The Sea Keeper's Daughters

by Lisa Wingate

  Stop. Whitney, you can’t get romantic about this. Hard decisions would have to be made here. I didn’t have room for any furniture in Michigan, nor funds to transport it. If Clyde never came back to the Excelsior, the time to sell the building could be coming sooner than I’d thought.

  Keep a business head. Don’t go sentimental. Don’t.

  Setting the taffrail log back in the desk, I hardened myself against the heirlooms and their stories. They were only brass, leather, wood. Of course I would give them up to save Bella Tazza, to ensure that Denise, Mattie, Grandma Daisy, and my employees didn’t suffer for my business mistakes. I was the one who’d wanted the mill building so badly that I’d rushed into the deal without taking time to wander around town, ask a few questions, get some details about the local climate.

  This was my mess to clean up. I would do whatever it took to prevent others from paying the costs.

  A clinical determination elbowed aside girlish fantasies as I searched the desk drawers, fingering antique pens and swinging open a compartment made to hold a wax candle and a stamp for sealing letters. The hidden latch that would allow the top of the desk to slide forward was right where I remembered—where Lucianne had shown me years ago. I slipped my hand over it, pulled the pin, and edged the upper compartment forward to expose the three cubbyhole spaces behind the drawers in the base. They’d always been empty, but now items rested in each one. How had those come to be there … and when?

  In the first compartment lay a brooch, its ornate gold filigree forming a crest that encircled a beautifully faceted red stone. The second space held a tusk-shaped scrimshaw carving of a woman in a billowing dress, standing at the wheel of a ship at sea. Beside it lay a necklace of carved bone or ivory beads, its centerpiece a snuff jar or a locket with a Maltese cross etched into the surface. The third cubbyhole held a book, leather covered and bowed slightly to fit into the little nook.

  I removed the items one by one, examined them. The brooch was definitely gold, the large stone probably a ruby, the others possibly diamonds. The head of the crest was emblazoned with a script B. Perhaps this had been my grandmother’s? Maybe given to her when she married into the Benoit family? No doubt it was old and had value, as did the scrimshaw carving and necklace. Setting down the brooch, I examined the carving, marveling at the intricate image created by etched lines and stained with ink, a masterpiece of scratches. Who was the woman? A captain’s wife? A passenger prominent enough to have been permitted to take the wheel? A captain herself? Would a woman have been allowed, even if she were a Benoit?

  Was the carved necklace hers? Had she worn the locket close to her skin as she’d set off on the ship, or had it been given to her there—perhaps crafted by a sailor who’d become smitten with her? Or was the woman on the scrimshaw piece only the artist’s imagining—a patron saint, a guardian angel? Was she a lover left behind, yearned for during the long voyage from the old world to the new?

  I’d never seen any of these things in my grandmother’s rooms upstairs, and helping Lucianne remove and dust her endless knickknacks had always been among my summer tasks. Who had selected these treasures and hidden them in the desk? When? Had it happened after my grandmother’s death? Long before? Had I even looked in the secret compartments the last summer I’d worked here, the summer I’d turned sixteen?

  Probably not. By then I was much more interested in boys.

  The book, now permanently bent by the cramped quarters, was a pocket copy of Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat.” It could easily have lived its life sandwiched among the Benoit library collection upstairs. I never would’ve known.

  The binding crinkled softly as I lifted the cover. Perhaps it was an autographed copy? An especially valuable edition? The pages fell open, parting almost down the center. A letter, clearly wadded and crumpled once, had been tucked into the spine. Its imprint had yellowed the pages, so that its ghost remained even after I removed it.

  “Where did you come from?” I didn’t realize I’d spoken until my voice echoed into the hanging mist of stillness and forgotten things.

  The letter didn’t crackle, but unfolded silently, its surface more like fabric than paper. It felt soft beneath my fingers, surprisingly pliable, almost velvety.

  The words had been written in 1936. A woman’s artful cursive, the carefully practiced penmanship of a bygone day when such things were considered important.

  Sister Dear,

  It is my hope, as this letter arrives, that you may know how very precious you are to me, as is your dashing husband, Benjamin, though I have only begun to know him in these greatly troubled times since your wedding. Could that have been only seven years ago? How short a while when spoken, yet it was another life, another world when first I met your beau and the four of us strolled in the Charleston garden, nervously warming to your sudden announcement. Mother and the aunts looked on, twittering behind their hands, for you had given them quite the shock, whirling in with your plans to marry. Knowing you, they should not have been surprised at all that you would go your own way. Your Benjamin, with his wild tales of world travels, was so different from any among our family, and from my Richard. I confess, I was a bit jealous of the life into which you would marry.

  Yet you always were the bold one, the one to marshal the activities among us children, and I the steady, careful one, happy to follow along with all that you had planned for the lot of us.

  How precious were those times! How wonderful the days when all was well.

  How necessary, also, that we must release them now. It is fine enough to glance at the past, but one must never focus there overlong. Don’t you think?

  Perhaps we did not recognize then, in our softness, in the ease of our lives draped in fine lace and pearls, how truly fortunate we were and how fortunes can change. Had I understood it, had I known that one can live with so much less, perhaps my Richard would still be with us today. Perhaps his choices would have been different, that fateful day in ’29.

  So many quiet nights, I wrap myself in wishing lines that begin with “If only …” I know you must yearn for Benjamin when he is gone to sea, particularly now that a baby is finally on the way, but be thankful for the anticipation of his homecomings, and for Benjamin’s gainful employment when so many cannot find work.

  You have such blessings in the stable fortunes of the Benoits and in your success with the hotel there in Manteo. Your child will never go hungry, nor be marched off to breadlines as so many are today. The world is not what it once was, as we well know from our own family’s sad decline. Those years of dress fittings and afternoon socials seem frivolous and far away now. They have become distant memories. My old gowns have gone almost too threadbare to wear to receptions and events about the college, and my work frocks are barely serviceable for minding the reception desk in the dean’s office. These will not, however, matter a bit where I am going next.

  I know that, upon the news of the closing of the women’s college, you had expected that my little Peapod and I would eventually come to the Excelsior for more than just a visit. Please know that what I have to tell you now does not in any way diminish my gratitude over your efforts and the plans you have formed on my behalf. I know you have done this out of love and no small bit of concern over my ability to look after Emmaline and myself. It is also evident that you, Lucianne, and Old Dutch have gone to quite a bit of trouble to make a room homey for us. Will you extend them my thanks for their hard work and kindness? Tell “Old Duck” (as Emmaline still calls him) that she will send more drawings to him soon. She still treasures the toy horse he carved for her during our visit there a year ago. She has since combed the little horsehair tail practically down to the nubbins!

  I do wish, Dear Sister, that I had spoken up earlier of another possibility that might come to pass for Emmaline and me. I suppose I had been reluctant to seem ungrateful and, as always, unwilling to go against your leading. I would treasure the opportunity to live by the sea and to whisk away your lonely hours
as you await your husband’s many returns to home harbors. I adore the very thought of being there for your child’s arrival late this summer, but in truth my presence and Emmaline’s would only intrude upon time that you and Benjamin should be spending with your wee one when he or she finally makes an appearance. I know that, after so many tries for a baby, these remaining months must be an agony of waiting, but it will happen sooner than you know, and you do not need the burden of a sister and niece to care for in the meanwhile. Similarly, with Daddy’s passing and Mama having lost the house in Charleston, we would only be another drain, were we to go there.

  Today, I have received the most exciting news, and I hope that you will cheer it as well! Some time ago, in anticipation of the difficulty in finding work after the college’s demise, I applied for a position with the Federal Writers’ Project, a program in the care of President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. The FWP provides a most exciting opportunity for those like myself, displaced from the academic world or from positions in the creative and journalistic arts.

  You may or may not, there on the Outer Banks, have heard of this monumental endeavor, but word is that this is a pet project of Eleanor Roosevelt herself! Through the program, our government has created a plan to document and preserve the natural wealth and common history of this nation. Writers, photographers, researchers, and mapmakers journeying along the byways of each state will document all natural wonders and bona fide tourist attractions, in order to encourage travel and promote economic growth. The writers shall also record a sort of history of the people, such as has never before been attempted or even considered worthy of effort. It is Roosevelt’s aim that these teams of documentarians in each state may gather the memories, folk legends, and lives of the common man, from farmer to factory worker, from Western cowboy to former slave.

  Can you imagine this? Such a magnificent and momentous undertaking! As of today, I have officially been added to the rolls of the Federal Writers’ Project. My salary of eighty dollars per month will not, by any means, secure accommodations at the Ritz, but it will provide for our basic needs if we are careful, and the kindness of strangers along the way will surely help as well.

  Though most writers on The Project operate in their home areas, I have been tasked to a region in which a field interviewer was recently dismissed for slovenly behavior and underwhelming effort. My job will be to act quickly and judiciously, so as to bring reports from the territory up to speed. To that end, I will soon go to the far western mountains of our beautiful state of North Carolina. I will be traveling in the company of a young cartographer who is charged with mapping and photographing the countryside there for the FWP. I will take along my typewriter and the folding desk that was once Father’s, as well as a bare minimum of belongings.

  You may be wondering now about Little Pea. Special permissions have been given to allow her to travel along as, at only six, she is considered too young to be away from me for long periods. I suspect that our kindly dean of students here may have had a hand in this arrangement, as in my being admitted to the program at all. Among the writers taking up this task nationwide are many famous names you would doubtless recognize. Even notables such as Anzia Yezierska, Max Bodenheim, and Zora Neale Hurston are rumored to be involved or considering it!

  Can you see, Dear Sister, that in this work I will be in fabulous company? Please do not think me ungrateful for your kind plans to take us in. This is simply a better alternative. Emmaline and I will come to visit when we can, though I anticipate that our time in the Blue Ridge could be lengthy. From there, I may move into employment at the FWP state office if a position is available. I will write to you daily and post letters as we come to towns along the way. Forgive me for not traveling to Manteo in person to tell you all of this. I simply cannot, as I am certain you would attempt to talk some sense into me. I know in my very bones that this is an adventure I must undertake and that this journey will change me. I will not allow myself to be turned from it.

  Do not worry over me. I look to my upcoming work with great anticipation. I will become a small piece of the vast history of this battered and magnificent country.

  Yours always,

  Alice

  The sound overhead stopped me halfway through another box. I’d been hearing voices from below for several hours as I worked—male voices. I’d concluded that I was over the Rip Shack and that the crew down there was having a good time. There had been numerous spurts of raucous man-laughter and a few high-pitched female giggles. Their day was clearly going much better than mine.

  So far, I’d gathered a few antiques and vintage items I thought might have some value, but in reality, I’d mostly come up with old magazines, tax forms, business files from the hotel years, free notepads, outdated phone books, hankies, linens, ashtrays, and assorted sea shells. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the items stored here.

  Among other things, I’d been hoping for more letters and enough clues to discern exactly who Alice was. My knowledge of my father’s family was tissue-thin and filled with holes. I’d always known that Grandmother Ziltha had two brothers she’d broken ties with, and that her mother was an Avondale, a name synonymous with old Charleston high society. But I’d never been told that my grandmother had a sister. Did my father know about Alice? Or was she a secret my grandmother kept from everyone … and if so, why?

  Maybe I should’ve left the whole thing alone—I had bigger fish to fry right now—but in some way Alice’s letter reached to the deepest shadows in the most hidden parts of me. Had her husband, like my father, chosen to leave his family behind, deserting them in the most painful way? Another young mother left alone? Another daughter abandoned, to make of fact and memories what she could? Was the tragic type of loss that had both marked and changed my life a sad form of family heritage? Was Alice’s decision to join the Federal Writers’ Project an attempt to finally break the cycle of pain that a suicide leaves behind?

  I know in my very bones that this is an adventure I must undertake and that this journey will change me.

  Had it? I wanted to find out. In some inexplicable way, I saw myself in the words of this woman who’d apparently been stricken from the family record. I needed to know what had become of her.

  A sound passed overhead again—something more disturbing than joists offering up ghostly creaks and moans. Those were footsteps. Footsteps upstairs, and then three rhythmic thuds. Boom, boom, boom, in rapid succession from one end of the building to the other. Too fast for human feet, unless there was an eight-foot basketball player up there.

  I let a stack of china rest in a box again, sat back on my heels, and focused upward, taking in the peeling plaster ceiling. The sound came again. Boom, boom, boom and then silence. Then boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, like the raven rapping at the door in Edgar Allen Poe’s poem.

  A pulse rushed up my neck, beating staccato accompaniment, and a tidal sense of dread brought me to my feet. Was Clyde finally home? Could he possibly have made it up the stairs without my hearing him? Maybe he wasn’t alone, or maybe it wasn’t Clyde at all. Maybe one of his sons had come. Perhaps they were here to move him out, take him someplace where he could get the help and care he needed?

  Only one set of footsteps tested the joists. Squeak, squeak, squeak … and then the pounding, whap, whap, whap, whap.

  My cell phone rang on the davenport desk, and I jerked upright, lost my balance, and did a backward knee bend over a box. A mound of threadbare velvet curtains broke my fall, and all I could think was, spiders, crickets, crawly things. I came up in a hurry, knocked a small pewter pitcher off a box, and watched it fall in slow motion. It hit the floor with a resounding ring and bounced away, the sound filling the empty salon and echoing down the hallway into the hotel rooms.

  Below, the hum of first-floor conversation halted.

  The pitcher rolled to a stop against the wall. My cell quit ringing. I stood stock still, aware that I’d just made enough racket to wake the dead. Had w
hoever was upstairs heard it?

  The noise came again. Thump, thump, thump.

  Then nothing.

  My cell let out another warbling ring. I grabbed it and answered, breathless, anticipating disaster. The only person who ever called back-to-back when I didn’t answer was Denise, and she only did it when there was a problem.

  Home and all its issues squeezed through the line and instantly arrived on Roanoke Island. “What’s wrong, Denise?”

  The question seemed to take her by surprise. “Well … nothing really. You didn’t call last night. I just wanted to make sure you were all right. Have you talked to your stepfather yet?”

  Her hopeful tone begged the comfort of a lie. I had a feeling there was something still unspoken, some new reason she needed me to say, Yes, it’s all settled. I’ll be home in a couple days with money in my pocket. Don’t worry about a thing.

  “I haven’t seen him yet. It’s kind of a long story.” A glance at my watch tightened my chest even more, the bones aching, so that I felt like Mattie during one of her asthma attacks. “I can’t believe you’re calling during the lunch rush. Is business slow today?” Please say no. We couldn’t afford a low take. Not even one.

  At least ten different mental scenarios played at lightning speed in the instant it took Denise to answer. I knew why. I was afraid that, in my parking lot standoff with Tagg Harper, I’d poked a sleeping tiger. I should’ve had the good sense not to lock horns with him again. No doubt that was the family temper coming out. When Grandmother Ziltha went on a rant, linens and improperly washed silverware flew from windows, sooty ashtrays shattered against walls, and hotel staff ran for cover.

  “No, it’s fine. The lunch has been good, actually. Had the Rotary club take the banquet room at the last minute, and a road crew came in on top of the normal crowd, so it got a little crazy for a while. Dale’s home sick from the hot line, and that held up the plate time some, but we were still averaging around nineteen minutes—not too bad. We’re slowing down a bit now. I put the blackened tilapia special up for tonight, so I’m sure it’ll be busy.”