The Harbormaster's Daughter

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  She could tell he was aware that they were watching him—his movements were sharper and charged with pride suddenly. After the murder, when the TV crews came to shine their lights into every corner and made Franco a celebrity for a while, he’d learned what was wanted and how to provide it. He might be a fisherman on an empty sea, but that gave him an enviable connection to earthly, watery reality. Too many people spent their days combing through columns of figures and went home to apartments that gazed out into canyons of other apartments. They vacationed at Disney World! They’d been longing for a murder, a really good murder like Sabine’s, to pop life open at a seam, so they could see in, smell it, taste it, drink it down like a fresh, salty oyster.

  Franco strode along the dock to lift the hatch on the upweller, check the oysters growing there. They were all proud of the upweller, which forced water over the oysters so they were able to suck twice as much nutrition every day, and grow twice as fast. Twice the crop meant twice the income—it meant the town might hope to live by sea farming one day. Franco was wearing a striped shirt and a red bandanna. His legs were slightly bowed. It was hopeless.…

  “Sipes,” Hugh said vaguely. “Does anyone know that guy over there?”

  Everything stopped. No one spoke, but they all, except for Hugh apparently, knew the story. Vita could tell by the way they averted their eyes from her. It was the best a small town could offer in the way of privacy, like the way Vita always took care to say “your parents” to Dorotea Machado, as if she didn’t know Dorotea’s father was in jail. Adam, Shyanne, Orson, all had that look Vita recognized—they had heard about her, talked about her, and her mother, and Franco. They knew her story from the television and the newspapers, in a way that had nothing to do with her.

  “He’s the assistant harbormaster,” she told Hugh, hoping to sound noncommittal. “He lives over the Walrus and Carpenter, up on Main Street.”

  Hugh, who had been preoccupied while filling the Charles Emerson Bray Chair, knew nothing of the murder. He did not watch Dateline, Nightline, or 48 Hours, nor did he read the New York Post or even the Daily News. He glanced around, puzzled by the silence, but he was concerned with finding an actor and let his question go.

  “No harm in asking,” Orson said. “Why don’t I just have a word…?”

  Sam glanced at Vita, over Shyanne’s head. Of course he was curious. Everyone was. Vita wished to heaven that she could pull her head in like a turtle. There always seemed to be a little spotlight following her, a light that made her look all wrong.

  They watched Orson go, his small figure enclosed in a heavy wool cape whose ends caught the wind that was scuffing whitecaps from glass green waves. Franco had come out of the back and was leaning in that doorway, looking toward them with those Neves eyes that could see fish fifty yards underwater. He welcomed Orson with a glad smile, the way he welcomed almost anyone. Of course. Orson drank at the Walrus and Carpenter; Franco knew him as well as if he were family. Or better. As she watched, Vita realized how well she did know her father. She’d been studying him all her life, with a fierce intensity. There he was, gracious, smiling—you’d think he was standing on the steps of the White House, not in the tilting doorway of the harbormaster’s shack. Somehow the murder that had left her lost and confused had made him the town’s unofficial mayor.

  She turned away, with a stone of defiance in her chest, and found herself face-to-face with Adam.

  “Hi,” she said.

  He looked as if one of the locust trees had piped up, and she realized she’d never dared speak to him before. Then he smiled.

  “Hi.”

  “That’s my father,” she admitted.

  “Yeah, I know.” He spoke kindly and Vita remembered suddenly that his mother had fallen in love with a woman a few years back, and left her family, only to return full of regret a few months later. She took up fitness and was always in some sort of Lycra outfit now, pedaling by or running by or swimming by, so there was never an opportunity to chat and you really couldn’t mention her without praising her. The waters of propriety had closed over the incident; it would be rude to bring it up now. So maybe Adam understood better than someone else might.

  “There must be fifty other boatswain types in town. Why him?” Vita said.

  Shyanne shot them a glance that would have silenced Vita any other time, but now, cheeks flaming, she kept talking. Franco was walking back toward them with Orson. She would not let him see how shy and awkward she was.

  “Do you know what your costume will be?” she asked Adam. It was the only sentence she could grab hold of.

  “No,” he said. “Which I’m kind of glad about, since I’m sure it’ll involve tights.”

  It was her turn to speak. Franco was coming closer, looking serious as he explained something to Orson.

  “I like tights,” Vita blurted. “I’ve always thought I’d have my first kiss with a man in tights.”

  An icicle went through her heart. What had she said? If she’d had a flirtatious, salacious lilt like Shyanne, it might have been okay, but she had actually confessed something, and she had said it in a naked, open voice, as if she and Adam had been friends forever, as if… oh, she couldn’t think at all.

  He blinked, and looked at her again, surprised.

  “I mean,” she began… but she couldn’t think of a way to cover it. That was why she never said anything, because every time she opened her damned mouth, she’d speak one of those truths everyone else had secretly agreed not to mention.

  Shyanne stepped behind Adam and her hands slipped around his chest, pulling him back against her. She was so exalted in the hierarchy at school that she had the absolute right to do this and whatever else she liked. But his face tensed and he squirmed away from her.

  “Why, do you think?” he asked, and Vita realized she knew the answer.

  “Because…” She was staring at the blazing green grass around her sneakers; her eyes were stuck there. “If it’s in Shakespeare, then it has to be beautiful.” She had exposed the tenderest piece of herself, that part that imagined love must come with great, brave, Shakespearean grandeur, a pas de deux between a man and a woman whose spirits would swirl together like tigers turning to butter. A little girl’s foolish dream. She prepared to feel him rip it in two.

  “I guess you haven’t read King Lear,” he said, not in the dickhead way most boys would have, but with a sweet, inquiring smile, as if he felt the same way she did, but with less optimism.

  “We’re looking for someone with a certain… maritime flair,” Hugh was saying, and Vita saw the word flair catch Franco: His shoulders straightened; he began to glow.

  “It’s a small part—the boatswain—but an essential one. Shakespeare…”

  “Shakespeare?” Franco said, with a crooked smile. His face was creased and weathered, an old fisherman’s complexion, but his eyes were full of life and humor. He had not graduated from high school; the fish had been teeming back then and his first son was on the way. He might never have spoken the name Shakespeare before—it was a password to a realm where he didn’t belong. But it pleased him that the current of his life had carried him here. Nervous, he undid the top button of his shirt; this always had an effect. He looked the part, and felt it. Fishing was his heritage, and if it had left him without financial resources, it had nevertheless given him the most surprising benefits. Suspected of murder, he’d become famous. Next? Shakespeare.

  “Shakespeare has been ruined by the academics,” Hugh rushed to explain. It was a confession he forced himself to make often. “He intended to entertain, and so do we.”

  “Danielle likes me home…” Franco said.

  “Danielle will be proud!” Orson said. “Franco, who else could play the part of the boatswain? Antone Pavao? Manny Soares?”

  He was appealing to the truest and most secret of Franco’s vanities. Yes, he was a native, in the local definition of the word: His father had come from Gelfa, he’d been baptized at Our Lady and married there,
had gone to work on his father’s boat. His mother kept to her house, rarely venturing beyond the backyard. His father drove the length of the wharf—the Portuguese trail, they called it— every day, stopping to smoke and talk with his friends. Franco’s openness, his curiosity, his energy, had carried him further. The strangers who lived in Oyster Creek, painters, editors, psychoanalysts, might have been giraffes, lizards, and owls to his parents: to be avoided, ignored or occasionally discussed with a smile and a shake of the head. But Franco was a man of the world.

  “Manny and Antone, they’re good guys,” he said, automatically defensive. They both owned new houses back in Cranberry Corners, Ford F150 pickups, and big fast boats, though they’d long since given up fishing. But they’d never crossed the threshold into the other world, except maybe to install a new appliance.

  “Fine fellows, absolutely,” Orson agreed. Neither of these men would have answered Orson if he’d tried to strike up a conversation. In their younger days they’d have shoved him off the sidewalk and if he had grumbled, they would have beaten him bloody on principle. Shakespeareans they were not. “But they were never described as… ‘dark and broad-shouldered,’ was it?”

  “‘Like a sailor just returned from a three-years voyage.’ That was the New York Times,” Franco said. The reporter had seemed so prim and dour, he wouldn’t have imagined she could think that way. But women were constantly surprising him, and there was always some moment in any conversation when he would feel himself slipping, falling under a woman’s sway. And then, she would fall under his. Sabine had been an artist, an intellectual, and still he had made his impression. He took the group in—Orson he had known forever; two gay guys such as would never come into the Walrus or out on the clam flats; Adam Capshaw, Hank’s son; Shyanne, who reminded him of her mother at that age—that same plush swaybacked blonde… and… He blinked. Dear God, it was Vita. Ten steps away, but he hadn’t recognized her. Her hood was up, her hands shoved in her sweatshirt pockets. Yes, LaRee saw to it he was invited to everything, and he and Danielle went to her chorus recitals, and to see her get the English Department prize, but… she was a teenager, you couldn’t expect too much. And he wasn’t going to make a fool of himself at some parent-teacher meeting, when Vita would have written papers on books he’d never heard of, never mind read. If she’d been a boy, they could have tossed a ball around, studied Morse code—that would have counted as a bond. If she’d been Shyanne—she and Danielle would have gone shopping together and gotten manicures and those things, and they’d have loved him together, the way mothers and daughters did. But she wasn’t Shyanne; she was Sabine’s daughter somehow, not his.

  If he were capable of saying no, his life would have been entirely different. “I work all summer, almost every night,” he tried.

  “We’ll rehearse around your schedule,” Hugh said. “We’ll make it work.”

  “You’ll enjoy it, Franco. You’re a natural,” Orson said. Couldn’t one person, one time, say Vita was “a natural”? Never. She was the one who tried so hard they gave her a part because they felt sorry for her. Franco, looking around at his new friends, met his daughter’s eyes. She instantly averted them.

  “Excellent!” Hugh said. “This is our little troupe. Orson you know, of course, and this is Sam, and Leo (they came forward together, Leo’s hand gently against Sam’s back), Shyanne, Adam, Vita…”

  She put out her hand; she was not going to let Hugh guess the truth. “Nice to meet you,” she said loudly. It was practically true. Leo cocked an eyebrow and this felt like reassurance.

  “Vita…” Too much rushed into his heart—regret, disappointment; a frustrated, battered kind of love. Danielle had managed in spite of his failures, his boys had taken the best of him and used it to push on, to get over the bridge and become Americans, instead of living in an extended immigrant twilight here as Portagees. He remembered the way Danielle had held Vita when she was a little girl, so tight. She had always wanted a girl, and now he had one, who couldn’t be hers. He saw Sabine’s face, warm and full of tender interest at first, and finally twisted and hateful, a shrew. All of the old muck was raked up every time he saw the child.

  “You’re an actress,” he said, trying to sound intrigued, impressed, proud. “Gonna grow up to be a movie star.”

  “An actor,” she said crisply, even haughtily. “On a stage. I hate the movies.”

  Of course he would assume she was looking for fame! What she wanted was understanding, to step into another skin and know how it might feel. His assumptions only showed his own limits; they didn’t matter a damn. Looking past his shoulder, she saw a hawk circling, so low she could see the soft down ruffling under its wings. And the water stretching away for miles… All lives are vast, infinite. Her mother’s was over, hers was just beginning. She felt the same as when she was standing on the high dune over the Outer Beach: Some things were so desolate they began to be beautiful.

  11

  SALVAGE

  When LaRee arrived to pick her up, Vita made a little show of not noticing, continuing her conversation with Adam, nodding super-seriously at whatever he was saying. She didn’t need LaRee the way she used to—did everyone see? The clouds were racing away to the east. Blue sky emerged, and a sun so low that the locust trees cast serpentine shadows. Halyards rang against their masts. Leo tapped Vita on the shoulder and pointed to LaRee’s car. And here Vita came, hands plunged into the pockets of her jacket, her ponytail bobbing. She hopped in lightly, then crossed her arms and scrunched her face into a frown so tight LaRee nearly laughed.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “He’s there. Didn’t you see?”

  “You mean Franco?”

  “He’s in the show, LaRee. They put him in the show.”

  “He’s in the show?” LaRee gave a little hoot. Franco’s knack for popping up wherever there was a spotlight would never cease to amaze her. Vita was tensed into a fury and looked the way she used to before a temper tantrum when she was four. The trick was to get her to laugh.

  “Is he portraying a suave country-club type?” LaRee asked. “Or a wise old man, dispensing parables from the mouth of a cave?”

  “LaRee, it’s Shakespeare,” Vita said, refusing to crack a smile.

  “Bottom, then? Puck? Does he do a funny little dance? Does he smoke a cigar?”

  “He’s the boatswain.”

  “Typecasting! Abhorrent.”

  They were driving up Back Street, past the little houses that had belonged to fishermen and shopkeepers a hundred years ago, though only the wealthy could afford them now. They were simple, solid houses built tight as ships’ hulls, and from their upper windows you could see over the bay. Some of them had the old Indian shutters, attached inside the windows so they could be closed against intruders.

  The town was built on a cluster of three hills around the harbor, and this, the northernmost, had once been crowned by the Calliope Hotel, a gabled, turreted Victorian fantasia with little balconies and pennants flying and a row of rocking chairs along the front porch—a last vestige of the town’s time of elegance, when trains brought families from New York and Boston to the seaside, and plein air painters lined the pier with their easels. LaRee’s first job in Oyster Creek had been waitressing at the Calliope, but it had already been fading by then, and the next winter it burned down.

  The Calliope fire was one of those defining moments in the town’s history, like the Gray murder, except that where people whispered about the murder, they spoke of the fire with nostalgia; they went over every moment again and again. How wonderful it had been to come together like that against a terrible threat! “Spontaneous combustion,” people would say still, shaking their heads, and you’d know immediately that they were seeing that night, the town’s skyline lit orange, great flaming wings overhead—that was what it had looked like, as the wind took shingles and curtains and anything it could, blowing them across the rooftops to start new fires wherever they landed. Every man in town belonged
to the fire department, and the women had followed the wind east, using garden hoses to wet everything down until the departments from Wellfleet and Provincetown arrived. The best night ever—that was how it had felt. The night she and Drew fell in love. When he left he said all the drama of the fire had confused him, turned him from the path he’d meant to follow. And she had asked him how twelve years could constitute a detour—twelve years during which he’d refused to consider having children and… oh, it was water under the bridge. He’d done the best he could; they both had.

  “LaRee, you know what it’s going to be like,” Vita said. “They’re all going to gather around him and go on about what an interesting type he is and… it’s just going to be famous murder all over again.”

  LaRee laughed, though it might have been more honest to cry. If the fire had resulted from neglect, old wiring plus a roof leak in a building the owners couldn’t afford to renovate… well, the murder was that way, too. Except the materials weren’t chemical but emotional, and the disaster hadn’t brought people together but pushed them apart. The fire could be recalled with pride, but someone needed to bear the shame of the murder, to take the onus off the town.

  “Funny. Ha-ha,” Vita said, but she was laughing, too.

  “Well, don’t be witty if you don’t want me to laugh.” LaRee reached over and took her daughter’s hand. All the years… Holding Vita tight through the first night, Sabine’s funeral, the child understanding and not understanding that her mother was gone forever… helping her balance on the ice skates later that winter, seeing her stand up suddenly and say, “I can do it,” and skate off across the ice with those little clicking steps that had never approached gliding but had gotten her where she meant to go… Finding ways to make life safe and steady, making sure there were beautiful surprises along with the discouraging ones—cookies when she came home from school, the miniature rose in a pot on the table, Bumble the cat curled up in a patch of afternoon sun. Holding the ice pack on the bruise, explaining that the mean girl had the problem, reinforcing the sugar cube model of the United States Capitol with popsicle sticks, making sure the gossip about Sabine never reached her, that the tabloids with their headlines were folded away out of sight… helping her see, when she didn’t win the blue or the red or even the yellow ribbon, that she still had reason to be proud. And always, wanting to grab someone, anyone, by the lapels and say, “She has suffered enough. The world owes her happiness from now on.”