He waited, then took a step forward. “Can I come in or not?”
She seemed to be thinking it over, but finally she stepped out of the doorway to let him by. She didn’t sit down or invite him to. Harry said, “What was it you wanted with me this morning?”
She half-smiled. “I wanted to see if things were all right between us. I found out the answer to that.”
“Well, what the hell did you expect?”
She seemed calm, but he could tell she wasn’t. “I didn’t know you’d even remember who I was.”
It was too late now to pretend he didn’t remember her. He wished he’d thought of it.
He did remember, though. He remembered how dark her eyebrows were against her skin and the way her lips curled at the corners. He remembered, but none of it could touch him now.
She said, “I didn’t think you’d still be anywhere near here.”
Harry wasn’t going to discuss the shape of his life with her. He asked his question. “How long will you be staying?”
“I’m not sure.”
He had humbled himself and crawled for an answer, and he had gotten it: I’m not sure.
“Anyway,” Harry said. He shoved his hands in his back pockets. This had been a useless exercise. As he drew breath to say good-bye, he noticed the bottle.
There, over against the wall, was a blue-and-white porcelain bottle.
It was sitting on a spindly wooden table under a photograph in a heavy frame. A Dutch bottle, or gin bottle, those square ones were called. Even from where he was standing, he recognized the pattern of blue flowering branches and birds against a white background.
Harry crossed to the bottle like a sleepwalker. It was whole, not a fragment— completely intact, not even chipped. The pattern was identical to the pattern of the fragments they were finding at the wreck. “Where did you get this?” he asked.
“It’s sort of a family heirloom.”
She had stayed by the door. Her tone told him she thought he was acting strange. He lied, “I think my grandmother used to have one like it.” He slid the tip of his forefinger gently over the surface of the bottle.
“My grandfather gave it to Merriam when she was a little girl, right before he disappeared.”
Harry had to act normal now, but nothing was normal. “When was that?”
“Back in 1922.”
“Huh.” Harry pinched the bridge of his nose. “And— where did your grandfather get it?”
“I don’t think anybody knows.” After a moment, she asked, “Are you all right, Harry?”
He forced himself to turn away from the bottle. “How is Miss Merriam?”
“Not very well. She’s moved in with a woman named Bernice Chatham. A practical nurse. Bernice is going to look after her for a while.” Isabel was looking at the bottle. “I just thought of something. I wonder how Merriam would react if I took the bottle next time I visit. It might stimulate her, don’t you think?”
Good. Good. He wanted to know what Miss Merriam had to say. “I guess it might.”
“I think I’ll do that tomorrow.”
There was an awkward silence. Harry said, “I better go. My wife will have dinner on the table.”
Isabel saw him out. Harry wasn’t as eager for her to leave Cape St. Elmo as he’d been before. She might as well stay until he found out more about that Chinese bottle.
12
Merriam took the blue-and-white porcelain bottle out of Isabel’s hands. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Unchecked, they dropped from her chin and spotted the front of her dress.
Isabel dug in her bag, brought out a tissue, and blotted Merriam’s face. The two of them were sitting on the screened front porch at Bernice Chatham’s. Bernice was out grocery shopping.
“I didn’t mean to make you cry,” Isabel said. It was too bad. Her idea of bringing the bottle to show Merriam had seemed the one constructive outcome of her reunion with Harry Mercer.
Seeing Harry again, talking to him, had been disturbing. Harry’s anger was one reason, certainly, but, to be honest, her motives in seeking him out had not been pure. She’d told herself it was because of the anonymous note, but she had been curious, too. Possibly even titillated. In the end, reluctant to disturb their fragile truce, she hadn’t mentioned the note.
To be honest, she had felt afraid, even though it was only Harry. Harry, her first lover.
He had looked much the same. More lines around the eyes, heavier in the gut. And a wariness— was it wariness?— in his face that she didn’t remember. A sense of something guarded, hidden.
She couldn’t figure out his reaction to the porcelain bottle. She hadn’t bought his explanation about his grandmother owning a similar one. Possibly he recognized it as a valuable antique. It could be, for all she knew, although she could hardly imagine Harry as an expert.
Anyway, he had given her the idea of bringing the bottle to Merriam, and now it was lying in Merriam’s lap while Merriam wept. Isabel put her hand out. “Why don’t you let me put it away?”
Merriam came alive. Jerking the bottle out of Isabel’s reach, she cried, “It’s mine!” She pushed her chair back, making a grating noise on the concrete floor. “Daddy gave it to me!”
The azalea leaves pressed against the screen, oppressive and suffocating. The metal arms of Isabel’s chair felt sticky. “Fine, Merriam. Fine. Keep it.”
Merriam cradled the bottle. “Then he went off,” she said more softly.
Best to stay on this familiar turf. Isabel could recite the story by heart. “There had been a big storm,” she prompted.
“All night, it blew,” Merriam said dreamily. “We stayed down in the back parlor the whole night long. The wind was howling, the trees cracking, and along about midnight you know what happened?”
Of course Isabel knew. “No. What?”
“Somebody came knocking at the window. I was so scared. Daddy pushed the curtain back, and River Pete was out there.”
River Pete had been a local character, a sometime hunting and fishing buddy of John James. He occasionally figured in Merriam’s stories of her youth. “So River Pete came in out of the storm?”
“Came in and spent the night. You know, he used to live in a driftwood shack down on the beach. Did odd jobs at Pursey’s store. That night, his shanty blew clean away.” Merriam fell into silence.
To keep her talking, Isabel said, “What happened the next morning?”
Merriam’s lips moved, then stopped. Her eyelids half-closed. After a minute, she continued: “Daddy and Pete went out at daylight to look around. Trees uprooted, branches blown down. I watched from the upstairs veranda. Waves were breaking practically in the front yard, salt water running down the drive.”
Merriam must have used these same words on the afternoons she and Isabel stood in obeisance in front of John James’s photograph. The story was as ritualized as the Apostles’ Creed. In Isabel’s role as listener, all she had to do was put in a question now and then. “The house was all right, though, wasn’t it?”
Merriam nodded. “It was God’s mercy. The only thing that happened was, we lost the wash pot. We had an old iron wash pot out in the back, where Mama boiled the clothes, and it was gone. I reckon it washed away. I wouldn’t have credited it, the pot was so heavy, but I reckon that’s what happened.”
As a child, Isabel had been intrigued by the disappearing wash pot and by the idea of boiling clothes over a fire in the backyard. She said, “It was never found? Not even out in the woods later?”
“Never. Mama had to get a new one to boil Johnny’s diapers.” She grimaced. She was approaching the nub of the story. “Johnny had colic the whole day, wouldn’t hush at all.”
That colicky baby had been Isabel’s father. As she had so many times in the past, she imagined his cries, the tearing wind, the downed trees, the encroaching sea.
“Daddy and Pete were cutting up fallen trees,” Merriam said. “We could hear them sawing. Toward afternoon, when the water was lower, Dadd
y crawled under the house to check the foundation. He came out covered with mud. Afterward, he cleaned up and told Mama he was taking his boat to St. Elmo that very afternoon. Mama didn’t want him to go. She said it was blowing too hard, that the seas were too high. He said he had business to do.”
That stubbornness wouldn’t be credible in some men. In John James Anders, who had constructed his dream house in the wilds of Cape St. Elmo and driven his family to ruin with impossible schemes for railroads and amusement piers, it was completely in character. He would go out in the wake of a hurricane if he took a notion, and he had taken a notion.
“River Pete was still in the yard,” Merriam said. “I saw him stick his head under the pump and rinse off his hair and beard and scrub the mud off his hands, but after that, I didn’t see him anymore. Daddy said he’d best get on, and he said to me, ‘Merriam, walk along with me a ways,’ so I went out with him.”
“That was when he gave you the bottle.”
“We got on toward the landing.” Merriam’s voice was remote. “He said, ‘You better go back to Mama now,’ and he pulled this bottle out of his coat pocket and said, ‘Here’s a play-pretty for you, Merriam.’ I took it and hugged him good-bye. He never got to St. Elmo, and he never came back.”
That was it. Rest in peace in the briny deep, John James Anders.
Isabel heard a lawn mower. She smelled fuel oil and cut grass. Merriam picked up the bottle and looked at it for a long time. Then she held it out. “Take it, Isabel.”
Isabel didn’t move. She said, “It’s yours.”
“No. You take it.”
Isabel sat still.
Some months after Isabel ran away from Cape St. Elmo with Ben Raboski, Merriam had tracked her down and written to say that Isabel was disinherited. The letter had been brief, and Isabel remembered it well. “My goods and chattels are none of yours,” Merriam had written. “You turn your back on me, Isabel. So be it. Now I turn my back on you.” Under the signature— a stark, upright Merriam— was a reference to the Bible: “See Psalm 41, verse 9.”
Hating herself for doing it, Isabel had looked up Psalm 41, verse 9, and read: “Yea mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me.”
Isabel’s fingers closed on the bottle. Merriam let it go.
Merriam pushed herself to her feet. “I want to lie down now.”
“All right.” Isabel replaced the bottle in the canvas bag she’d brought it in. She walked with Merriam to the back bedroom, shook out the pillows, and turned on the ceiling fan.
Merriam stretched out. Breeze from the fan stirred the hair on her forehead. She said, in a voice almost lost in the fan’s gentle whir, “I lost his letter.”
Isabel returned to the bedside. “What letter, Merriam?”
“The letter. He gave me a letter.” The sides of Merriam’s mouth had pulled down in a mask of misery.
“What are you talking about?”
Merriam’s eyes bulged. “Don’t be so careless!” she screamed. “Look what you’ve done!”
Isabel recoiled. She had heard this too many times in her life already. “Stop it! Stop it!” she cried. There was an assortment of pill bottles on the bedside table. She thought she knew which pill would calm Merriam down.
“Look what you’ve done!” Merriam howled. She thrashed on the bed, flinging her body from side to side. “You idiot! You stupid, careless girl!”
Isabel grasped at Merriam’s arms, trying to hold her down. “I am not!” she cried. “I am not!”
They wrestled grotesquely for a few seconds, and then Merriam broke free and sat up. Panting, she said, “I lost the letter. I lost it.”
Isabel tried to fight back to rationality. “What letter, for God’s sake?”
“Daddy gave it to me.” Merriam’s voice had dropped to a whisper.
This was not part of the recitation ritual. “When? That same day?”
“Yes.” The sudden hysteria had dissipated. “When he gave me the bottle, he gave me a letter for Mama. I lost it, Isabel.”
“I don’t—”
“I wanted to pick a flower to put in the bottle. There was Queen Anne’s lace by the path. I let go of the letter and the wind blew it away.”
“Merriam—”
“I went after it, into the deep woods. Everything was wet; the wind was blowing. I couldn’t find it. And he never came back. Never came back.”
You careless, irresponsible girl. “It’s all right,” Isabel said.
“No. No.”
“Yes. It doesn’t matter now.”
Merriam slumped against the pillows. “I never told. I couldn’t tell,” she said. Her eyelids drooped.
After a few minutes, Merriam seemed to doze off as Isabel sat on the edge of the bed. So John James had left a letter, and Merriam had lost it. If the episode Merriam just described had really happened. If it had, Isabel began to see a connection: Merriam once lost an important letter; to atone for her mistake, she spent years making hapless Isabel toe the line.
Merriam’s breathing became regular. Isabel returned to the front porch. She found Clem Davenant there, his tall frame folded into one of the metal lawn chairs.
“I knocked, but there was some commotion going on,” he said. “Is Miss Merriam all right?”
Isabel sat down. “I don’t know.”
“What happened?”
It was too complicated to explain. “She was talking about something that happened years ago.” She thought about it. “Actually, I think she’s getting better. Her memory is coming back, and some of what she says makes sense.”
“Is that so? I never thought she’d get that far.”
“Neither did I.” Isabel was sagging with exhaustion.
From the back of the house came a low, anguished wail. Goose bumps rose on Isabel’s arms. Her eyes met Clem’s. “Oh God,” she said, jumping to her feet.
He followed her to Merriam’s bedroom. Merriam was sitting up in bed, wild-eyed, her hair standing in tufts as if she had been pulling it. “Watch out, Isabel!” she shrieked. “Watch out!”
Merriam scrambled away from them, toward the wall, while Isabel fumbled with the pill bottles.
Clem reached out. “Calm down, Miss Merriam!”
She shrank away, pressing herself into a corner “Watch out! Watch out!”
Clem grasped her arms as she howled and fought, screaming hysterically. He held on, his face taut.
After a while, Merriam’s eyes unfocused and her strength ebbed. She took her pill meekly. As Clem lay her down, the back door slammed and Bernice called, “I’m back! Everything all right?”
Isabel’s eyes met Clem’s. Neither of them answered.
13
“You went to see her. I know it,” Kathy Mercer said.
Still in his swimming trunks, his body sticky from salt water, Harry Mercer stood in his bedroom. Kathy was sitting in the middle of the gold quilted bedspread. Her nose was red. Fortunately, the girls had gone off to camp for two weeks.
“With who?” Harry had more than a suspicion that this wasn’t his night.
“You know who.”
Harry started unbuttoning his shirt. He had ferried a boatload of assholes out spearfishing, worried about the engine some more, locked horns with Scooter as usual, and hauled his butt home for this? His shirt hanging open, he untied his sneakers and took them off, scattering sand on the wall-to-wall carpet, but to hell with it. “I don’t know who, so you better tell me.”
Kathy’s eyes narrowed. “Isabel Anders, that’s who.”
Harry felt a deep rumbling of fear. “I don’t know why you think that,” he said, a response so lame he might as well have kept his mouth shut.
“You don’t?” Behind her glasses, Kathy’s eyes looked like huge brown accusing blobs. “I think it because I know it’s true.”
Harry needed to work up some righteous indignation, but he wasn’t sure he could. He dropped his shirt on the floor and said,
“Kathy, tell me exactly what you think is going on.”
“I know what’s going on!”
“Well, fill me in.”
Kathy’s face and neck were blotchy, almost as if she had a rash. Her nostrils were flaring in a way that Harry did not like. She drew an unsteady breath. “You went to see Isabel Anders yesterday evening. You parked your truck right there in her driveway.”
God damn this gossiping town. Yes, he had gone to see Isabel yesterday. Yes, he had parked in her driveway. And it had been as pure and innocent as the driven snow, but he might as well have been screwing his brains out with her, for all the good his virtue had done him.
Miraculously, righteous indignation began to seep into Harry, after all. “Well, did any of your nosy friends tell you she came looking for me? Came to the Beachcomber and said she wanted to talk to me?” He could see by her face that this was news to her. He pressed his advantage. “Yes, she said she wanted to talk to me, so I did stop by her place a few minutes—”
“Just because she wants to talk to you doesn’t mean you have to go to her place!”
Harry had sand between his toes, his trunks were scratchy and dry, and he wanted to take a shower. Most of all, he wanted Kathy to shut her mouth. “That’s right,” he said in the most scathing tone he could manage. “I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known it was a mortal sin.”
She wasn’t giving up. “Why didn’t you tell me you went there?”
“I sure don’t know, Kathy. I guess I thought I was a grown man, not a snot-nosed kid you had to keep watch over.”
“What did she want to talk about?”
He exploded. “What is this? I’m telling you nothing happened and it wasn’t important. Now back off!”
Kathy seemed to shrink. She looked pathetic with her blotchy face and blobby eyes. In a hushed tone, she said, “You were in love with her.”
“Oh my God Almighty.” Harry thought about throwing something, but there wasn’t anything handy. He settled for clenching his fist and bonking himself on the forehead. The problem was, all those years ago when he and Kathy were courting and he was still smarting from the way Isabel had treated him, he had told Kathy things. He had told her what a bitch Isabel was, how badly she had treated him, how much nicer Kathy was than Isabel. “Kathy, that was high school. Do you know how long ago that was?”
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