The Ice Cradle (5 page)

T
HE BLOCK ISLAND
school, a jaunty new brick and shingle edifice, served all the young scholars on the island, from age five to age eighteen. As Henry and I approached the building early on Monday morning, dozens of kids, some still small enough to be wearing OshKosh overalls and others sporting Goth-style makeup and downy upper lips, could be seen making their way to the island’s only school—ambling in clumps of three or four, speeding on bikes, hopping out of the cars and trucks their parents had pulled in to the school’s circular drop-off area.

The morning had gone smoothly enough, eased along by Henry’s elation at the fact that he didn’t to have to wear his school uniform: chinos, blue oxford shirt, navy blue clip-on tie.

“What?” I said, laughing. “You thought you’d have to wear your
uniform
?”

“You said it was school!”

“No, honey, I said it was
at
a school. You think I’d make you go to
school
on your vacation? Come on! It’s more like—camp! It’ll be really fun!”

“It will?” His hair was all cowlicky. He beamed up at me, prepared to believe just about anything I said.

I squashed the impulse to get all breathless and enthusiastic. I hoped he’d have more fun than I would have had doing this at his age, but things could go either way. I would have hated walking into a huge, strange school filled with as many big loud kids as with kindergarteners, having to be on my own all day long without a pal to eat lunch with, not daring to ask where the bathrooms were. I didn’t want to promise Henry that he’d have fun, because he very well might not, not today at least, and maybe not at all. Fun, sadly, was not the primary purpose of this arrangement.

I could feel his apprehension kicking in as we approached the school. He started to lag behind me, eyeing the chummy clusters of kids, and beginning to bite his lower lip, a sure sign that he was getting the jitters. I paused on the steps, then took him by the hand and led him over to a bench at the edge of the playground.

I adjusted his scarf and attempted to subdue a stubborn cowlick.

“I don’t want to go,” he said.

“You have to, sweetie. Because I have to go to work.”

“I can come with you,” he announced, as though alerting me to this possibility for the very first time.

I shook my head.

“Listen,” I said. “All these kids hang around together
all
the time. Every day, summer and winter. They are going to be
so
excited to meet somebody new—you!”

He looked up at me, then back at the kids streaming up the steps. A burly teenager wearing a Clash T-shirt chose just this moment to put one of his friends into a headlock.

“They’re going to have so many questions for you,” I said, trying to distract him.

“Like what?” he asked, eyes glued to the tussling teenagers.

“Like—about the T. They don’t have subways here! I bet a lot of these kids have never, ever been on a subway! They might want to know all about it.”

Henry made no response.

“And—the Freedom Trail! Paul Revere’s house! Think of all the things you have in your hometown! Because even though we live in Cambridge,
you
were born in Boston!”

“And the Children’s Museum,” he mumbled.

“Right! And those gondolas down by the science museum! They won’t believe we have gondolas in Boston. Gondolas aren’t anywhere but Venice!”

“Yeah,” he said quietly as I glanced at my watch. I had to go. Soon.

I stood up, but Henry didn’t budge. When I looked down, I could tell he was about to cry.

I scooped him up, crossed the lawn, and walked firmly up the steps as he buried his face in the collar of my coat. There was only one way to do this—fast. That much I had learned, during what had felt like the endless nursery-school years. Long, bargaining good-byes might work for some kids, but they never worked for us. Sending the message that I was reluctant to depart made Henry wonder if there wasn’t a very good reason for that, leaving him feeling even more worried and uncertain than he’d originally felt. The current situation might not improve if I continued to project confidence and excitement, but it would surely deteriorate if I didn’t.

I checked Henry into his classroom, met his teacher, Michelle, who seemed barely out of her teens, made sure he was
on the prepaid list for lunch and snacks, and verified my contact information. I hugged him, stood up, and left. I didn’t turn around—I couldn’t—but at least he didn’t come after me, wailing and clinging to my leg.

I felt heartsick all the way to the Historical Society. You can console yourself with all kinds of platitudes about kids being resilient and able to adapt. You can remind yourself of how lucky your child is to be spending time like this, whether he realizes it right now or not. But it still feels awful to tear yourself away from an anxious little person who doesn’t want to be left.

As I strode briskly toward the road, pretending to be a happy, well-adjusted mom looking forward to her day at the office, I wanted nothing more than to turn around, walk back, gather Henry into my arms, phone Caleb Wilder, and call this whole thing off. Instead, I sniffed, dabbed at my watery eyes, and kept on walking.

Caleb reminded me of a few guys I’d met since I moved to the East Coast, guys with Ivy League educations who’d decided to take a pass on finance and law and work in what were, at least formerly, genteel professions: teaching in prep schools, working in publishing and journalism, running discreet trusts and historical societies. I knew nothing about Caleb’s background, but he wore horn-rimmed, literary-looking glasses, Top-Siders, a starched white shirt, and a now rumpled, though clearly expensive, sports jacket.

I imagined there was a very large sailboat in the picture.

The Historical Society was located on the first floor of a sprawling white farmhouse on Old Town Road. A plaque
beside the main entrance informed me that the unassuming structure had been built in 1850, but the house seemed remarkably well maintained, right down to what looked like the original windows: four panes over four on the lower level, and six over six up above. Hydrangea bushes lined the long porch, which ended at an enormous Rose of Sharon hedge. I imagined it was stunning in summer.

“How’d the drop-off go?” Caleb asked, showing me into his office. “I saw you two there on the bench.”

“Not so hot,” I said.

“Yeah, I got that impression. Kara, my eight-year-old, she couldn’t wait to get there. But not Louisa. It was a battle just getting her out the door.”

“But you like the program,” I prompted anxiously. “I mean, the people are good.”

“Oh sure, yeah. You’ll see. Kara went last year, which is why she was all revved up. They did
Guys and Dolls
, and she had a great time.”

“Guys and Dolls?
How’d they manage
that
, with all the little kids?”

“Well, the high school students get all the main roles, obviously, but anybody who wants to be onstage gets a part. Or they can make costumes or paint sets—they keep them busy, that’s for sure. Your son—what’s his name?”

“Henry.”

“Henry. He probably won’t want to leave when you go to pick him up.”

“Let’s hope so. Anyway …!”

“Anyway. So. You’re all settled in at the Grand View?”

“It’s a beautiful place. Thanks so much.”

Caleb nodded. “They’ve done a great job on it. Nice couple.”

“Very nice.”

“I knew Mark from way back when. He’s younger than me, but he was around every summer. Though I was surprised when he took the old place on. I really was.”

“How so?”

“The house was a disaster, and not just cosmetically. The foundation was literally crumbling. A number of developers had scoped it out over the years, but they ended up walking away. It would have been cheaper to tear the whole thing down and start from scratch—in fact, that’s what a couple of them wanted to do—but the family wouldn’t agree to it.”

“I’m glad they didn’t.”

“Everybody’s glad. And they’ve really done it right, Mark and Lauren have.”

“Have you been inside?”

“They had an open house about a month ago.” Caleb shook his head. “Very impressive. You know, a lot of times people overdo it, take a simple, vernacular structure and gussy it up so much that it ends up looking like a Trump Tower.”

I smiled.

“Anyway,” he continued, “so here we are. I was thinking that you might want to spend today just reading and getting your head around all the materials we’re going to work with. Then we could meet first thing tomorrow and make a plan.”

“Okay,” I said. “Do you have any ideas about how you want this done?”

“One or two,” Caleb replied, “but I’d love to get your opinion. I was thinking it might be sort of interesting to formalize a timeline and bind the documents according to when they were important, to when they figured in the course of the week.”

“That could work,” I said. “So you mean, instead of keeping
all the similar items together, the—I don’t know, what?—telegrams, search-and-rescue records?”

“Eyewitness statements, medical documents, all the reports from New Shoreham and Sandy Point—those were the lifesaving stations, at the two lighthouses. They were the centers of all the activity.”

I nodded, though he was beginning to lose me.

“So,” Caleb went on, “there would be two ways for a person to come at the material. The website, which a fellow up in Boston is putting together, will be very straightforward, with all the documents listed and catalogued, easily downloaded. But here in the building, we’d also have a narrative version, for someone who wanted to leaf through books and get a sense of how the events transpired in real time.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “Who actually comes in here?”

“People here for the weekend, or on vacation. They wander in, especially on rainy days. They’re not writers or academics, they’re just curious. Most have never heard of the
Larchmont.”

“So this way,” I said, “they’d be able to sit down and read the documents like a book, or flip through.”

“Precisely. We want the materials to be user-friendly, for the average person who just drops by. We get a lot of retirees coming through. It’s the nature of the island, really: you don’t visit Block Island if you want your vacation to be a thrill a minute. People who come here tend to appreciate the past and be interested in it.”

“Sounds good,” I said. “I’ve brought some supplies, but I didn’t want to order any materials until I knew exactly what we’d need. I’ll go online and have some samples sent. We can see what looks and feels right with the documents. You get FedEx here, right?”

Caleb laughed and nodded. “It only
feels
like the nineteenth century.”

The stories I read would stay with me for days.

At eleven o’clock at night in February 1907, as a fierce winter storm was whipping up the waters between Block Island and Watch Hill, Rhode Island, a schooner named the
Harry Knowlton
, packed with coal it was transporting from South Amboy, New Jersey, to Boston, rammed its bow deep into the side of a steamship called the
Larchmont
. Up to two hundred people were aboard the ferry. Nineteen survived. All of the children on the ship were lost.

A massive steamer with three passenger decks, the
Larchmont
had left Providence that evening on an overnight journey to New York City. A bitter wind was blowing in from the northwest as the vessel made her way through Narragansett Bay, but the ferry didn’t encounter the full force of the icy gale until it rounded Point Judith and headed directly into Long Island Sound.

The boat’s captain, who had spent the evening in the pilothouse and had just steered the vessel safely into open seas, was in his quarters, getting ready for bed. Startled to hear several sharp blasts of the steamer’s warning whistle, he raced back to the pilothouse. The three-masted schooner had been spotted. It was headed directly toward the
Larchmont
.

The captain and his quartermaster blew the whistle again, and when the schooner failed to turn or slow down, they both grabbed the wheel and frantically tried to alter the
Larchmont
’s course, hoping to avert a catastrophe. Seemingly propelled by the storm’s powerful winds, the schooner rammed into the side of the steamer.