The Harbormaster's Daughter

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “You know so much…” Vita burst out in sympathy, then stiffened.

  “Hardly,” LaRee said. “Even now I’m expecting someone to correct my pronunciation. And I knew a lot less back then. I hadn’t heard of anyone, or been anywhere, and there was Sabine.… Once, there was a visiting poet, and I went to hear him speak, and I was thinking how amazing it was to be at college and meet people like that who had Pulitzer prizes and talked about Yeats as if he was just their next-door neighbor.… And in the morning I went to Sabine’s room to borrow her shampoo and there was the writer asleep next to her! And she…”

  Vita was listening so intently, LaRee had to take a breath and think twice. Sabine had shrugged off her tryst with the great poet, said that she didn’t see why women shouldn’t be able to make conquests just like men, that once she’d gotten a famous sculptor to strip naked for her, and then when he was standing there fleshy and sagging, she told him she’d changed her mind and sent him away. That she was leaving out. “I was jealous of Sabine,” she said. “Probably I shouldn’t have been, but I was young and I would fall desperately in love with some boy or other.… But real men fell for your mom. She was beautiful and sophisticated and adventurous, and I was just another girl.”

  “LaRee,” Vita said, her reserve breaking. “Nothing is better than being you.”

  “My lovely girl,” LaRee said. “I do feel that now, but at the time, I was young and very uncertain.”

  Vita looked down. “Like me,” she said.

  “A little. Your mom named you after Vita Sackville-West, did you know that?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “She was a writer, but she was famous for her love affairs really. Your mom wanted you to be free to live, not cramped by convention.”

  LaRee’s given name was Laura, after a great-aunt who “was at the round table with Dorothy Parker,” according to her mother, who had never, ever told a simple truth. LaRee figured Great-aunt Laura had been to the Algonquin once, perhaps during Dorothy Parker’s life span, perhaps not. Her mother was always alluding to family members who were “very important during the Roosevelt years,” but whatever glory there might have been once was utterly lost by the time LaRee was born. Her father was an optometrist, and they had lived in a small, plain house chosen because it had good parking and an office space attached. The poor man had stood by in wooden silence as his wife taunted him—he never got the bills sent out, never went after the debts owed, fell for any sob story, was still tangled in his mother’s apron strings, had not the fire of true genius (as she, whose family was very important during the Roosevelt years, ought to know).… Then her car slid off the road into a telephone pole, in the first little snow of the year. The house went silent. Her brother, Robin, had been twelve and followed the prescribed path until he was in his mid-twenties and the back injury gave him reason to move back home. He continued to insult his father as if it were a way of keeping his mother alive. Their father barely seemed to notice, as if he was just glad for the company. When he wasn’t in his office, he was reading the newspaper, sighing and shaking his head. “Well, people will always need eyeglasses,” he’d say. “An optometrist never lacks.”

  Without noticing, she had followed in his footsteps. People would always need nurses, too. Laura had become Laurie in high school and it was easy enough to start emphasizing the second syllable when she got to college. It had seemed to sound French that way.

  “But LaRee doesn’t sound French at all,” Sabine had said. France, up to and including Ingres and the Sorbonne, where she had studied one semester, was Sabine’s territory. Sabine was named for her grandmother, whose portrait hung in the National Gallery. “Miss Sabine Newbold with her Canary.” Her tuition was paid from the grandmother’s trust, but she was one of six children from her father’s four marriages. Her little inheritance from her mother was in trust for Vita’s care now.

  “Your mom was beautiful,” LaRee said to Vita, with an effort of generosity. “And very delicate, and she’d grown up around art, so she was naturally artful.”

  “Which is why you’re so disappointed in me.”

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  “You know exactly what I mean,” Vita said, tugging her hair back tight as an example. “You wish I wore little dresses and had perfect hair like the others. You’d like me to be more like… Shyanne!”

  “Shyanne? The girl with the neon brassiere? How could you think such a thing?”

  “I see you looking at them, LaRee. And then you look at me like ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ You’re like, ‘Why don’t you wear your hair out?’ and ‘You wear that sweater every day…’ You think I’m ugly and you want to fix me.”

  “Oh, Vita…” Of course she would see it this way. If LaRee looked longingly at girls in pretty dresses it was because they seemed to have the happiness she wanted for Vita.

  “I know you are beautiful, and I try to help bring that beauty out. You want all truth, the awful truth. But truth isn’t necessarily awful.”

  “‘Those are pearls that were his eyes,’” Vita quoted, to no one in particular. And to LaRee, harshly, “Some truth is awful. Maybe you hate me because you were jealous of Sabine.”

  “I suppose that could be.” Let her think about it, see if she could feel it. “I think she was jealous of me, too,” LaRee said.

  “Why would anyone be jealous of you?” Vita asked, sitting down on the couch suddenly.

  LaRee had to laugh. “Well, that does seem like a good question! I don’t think it was anything I had but more that she was so at sea with herself, so afraid of being ordinary. And I was ordinary—a nurse who married a carpenter, opened a savings account, planted a vegetable garden.… But I didn’t mind it. In fact I was more or less happy that way. When she first told me she was moving to Oyster Creek, I thought—‘Of course, I always knew I’d end up taking care of her.’”

  “So, you hated her.”

  “Oh God, yes I did. Sometimes, I hated her. After… after she died…” All that night while Vita slept, LaRee had realized in little waves how unkind she had been. She’d refused to be impressed, when it was so important to Sabine to impress people. The least she could have done would have been to say how brave her friend was, to pursue… whatever she was pursuing… so boldly. She could have said that it was wonderful to know a picture of your grandmother hung in the National Gallery, that it gave you ground to stand on, from which to reach higher.… Except, if she admitted such a thing, she’d have had to give in to Sabine and admit that she herself was less interesting, less worthy somehow. So she’d made sure to sound bored when Sabine told her about the painting, to raise an eyebrow just slightly at such bragging. Yes, the optometrist’s daughter was very clear-sighted about the airs others gave themselves.

  That was what she’d kept from Vita—her mother’s genius. It was a last little act of revenge, and it was disguised as goodness: Of course she had kept the squalid story of the murder from the child, but she had hidden the rest, too.

  “After she died I realized how fragile she’d been and how brave to keep living, going ahead, even when she must have felt completely lost. All the things I hated about her seemed so small they were hardly worth noticing, just ways of protecting herself from a frightening world. I called some of her old friends from the city and invited them to the funeral, and one man who she’d talked and talked about didn’t even seem to remember her. But there were other things, and once she wasn’t there, being more chic and worldly than I was all the time, I could see them.”

  She had never had Vita’s attention so completely. But one dishonest syllable and the connection would break.

  “Like what?”

  “That she had loved the world enough to think how the sky might be the same color as a dress in a French painting.”

  “Enough to have an affair with a man who drove the septic truck.”

  “She was in love with your father, of all people. She was… literally crazy in love with him.
”

  “What do you mean, ‘of all people’?”

  “Well, he wasn’t her usual type! She liked to have someone who would distinguish her, a professor, or an heir. But Franco? The assistant harbormaster of Oyster Creek, Massachusetts? He was sort of a comedown.”

  “LaRee!” But Vita was laughing, happily. Candor was building a tentative bridge between them.

  “No one will ever be such a big deal in Rome as Franco is here. He understands the ocean, for God’s sake! Sabine inherited a worn-down fortune, Franco inherited a rusty dragger. And no fish in the bay. But he’s rolled with the punches; he’s managed a life in spite of all the changes in the world. To her, to marry Franco would have been better than marrying a prince!

  “So, she’d go down to the Walrus and he was the bartender; it was his job to make her a drink. She had the idea that they were star-crossed lovers, that he stayed with Danielle because he was too guilty to leave. But… Franco and Danielle have known each other all their lives. If he left her he’d be walking out of his own life. That didn’t make sense to Sabine. She was younger and prettier and she’d had this glamorous life and she just couldn’t believe Franco wouldn’t drop everything to be with her. It was the last straw, and all the feeling that went into that love soured into retaliation. She’d accuse him of not caring about his own daughter, she forced him to tell Danielle about you, she sued him for child support.”

  “So, she was just what people say,” Vita said, with bitter triumph. “Asking for it.”

  “Asking for what? Asking to be murdered? She was a little bit crazy, like a lot of people, but she was floundering toward love. She made mistakes, like everyone. If inviting Vinny in for a drink is ‘asking for it,’ what does that say about Vinny?”

  “Before I was at Orson’s yesterday… I went to see Dorotea.”

  “My God… way down in the Driftwood Cabins?”

  “I took Franco’s bike.…”

  “Aha. Georgie Bottles said he saw you on a bicycle, but I couldn’t figure it out.”

  “You asked Georgie Bottles about me? I wouldn’t even think he knew who I was.”

  “I asked everyone I could find.”

  “Well, I’m not sorry. I ought to have something of Franco’s. He’s my father.”

  “I’m sure he would understand.”

  “Dorotea’s house… It’s a nightmare in there. I didn’t know anyone lived like that, especially not in Oyster Creek.”

  “You know what the tourist brochures say: ‘We’ve got it all in Oyster Creek.’”

  Vita gave a crooked, grown-up smile, which dissolved into a plea. “What could Sabine have wanted with Vinny? What? He didn’t just break in—she was drinking wine with him!”

  “You want complete honesty, so I will tell you the truth: I don’t know. I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t believe you! Was she buying drugs from him? Was it that?”

  “No. Vinny was probably high, probably on meth. He hit his wife, so he was used to being violent.…”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I treated her. Though when I did, she said he never hit her, and I never reported it. So you could say that I might be partly to blame.”

  “Good. That sounds true. I mean, it’s the kind of thing that would be true.”

  “Yes, exactly. So he was a violent man, and Sabine probably provoked him. I don’t know that either, but she did everything to infuriate Franco.…”

  “But what happened? Why? He went there for the sex. That’s why everyone went there.”

  For the last two years or so, LaRee had had the sense that Vita wasn’t so much growing up as coming into focus. The other girls drew a certain kind of clarity on their faces with makeup, but Vita of course refused that and she always looked much younger, more innocent, and in some ways more ignorant, than they. Lately, though, she had grown into her own face, and it struck LaRee now that she had been asserting her right to youth and innocence, giving herself time. Her expression had resolved, become thoughtful, questioning, clear-eyed. She was not looking for a mirror so much as for some understanding that might take her another step into life. LaRee had forgotten how little she knew, and what a phantasmagoria ignorance can be.

  “If Vinny went to your house with the idea that your mother was a prostitute, that was because of his own stupidity, and maybe some kind of drugged idea—nothing real. We know what happened was terrible, but we don’t know what it was.”

  “Amalia Matos knew my mother and I didn’t!” Vita said. “I can’t defend her.… I can’t do anything!”

  “What can it possibly matter to you what Amalia Matos thinks of your mother? Amalia never looked at her through any lens except the one she looks at everyone with, which makes Amalia big and everyone else very, very small.”

  “It matters, because… because, LaRee, you’re trying to spare me, to make the world all nice and neat and pretty for me. Amalia has no reason to lie.”

  She stood up—she seemed taller, and straighter, grown from her efforts to understand.

  “Your mom would be so proud of you,” LaRee said.

  “I want to be proud of her.”

  “Well, you can be. She was as brave as a lion, going off to Rome to pursue her art, and she’d meet a new man and dive into his world and add a whole new piece to her life.”

  “So she dove into Vinny’s world?”

  “Well, no.” She could hear Sabine now: He’s always staring at me. You have to wonder what it would be like to go to bed with a man like that, a man who’s all instinct and no intellect—it’s all movement and muscle with him. Vinny knows what it’s like to be outcast; he gets things everyone else misses. Like me. I wonder what Franco would think if… All that swagger, from one small, sad woman who’d been disappointed in love.

  “I was tired of her ego and her silliness and her never-ending vengeance against Franco,” LaRee went on. “And I was caught up in my own life, my own misery… and then she was gone and I was sitting in the church while they played ‘Be Thou My Vision’—and I knew that if I’d just said something to her about it, that she was crazy to be flirting with someone like Vinny… She loved you, Vita, and that love was changing her. She didn’t give a damn if you ever slept through the night, as long as you knew she was right there for you. So you trusted her, and because of that you trusted people in general. That was her real legacy. You were three years old when you came to me, with all the faith and sweetness your mother had given you. If you hadn’t dared trust me… I don’t know if you could have survived. But you did, and… here you are, and you can be proud of your mother for making that happen.”

  LaRee turned her head, wiped her eyes, got herself to laughing instead of crying.

  “And that is the truth,” she said. “The true truth, as you call it. Okay?”

  Vita looked skeptical.

  “The truth isn’t always cruel, you know. Most of the time it’s more just… sad.”

  Vita nodded. “Dorotea’s house was sad,” she said. “Really sad.”

  “Vinny’s life was pretty brutal.” She wasn’t going to tell about the basement, no matter how truthful she meant to be.

  “LaRee, why didn’t you tell me before? Everyone else knew!”

  “I don’t think they knew very much. They knew little bits of gossip, plus whatever their parents told them, just like you did. And except for Dorotea and a few others—it didn’t matter, because it wasn’t their life. But… I am very sorry. I’ve always wanted to protect you from all of it, and instead I left you exposed.”

  Vita sat down again, took LaRee’s hand.

  “Here’s a truth,” LaRee said. “When your mom asked me if she could make me your guardian, in her will, I felt like it was a trap, a way of forcing me to stay close to her the way she tried to force Franco. But I said yes, and then I forgot all about it. Who could have imagined what would happen? And then, there you were, as if a stork had brought you! I had no idea what to do, none. But both of us alone
in the world, and from then on—through everything, your first ice-cream cone, the first time we carved a pumpkin and we stood out in the dark to see it with the candle burning inside—you’ve been my daughter. How lucky is that?”

  “You’re crazy, LaRee,” Vita said, snuggled in beside her, the way she used to when she was tiny. What it had been like, to hold her for the first time! A lifetime of sorrow had slid away—and simply disappeared, like a glacier falling into the sea.

  Vita jumped up. “I’m going to the library. I have to read all the newspapers, everything everyone said. I’m going to understand it all.”

  “I have most of them here. In a trunk out in the shed.”

  “Really?” Vita turned wide eyes toward her. “You do?”

  “I knew you’d want them someday. I thought, maybe in ten years or… Anyway, I couldn’t throw them away.”

  So, here it was, the time of reckoning, with the dust and webs, the boxes full of salacious, idiotic old newspapers, and also of letters from Drew. She’d kept his love letters and then the letters from after he left, the ones that said he’d never loved her and she had “coerced” the love letters from him. These she had saved because she couldn’t bear to think about them long enough to throw them away.

  “I’m so sleepy, now, though,” Vita said. And instead of rushing out the door, she slipped down with her head against the arm of the couch and her legs across LaRee’s lap.

  “No wonder.”

  “I guess I can look at that stuff tomorrow.”

  “Whenever you want to, honey. It’s all there, all the headlines, even the picture of your father in Cosmopolitan magazine.”

  “What?” Vita said, opening her eyes.

  “Cosmopolitan had this article on handsome murder suspects—it was kind of like—‘Could you fall for this criminal?’”

  Vita giggled. “We do have an interesting life, LaRee,” she said.