conspiratorial glint in her eye when he asked.

  “If I say no, will you drive through the guardrail?”

  “I’ll have no choice.”

  “Then I’d better say yes.”

  He had reached out his hand to hers, and she had placed it on her thigh, at the cuff of her tennis shorts. His fingers had done the rest.

  She was wearing tennis shorts this morning, and he still found her thighs irresistible. Halfway across the canal that separated the Cape, like a moat, from the rest of the world, he placed his hand on the smooth skin. “This isn’t dumb.”

  She covered his hand with hers. “Not dumb. Daring.”

  “And haven’t we always been daring?”

  “Just ask our families.”

  ii.

  At one-fifty-nine, they parked in front of the house in Dennis where Janice had grown up. She glanced at her watch and put her fingers in her ears.

  At two o’clock on the nose, a thunderous explosion rattled the windows of the house, then Dickerson Bigelow bellowed, “The bar is open. Let the glorious Fourth begin!”

  When he saw Janice, Dickerson fired the brass starter’s cannon again. The blast nearly blew Grandma Agnes off her chair. Drinks spilled, Bigelows jumped, and inside the house, a picture fell from the living room wall. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried, “it gives me great pleasure to announce that my favorite Hilyards are here!”

  Uncle Hiram, family attorney, thrust his hand at Geoff and said, for what seemed like the thousandth time, “Welcome, young Montague, to the house of the Capulets.”

  Geoff answered, as always, “ ‘What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’ ”

  “A rose by any other name would be my Janice.” Dickerson threw his arms around his daughter.

  She kissed him and tugged at his beard, bringing the usual laughing yelp. A shopworn old greeting, something from Janice’s girlhood, had become a comforting tradition for both of them since her mother’s death.

  Geoff tolerated it. He always tolerated tradition, even if the yelp was just another way that Dickerso
n attracted attention. And he tolerated Dickerson’s knuckle-squasher handshake, which didn’t squash quite so much since the heart attack. But he could never stand the stage whisper when Dickerson wanted the family to know how good he was to his son-in-law. “Come to my study in ten minutes, Geoff. I have a little proposal.”

  “Hey, Grampa,” said Keith, “see my muscle?”

  Dickerson squeezed the boy’s arm and let out a long, low whistle.

  Geoff looked at Janice, “Proposal?”

  She shrugged and shook her head.

  And the Hilyards greeted the other Bigelows—Grandma Agnes, eighty-nine-year-old matriarch, Cousin Blue and his son, aunts and uncles, Bigelows by birth and Bigelows by marriage… all members of Cape Cod aristocracy.

  Of course, on Cape Cod, aristocracy had little to do with money, achievement, or even education. Millionaires with Harvard degrees and waterfront houses might look down their noses at the natives. But the natives looked at them as little more than tourists. The natives might mow the tourists’ lawns or paint their shutters or pump their cesspools. But it was the natives who were the aristocrats, because they had been there since the beginning.

  Names like Nickerson, Doane, Crosby, Snow, Sears, Eldredge, Cahoon, Bigelow, and Hilyard appeared on businesses all along Routes 6A and 28. For three centuries they had been appearing on fishing boats, masters’ logs, cranberry boxes, saltworks, salvage vessels, the rosters of the U.S. Lifesaving Service, and before anything else, on primitive purchase and sale agreements signed with the Indians.

  In most Cape families, there had been Tories and Whigs, solid citizens and scoundrels, empire builders and clam diggers, geniuses and inbreds, and they had formed an aristocracy of strong backs and stiff spines, because nothing came easy on a peninsula surrounded by the sea. It was still said among the Bigelows who ran a Hyannis service station that while the Kennedys had the compound, the Bigelows had the history.

  They were not close-knit clans. There were simply too many of them, and after three and a half centuries, some branches were so far apart they had nothing in common beyond their intertwined names. The Bigelows of Bourne barely knew the Dickersons who fished out of Provincetown, or the Bigelow who kept law offices in Boston and Barnstable. But they all knew Dickerson Bigelow, because he made it his business to know all of them. And he invited all of them for the glorious Fourth.

  His house had been built in the 1840s, when American architects were looking to classical forms for inspiration and American shipbuilders were creating classical forms of their own. A forebear had invested a sea-made fortune in Shiverick & Sons Shipwrights, then built a Greek Revival house overlooking the harbor where the Shivericks built their clippers. The shipyard was gone, but the house still stood, monument to the same Greek ideal of beauty through efficiency embodied in the clippers.

  Geoff thought that way about things. It was the way architects thought.

  He liked the library best of all the rooms. The ancient Oriental gave it a sense of history. The books mellowed it, though Dickerson seldom read anything beyond the real estate section. And the artwork reminded Geoff that he was not the first of his family to mix with the Bigelows.

  While he waited to hear Dickerson’s proposal, he sipped a beer and studied the painting above the fireplace. Reading the Compact had been painted by Geoff’s great-great-uncle Thomas Hilyard in 1895 and purchased by State Senator Charles Bigelow, Dickerson’s grandfather.

  Americans had been taught that the creation of the Mayflower Compact was one of the pivotal events in the history of democracy, and artists usually poured the golden paint all over the ship. Tom Hilyard had painted a day so shrouded in mist you could almost smell the damp wool on the dark and brooding figures. The only splash of color was the red quill that Ezra Bigelow offered to Jack Hilyard, and for ninety-five years, people had been arguing over that: was Jack raising his hand to take the quill or to ward Bigelow away?

  “That painting proves that our families have been cooperating since the Mayflower.” Douglas Bigelow ambled in wearing his white trousers and green golf shirt.

  “If you believe that,” answered Geoff, “you’ve never looked at the painting.”

  Douglas slipped the bottle of beer from Geoff’s hand, took a sip, then handed it back to him. “It shows a Bigelow and a Hilyard making history.”

  Geoff wiped the mouth of the bottle and drained the beer. He liked Douglas, who was as tall as his father, not nearly as broad-beamed, and far more subtle, except in the choice of his second wife, she of the short skirts, long legs, and gold jewelry heavy enough to bench press.

  “How’s your golf game?” asked Geoff.

  “Long drives, accurate irons, putts like pool shots. How’s my sister?”

  “Glad to be here for the glorious Fourth—”

  “And ready to go back to Boston next week.” Janice came in and dropped onto the sofa.

  “That’s not going to happen.” Dickerson lumbered after her, a beer bottle working in his right hand, the necks of two more twined into the fingers of his left. “Now that you’ve moved back, we’re going to keep you here.”

  Like a bishop offering his ring, he held out his left hand and the younger men each took a beer. Dickerson touched his bottle to theirs. “To the future”—he pointed his bottle at the painting—“and the past.”

  “And the proposal?” Geoff leaned on the mantel.

  “Jan, I know why you love this guy. He comes right to the point.” Dickerson sat behind his desk and looked Geoff and Janice up and down. “Nice white tennis shorts on both of you, a powdery pink jersey for the girl, navy blue for the boy.” He glanced at his son. “You, too, in all your golfie stuff.”

  “Leisure wear,” said Douglas.

  Dickerson looked at his khaki trousers and shirt. “In my leisure I like to dress like an old fisherman.”

  “You never fished for money in your life,” said Janice.

  Dickerson ignored her. “I remind me of where we came from. You remind me of where we’re going.”

  “Grow up, grow old, and die to make room.” Bad joke. Geoff knew the moment he said it. Bad hearts and gallows jokes didn’t mix.

  But Dickerson didn’t acknowledge the joke. Only the row of pill bottles on his desk—isosorbide, 10 mg., propranolol, 20 mg., dipyridamole, 50 mg.—acknowledged the heart attack. He leaned on his elbows and looked at Janice. “Honey, you know how happy 1 am that you’ve decided to move back so Geoff can make a go of his own firm.”

  “Geoff decided. I’m going along with it.”

  “Whatever… We’re happy. We want you to be happy, too.”

  Geoff felt the backs of Dickerson Bigelow’s unread books closing in around him. “The suspense is killing us. What is it that will make us happy forever, and what do I have to give up to get it?”

  Dickerson looked at his son. “In the family for seventeen years and still he doesn’t trust us.”

  “He knows that if we let him in on this deal, we’re not doing it because he’s the brother-in-law.” Douglas slipped a golf ball from his pocket and began to roll it between his fingers.

  “It’s because he’s the best architect in New England, right?” cracked Janice.

  “It’s because I’m Rake Hilyard’s nephew.”

  “Cynic!” Dickerson Bigelow pushed himself away from his desk and went to the window. Outside, his ancient mother was carrying a tray of hors d’oeuvres toward the back lawn. “I raised a generation of cynics, Ma!”

  “Because they grew up around men like you, Dick.”

  “Never misses a beat,” said Janice.

  “Neither does her granddaughter,” added Geoff.

  “And we both love them both,” said Dickerson, “just like we both love Jack’s Island.”

  “There’s a difference between love and lust.”

  Dickerson looked at Janice. “Why did you have to go and marry such a smartass?”

  “Because I knew that some day, you’d want to do business with him. So
stop insulting each other and talk like grown men.”

  Love and lust had been known to serve each other well, Geoff knew, and if this offer meant a good commission, which would mean a little freedom, Geoff could stand a little of Dickerson’s lust.

  While the party went on outside, Dickerson talked. Douglas rolled the golf ball between his fingers and clarified. Geoff sipped his beer and acted impassive, as he would in any negotiation. Janice listened, and when she thought her husband too impassive, she asked questions.

  The Bigelows wanted to develop Jack’s Island. The Hilyards resisted. That much had been known for years. During the mid-eighties boom, the Bigelows didn’t even bother to try to develop their side of their island. It wasn’t worth the fight with the town and the abutters when there was so much money to be made on the rest of the Cape.

  But the boom was over. Real estate prices had turned in a big way. No one was buying middle-priced homes in subdivisions hacked from the scrub pine. Planning boards and conservation commissions were getting tough. And the people of Cape Cod, who shared watershed and coastline but who had always acted as fifteen towns going in fifteen directions, had voted a County Commission to contend with development.

  The only land certain to sell—or worth the fight—was waterfront. In a bad market, scarce things kept their value. Douglas said they could squeeze thirty to thirty-five premium-priced one-acre lots out of the island, each one worth three to five hundred thousand once it was perked and permitted. And once they put houses on the land, the profits would double.

  “Geoff, sell us your land, convince Rake to sell,” said Dickerson, “and you’ll design the development we want to call Pilgrims’ Rest.”

  “Modern luxury inside, Pilgrim ambience outside,” added Douglas. “Like… Star Wars meets the seventeenth century.”

  “What about the permits?” asked Geoff. “The town and county will put you through hell to develop that island.”

  “We’re grandfathered.”

  “Grandfathered?” said Janice. “How?”