He met Tom, when they were young, on this wharf. Henry, the fisherman’s son; Tom, with a look about him that spoke of money. But all the same, a kid looking for a bit of excitement. Something outside his world. And it was Henry who arranged for Tom to go fishing with them, who introduced Tom to the sea; and Henry who was responsible for Tom’s first glimpse of the rocks, coming back in one day from one of those trips that the young Tom never told his parents about. This was a Tom they never knew. And Emily is sure that the Tom Henry knew was another Tom altogether from the one who smoked French cigarettes and read French verse as if, outside of France, he alone understood it. Not her Tom, not his parents’ Tom or his brother’s or his sisters’ Tom — but another one. All housed inside the public Tom. How many Toms were there? How many Emilys?
‘Yes, I expected you had.’
Her fingers caress the satchel slung over her shoulder.
‘You got my message?’
‘I’m here,’ he smiles.
‘As I am. The two of us.’
And here she lets out a faint sigh and closes her eyes. The slightest betrayal of the emotional forces that have brought her here; the slightest hint that this composed, upright woman in her mid-seventies is not as composed as the world might think, and that she has, indeed, been well enough these last few years — but no more than that.
‘Well then,’ she says, ‘shall we do it? Shall we get the thing done?’
‘Yes. No point hanging about. It’s the Dry Salvages you want, then?’
‘It is.’
‘You know we can’t go too close?’
‘I know.’
‘Only fools get too close.’
‘Or the foolhardy. Or those who just don’t care any more.’
Henry makes no answer, only looks at her with the same uncertainty with which he eyes the sky.
He steps down onto the boat, with its nets and craypots strewn across the deck, for Henry still fishes, still goes out to sea, because — he’s said often enough to anyone who’ll listen — what else would he do? And as she points her foot towards the deck he offers to take the satchel from her, but she snatches it back.
‘No!’
Her action is swift. Her voice shrill. Why, she seems to be saying, why do you all want them?
He is concerned, and wary, taking her hand instead. ‘I was just trying to make things easier for you.’
‘Oh?’ she asks, in a way that suggests there’s always something more.
Her mood settles as her feet land on the deck. ‘No need, Henry. I can do this.’
She stands there, taking in the residual smells of the morning’s catch, of fish and lobster and squid, quietly rebuking herself for the outburst — for just as he heard about the death of Tom on a cold January day earlier in the year, he surely also hears from time to time about Emily: that friends are deserting her, that she took certain things badly and has become what the world calls a ‘difficult’ woman. Even, depending on whom you talk to, a little bit mad.
Henry loosens the rope securing them to the wharf, and starts the engine. Soon they are moving out, leaving the wharf and the land behind. The wharves and port buildings begin to pass slowly by, the lighthouse awaits. As does the open sea. Out there the Furies ride the surf and the mob of the waves gathers as the sky rumbles.
As they near Eastern Point the lighthouse looms in front of them, white against a swirling, changing sky. The boat, a substantial one built for the open sea, cuts through the swells. Henry, at the wheel, says nothing. Neither does Emily. The silence suits her. Even though she lives only a modest distance away she hasn’t seen this coastline for years. Either by accident or on purpose. Or, she ponders, is it accidentally on purpose? It is an annoying phrase to the likes of Emily Hale, and she is annoyed with herself for using it. If only in thought. But, like certain annoying phrases and jingles, it sticks. And she tells herself that whether we like them or not they spring to mind and find speech at the oddest times, and when we do use them, however accidentally, we surrender the moral authority to condemn them. It’s like humming one of those songs (pop, they call them) that are everywhere now an hour after you disdained it.
What did her Tom make of this world? This world in which young people seem to be forever running from one place to another. They never seem to walk. That’s because they’re young, she smiles. And wasn’t it always like that? All the same, she can’t help but feel that the very fact that everything is young now — on the television and at the cinema and on the covers of tacky, coloured magazines that bulge from newsstands like bunches of plastic flowers — is odd. Even suspicious. As though somebody has only just discovered that youth has money and will pay to see itself up there on television screens and on magazine covers. And so youth itself, she imagines, becomes not only the subject of television programs and magazine articles, but the product as well. Is that what’s different, or was it always like that? She doubts it. This is a different kind of youth.
What did he make of this world? She’ll never know because she never had the chance to ask him. They’d stopped seeing each other, talking to each other and writing to each other by then — when the world, abruptly, turned young and she felt not only deserted and alone, but quite old. As though all the expectation and the waiting for Tom had somehow kept her young. But once there was nothing left to wait for, once she’d lost him for the second time, once he was irrevocably gone from her life and all the waiting had come to nothing, that which had sustained her left her. And it was during this time that she first felt herself to be, and pronounced herself, a spinster. A hateful word that conjured up images of ugly women in fairy tales. And as much as she told herself not to use it, she did. It was, she concluded, due to a sort of self-contempt, as though she had failed in some way, and the whole long wait for nothing in the end was her fault. And the more she told herself it wasn’t, the more she denied the charge of spinsterhood (as though delivered by a ghostly chorus of long-dead aunts), the more it fell upon her, as though it was her destiny, all she deserved. She had waited, in parlour and garden, all her life. And in the end, all her waiting had come to nothing.
She looks round at the shoreline and watches as the lighthouse slowly recedes. The previous year, in late summer or the fall, she’d watched on television the arrival in New York of a group of young musicians who looked vaguely like French intellectuals, but who spoke in interviews with a strong northern English accent that she knew well from her travels. Not from the village in which she nearly always met Tom, but from trips further north. Taken to fill in time while Tom wasn’t around or to be near Tom while he gave a lecture or a reading. And always, more or less, his secret — the secret Miss Hale who wasn’t there, who was only spoken of in trusted circles. But when he wasn’t in the village or back in London, she explored the rest of the country. Often the north. And so she felt a certain connection with these young musicians, as though she and they had something in common. Felt a surprising affection, even. For they brought with them — in their very voices — echoes and hints of a place and time when the waiting was as real as the possibility of the dreams of dreaming waves coming true.
It was the only time she’s ever felt any genuine connection with this new world, for their voices conjured up her past. And it’s not as though she finds this new world confusing or baffling. It’s just not hers any more. And for the first time in her life she’s beginning to think that you can live too long.
From time to time Henry looks round for her, almost as though he’s checking she’s still there. As though he’s read her thoughts. And there she is, clutching that damn satchel and whatever is in it, riding the jolts of the waves and looking out to sea like some sailor’s widow, even though there’s nothing left to wait for.
Is that what he sees? Why not? It’s what she herself sees at this moment. And the thought that you can live too long returns. But it’s not frightening. No. There’s something comfortably logical, even symmetrical, she imagines, about beginnings, middles
and, yes, endings, that makes death … do-able.
4.
There’s really only one main street in the town, and not much to look at there anyway. Not for the likes of Grace and Ted. But there is a music shop. There are music shops everywhere now, because music is everywhere. They are standing at the front window of the shop, gazing at an electric guitar. They have been for a while. Ted is dreaming out loud, telling her just what he could do with a guitar like that if he only had the money to buy it, and Grace is nodding, but only half listening.
It’s morning, bright and sunny, and a short time ago Grace watched Miss Hale drive along the main street and out of town. She knew it was Miss Hale at a glance. That car. You couldn’t mistake it. And as Ted is talking, she rubs the love bite on her neck, Miss Hale’s small lounge room appearing before her as she does: the old furniture, the paintings and framed qualifications on the walls, and the sideboard built from the kind of dark red wood that tells you it’s expensive. And on top of the sideboard, framed snaps of people and faces, young then but old now, like the furniture. Or dead. And one of the snaps she knows is important. She knows this one, above all the others, is important, because she caught Miss Hale looking at it one day during her lesson. And not just casually, but puzzled and lost in it. To the point that when she looked up and saw Grace she was momentarily surprised by her presence, then regained herself.
And Grace is thinking of the man in that photograph now as Ted goes on and on about the guitar. He’s somebody famous, very famous, she knows that. Miss Hale is one of those women that a town like this talks about. And it’s well known that she and somebody famous had a thing. Or almost had a thing. And Grace, with the unerring accuracy of the young (who don’t appear to be noticing anything around them, but who are taking in everything), has long concluded that this oldish-looking man with a part down the middle of his hair, and who looks so English, is that someone famous. But she’s never got around to asking just who he is, for a number of reasons. Mostly because it’s Miss Hale’s business. Had she ever asked and had Miss Hale ever replied ‘That’s Tom. Tom Eliot’, it still wouldn’t have meant anything. It’s not ‘Tom’ that makes the name Eliot distinctive, it’s the ‘T.S.’. She’s heard of T.S. Eliot, a sort of Shakespeare. He’s on her ‘should read’ list. One day. A kind of duty, like Shakespeare. But she hasn’t read him and has never seen a photograph of him. Or if she has, she wouldn’t have known who it was. No, all she hears about is this ‘special friend’, this ‘companion’, and while she knows it’s code for someone famous, she’s never known who. But she’s also never asked about the photograph because, in his tweed suit, tweed cap, short pants and long socks (leaning against what is unmistakeably Miss Hale’s car), he looks like a golfer. And whenever she looks at the photograph or occasionally, for no particular reason, thinks of that room, she sees this golfer. And who asks about golfers? Only her father. And so, over the months that she’s been going to Miss Hale, she’s come to think of him as this golfer: this famous golfer that Miss Hale once had a thing with.
There are times when she doesn’t mind being in that room: the lessons pass the time and she does get something from them. And there are other times when she just can’t wait to get out, as if she were suffocating. Just as there are times when she likes Miss Hale, quite likes her — and other times when she wants to shake her and shake her until something like the real Miss Hale finally pipes up and she drops the whole nineteenth-century Henry James thing altogether. And although she has never read T.S. Eliot, Grace has read Henry James. Even likes him. Sort of fell into him one classically rainy afternoon. Washington Square. She lives just off Washington Square, was automatically drawn to the book because of the title, and after reading it was haunted by the characters and that whole world of Henry James for weeks. It’s one of the things that she and Miss Hale have in common, one of those things that spans the ages between them and gives Grace a way of picturing Miss Hale in her time and place — something that makes her understandable. Turns Miss Hale into a kind of Catherine, forever waiting. Not that she’s ever mentioned this to her. No, she might like James, but she has no desire to live her life as if having been written by him. But Miss Hale — and the name says it all — seems to. Whether she knows it or not. And rather than have a discussion with Miss Hale about James, she’d like to shake Henry James right out of her and see what’s left. If anything.
Then Ted asks her something and she’s wrenched from Miss Hale’s lounge room and is back on the street.
‘It’s a beauty. What do you think?’
She shrugs, he turns back to the window. Ted’s not his real name. It’s actually Waldo, or Humphrey, or something that belongs in a circus. And he wasn’t having that, so he called himself Eddie. After one of those Eddies from the fifties. And soon everybody shortened it to Ted. And that was that. She’s eighteen, he’s twenty-two. Only four years difference, but there are times when his fifties feel as distant to her as Miss Hale’s Boston tales, in those glimpses she gives of her youth, where the real Miss Hale, no doubt, was left behind.
Grace is from New York. Her father is a lecturer. Sociology. Weber, except you say Vaber. He’s here in New England for six months, five of which are up, before they go back to New York. Her mother disappeared with another academic years before. Philosophy. Kant. Except you say … Well, the joke (according to her father) was that he couldn’t bring himself to say it. She grins. He would say that. Her mother and her philosopher disappeared somewhere into New Zealand. Have been there for years, and she rarely hears from her, let alone sees her. She tells herself that she never really knew her (she was two years old when she left) and you can’t miss what you’ve never had. But all her friends tell Grace that as soon as she turns thirty — on the stroke of midnight — she’s going to crumble into a screaming heap and call for her mama.
She’s finished high school and come September she’ll go to university. Which one they’re not sure, because she only just scraped through high school. All the same, she told Miss Hale one day that she was going to Harvard in the fall, and a look of envy and longing came instantly into Miss Hale’s eyes. And the meaning of the look was clear: that was never possible in my time. You young people, with your freedoms and your love bites. She never said this, of course. But she didn’t have to. And Grace added that she didn’t want to go to Harvard or Princeton or Yale or Rutgers — and she pronounced them all with a sort of jaunty, bouncing rhythm — all she wanted to do was sing in a band. And she knows she can sing, really sing (it’s been confirmed by Miss Hale), better than most of the singers in the bands she hears on records. But her father insists she find a university, get a degree and then she can sing her heart out. And when she said this, Miss Hale took on a sympathetic look that said, you and I … we might not be so different, after all. At least, it looked like that.
So this is all a kind of in-between time for Grace. And when they first came to the town she couldn’t believe she’d last a week, let alone six months. There was nothing, nothing to do. Then she met Ted. Well, she had to eventually. Small town. Big history, but small town. And she knew straight away that he was one of those who are always two steps behind the times. But he had a touch of excitement about him. Danger, even. A bit of an animal. Been in trouble with the police. Did a job once. Nothing much. Breakin, a few dollars. He shrugged it off when he told her as though everyone did it. But apart from this, one of the things that Ted had going for him was that he had a car (he does deliveries). That and his looks. Dark eyes. The brooding eyes of a poet, except he’s not a poet’s bootlace. But he’s got the looks. The right looks at the right time. And this, she knows already, is one of those times in her life she will occasionally look back on and pause for a while, when she’s old enough to start looking back. And although Grace was sort of imprisoned in a small town, with her father at work all day, she also had more freedom or, rather, the chance for more freedom than she’d known before. And a car was freedom. And Ted, she could tell, would be fun
enough. A phase, she smiles to herself as she points to something on the guitar and asks what it is. Her Ted phase.
‘It’s the tremolo arm,’ he says.
She’s heard of tremolo arms, pretty much in the same way as she’s heard of Frank Sinatra. And as she looks at the guitar, Ted all excited and jumpy like a fifteen-year-old, she can see straight away that it’s yesterday’s guitar. The kind of guitar that was always strung around the necks of yesterday’s singers. The old singers, all those forgotten Eddies, played guitars like this. No one plays them any more, not on television. That’s why it’s going cheap. And with that thought, she is also aware once again of the gap between them. Not just in years, but everything else. Sometimes the difference between one decade and the one that follows can be as dramatic as a shift in generations. And to Grace, the difference between the fifties and the sixties is one of those shifts. Suddenly, Elvis was an old fart. And overnight. How often does that happen? And as Ted stands in front of yesterday’s guitar, all jumpy and excited, it’s the eighteen-year-old Grace who feels the older of the two. And there’s sadness in his excitement, for she knows that this is Ted’s lot, Ted’s life: two steps behind the times, and getting excited over yesterday’s guitar.
‘If I had the money I’d buy it now. Just walk right in and walk right out strumming it. Would you like that?’
‘I would,’ she laughs. That’s the other thing about Ted, he makes you laugh. Yes, she would like to see it. And she means it. It’s impossible not to get caught up in his enthusiasm. For it’s got a kind of innocence to it that’ll never go. He’ll be fifty, she thinks with amusement, and still be saying things like that. And with that thought comes a wave of affection for Ted, or for herself and all her friends who will wake one day and be fifty. She’ll just have to imagine Ted at fifty, because she won’t be there. And as much as it’s yesterday’s guitar and yesterday’s dream, she wants him to have it because, heaven knows, for all the life and fun that Ted’s got in him, life isn’t going to give him much fun in return. Especially when that brushed-back hair thins, for Ted was born to go bald.
A New England Affair Page 5
