Harbor Lights
Page 1
Praise for Harbor Lights
“…a beautifully written, harrowing novel…about agonizing choices and heartbreaking truths that vividly dramatizes the consequences of not courageously and honestly facing those truths.”
–Library Journal
“The triumph of Weesner’s rigorously realistic story is that we come to know his characters as fully as we know ourselves, yet are as startled by the directions in which their emotions lead them as we are by the unpredictability of their own lives. An unforgettable novel, unquestionably Weesner’s best.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Praise for Winning the City Redux
“A courageous author… No one better has a handle on heart-break—he reminds me of a latter-day Dreiser who writes better, stylistically… What is so special about Weesner is the emotional precision.”
–Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune
“…a knockout! …Dale’s struggle to win in a world whose odds are stacked against outsiders… leads to a heartbreaking kind of disillusionment and courageous maturity.”
–Dan Wakefield, Boston Globe
“Winning the City tells of a young athlete ‘nearly driven out of mind with all he knew,’ but Mr. Weesner’s own mind is superbly clear on every page. He is an extraordinary writer.”
–Richard Yates, New York Times Bestselling Author of Revolution Road
Praise for The True Detective
“…a compulsively readable thriller that is to the nuclear family what Hiroshima was to the nuclear bomb, and the best account yet of its detonation.”
–Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune
“…while it deals with a sensationa, even loaded subject, ultimately I’d say the novel is that rare achievement, a wise book, and maybe the saddest book I’ve read. That it’s also a page-turner is a marvel.”
–Stewart O’Nan, acclaimed author of Emily Alone and Last Night at the Lobster.
Praise for The Car Thief
“A remarkable, gripping first novel.”
–Joyce Carol Oates
“…a poignant and beautifully written novel, so true and so excruciatingly painful that one can’t read it without feeling the knife’s cruel blade in the heart.”
–Margaret Manning, The Boston Globe
“A simply marvelous novel. Alex emerges from it as a kind of blue-collar Holden Caulfield.”
–Kansas City Star
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this novel
are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
HARBOR LIGHTS
Astor + Blue Editions
Copyright © 2015 by Theodore Weesner
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof, in any form under the International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by:
Astor + Blue Editions
New York, NY 10036
www.astorandblue.com
Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data
WEESNER, THEODORE. HARBOR LIGHTS.— 2nd ed.
Originally published Grove Press, 2000
ISBN: 978-1-941286-85-2 (epdf)
ISBN: 978-1-941286-84-5 (epub)
1. Literary—Fiction. 2. Family drama—Fiction 3. Psychological—Fiction 4. Dealing with sickness—Fiction 5. Marital issues—Fiction 6.Southern Maine—Fiction 7. I. Title
Jacket Design: Kate Murphy
This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.
CONTENTS
Praise for Theodore Weesner
Copyright
Title Page
Did This Story Really Happen?
ONE
Warren
Beatrice
Marian
Warren
Beatrice
Marian
Warren
Beatrice
Virgil
Warren
Marian
Beatrice
Warren
TWO
Beatrice
Warren
Marian
Virgil
Warren
Marian
Warren
Beatrice
Virgil
Beatrice
Warren
Marian
Warren
Marian
Beatrice
Virgil
Warren
THREE
Marian
Warren
Marian
About the author
Read on for a special preview of Theodore Weesner’s forthcoming novel
HARBOR LIGHTS
Theodore Weesner
Did This Story Really Happen?
My first novel, The Car Thief, was as true to life as I could make it. Stil, I was disappointed when most readers wanted to know little else than if it had really happened. I was offended, too, though I hardly knew why at the time.
Well, yes and no—what do you mean exactly? Was my shaky reply, for I’d given my heart to it, to the language, scenes, shadings of character, to finding just the right word and in merely posing the question there was impiled a diminishing of what I believed to be a work of art separate from, higher than the scrubby author from whence it came.
I’ve decided to believe that was the old bugaboo question says: Your fiction was so true to life for me, so happened as I read it, that I found it to be the essence of life itself, and I just wanted to be sure, in asking, have you know how sympathetic you persuaded me to be to the world you created!
That’s what I’ve decided to believe.
If asked if my novel Harbor Lights really happened, I’m sure I would have the same shaky replay: “Yes and no—what do you mean exactly?” And I’ll certainly offer a Law & Order disclaimer of my story being fiction, which will not be untrue. Something like this did happen hereabouts but it was the plot alone that caught my eye; the persons involved remain unknown to me. I may also mention that a similar story was reported about Henry Hyde, as a powerful politician in Illinois, appropriating another man’s wife as a mistress and setting her up in business, while remaining in his own marriage. That plot, too, struck me as I was struck by the strong plot of Romeo and Juliet the first time I read Shakespeare’s play—another story that found its seed elsewhere, in a popular poem of its time. Infamous plots, that is to say, should not necessarily be confused with the flesh and blood of someone else’s confession. What I found intriguing in a local love triangle was what aroused within me—the conundrum, the truth, the theme of possessing, or failing to possess, another person, even in marriage, and my awareness from certain personal experience that possessiveness is a double-edged sword which may make or break a person’s life…as in all those country songs.
To avoid confusion between newspaper fact and personal fiction, I located my story elsewhere and shaped characters all my own—fashioned my story from my own perspective on the human condition: jealousy, possessiveness, rejection, a damaged psyche; all, I’m sorry to say, have visited your author’s woebegone life.
Here’s the action from the newspaper. Early in 1992, in a tiny coastal town north of Boston, a 57-year-old husband was diagnosed with terminal lung caner. Thereafter, one summer day, he asked his 55-year-old wife to meet him for lunch. She declined, letting him know she would be having lunch with another 57-year-old man, a former state senator and—as it was known to all, including her husband—her lover of more than 30 years, though the powerful ex-senator was likewise married and had a family of his own with whom he continued to live.
From the outset I was interested in the husband as a pathetic man who was, I thought, the person most wronged by the ordeal. His wife had a store and lover, the ex-senator had hi
s residual power plus a family and a mistress, and the husband, living 30 years as a cuckold, had his dismay and terminal lung cancer. The press described the wife as “vivacious,” the senator as a “power broker,” the husband as “reclusive.” I thought it likely that this wasted man, remaining devoted to his wife, had become what is known as netted. All those years he had been unable to either get out or let go. Facing irrevocable meaninglessness at the closing of his life, he could contrive no other psychological option than to do what he did.
*This article is published in its entirety in Fiction Writer, June 2000.
The same old harbor lights…
that once brought you to me
Jimmy Kennedy, 1937
ONE
Warren
He turned his lobster boat upstream and gave her some speed, though not much. She was a ’48 Jonesporter, a thirty-two footer, and she rode low in the stern and high in the bow. Her hull had been refinished yearly with fiberglass quality bottom paint, and in her lifetime her structure and pilothouse had been stripped and repainted eleven times. She remained a handsome boat and one of the oldest in service though decay was setting in with her, as it was with her owner, and Warren knew they both were doomed.
Seas were placid, and it was unseasonably warm for October. The pastures of harbor water were as thinly green as old mirrors, with fissures of air escaping fault lines here and there as if hissed from whales. Fishing boats passed soundlessly in the distance, and all around was the solitude that came with the livelihood of one man hauling traps within sight of land. Larger boats carrying radar and crews went far out and stayed weeks at a time, but were neither as solitary nor as philosophical as the one-man entities.
Lobstering and independence went hand in hand. Within a hundred yards of shore were depths over forty fathoms, and within the volume of black water along reefs and seaweed-draped valleys lay promises of treasure in forms of fish and crustacea, together with daily threats of death and discouragement. Questions were ever present for lobstermen: Can you stand the loneliness? What of the cold water on your hands, the smell of bait in your lungs, and rowing out before dawn in snow squalls, pouring rain, uncompromising walls of wind? What of your oilskins getting tangled and finding yourself pulled over the side? What of the times when lobsters aren’t feeding, or when a glut is on the market? And your family—will they provide the support on land a lobsterman needs to succeed at sea? Why not trade some of that mean independence for a seat at the wheel of a backhoe, for wages, regular hours, the camaraderie of a factory with dry wooden floors, heated air, a candy machine? For coffee and talk with friends … at least until a foreman came cracking the whip?
Why not trade the whole wet, risky business—as Warren had for eight years, not that long ago—for a civil service rating with the State Water Pollution Commission? Yes, for rancorous disputes with neighbors over lab readings and subsurface disposal pollutants. Yes, for that brown cap and labeled jacket he had been ashamed to wear in the presence of his wife, however rarely she looked his way.
Through no wish of his own Warren was coming in early today and had the Lady Bee riding an incoming tide at minimum power. All about was calm as the boat sliced a quiet V, and, resting against his jerry-built driver’s seat, he gazed within as he kept the boat on course. He strove to be as even-tempered as the day itself and to keep his thoughts under control. For he was fifty-seven, his cough had grown chronic, and the threat of mortality had been intercepting his view for a string of months. He gazed into the breach now as the hull slapped the water like an opened hand and sent a spattering over the windshield and one side of his face. He couldn’t help thinking how satisfying it would be to motor forever into the Indian summer horizon. What a dream it would be to pursue the horizon and leave his problems washing away in the suds.
He’d have to talk to Beatrice soon and explain what was happening. Her blatant affair had been hard to believe, but he had lived with it all these years and it was a fact of life. If there was a saving grace, it was that they lived in the same house, if not entirely as husband and wife, and saw each other, spoke to each other two or three times a week. Now this turn in the road—if his lungs proved malignant, as he knew they would. The thought of her living on, and of Virgil Pound being ever in her midst, touching her, lying in bed with her, set off Warren’s lifetime of resentment every time he thought of it.
Dear Beatrice. Nearly all his life Warren had had thoughts of hurting her for the pain she had made him suffer. The thoughts surfaced as if on their own, though he never allowed them serious entry into his mind. Shooting, stabbing, choking. Suppressed fantasies of forcing her to submit. Compelling her to lower to her knees, to remove her clothes. Still, when the fantasies tried for center stage, he pulled a curtain down on his mind. He had gained some wisdom with age, and violating her was nothing he wanted to have on his conscience. Not with so little time left. She may have treated him badly, but he wouldn’t be returning the favor. Taking the high road, at this time in his life, had become his only hope for peace of mind.
Warren had a string of traps just ahead and wasn’t sure he would run them, though habit would make stopping hard to resist. Turning from traps along Outer South Banke was one thing, but crossing the harbor to Narrow Cove and motoring by a last string would be like passing his own child on the highway and looking ahead as if he hadn’t seen her.
His strings held six traps each and were marked by buoys at each end plus a toggle buoy for each trap. Like charms on a Krylon bracelet, the traps lay where they settled on the bottom, and their locations would be changed if they failed to produce. When they produced well, when they fell not to lifeless muck but into lobster playgrounds and tenements within rocks and kelp, attempts were made to return them over and over to the same locations.
Throughout the years Warren had maintained fifty to seventy strings, three to four hundred traps in all, but had had difficulty in recent years keeping up with twenty strings, running half daily in the high season and exhausting himself doing so. Working ever more slowly, he had to pause, gasp, and gather strength to raise, clear, rebait, and return a plastic-coated wire trap to the cold, sloshing water. His grounds—a 700-yard stretch along Outer South Banke, twenty acres of seaweed-draped ledges and rocky valleys, plus the two-acre spit there in Narrow Cove, near where he moored his boat—had been his father’s grounds and mooring site before him and were his as if legally deeded. If another fisherman, or a ragpicker—some airline pilot or professor wanting to impress visitors with a crate of lobsters for dinner—put out traps in a lobsterman’s area, the intruder would be subjected to a warning and the surrendering of his catch or, more likely, to having his trap lines cut in his absence. Remaining obstinate, an interloper could count on having his boat cut loose in the dead of night, even introduced to some bullet holes and the havoc a half-sunken vessel left behind, though instances of lobstermen using rifles and pistols were rare. Warren knew of maybe six boats burned or put on the bottom over four decades and but three armed assaults, each an occasion of a ragpicker insisting on keeping a catch he’d taken and needing the crack of a rifle close to the hull to see that no matter legal niceties, a lobsterman’s grounds were not subject to negotiation.
Narrow Cove, northwest between Gerrish Island and the mainland, was coming into view, and Warren had to decide whether to pull his last string or move on to the Co-op with what he had—an embarrassing half-dozen three-quarter pounders. The last string represented the call of duty, of being a highliner rather than a dub in the community of lobstermen. Creatures in traps would survive weeks without being harvested, but their lives were finite and crowded traps were inhospitable to newcomers. Lobsters and crabs cannibalized in fights to the death, and the tables had to be reset twice or more a week in season if a profit was to be realized.
There came one of Warren’s familiar green-and-white striped buoys breaking the surface, and, helpless against the old pull, he cut the Lady Bee’s engine to neutral and let her sink—belly
toward the bobbing pin with its balancing stick. He had accumulated some strength by then and proceeded to work slowly, one step at a time. He used a metal hook to snare the line and lifted the rope to within reach of his left hand. He had not given in to coughing, though he was expending breath and strength rapidly, and he held for the moment against the rising and falling of his broad, thirty-foot boat. Seas remained calm, but for the waves he’d created. Bent close to the chilled water, hands wet, the air temperature had to be in the sixtiess, and the warm October day was growing warmer and more thought-provoking. The American League play-offs were under way—in New York or Baltimore, he wasn’t sure—and for a moment he glimpsed himself in the solitary long-ago, when baseball had been an afternoon more than an evening game, and his summertime work on swaying salt water had been joined by announcers narrating balls and strikes, hits and runs from Fenway Park in Boston, just fifty miles south by southwest by way of the sea.
Sensing an accumulated body of strength, he readied for the next step. Okay, he told himself, and, reaching a rubber-gloved hand to grip the rope, backed off half a step, lifted the dripping line with both hands, and placed it on the snatch block he had long ago connected to the Lady Bee’s hydraulic hauler and straight-six Chevy engine.
He paused again, gathering added breath and strength. No breeze was moving over the water, leaving the pastures free of ripples, and he knew it was one of those days when people on land would be using terms like glorious and gorgeous, and conniving to be out in the intoxicating air. Well, at least he’d had an outdoor life to both endure and enjoy, he thought. Every day he had tasted air and sky; his pipe and cigarette smoking may have diluted taking in the elements, but even that combination had been satisfying until the time came, some months back, to commence paying the tobacco piper.