by Anita Shreve
In 1846, Thomas Laighton built a hotel on Smuttynose known as the Mid-Ocean House. This hotel was a thin, wooden-frame, clapboard structure, not much bigger than a simple house. It was built on pilings and had a wraparound porch on three sides. Over the tin roof of the porch hung a hand-painted sign from a third-story window. The sign was imperfectly lettered and read, simply, MID-OCEAN HOUSE.
From photos of the hotel, there is little evidence of landscaping around the building; sand and rock and seagrass border the pilings under the porch. But history tells us that the hotel, in its heyday, boasted a garden, several fruit trees, and a bowling green. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Edward Everett Hale, and Richard Henry Dana were guests at the Mid-Ocean. In one archival photograph, three unidentified people are relaxing on the porch. One man is wearing a suit with a white straw hat; a woman has on a high-necked, long-sleeved black dress, with a black silk bonnet, a costume that seems better suited for a Victorian funeral than for a holiday on Smuttynose. A second woman, who appears to be stout, and who has her hair rolled at the back, has on a white blouse, a long black skirt, and over it an apron. One imagines her to have been the cook. The Mid-Ocean House burned in 1911. In March of 1873, the hotel was unoccupied because the season didn’t begin until June.
I wonder now: Did Maren ever go to the Mid-Ocean Hotel? Might John, on a pleasant summer evening, have walked his wife the hundred yards, across the rocks with the wildflowers snagged and blowing, to the hotel porch, and had a cup of tea and a piece of American cake — a bowl of quaking pudding? Whitpot? Would they have sat, straight-backed, in the old woven rockers, damp and loosened already from the sea air, and looked out to a view they knew already by heart? Might this view — this panorama of rocky islands and spray and some pleasure boats coming now from the mainland — have looked different to them than it did from the windows of the red house? Did Maren wear a dress brought from Norway, and were they, as they sat on the wooden porch in the slight breeze from the water, objects of curiosity? Their shoes, their speech, their not-perfect manners giving them away? Might they have sat beside Childe Hassam at his easel or Celia Thaxter with her notebook and passed a pleasantry, a nod, a slight bow? Might John once have reached over to the armrest of his wife’s chair and touched her hand? Did he love her?
Or was the hotel a building they could not enter except as servants — John, in his oilskins, bringing lobsters to the cook? Maren, in her homespun, her boots and hands cracked, washing linens, sweeping floorboards? Did they, in their turn, regard the guests as curiosities, American rich who provided Shoalers with extra monies in the summer season? Pale natives who were often seasick out from Portsmouth?
I like to think of Hawthorne on Smuttynose, taking the sea air, as had been prescribed. Would he have come by steamer from Boston, have brought a boater and a white suit for the sun? Would he have been inspired by the desolation of the Shoals, tempted to bathe in the extraordinarily deep waters that separated Smuttynose from Appledore or Star? Might he have been invigorated by the conversation of the intellectuals and artists Celia Thaxter had gathered around her — Charles Dickens and John Greenleaf Whittier, William Morris Hunt, a kind of colony, a salon. Did he eat the blueberry grunt, the fish soup, the pluck that was put before him? And who put it there? Is it possible that a Norwegian immigrant hovered over him? Did this woman ask a question of Nathaniel Hawthorne, a pleasant question, having no idea who he was, another guest is all, in her charming but broken English? Tings. Togedder. Brotter.
It is almost impossible now, looking across to Smuttynose, to imagine Hawthorne on that island. There is no trace of the Mid-Ocean Hotel. It has passed into recorded memory, historical fact, with no life except in sentences and on photographic emulsion. If all the sentences and photographs about the hotel were to be swept into the sea that surrounds Smuttynose, the Mid-Ocean — Hawthorne’s stay there, an immigrant’s abbreviated pleasantries — would cease to exist.
No one can know a story’s precise reality.
On October 2, 1867, a boxing match was held at Smuttynose. Because gambling was illegal in the 1860s, isolated locations, without much interference from the police, were in demand. The Isles of Shoals, and Smuttynose in particular, appeared to be ideal for this purpose. Two fighters went at it for an hour and a half in the front yard of the Charles Johnson house, previously known as “the red house,” and subsequently to be known as the Hontvedt house. The spectators came by boat. Another fight was planned, but was canceled when bad weather prevented any observers from reaching the island and made the contestants seasick.
At dawn on the morning of the second day at the Isles of Shoals, I am awakened by unwanted and familiar sounds. I slip out of the bed, with its damp-roughened sheets, and begin to make a pot of coffee in the galley. When I run the water, I cannot hear the movements in the forward cabin. I am waiting for the coffee to drip through the filter, my arms crossed over my chest, a sense of wet seeping through my socks, when I reach up and pop open the hatch for just a sliver of fresh air. I see immediately that the sky is a darkened red, as though there has been a fire on the shore. I open the hatch fully and climb up through the companionway in my robe. A band of smoky crimson arches over all the islands, a north-south ribbon that seems to stretch from Portland all the way to Boston. The red is deep in the center, becoming dustier toward the edges. Beneath the swath of red, gulls catch the light of the slanted sun and seem momentarily imbued with a glow of color all their own. I am somewhat concerned — the way you are when nature goes off her routines — yet I want to go below, to wake Billie, to show her this phenomenon of sunlight on water particles in the air. But Billie is already there, behind me.
“I’ve cut my foot, Mommy” is what she says.
I turn in the cockpit. Her face is sticky and puffed with sleep, her mouth beginning to twist with the first messages of pain. She has on her summer baseball pajamas, shorts and a T-shirt — Red Sox, they say. Her feet are white and tiny and bare, and from her right foot the blood is spreading. She moves slightly toward me and makes a smudge on the white abraded surface of the cockpit floor. A small stray shard from last night’s broken glass must have fallen below the ladder of the companionway. My opening the hatch this morning has woken Billie, who then walked into the small triangle under the ladder to retrieve one of Blackbeard’s treasures, the key chain.
I go below to get towels and hydrogen peroxide and bandages from the first-aid kit, and after I have washed and dressed the cut and am holding Billie in my arms, I look up and realize there is no trace, nothing left at all, of the red band in the sky.
Rich comes up onto the deck, puts his hands to his waist, and examines the color and texture of the sky, which is not altogether clear, not as it was the day before. To the east, just below the morning sun, a thin layer of cloud sits on the horizon like an unraveling roll of discolored cotton wool. Rich, who looks mildly concerned, goes below to listen to the radio. When he returns to the deck, he brings with him a mug of coffee. He sits opposite Billie and me in the cockpit.
“How did it happen?”
“She cut it on a piece of glass.”
“She’s all right?”
“I think so. The bleeding seems to have stopped.”
“NOAA says there’s a cold front coming through later today. But NOAA is not to be entirely trusted.”
Rich moves his head so that he can see beyond me. There is a gentle chop, but the harbor still seems well protected. Across the way, there is activity aboard a ketch anchored near us. Rich nods at a woman in a white polo shirt and khaki shorts.
“Looks like they’re leaving,” he says.
“So soon? They just got in last night.”
A sudden breeze blows the skirt of my robe open, and I fold it closed over my knees. I do not really like to be seen in the morning. I have a sense of not being entirely covered, not yet protected. Rich has on a clean white T-shirt and a faded navy-blue bathing suit. He is barefoot and has recently showered. The top of his
head is wet, and he doesn’t have a beard. I wonder where Adaline is.
“I don’t know,” he says, speculating out loud about the storm.
“It isn’t clear how bad it will be, or even if it will definitely be here by tonight.”
I shift Billie on my lap. I look over toward Smuttynose. Rich must see the hesitation on my face.
“You need to go over to the island again,” he says.
“I should.”
“I’ll take you.”
“I can take myself,” I say quickly. “I did it last night.”
This surprises him.
“After everyone was asleep. I wanted night shots.”
Rich studies me over the rim of his coffee. “You should have woken me,” he says. “It isn’t safe to go off like that by yourself. At night, especially.”
“Was it scary, Mommy?”
“No. Actually, it was very beautiful. The moon was out and was so bright I could see my way without a flashlight.”
Rich is silent. I pick up my own mug from the deck. The coffee is cold. Billie sits up suddenly, jogging my arm. The coffee spills onto the sleeve of my white robe.
“Mommy, can I go over with you tonight? To the island when it’s dark? Maybe there will be ghosts there.”
“Not tonight,” says Rich. “No one’s going over there tonight. We may be having a storm later. It wouldn’t be safe.”
“Oh,” she says, dropping her shoulders in disappointment.
“I’ve got landscape shots from the water,” I say, tallying up my meager inventory. “And night shots, and I’ve done Maren’s Rock. But I need shots from the island itself, looking out to Appledore and Star, and to the east, out to sea. And also some detail shots.”
“Like what?”
“Scrub pine. Rose hips. A window of the Haley house, the footprint of the Hontvedt house. I should have done this yesterday when I had the chance. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” he says. “We have time.”
“Me too!” says Billie excitedly.
Rich shakes his head. “You stay here with your dad and Adaline.” He reaches over and pulls my daughter from my lap. He whirls her around and tickles her at her waist. She begins to laugh with that unique helplessness that borders on hysteria. She tries to wriggle away from his grasp and screams to me to help her. “Mommy, save me! Save me!” But when Rich suddenly stops, she turns to him with an appreciative sigh and folds herself into his lap.
“Whew,” she says. “That was a good tickle.”
George E. Ingerbretson, a Norwegian immigrant who lived at Hog Island Point on Appledore Island, was called to the stand. He, like many who were summoned, spoke in a halting and imperfect English that was not always easy to transcribe. He was asked by the county attorney what he observed between seven and eight o’clock on the morning of March 6, 1873. He replied that he had two small boys and that they had come into his house and said, “They are halooing over to Smutty Nose.” He was then asked what he saw when he got to the island.
“I saw one bloody axe; it was lying on a stone in front of the door, John Hontvet’s kitchen door. The handle was broken. I went around the house. I saw a piece knocked off the window. Then I stopped. I saw John was coming. I did not look into the window. I only saw the bloody axe and blood around.”
After John Hontvedt arrived, along with several other men, Ingerbretson went inside the house.
“Evan Christensen went just ahead of me; he opened the door. Evan is the husband of Anethe.”
“Who else went with you at that time?” Yeaton asked.
“John Hontvet and Louis Nelson and James Lee, no one else. John’s brother, Matthew, was with us. I do not know whether he went into the house or not.”
“State what you saw.”
“It was Anethe, lying on her back, head to the door. It looked to me as though she was hauled into the house by the feet. I saw the marks.”
“Of what?”
“From the south-east corner of the house into the door.”
“Traces of what?”
“Of blood.”
“Was there any other body there?”
“Yes. Then we went out and went into another room in the northward side, north-east of the house. We came in and there was some blood around, and in the bed-room we found another dead body.”
“Whose body was that?”
“That was Karen Christensen.”
“Did you notice any wounds upon the body of Anethe?”
“Yes; there are some scars on the head.”
“What part of the head were they?”
“In the ear most, just about the right ear. She had some scar in her face there.”
“Scar on top of the head?”
“We did not look much after that time.”
Yeaton then asked Ingerbretson some questions about the well that belonged to the house and its distance from the house, and whether he had disturbed any of the bodies. Ingerbretson said that he had not. Yeaton asked the fisherman if he had seen any tracks, and Ingerbretson said no, he had not seen any tracks. Before Yeaton dismissed the witness, he asked if, when he had arrived on Smuttynose that morning, there was any living person on that island.
“Yes,” the fisherman replied.
“Who was it?”
“Mrs. Hontvet and a little dog.”
“State condition in which you found her.”
“In an overbad condition. She was in her night-dress crying and halooing, and blood all over her clothes, Mrs. Hontvet’s clothes. I got her into the boat.”
“Do you know whether her feet were frozen?”
“Yes. I searched her feet right off and they were stiff. I carried her over to my house.”
Before a shoot, I will prepare the cameras — check my film and the batteries, clean the lenses — and I begin these tasks in the cockpit. Billie has gone below to wake Thomas. I can hear them talking and laughing, playing on the bed, although the wind, with its constant white noise, steals their words.
Adaline emerges from the companionway. She smiles and says, “Good morning.” Her legs are bare, and she is holding a towel around her, as if she had just stepped from the shower, although she is not wet. Her hair is spread all along her back in knots and tangles. I can see a small bit of red beneath the towel, so I know that she has on her bathing suit, and I wonder for a moment why she has the towel around her. How strange we women are in the mornings, I am thinking, this modesty, this not wanting to be seen. Adaline turns her back to me and puts her foot up on the cockpit bench, inspecting her toes.
“I hear Billie got a cut,” she says.
“Yes. She did.”
“Bad?”
“Not too.”
“I’m going for a swim.”
She lets the towel drop to the cockpit floor. She keeps her back to me, and I notice things I have not before. The plate-shallow curve of her inner thigh. The elongated waist. The patch of hair she has missed just above the inside of her right knee. I think about what her skin would feel like. This is painful curiosity. She steps up to the back of the stern, positions herself for a dive. She skims the water like a gull.
She does not come up sputtering or exclaiming from the cold, as I might have done, but rather spins in a lovely barrel roll and swims with an economy of strokes, her feet barely moving at all. I see wisps of red amid the chop. She swims for about ten minutes, away from the boat and back. When she is done, she climbs up over the stern with ease, refusing my outstretched hand. She sits opposite me in the cockpit and picks up the towel to dry herself. She is slightly winded, which is somehow reassuring.
“You kept your maiden name,” she says.
“Jean Janes had an infelicitous ring to it,” I explain.
I notice that the water beads up on her skin.
“It wasn’t for professional reasons then?”
“Not exactly.”
She sets the towel down beside her and begins to brush out her hair.
“Did I
hear Rich say there might be a storm?” she asks.
“We may have to leave before this afternoon.” The thought of leaving the harbor fills me with swift, sharp regret, as if I had left something significant unfinished.
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know. Portsmouth possibly. Or Annisquam.”
She bends her head to her knees, letting her hair fall forward to the floor. She brushes upward from the nape of her neck. She throws her head back and begins to brush from the sides of her face. In my camera bag is a Polaroid camera I use in test shots. Often, when I have a scene I like, I take a Polaroid first, so that I can examine the composition and the light and make adjustments if necessary before shooting the real thing. I take the Polaroid out of my camera bag and aim it at Adaline. I quickly snap a picture. She blinks at the click. I rip the film out and hold it in my hand, waiting for the image to appear. In the photograph, Adaline is holding a brush to her head. Her hair, which has dried in the sun, has streaked itself a light blond, or perhaps it is a photographic deception. Her skin looks dark by contrast, deeply tanned. I hold the picture out to her.
She takes it in her hand and examines it.
“A mere negative of my former self,” she says and smiles.
In Haley’s Cove, a pier supported a long warehouse and fish processing plant. The men of Smuttynose invented the process of drying fish called dunning. Large vessels would tie up inside the pier to load and offload goods and fish, which were then stored in the building known as the Long House. The area that comprises the pier, the Long House, Captain Haley’s House, and the footprint of the Hontvedt cottage is not much bigger than a modest suburban backyard.
Dunfish sold for three or four times the price of regularly prepared fish. So many fish were harvested by Shoalers that in 1822 the national price of fish was quoted not from Boston but from the Isles of Shoals.
