A New England Affair

by Steven Carroll

  Grace broke into a grin again, and turned, looking out the cottage window as she spoke. ‘Oh, it is.’ Turning back from the window, as she looked down at the text, she added, ‘You can bet Romeo gave Juliet one.’ She paused. ‘And Juliet, Romeo.’

  Have you never had one? And it is again not so much the directness of the question as the innocence of it. Or is it the assumption underlying it? That, surely, everybody bears such a mark at some stage in their life. Emily sighs at the wheel. How to explain it? How, if she ever tried (and she won’t), could she explain it? For it would almost be like speaking to a creature from another planet, not just another time. Our days were governed by different manners and expectations, she would begin, and what we said and didn’t say (and we would never have spoken of such things) was determined by those manners. We lived by codes, and whole orders of feeling, that are perhaps now extinct. You have your love bites, and heaven knows what else, but will you ever be granted a touch of the sublime by a simple, yet daring, kiss on the cheek at the end of an evening, as she had after the opera one evening with Tom, and will you lie awake for hours afterwards with the sensation, the feel of a parting kiss, still there on your cheek — as lasting, even more so, than any love bite?

  At some point a look, almost of pity, came into Grace’s eyes. And Emily was on the verge of saying, there’s no need for that. But of course, Emily is of an age and a place and a social circle that thought far more than it ever said, and so she said nothing.

  The lesson finished, Grace paid her in cash, and Emily, as she always did, went straight to a small study, just off the lounge room. What she didn’t notice was that while Grace was facing the front door, idly thinking about how to fill the rest of the day, a trick of the mirror on the lounge-room wall gave her a clear view of Miss Hale in her study. She didn’t mean to look, but could not help but see Miss Hale slip the notes into the drawer of her desk. Grace took it in, then promptly forgot about it.

  Emily returned, glancing at the portraits on the sideboard: of family, of friends, and a treasured framed snap of Tom that she had taken just after the Second World War on a visit to Wood’s Hole — and straight away the image conjured up that whole world of vanished feelings. Did we really, did we really feel differently? Still conscious of the mark on Grace’s neck as she approached the front door to farewell the girl — the front door that opened onto a small green that ended with Emily’s church, which had been there since the Revolution — Emily was left (as Grace waved goodbye and called out ‘Next time’) with the lingering feeling that yes, they did feel things differently, and that she had, indeed, let a bit of an animal into the house. She dwells on this once again as Gloucester Harbor appears in front of her: a bit of an animal, wise beyond its years.

  It’s not the prettiest town on the coast and it never was. It’s a working town. A fishing town. Ship building and granite. No, not pretty. A bit scrappy, even, the way working towns are.

  It’s also a town of stories. Fishing tales, sea tales. All both true and untrue. Fishermen’s tales: utterly believable, and fabulous lies. Myths. For it is in working towns like this that mythic memories and tales of the sea are born: memories that survive through successive tellings (each one different from the one before), eventually entering the realm of the mythical and achieving their own truth. The way good tales do. Achieving their own truth to the point that nobody cares any more how they started.

  Emily Hale is walking along one of the wharves. It’s densely packed with boats and crates and nets drying in the sun; behind her, the lobster and chowder bars the boats supply. On one of his trips back here, after the war, she and Tom walked along the same wharf in sunshine like this. And Tom paused all the way along it, glancing at this boat and that, while taking in the panorama of the whole harbour. And when they reached the end of the wharf he turned round to her, a smile on his face, a light in his eyes, like a man who, after a long journey in foreign lands, was finally home again. Not so much a return of the native, as a rediscovery of home. As if knowing the place for the first time.

  A late-morning hush hangs over Gloucester Harbor, broken by occasional talk and shouts. Emily pauses near the end of the wharf. From here she has a good view of the eastern point of the harbour. It’s well populated with holiday houses now, but once there was only one house there. Tom’s. Or rather, his family’s. But she thinks of it as Tom’s. She’s seen the photographs of the family there (Tom’s father lounging on the front veranda), of his brother, sisters and cousins — and Tom, no more than seven or eight years old, playing with a model boat, eyes bright, just like any boy with a new toy. There they lounged, there they sat, there they chatted and laughed or frowned: the family she never had. The photographs a record of summers past. The house would have stood out in those days, before the wood reasserted itself after being cleared and the trees grew back. Up there, amid the boulders and rocks. A lone three-storey residence. Overlooking the harbour, out towards the lighthouse. A clear view of the water, and an easy stroll down to the beach and the jetty where Tom’s boat was moored. A catboat. Small, but big enough to take out into the open sea, get into trouble and come back with tales. For as much as he listened to and absorbed the tales of the fishermen, and as much as he thrived on them, he had a tale of his own.

  And as she stands there recalling the various tellings, she rubs, even caresses, the satchel strung over her shoulder as if it were a living thing in need of soothing and reassurance. Not long, my dears. Not long. Yes, he had his tale too: a tale told not in the poet’s voice or the master’s voice or even the Missouri voice (which he always said he lost when he moved east), but told in what she thinks of as Tom’s informal, at home voice, rising and falling like the waves as they sat on the boulders, looking out over the harbour …

  One moment he was sailing his boat, summer clouds rolling around in the sky, a distant rumbling every now and then, but no great matter. The air was warm, the boat bobbed up and down on the waves, responding to his touch. Happily. A happy boat on a happy sea. The rocks, the Dry Salvages, were in the distance, teeth bared and clearly visible as he steered his way back towards Gloucester around the headland. A happy boat on a happy sea. Distant rumbling in the summer clouds, but no great matter. All manner of things — boat, birds and man — were well. Warm and pleasant, a day in which to doze. And perhaps he did doze off. Because all was well one minute, and then, it seemed, all was changed.

  When the first cold blast hit, the warmth was blown from the air. Still no great matter. Then the second blast of cold air hit, even more suddenly than the first, and not only was the remaining warmth blown away, turning the air winter cold, the light too went from the sky as a giant bank of black cloud rushed in on the wind, blocking out the sun and shutting down the horizon — all as dramatically as a blind being snapped shut. At the same time the catboat’s sail blew out and he stood up, trying to rein it in, pulling hard on the ropes, just as the first wave hit with such a massive whack that his knees buckled and he was almost flung overboard. Then the second wave, and the third. The spray, or was it rain, all around. And the boat was propelled forward, no longer bobbing on a happy sea, but blown by an angry one. No longer calm. All changed. And with no warning. A change that no one saw coming. Like those dramatic shifts in temper that turn some people from happy company to spitting vipers in an instant. The same kind of white anger that she knows he is perfectly capable of and which she has witnessed (the white anger that he reserves for her aunt and anybody else guilty of meddling), the same anger that can take the measured and detached, the impersonal Tom Eliot — loftily above the crowd — and fling him into the midst of it, make him just one of the crowd, after all: an incoherent mess of unmastered emotions that blows the Tom Eliot, the T.S. Eliot he presents to the world, into a thousand bits. So too the air and the sea changed. The sail was blown out like a hot air balloon — except he was now drenched and shivering, and the summer flannels he wore so easily just a short time before hung like lead upon him. And the boat,
far from bobbing up and down and responding readily to his touch, was being driven through the waves by a maniac wind straight towards the rocks: those granite teeth that were visible one minute, then out of sight — at their most dangerous, lost and submerged under the waves.

  And even when he managed to stand on his feet and rein the sail in — a simple task that took all his energy and turned his arms and legs to jelly — the boat was still propelled forward by the wind and the water on an unwavering course that led directly to the rocks, whose gaping teeth — now there, now gone, now there — seemed to be waiting, open-mouthed, for this morsel to arrive. Yet amid it all — the shock of standing in a sea with waves, taller by the minute, hitting the boat one after the other, any one of which could have thrown him into the water — there was still a part of him that was miraculously, or absurdly, detached from it all. Taking notes. A spectator. And while his hands gripped the rudder and he did all he could to steer a safe course, blinded by spray and gulping water, this other, detached part of him, which was observing it all as if not even in the boat but somewhere else, began to look upon the sea as many things. Or did this happen later? Something he added for effect? Probably. All the same, the sea became many things and he had the distinct feeling that he and the boat were being thrown upon the mercy of an angry mob, for suddenly the sea was a mob intent on revolution or murder. A mob possessed that saw no distinction between murder and revolution, revolution and murder; driven forward by forces beyond it, which it neither understood nor cared to, towards a blissful violence that it craved and would unleash at the expense of anything that came between that craving and its resolution. The rocks reared up, and the morsel of Tom and his boat was the very sacrifice the god of the rocks required, the mob of the waves intent on delivering him into those waiting jaws.

  And as he was registering the mob of the sea, his hands aching on the rudder or frantically trying to work the ropes, the waves rose up with faces, faces from the depths. Waves drawn out in the gusts of wind like a woman’s hair, drawn out tight by an invisible hand. And the waves ceased to be an impersonal, nameless and anonymous mob and assumed human faces — all female — drawn up from the depths, all wondrously strange, then strangely recognisable. For these women, it seemed to him at that moment (you must realise, he told her, what moments of such intensity do to the mind), were the faces of the Furies themselves. Furies? Really? Despite what he said, she wondered then, when he first told her, and she wonders now: don’t we make these things up afterwards? And don’t we later convince ourselves that this is how it happened? Like those clear memories of events we, in fact, never witnessed? But as much as she wondered about it all then and wonders now, she never said so because he was always so far into the tale by then, his delight in telling it so obvious, and her delight in hearing it such that she didn’t care. Let it be, the waves of the sea rose up with women’s faces. The Furies. Come for him. And the sea ceased to be indifferent nature — a sheer phenomenon that had fallen on him out of a summer sky — and become something personal. The waves were simply the form the Furies had chosen to take, and this was the destiny they had decided was his. The wind hit him like an assailant; a wave, like a screaming harridan, crashed into the boat, knocking him down — and everything stopped.

  Was he really unconscious, had the wind and the wave hit him that hard, or was he spent, exhausted from struggling against a sea bent on his personal destruction? Or did he decide that the forces lined up against him were so overwhelming that struggle was useless, and that all that was left was to lay down his weary frame and pray to a force beyond him, a force commanding enough to overwhelm the sea itself? It was all said to her in the manner of a Kipling tale. Or a sea-going Dickens’. Or both. A performance. For her.

  And for how long was the world gone? For when he raised his head (was it minutes or seconds?), he had passed the rocks and was being driven into shore, the lighthouse never so welcome, the land never so desired. And when his bobbing cork of a catboat finally rammed into the beach, he lurched into the sand and sank to his knees, whether out of sheer exhaustion or thanks — to that force beyond him to which his weary frame had surrendered, and which had delivered him from the mob and the Furies, and steered him to safety — he didn’t know, either then or years later, when he sat on those boulders with Emily, recounting the tale and losing himself in the telling.

  And what she saw — and couldn’t help but see — was the sheer exhilaration in his eyes as he told it, and which was still there when he finished, on that summer’s day not long after the war. But at the same time, she couldn’t help but feel that the light in his eyes, the delight, had not so much come from her company as the telling. As though he could have told the same tale to just anybody. Did she know even then that her power was leaving her? That, by then, he’d closed in on himself like a sea creature upon being touched and didn’t really want or need anybody any more. Or thought he didn’t. And that one day he would utter the fatal words: too late?

  Where was she in all of this? Where was Emily? Where was the Miss Hale she eventually became to her ‘girls’ — for wherever Miss Hale taught, she gathered round her the crème de la crème of the senior students, and they became her ‘girls’. And she uses that phrase because it is in one of the few contemporary novels she has read — about the prime of a Scottish school teacher, the title of which eludes her, that could so easily have been Emily herself. All through the years of his fame, when she was visiting Tom or he her between the wars, those summers in the same English country town they always went to with her aunt and uncle when Tom was on the run from that fearful woman he married, she either wrote to her girls or shared his letters with them when she returned to America. But only those parts she chose to share, and which she read to them as if they were communications from a distant god, one with whom she just happened to be on first-name terms. It was, she granted, if only to herself, a kind of public confirmation that, as her girls put it, something was ‘going on’, and seen to be going on, between Miss Hale and this distant god, in the same way that the ring that he gave her on one of his visits to the town, and which she no longer wears, was also a confirmation.

  But behind the gift of the ring, the letters and the secret references just for her in his poems and essays (transmitted, she always imagined, like coded messages being beamed out from his world to hers), behind all that just what was really going on, or not going on? And how is it that an event that feels as if it is just waiting to happen or already has never does? And where was Emily in all that talk of the storm and the sea and the waves like revolutionary mobs and pursuing Furies, and death and surrender and salvation, and lighthouses never so welcomed, and land never so craved? Who was she? The adventure, or the hearth of the land at the end of the adventure?

  She follows the wharf to the end, the eastern point of the harbour stretching out on her left, the house and the boulders upon which they sat concealed by the trees. And as well as having a clear memory of his tale, she also remembers him after he told it: quiet, calm, even serene, delighting in the sights and scents of this harbour of his youth; yes, like some modern, everyman Ulysses who had finally come home. For this harbour, the house that overlooks it, the town and the whole coastline, she is sure, was his home. This is where his mythic memories came from, as well as from those childhood years out there in St Louis, before she knew him, where the wide, brown river flowed easily through his dreams and flooded his nightmares: both a kindly god and a terrifying one. Here was his home. And it seemed to her that with every succeeding visit back home he was rediscovering this simple fact. And she could tell him now, as she could have told him then, that wherever you go, Tom, you will always take home with you. It is not just the house and the giant rocks at the front of it that claim you, but the harbour, the pines and this working town that could never be called pretty, but which, all the same, entered your memory and imagination all those years ago, and never let go.

  She looks around at the end of the wharf for th
e right boat, and an old fisherman, one of the locals, emerges from his cabin and waves. The summer sky rumbles. The fisherman, in gumboots and the practical clothes of his trade, shakes her hand and smiles.

  ‘Miss Hale.’

  ‘Henry.’

  He drops his hand, she drops hers.

  ‘It’s been a while,’ he says, noting, she can tell, the changes in her face.

  ‘It has.’

  ‘Have you been well?’

  ‘Well enough.’

  ‘That’s all we can ask.’

  ‘Is it?’

  There is another pause. The question, bristling with impatience, was directed more at the world than the fisherman, and it goes unanswered.

  ‘Just how long has it been?’ Henry frowns.

  ‘It’s been years, Henry. Years.’

  ‘Has it now?’

  There is another distant rumble and she looks to the sky.

  ‘Will it hold?’

  He gives the sky a quick glance. ‘Should. It’s just a bit of grumbling.’

  But it is a judgement offered with a hint of uncertainty, implying that things can change quickly here.

  Emily forgets the weather and looks directly at him. ‘You heard?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He could offer more. She could. But neither of them does. Henry knew Tom all his life. In fact, it was Tom who introduced her to him, almost as if introducing her to a living myth, someone who could just as easily have lived in the distant, early days of the town, and whose stories he had absorbed for years. He was born the same year as Tom, and, she notes, with the faintest trace of amusement, now looks like the Old Man of the Sea himself, but perhaps he is simply one of those, gnarled by constant exposure to the weather, who were always old even when they were young: in the way that Tom, for all his youthful looks, was, in his manner, always an old young man. But as she looks at Henry she decides he has achieved a kind of agelessness, a look that you can’t count in years, one that seems to have transcended them.