The Harbormaster's Daughter

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “What boat was it?” LaRee asked, though she hardly had to. Of course it was the Rainha.

  “I don’t know,” Alice said, tight-lipped. Her time here would soon be up; she’d go work in a city hospital, meet a suitable man, marry, work hard, save scrupulously, and invest intelligently. They would name their son after Alice’s infant brother, who had died in the refugee camp, and their daughter for a goddess. When she was twenty they would have her portrait painted… like Miss Sabine Newbold with her Canary.…

  LaRee would stay here in Oyster Creek. Her roots had gone too deep here and branched too finely; she had no choice. The ambulance had arrived and was backing around to the door.

  “Hello, darlin’,” Manny said as he was wheeled past LaRee on the gurney. He sounded glad to see her… as glad as if she were his daughter. He’d had a daughter, she remembered, but she had married and moved away.

  “How do you feel, Manny?”

  “Like a damned fool. I always said I’d die down on the pier, but I didn’t expect to break my neck falling over in my chair.”

  “Well, seems like you’ve survived,” she said. “Let’s take a look at you, be sure nothing’s broken. Then I’ll call your wife to come get you.”

  “She’s gonna be mad.”

  “Manny, was Georgie Bottles… Georgie… Wasn’t he living on the Rainha?”

  Manny shook his head, then nodded.

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “Yeah, he was. Supposed to be for a couple of nights while he looked for another place, somewhere to get in out of the cold, you know. But he got used to it. If it was low tide he’d go down the ladder at the end of the pier, and walk up under the wharf to the landing so nobody would see him. Even I only saw him a couple of times and I’m out there every day. Of course, my neck is stiff; I pretty much look the other way, toward Barrel Point, out to sea.”

  “What did he use for a bathroom?”

  “Probably the library, or under the wharf. He’s one of our own; we couldn’t just leave him without shelter. He wasn’t doing any harm.”

  “Where is he now?” LaRee asked. Manny lifted his head suddenly, as if he’d just realized Georgie might be in danger. He was such a part of their daily landscape they’d almost forgotten he was a living man.

  “I don’t see anything,” someone said—a random tourist who had wandered over because of the commotion. There was nothing to see unless you looked over the edge where the Rainha had been tied. The explosion had knocked her on her side and she sank almost instantly, taking the piling she was tied to with her, so that end of the pier slumped into the water. The town’s two police cruisers and three fire trucks were all there, and Matt, who was the first volunteer firefighter to arrive, was just closing the back door of the ambulance, which headed off, swaying, up the hill.

  “Can’t go any farther, ladies and gentlemen,” Hank Capshaw said. “It just isn’t safe.” Amalia had found her husband and Bobby walked a step ahead of her down the pier, striding swiftly around Hank to show who was really the authority, while Amalia waited at the edge of the crowd, watching him. Fire hoses were coiled everywhere—useless, but they had to follow protocol. The tide had just turned, but the water was high enough to completely cover the Rainha.

  “Not much to see,” Hannah Stone said to Amalia. She was stretching yellow caution tape across from one bollard to another.

  “It’s a shame,” Amalia said to her, sizzling with disapproval.

  “Sad,” Hannah agreed.

  “Shameful. An accident waiting to happen. This kind of thing… Manny Soares wouldn’t have allowed it. No one would have, before… this.” “This” referred to Hank, who, though his sideburns were graying after years on the job, had still not learned to respect the natural order of things here. “When Manny was harbormaster, there was so much traffic in this harbor there was no room to tie up a derelict boat… never mind…”

  Her voice grew louder on the phrase “derelict boat,” and she shot a glance at Danielle, who was standing with Franco, staring at the spot where the Rainha had always been before. If Franco had married Amalia, there would have been no dereliction of any kind. Bobby stepped back over the caution tape. “Nothing to see,” he said.

  “Did anyone see Georgie?” Danielle asked. “Today, I mean?”

  “Why?”

  “He… might have been… sleeping on the boat. Probably not, but…”

  There was a splash as, hearing this, Matt dove in and began swimming toward the wreck.

  “No!” Hank said. “No! Jesus Christ, there could be another explosion! Or… anything. Jesus Christ!”

  It seemed a very long time but finally Matt’s head popped up out of the water like a seal’s. He shook the water out of his hair, wiped his face across his arm, then swam a few quick strokes and pulled himself back up onto the pier.

  “No one I can find,” he said, shaking violently. “I didn’t think about the cold,” he managed to say. Hannah went around to the back of the cruiser and pulled out a silver emergency blanket. “Maybe you need to go to the clinic, too,” she said.

  “Can the Coast Guard come in?” Danielle asked. “To look for Georgie?”

  “It’d be nice to confirm there’s a body… I mean, a victim. First,” Hank said. “When was the last inspection?” he asked Franco. Hank rubbed his temples, then Franco rubbed his, both of them looking at the ground. Hank shouldn’t have let Franco leave the boat there all this time—it wouldn’t have happened, wouldn’t have been conceivable, in Newburyport. But you couldn’t just arrive in a town and start ordering people off the pier their grandparents had built. Franco shouldn’t have let Georgie stay on the boat, but Georgie… well, if you knew his life, you’d find you couldn’t say no.

  “Has Georgie Bottles been living on the Rainha?” Hank asked.

  “Didn’t know what else to do,” Franco said, more or less to himself.

  “No… no, I see,” Hank said. “I’ll call the Coast Guard, though really there’s not much chance.”

  “Call the liquor store first,” Danielle said.

  “Good idea.”

  Danielle put an arm around Franco. This was one of those moments she would never be able to forget, and though the tide was brimming and there was not a cloud in the sky, it would be the fire hose snaking around her feet, the caution tape, and the crazy tilt of the pier that would stick in her mind—the disorder. “She’d come to the end of the line, you know that,” she said.

  The tide sucked at the pilings. They were going to have to take that arm of the pier down, and decide whether it was worth replacing. “I’ll call the salvage guys out tomorrow,” Franco said. “We don’t have to tell the insurance company… anything else.”

  “Franco,” Danielle said, “honey, we haven’t paid insurance on that boat for years.” She touched his cheek and he could see she was going to cry. Not for the boat—she’d never given a damn about the boat—but for his dream.

  Dorotea Machado came down Sea Street, wheeling Franco’s bicycle. The firemen were pulling the hoses in and one of the trucks was beeping loudly as it backed around to leave. The tourists who’d been watching stepped out of Dorotea’s way; she walked toward Franco and Danielle as if she didn’t see anyone else. That was the way it was here; maybe it was the only way to get by in a town as small and isolated as Oyster Creek. In cities you had neighborhoods; in the country you had acres of farmland in between the houses. Here you just had to avert your eyes and pretend the people who made you nervous didn’t exist.

  Amalia stepped forward. “Dorotea,” she said sharply, the way she’d have spoken to her own daughter, but Dorotea didn’t turn her head. She walked straight to Danielle and Franco. “I thought I could learn by myself,” she said. “But… you said…”

  “It’s not hard,” Franco said. “We can work on it this afternoon.”

  Dorotea smiled, widely. She was still young enough, Franco thought. There was still time to help her find a way forward. Over Dorotea’s head Danielle held Franco�
�s gaze. It was time to let the Rainha and the past go, for the sake of the future.

  “You!” LaRee said, finding Matt standing in a puddle at the clinic’s front desk, with the silver space blanket around his shoulders. “What on earth?”

  “You said Georgie was living on the Rainha,” he said. “I had to go in after him. It was only twenty feet of water.”

  “Come on,” she said, taking him back into the examining room, grabbing a handful of towels on the way. “Get the clothes off, and we’ll get you dry.”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Just cold.”

  “A fifty-year-old person has a fifty-fifty chance of surviving a fifty-yard swim in fifty-degree water,” she said. It was straight from the textbook.

  “Well, it’s my lucky day, then. I didn’t swim any distance at all, and here I am. I survived.”

  “Step out, here.” She knelt and pulled the pant legs off, one foot at a time, eyes politely averted.

  “There’s nothing here you haven’t seen before,” he teased.

  “Maybe there’s nothing there I want to see again. Did you think of that?” But her voice was tender and fond; it felt so good to know that night was still back there in both their memories.

  He wrapped a towel around his waist, holding it closed with one hand, and she put the other around his shoulders. He looked ridiculous—he had a tattoo of a leaping tiger on his chest that would have been a proud sight once, but was droopy and swaybacked now. LaRee was wearing scrubs with tropical fish on them and had her bun secured with a pencil. Her right hand had more age spots than her left; she tried not to use it.

  “We used to be better-looking,” she said, wishing she’d bothered with makeup that morning. Her own signs of age were just ugly, whereas his seemed marks of honor, showing all he had taken on and how well he had borne it.

  “That’s true,” he said, as sincerely as if he were swearing on a Bible. “I remember every minute of that night, so I know it’s true.”

  “Matt…” She could not stand to feel it all again.

  “I understand. I just wanted you to know. It’s funny how memory sorts things out for you.”

  All this time she’d thought herself pathetic, for letting that night feel so important. It seemed like anyone else would have shrugged and moved on. She rubbed Matt’s shoulders through the towel, and would have hugged him just for the sake of consolation, except that he might misunderstand.

  “That’s nice of you to say,” she said. “No sign of Georgie?”

  “No. It happened so fast. I saw the flames from Front Street and by the time I got to the pier the boat had sunk. The tide goes out pretty fiercely right there—there’s no telling how far it could have pulled him.”

  24

  THE WASHING OF TEN TIDES

  “There comes a time when whatever is unfinished must be left as it is,” Hugh said. “And sometimes that’s what makes the show. It makes an entry point for the imagination, a mystery that carries on through time. It might be that someone in tonight’s audience will remember a moment in this play years from now, that it will cross his mind casually, and suddenly some small thing will come clear to him in a new way. And we will have done our job, or at least part of it.”

  Well, it sounded good, and there was nothing to do but say it. The Tempest was going to open in forty-eight hours. It was not what Hugh had imagined, but then, what ever was? They’d put up the tent the day before, and strung the lights through the locust grove, but it had not created the right effect and Sam and Leo had had to take them all down. So they had worked through the night, Vita and Orson replacing every third white bulb with a blue one and handing the strands up to Sam and Leo on ladders. Vita was asleep at the picnic table when they finished. “An enchanted forest?” Leo asked, shaking her awake.

  She looked up into the brilliant predawn blue, the last stars still shining, the locust grove.… “Yes,” she said. “An enchanted forest for sure. Oh, Leo, it’s amazing! And Sam…”

  “And you!” Sam said. “I think we’ve got it.”

  At this all four of them began to sing “The Rain in Spain.” Vita felt Orson’s cape slip off her shoulders and picked it up before the dew could soak into it. They’d been watching over her as she slept; of course they had.

  “It’s catching up with us,” Orson said, looking east where a red glow was spreading ahead of the sun.

  “Done with just minutes to spare!” Leo crowed. Sam leaned against him. “And now, to bed…” They’d headed back through the locust grove to their cottage while Orson gave Vita a lift home, where she had kissed LaRee, who was scrambling an egg for herself before work, and fallen back asleep until rehearsal started up again that afternoon. School was out. Summer had come. She had survived a C in geometry, and so many other failed equations. More than survived—she had absorbed them, reckoned with them, made a certain kind of peace. The old fears seemed almost like steadying influences now.

  “The flaws, the errors become part of the whole and the new growth shapes itself to fit,” Hugh said, thinking how far he must have come to even feel such a thing, never mind give voice to it. “Beauty is serendipitous, and fleeting.”

  He still spoke as if he were standing at a lectern in a marble-columned lecture hall, instead of before a public barbecue grill. And as they listened they looked past him, out over Mackerel Bay where not a single mackerel had been caught in years. But as far as Vita was concerned, it might as well have been the Vatican, and Hugh was speaking unshakable truths.

  Behind him was Caliban’s hut, with a bundle of sticks at the doorway and burlap sacks on a laundry line behind, and the ragged hurricane flag fluttering. They had thrown a rag over the joint of wood that Vita had salvaged from the wreck, with the idea that it would look like Caliban’s dinner table.

  And behind that, moored by a heavy chain to a rusted buoy ball, was the last of the Rainha do Mar. Orson had paid to haul her up, and there she lay on her burnt-out side, splintered and sooty, the window broken, the boom askew.

  “Get some use out of her, anyway,” Franco said. He—all of them—were in costume. Franco wore a striped jersey with a red bandanna knotted around his neck. Vita felt lighter than air in a silk slip, silver blue just like the water on a still day, with colored scarves floating out from her shoulders. There was joy in this—the costume laid out for Shyanne was a kind of burlap toga.

  “Not exactly a galleon, but it’s realistic,” Sam said of the Rainha. “There won’t be any doubt it’s a shipwreck.”

  “Did you see what else we found?” Orson asked, coming around from behind Caliban’s hut, carrying the Rainha’s cabin door.

  “It was floating out there,” he said. “I saw it from my widow’s walk. It must have been torn off by the force of the explosion.” He turned it over and set it on the picnic table so they could all see. The inside face of the door was covered with a mosaic made of shells, showing the town as it looked—or as it had looked years ago—from the pier: the pattern of roofs, the spires of the three churches, and the Calliope Hotel cupola.

  “Georgie did this?” Franco asked.

  “I imagine so,” Orson said.

  “He was always carving something with a jackknife,” Franco said. “I mean, back when he was a little boy. I didn’t know he’d kept it up.”

  “Georgie… the drunk?” Sam said. “He couldn’t bicycle in a straight line.”

  Franco looked past him to keep from taking offense. When you’d gone to school with a guy, remembered him enlisting—enlisting!—in the army when everyone else was scheming to escape it, back in Vietnam… thinking he was going to show them all what a man he was… Yes, yes, he was Georgie the drunk, but he hadn’t meant to be.

  “Have they found his body?” Leo asked, tempering Sam’s tone.

  “No,” Adam said, having just loped up from the beach in his ripped white sailor’s uniform. “The Coast Guard charted the currents and they had divers out off Barrel Point for two days, but they never found him. The chann
el is so deep—they think he was maybe carried out to sea.”

  “It’s the right death for him,” Franco said.

  “How’s that?” Hugh asked. They had been so uncomfortable with each other at first, Hugh speaking heartily as if Franco’s lack of a Shakespearean education might have made him deaf, Franco self-consciously adding big words wherever he could fit one. But they had something in common, some way of seeing as from a great distance, with tenderness, and fascination. “He was part of the place, same as if nothing had changed since whaling,” Franco said. “He lived on what he caught. He’d row miles if he needed to, if he heard the stripers were running out off Provincetown. I almost never heard him say two words, but he was made of iron. He was… fated… to die at sea.” Franco would never have spoken the word “fated” if it hadn’t been for The Tempest.

  “He hath the drowning mark upon him!” Vita said, thinking of the play. “But your complexion is perfect gallows.”

  They laughed without thinking, without noticing it was Vita—little Vita—who’d spoken. She was just one of them now.

  “Who’d have guessed an ‘iron man’ could do such delicate work?” Hugh said.

  Franco shook his head, laughed, then pushed his cap up on his forehead. “Not me,” he said. “Never.”

  Georgie had used the shells that covered the beach at low tide: tiny iridescent mussels, scallops and periwinkles and translucent peach-colored circles, and he had carved mother-of-pearl out of oyster shells and pared it to different shapes, gluing it to the back of the wooden door.

  “This must have taken hours and hours and hours,” Hugh said. “You never really know, do you?”

  “The whole cabin was lined with it,” Franco said. “A view of the town from Sedge Point, forty years ago, back when it was…” He had started to say “ours.”