The Matchmaker (20 page)

Shannon:
I am the only person Dabney has set up twice. The first time, of course, was with her father.

I started working with David Kimball at the police department in 1973. My father had been on the job in Brockton, and so even though I came to Nantucket in the summer of 1972 intending to wait tables and get a good tan, it was no surprise that I ended up as the dispatcher at the Nantucket Police Department.

I met David the year before his wife disappeared. My first impression was: solid guy, Vietnam guy, maybe a bit angry, with the bitter edge of any vet. He was patriotic, serious, dedicated to his job in law enforcement. He was a fourth-generation islander, he had inherited some pretty nice real estate, and I’d heard he’d married a fancy summer girl, a Sankaty Beach Club member and all that. He had a young daughter named Dabney; he kept a picture of her on his desk, but I never saw the wife or the daughter in person that first year. They didn’t stop by and say hello like some of the other families.

Then, in December of 1974, the wife, Patty Benson, pulled an unbelievable stunt. She took the daughter to see
The Nutcracker
in Boston. David talked about their impending trip more than he talked about other things—the orchestra seats, the suite at the Park Plaza Hotel downtown, the black velvet coat for Dabney. “Patty knows how to do things right that way,” David said.

Patty really knew how to do things right. She left the child in the hotel room and vanished—with twenty bucks to the concierge and a phone call to David saying,
Come to Boston and get our daughter.

He never heard from her again, and I thought,
Isn’t curiosity, at the very least, killing him?
Then, one night late at the station, he admitted to me that he had hired a private investigator who had found Patty in Midland, Texas, working as a flight attendant on a private jet.

“Are you going to see her?” I asked. “Or call her? Write a letter?”

“What for?” he said. “She doesn’t want me.”

David was, in the years that followed, a sad, resigned man. He lived for his daughter—but a man raising a daughter alone was a delicate thing. He had his mother, Agnes Bernadette, to help, but the original Agnes Bernadette was something of a battle-ax, with fiery red hair even at age seventy, and a thick Irish accent. So I helped out behind the scenes with raising Dabney. I went to Nantucket Pharmacy and bought her sanitary pads when she got her period. I advised David about the stumbling blocks of training bras and curfew and a frank discussion about sex.

Here, please let the record show that I did advise on birth control. But Agnes Bernadette was an old-school Catholic, and David was afraid to defy her. No information about birth control was provided for Dabney—and look what happened.

Was I interested in David in a romantic way all those years? I would say that, most of the time, our relationship was professional and platonic. David had moods, the most common of which was serious and focused with an edge of gruffness; he wasn’t one to joke or flirt. But there had been times when we were working nights and David had returned from a particularly unpleasant call—a drunken domestic, say, where a man had shattered his wife’s nose—when David would relay the whole grisly story and then he would look at me in a certain way and I knew he felt something. I had been married once upon a time to a scalloper named Benjamin Copper, who had left the island for Alaska. Ben was long gone, and although I occasionally enjoyed a one-night stand when I was off-island, I had never had any inclination to replace him.

One night, late in the empty, quiet station, David nearly kissed me. But he stopped himself, for reasons I have never figured out.

And then, Dabney got involved. It was her senior year in high school; she was newly accepted to Harvard. Agnes Bernadette was very sick and didn’t have much time left. Dabney was, perhaps, concerned about leaving her father alone. When Easter rolled around that year, Dabney called the station and invited me to dinner. I accepted right away. For a woman who lived alone, Easter was hard to celebrate. In years past, I had gone to Mass, and by way of celebration, I watched
The Wizard of Oz
on TV and nibbled a chocolate bunny.

Once I accepted, I had second thoughts. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Does your father know you’re inviting me?”

Dabney said, “Not exactly. But he’ll be happy, Shannon. Trust me.”

I showed up at the Kimball house with tulips in a pot, trying not to feel like an interloper. By that point, I had been working alongside David for ten years, but I had never been invited to his house. He greeted me at the door wearing a shirt and tie. It was clear he had made an effort to look nice, and he smelled good. I was wearing a dress that I had bought for my niece’s confirmation; it was flouncy and flowery, maybe a bit too springlike for the cold, gray, early April day, but I felt attractive in it. I never wore anything like it at work.

“Wow,” David said. “Look at you, Shannon.”

I didn’t know what to say or do; we had never greeted each other socially before. But it was Easter and I was excited to be there, so I leaned in and kissed the side of his mouth. He looked shocked for a second, then he blushed and took the tulips.

Even at seventeen, Dabney was a magnificent cook. She had made hot cheese puffs and a crab dip to start, then at the table we had beef tenderloin with a horseradish crust and creamed spinach and roasted potatoes. Dabney and Agnes Bernadette were drinking water, but David and I shared a bottle of red wine. The wine had been Dabney’s idea; she brought it up from the basement, a good bottle that a grateful citizen had given David, and which he’d been saving for a special occasion.

“This is a special occasion, right?” Dabney said. “It’s Easter and Shannon is here.”

“Our Savior reigns,” Agnes Bernadette warbled.

The meal was delicious and conversation eased a bit with the wine. David and I fell into reminiscing about the more memorable 911 calls we’d received over the years: the woman who claimed her husband made her drink Windex, the portly father who got stuck in the chimney on Christmas Eve in his Santa suit. Dabney listened and asked encouraging questions while Agnes Bernadette inserted non sequiturs.

Dessert was lemon meringue pie, made entirely from scratch, and then Dabney presented me with a small Easter basket filled with buttercream eggs and jelly beans. It was one of the nicest Easters I could remember.

Dabney stood up from the table. “I’m going to take Grammie home, and then I’m going over to Clendenin’s. I’ll be home at ten.”

David nodded his assent, although I knew, because he had confided in me, that he didn’t like Clendenin Hughes. David felt there was something not trustworthy about the kid, he was smug, and too smart for his own good.

I laid my crumpled napkin on the table. “I should go,” I said.

“No!” Dabney said. “Stay! Please stay!”

I looked at David. “Stay,” he said. “We can watch
The Wizard of Oz
.”

David and I started dating shortly thereafter. We kept it under wraps for the most part, appearing out in public only as “friends,” but I don’t think we were fooling anybody. Agnes Bernadette died in January, and David proposed to me the following Easter Sunday, in front of Dabney, over the dinner she had once again prepared.

Dabney said, “You two are a perfect match. I can see it.”

But the fact of the matter was, David couldn’t actually marry me because he was still married to Patty Benson. He had never hunted her down and asked for a divorce. It was when he finally used the information that he had gotten from the private investigator to track Patty down in Texas that he learned she had overdosed on Valium the year before. She was dead.

David had been afraid to tell Dabney. He believed that Dabney had spent her whole life waiting for her mother to come back. Dabney had been in therapy for years, dealing with her fear of leaving the island, which both David and Dabney’s therapist, Dr. Donegal, believed was connected to her abandonment. But Dabney took the news in stride.

“Oh,” she said. She shrugged. “Maybe I should feel sad? But I hardly remember her.”

Dabney was not so levelheaded in her relationship with Clendenin. The romance endured, despite the fact that she was at Harvard and Clen at Yale. There was the disastrous weekend of the Yale-Harvard game in New Haven during Dabney’s sophomore year. Both David and I thought that would be the end, but Dabney refused to let go.

And then, Dabney found herself unexpectedly pregnant at twenty-two. Clen was already in Bangkok; he sent her a plane ticket, but Dabney refused to leave the island. She would raise the baby herself, she said.

There was one time during the pregnancy when David was working a double and I heard Dabney crying in her room. I knocked lightly and opened the door. Dabney raised her face from the pillow and said, “I hate love, Shannon! Love is the worst thing in the world!”

I sat with her awhile and rubbed her back. I almost felt like a mother. I asked her if she missed Clendenin and she said yes, she missed him with every cell of her being. I asked her if she was angry at Clen for not coming back to Nantucket. She told me that she had asked him to please let her be. Not to call her or write to her or contact her in any way ever again. This was news to me, and I was pretty sure it would be news to David.

Dabney said, “His dream is over there. I couldn’t ask him to stay on Nantucket, Shannon. He would hate me and hate this baby…just the way…” She trailed off.

Gently, I said, “Just the way, what, Dabney?”

“Just the way my mother did,” she said.

“Your mother didn’t hate you,” I said. But with those words, I was way out of my comfort zone. Who was I to explain why Patty Benson had done what she’d done?

Dabney started crying again. “I thought Clen and I were a perfect match. I have been right about everyone else. Why was I wrong about myself? It isn’t fair!”

I agreed. It wasn’t fair.

David died of a heart attack in his sleep when Dabney was thirty-four, Agnes nearly twelve. It was a sad time for us all, although Box was around to help us manage things.

I stayed on at the police department until I had my thirty years and could properly retire. Then I decided to leave Nantucket. It was too lonely a prospect to stay, a woman nearly sixty-five, alone on this island. I had cousins in Virginia, and I liked the idea of moving south, someplace milder.

But then Dabney got involved. She asked me, did I know Hal Green, he had been a summer resident for years with a house in Eel Point, and only now had moved to the island year-round. He’d lost his wife a few years earlier to breast cancer, and he was a terrific guy; Dabney knew him because he entered his Model A Ford in the Daffodil Parade each year.

I said, “No, Dabney, I do not know Hal Green.”

Dabney said, “That’s good, that means he hasn’t had any run-ins with the law.”

I did not crack a smile. I knew what Dabney was up to.

She said, “I think you should meet Hal Green. I think you would like him.”

I said, “Oh, do you?”

Dabney said, “Come for dinner on Saturday. I’ll invite him.”

“Dabney.”

“Please,” she said. “Just come.”

Hal and I have been married for four years.