Seasons' End

by North, Will

  “Goodness, I had no idea they had Puritans in the New York Mafia…”

  “I’m serious; I don’t get that part.”

  Tyler smiled, leaned back on the rear legs of his chair, and made a grand slice through the smoky pub air, as if dividing the Red Sea.

  “One bifurcates,” he said. Then he winked, as if he’d just lured a naïf out of innocence.

  “As in divide and compartmentalize.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So all these other women—the ones who call you from Oxford, the ones you bring home from the pub here, the matron at the Grapes…?”

  “One box, as it were.”

  “And Pete?”

  “Quite another. One box holds trash, the other treasure.”

  “I just hope you remember which box is which.”

  five

  THE FOLLOWING SUMMER, having completed his undergraduate degree in London, Colin moved to eastern Washington to begin his certification work at the vet school at Washington State University. A few weeks later, Tyler invited him to his family’s Puget Sound summer compound on Madrona Beach.

  He stood at the stern rail of the shiny enamel-white and forest green car ferry from Seattle watching it drag its frothy wake like a bridal train. The air was gentle and warm and gulls hitched a ride on the cushion of air the ferry pushed ahead. As he strolled up the port side toward the bow, the snowy volcanic cone of Mount Rainier loomed impossibly massive away to the south, rising through a low cloud layer and emerging again above and climbing up, up into the cobalt blue sky to more than fourteen thousand feet. Above its summit, a flat lenticular cloud sat like a pale gray beret.

  On the green and yellow bus, stumpy as a box car, that met the ferry and chugged south along the road that formed the island’s spine, he’d had the queer sensation that the ferry had somehow slipped through a crack in the time-space continuum and he now existed in a parcel of reality that was running some forty years behind the rest of the world. There were kids safely peddling their bikes down the middle of the road, free of the anxious oversight of adults. The drivers of cars passing in opposite directions would wave and even stop to exchange greetings and those behind them waited without leaning on their horns. It was a small island with no room for impatience.

  At the heart of the island’s compact commercial center the bus stopped at the curb next to a park and across the street from the Thriftway supermarket. Several people got off, others boarded, but the bus didn’t immediately depart. In the little park, beneath an open-air shed, local farmers stood behind tables laden with fresh flowers, produce, meat, baked goods, wine, and crafts. A group of musicians played and children danced barefoot in the grass. After perhaps ten minutes several of the riders from the ferry returned carrying bags from the farmers’ market and the bus moved on a hundred yards or so to the town’s only significant intersection. There, a solitary traffic light blinked red shyly, as if embarrassed to remind people to stop and take care. No one seemed in a hurry anyway. On the corner, there was restaurant called The Hardware Store. He chuckled and wondered if the hardware store was in a building called The Restaurant. A few doors down, opposite the pharmacy, a fellow wearing mirrored blue sunglasses and a weathered baseball cap in matching blue was working with machinelike intensity at sweeping the curbside gutters. Another much older gentleman sat upon an adult-scaled tricycle wearing a red football helmet, smoking and smiling crookedly and chatting up everyone who passed him on the sidewalk.

  As the bus inchwormed its way south, stopping wherever anyone needed to get off or on, Colin could feel his jaws unclench, his shoulders unknot and drop. It was an experience that changed him profoundly and that, ultimately, would bring him back to the island a few years later. That wasn’t the only draw, but the sense that he’d finally found where he belonged in the world was powerful, something he couldn’t ignore. He had found home.

  That first, glittering August afternoon, he arrived at the beach where the Petersens and Strongs and their friends had their summer houses and felt as if he’d stepped into an old LIFE magazine pictorial of “old money” grandees—those families who, long ago, spent “the season” at sprawling, rustic-chic summer cottage compounds in places like eastern Long Island, Cape Cod, or coastal Maine—“summer cottages” that, in actuality, were cavernous compared to the shotgun flat in which he’d been raised on the lower west side of Manhattan. The beach families seemed perpetually in motion; playing tennis, sailing, swimming, organizing touch football matches, or taking cocktails on the verandah before dinner.

  Colin thought this gracious way of life had faded into extinction long before the second World War. And in some remote part of his mind, he’d mourned its loss, the way you might mourn the passing of, say, the original Orient Express even though you’d never made a journey across Central Europe to Constantinople in its luxurious carriages. What he mourned, he supposed, was a certain vision of family he’d never known himself. One crowded with brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors, all gathered along some broad, sun-blessed beach of the imagination, a beach a universe away from the clangorous and threadbare amusements of the only beach he’d ever known as a boy: Coney Island.

  The beach families were gracious and welcoming from the start and treated him as if he were family. But of course, he wasn’t. There really was no place in this wealthy patrician stronghold for an Irish Catholic street urchin whose principal family distinction was having owned and lost a bar on the corner of 38th Street and Tenth Avenue in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen.

  The bar had catered to the predominantly Irish firemen from the Ladder 21 Station down the block where his father, Rory, had worked before he was injured in a roof collapse while fighting a fire in the garment district. The guys at the station joked that any time the economy slumped the garment district caught fire. Inventory that had been hanging around too long was destroyed and insurance companies covered the losses. It was as if insurance settlements were the venture capital of the rag trade.

  Colin always stopped at the bar on his way home from school. The off-duty fire laddies would slip him a beer in a shot glass and a greasy Slim Jim sausage and tell him stories while his father, Rory, limped around behind the bar. In those days, the saloon was festooned with memorabilia: old photos of the station, framed newsclips of famous fires, insignias, retired badges, and long polished brass hose nozzles. It was an institution, as much a part of the station as the shiny red fire trucks.

  In such a neighborhood, and with such a loyal clientele, it took a lot to lose money with a bar, but Colin’s father had what it took, which mostly had to do with drinking up the profits and having entered into a few “business arrangements” with the Gambino family—arrangements which took the form of loans with distinctly favorable terms…for the Gambinos. When Rory eventually, and inevitably, failed to meet his payments, the Westies, a group of Irish-American thugs working for the Gambinos, arranged a fatal four-story fall for Rory from the roof of the tenement that housed his bar. The medical examiner found the alcohol level in Rory’s blood to be as high as the building from which he’d dropped and ruled it an accident. No one ever asked what he was doing up there or—given how drunk he must have been—how he got there in the first place.

  The Gambinos took ownership of the bar, which was their objective all along. A bar is a splendid business for laundering money. By then, though, the neighborhood had begun to change. Puerto Ricans were moving in, the Irish and other Anglos pushing back against the tide. Bernstein, Sondheim, Laurents, and Robbins turned the years of that sometimes violent transition into the hit musical, West Side Story. Colin saw the movie version and found it both wonderful and ludicrous; he’d never seen either the Puerto Rican or the Anglo gangs dancing and singing in the streets. But he had seen them bleeding there, and he had a couple of knife wounds of his own by which to remember his neighborhood.

  Colin got out on that classic Irish ticket: wit. He was smart and quick. The guys at the firehouse found his
mother, Margaret Mary, a cheap apartment in a rent-controlled building nearby and looked after them. And when the combination of a hard life, a three-pack-a-day smoking habit, and a massive heart attack killed his mother when he was in his first year at vet school, Colin returned to the city for a week, made the funeral arrangements, thanked the guys from the station, buried her next to her husband at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, and never went back. The remainder of the payout from his father’s pension put him through school.

  By the time he’d met Tyler and Pete in London, Colin Ryan was well advanced in the process of reinventing himself. It wasn’t a matter of creating a false identity—he couldn’t escape his West Side accent, for one thing. But he didn’t divulge much about his history. He wanted to be taken as presented, a person in the present tense. There wasn’t much past worth telling anyway as far as he was concerned.

  ***

  OF THE BEACHFRONT families, Pete’s was the oldest and best established. The Petersen compound, an archipelago of three gabled and shingled houses, sat on flat, grassy terrace at the apex of the beach’s half mile-long, inward-curving arc of sand, pebbles, driftwood, shells, and sand dollars. Pete’s great-grandfather Neils, a Danish immigrant, had been a shipwright at the big dry dock that operated in the 1890s just across the outer harbor from Burton, in the Maury Island hamlet that naturally came to be called Dockton. He’d helped design and build many of the nimble little steamship ferries that constituted what was known then as “the Mosquito Fleet” that linked the island to ports on the mainland.

  At the turn of the century, when a steam ferry pier was built at the west end of Madrona Beach in Burton and the Bayview Pavilion Dance Hall blossomed and ragtime bands came to play, Neils was quick to buy land east of the dance hall, where he built a cottage and rented rooms to weekenders from Tacoma. When the dry dock was sold and floated to Seattle in 1909, Neils set up his own company on the abandoned waterfront and began building coastal fishing boats. He never looked back.

  World War I stopped the dancing at the Pavilion, but it didn’t stop Neils Petersen. After a fire “of suspicious origin” leveled the abandoned dance hall, he bought up the land and cleared it, more than doubling his beachfront holdings. By the time Pete’s grandfather Robbie was born in 1919, Neils had built several extensions to the original cottage. That sprawling, weathered beach house had been an anchor for the family for three generations since.

  ***

  DURING HIS FIRST visit, Colin often rose early to walk the driftwood-strewn shoreline. There were surprises every morning for a city boy: a family of raccoons ranged in size like kitchen canisters—large, medium, small—waddling hurriedly down the beachfront lane, stopping to make furtive, over-the-shoulder glances to ensure humans weren’t following; deer tracks in the sand, as if the leggy animals had gathered in the pre-dawn darkness hours for a communal swim. And, as the light strengthened, he could see, atop an old guano-stained piling only fifty yards offshore, the motionless American bald eagle that spent mornings at slack tide scanning the still water for foolhardy young salmon lounging near the surface. If you were lucky you’d catch that moment when, suddenly, the great bird rose on silent wings, then swooped down toward the surface, talons flared for the ambush. Then it would yank itself airborne again and circle, rising on updrafts, until it drifted off toward the forested shore with its prey, followed by pestering crows and dive-bombing gulls which it utterly ignored.

  But it was the silence that stunned Colin, a quiet beyond his experience. He’d never lived anywhere but a city before, a world in which life was measured in decibels. But here, apart from the murmur of wavelets and the wakening birdlife, the screech of the gulls and complaints of the crows, the beach was enveloped in silence as if by a fog. As the day brightened, however, the first cars and trucks, their headlights sweeping the blue-black water as they came up-island from the south end ferry, rumbled northward along the “highway.” Their intrusion was like a miniature of the distant dawn thunder of the empty New York Central Railroad freight trains he remembered from his childhood, mile-long chains of boxcars that hammered hollowly north along the Hudson River tracks, bound for what, to him, were the unimaginably exotic lands to the west.

  On such mornings, Colin returned to the kitchen of the Old House and often found he had a companion.

  “Can you make a decent cup of coffee, child?” the old woman, knotted like old wicker, would shout. It was the same question she always asked. She always shouted because she was nearly deaf and refused to wear a hearing aid. And she always called him “child” because she couldn’t quite hold the nice young man’s name, though she knew she’d met and liked him. Friend of the family, he was.

  “I can, ma’am,” Colin would answer, bowing and also shouting.

  “Then get to it, boy! Day’s a’wastin!”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  Solveig Petersen was approaching seventy-five that year. She was Neils Petersen’s son Robbie’s widow. And though she came from tough Norwegian stock, her mind was failing at roughly the same rate as her hearing. The doctor, Colin knew, had diagnosed advancing dementia, but the family wondered, too, whether Solveig was simply, quietly, modestly retreating from the pain of her losses. If memory fails you, if sounds muffle, it’s like being wrapped in a thick down duvet: cushioned, insulated, warm. You could sink into that warmth and let go of the past.

  After coffee and before the rest of the family began stirring, Solveig would announce it was time for “their” walk, and Colin would accompany her on a tour of the grounds.

  “Did you know Robbie, my husband?!” she’d demand as they descended the porch steps, her hand in the crook of his arm.

  “No, ma’am, but I’ve heard stories about him.”

  “No? Did you say, ‘No?’ Well then, let me tell you a story about my Robbie.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Brilliant man, he was, my Robbie. And not just because he had the sense to marry me. Oh, no. Made his mark early, he did, long before Old Neils died. Robbie—did I tell you he was my husband…?”

  “You did, ma’am; Robbie was your husband.”

  “Right you are, you clever lad. Well, Robbie—he was barely twenty, you see—but he could see into the future. And he got the old man to shift his business from building dinky little fishing boats to creating a company to ship freight north to Alaska. Alaska was the future, he said!”

  They had completed their promenade along the lane that paralleled the beach and now turned across the close-cropped lawns toward a garden that was not much more than an unkempt tangle of salt- and drought-tolerant plants and shrubs at the west end of the compound, a garden which, despite chronic neglect, provided a profusion of blooms.

  The old woman turned a familiar page: “In 1939, ten years into the Depression, mind you, the crazy kid persuades the old man to buy two mothballed freighters at a bankruptcy auction in Seattle. Can you imagine? Gets them refitted and next thing you know he’s running the Pacific Pioneer Shipping Company.”

  They’d nearly reached the Old House again when Solveig pulled Colin’s arm down to share a confidence she shared on every one of their morning walks. “Met him that year and married him straight away, I did; I know a winner when I see one!”

  “You were right about that, ma’am. You sure were.”

  “Damn right!” the old woman shouted, laughing and giving his arm a slug.

  Sometimes, at this point, as he led her indoors and settled her in her chair by the south-facing window, she’d fix him with a look and say, softly this time, as if to herself, “You’re a winner, too; someone will notice.”

  And then, if no one was there to see him, Colin would bend down and kiss the old woman’s forehead. He prayed she was right, but he had no faith in prayer.

  “Anything else you need right now, ma’am?”

  “No thank you, child. I’ll just sit a bit.”

  Colin bowed and took his leave. He poured another coffee, slipped out to the porch, and se
ttled into one of the Adirondack chairs that were arrayed in a row there like deck chairs on an ocean liner.

  Colin knew the rest of the story. It was told in the snapshots bound in a worn leather photo album that stood on a shelf by the fireplace, images that were like stills from “The Robbie Petersen Movie.”

  World War Two, a cataclysm for the rest of the world, was the making of Robbie Petersen. He was in the right place at the right time. The Aleutian Islands are a thousand mile-long serrated scythe blade of weather-shattered volcanic islands that slices far across the North Pacific, nearly to Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula. While World War Two American commanders were preoccupied with the campaign in the South Pacific, the Japanese attacked in the far north, bombing Unalaska Island and the military post at Dutch Harbor on June 3, 1942, and then occupied the westernmost islands of Attu and Kiska. With a presence in the Aleutians, the Japanese were suddenly within a few flying hours of the big military bases and naval shipyards around Seattle.

  The United States had not been unaware of this potential threat and, somewhat belatedly, had begun building clandestine military bases, disguised as canneries, at Cold Bay on the Aleutian peninsula, and on Unmak Island, just west of Dutch Harbor.

  With the Japanese attack and occupation, a thorny problem emerged: how to protect the native Aleuts. The office of the Alaskan territorial governor and the military debated the subject for months, with the governor arguing, with unusual sensitivity, that relocation to an alien environment in the dense forests of the Alaskan panhandle might cause greater harm to the Aleut population than might Japanese occupation of their barren islands, for the invaders would need the natives’ fishing and foraging expertise to survive. Naturally, the military ignored the concerns of the governor and ordered the evacuation of virtually all of the population from the Aleutians.

  It was a disaster for the Aleuts, but a windfall for Robbie Petersen. When the federal government commandeered vessels to support the buildup in the Aleutians and evacuate the native population, Robbie’s company, Pacific Pioneer Shipping, had a distinct advantage over other Alaskan freight companies which served the more populous mainland communities: his captains knew the vicious currents, the massive tide shifts, the impenetrable fogs, the safe harbors, and the narrow passes between the islands of the Aleutian chain like no others.