Up Island (16 page)

I could expect more of the outbursts of near panic. He had suggested a course of therapy beginning immediately, but I wanted, all of a sudden, nothing but to get out of Atlanta and on to Martha’s Vineyard, and said that maybe I would consider it when I got back.

He did not like the idea of my running away, but did not push the therapy, and wrote me a prescription for Xanax and one for Prozac. I still had them, unfilled, in the bottom of my bag. Watching the boiling crowd of wet people on the narrow streets, some of whom I would probably have to meet and spend time with, I wished that I could swallow several of each. The anxiety was really quite uncomfortable. It rarely lasted very long, but it left my hair soaked with perspiration and my hands trembling.

“If it gets too bad, try to face it and examine it,” my shrink had said. “Sometimes it will go away if you look at it and see what it really is. Of course, the best thing would be to tell your husband and your brother and your mother just what you think of them, but you’re obviously not ready to do that.

So look the fear in the face and see what’s there.”

So I did. In the middle of teeming Edgartown, stalled in traffic by a seemingly endless line of creeping four-wheel-drive vehicles, I looked inside myself to see what it was I was so afraid of. And I saw only emptiness.

I had never been afraid of strange places before, had loved them, in fact; had been hungry to taste and explore and experience the very differences of each new place that we went.

But the operative word was “we.” I had never traveled without Tee. Wherever in the world I went, I went as part of a unit, part of the family of Theron Redwine, and was therefore safe because I

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knew precisely who and what I was. My basic self could not be changed, could not be lost.

But travel does change you. We know that instinctively; it is for that, I think, that we leave our homes and go looking for the rest of the world. Not just to see it and know it, but to be changed by it. Or, at least, the strong and healthy and safe among us do. The others—those of us who have suddenly lost ourselves or never really had them—are instinctively afraid of strange places. If the shards of self we take to them are themselves changed, what will we have left? Who, then, will we be? Will we be anyone at all?

Will we look inside and see emptiness?

I sat in Livvy’s Jeep that morning and literally shook all over with the terror that I would lose the last remnants of myself on this island, and never be able to get me back. And hated myself for the fear.

“Are you okay?” Livvy said. “Your hands are shaking.”

“I haven’t had any breakfast or lunch,” I said, forcing nor-malcy out between dry lips. “Are you going to feed me?”

“Chowder,” Livvy said. “Made from clams I dug myself this morning, before you even thought about getting up. It’s the only thing for a day like this. And first a Bloody Mary. How does that sound?”

“Like I’ve died and gone to heaven,” I said, and it did. The anxiety went sulking back to its pit. The people on the streets looked benign and agreeable again, even their feet. Maybe I really was only hungry.

We finally inched our way on to the wallowing little On Time Ferry—“because any time it runs is on time”—and were decanted into the equally dense fog of Chappaquiddick Island, where the Bowens’ summer

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house was. All I knew of Chappaquiddick was the painful incident of the young Massachusetts senator and the drowned secretary, and that seemed so antiquated now as to be merely quaint, an anecdote out of another time. I looked about curiously, but could make out only swirling mist and rain and the blurred shapes of low trees and scrub.

“The beach club is over there, but you can’t see it,” Livvy said, pointing, and I looked, and indeed could not. “We’ll go swim and have lunch tomorrow. It’s supposed to fair off.”

Just past a phantom gas station and a community center, she swung the Jeep hard right. The fog thickened, until the yellow fog lights seemed to bounce off its solidity. I could see nothing at all. Then she turned right down a smaller lane and bumped slowly past the great masses of what I supposed to be summer homes, and pulled into a gravel and sand drive at the very end of the lane. A vast grayness loomed up before us, seeming to reach high into the sky, supposing that you could have seen the sky, and she cut the Jeep’s engine and said, “We’re here.”

We sat silently for a moment, and by some trick of the wind off the water the fog parted for a moment, like a curtain being swished aside, and I saw a tall Victorian house dead ahead of us, shingled in dark gray-brown and girdled around with stone-pillared porches. Even here, at what was obviously its rear entrance, it looked imposing and formidable, bearing its bulbous curves and mansards and turrets upright, like an old corseted dowager. A few dark pines leaned over it, old trees by the gnarled look of them, and the latticework around the back door dripped tangled vines of old white roses. A severely

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clipped privet hedge ran beside it on both sides, around to the front, turning a faint sepia and russetred with the looming autumn, and there seemed an infinity of white-shuttered windows, all blank like sightless eyes, and many chimney pots, scrabbling fingerlike at the thick sky. No lights burned.

“My lord,” I breathed involuntarily, and Livvy laughed and said, “Welcome to Harbor House,” then the fog swept in again and left me looking only at whiteness, though beyond the house I could sense, if not see, the immense presence of water.

“You said it was a cottage,” I said, reaching into the back of the Jeep for my suitcase.

“Well, we call everything on the Vineyard a cottage if it’s seasonal,” she said. “It’s the Old Yankee ethos, you know.

Plain living and high thinking.”

“You couldn’t live plainly in that if you tried,” I said.

She snorted. “Wait till you’ve seen the inside. It’s falling apart, but Caleb won’t let me change anything from the way it was when he was a boy unless it’s rotted and fallen in under you, and then it has to be as much like the original as possible. What I wouldn’t give to fill the damned thing up with Ralph Lauren and microchips.”

“You do have electricity, don’t you?” I said. Under my feet the porch boards creaked and yawed.

“Barely. Caleb only lets me light one room at a time, the one we’re in, and even then it has to be an old forty-watt bulb like his sainted grandmother used. Sometimes he even gets out the goddamned oil lamps.”

“And you with every computerized gizmo in the world in your house at home,” I said, grinning. “And
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Caleb with Windows 95. Why don’t you light it up like the Atlanta stadium when he’s not here?”

“He reads the electric bill with a magnifying glass. I’ve long since gotten used to the idea that my husband goes a little mad when he gets up here. It’s the Bowen family curse. But now that you’re here, I’m going to burn every light in the house all day long, and tell him you’ve got seasonal affective disorder and it’s doctor’s orders.”

She opened an ornately scrolled screened door, reached in and flicked a switch, and the living room of Harbor House bloomed into dim, yellow light. I followed her in. Even cowed by the fog and the darkness of the big house and shaken with the dregs of the anxiety, I had to laugh. It looked like a stage set for
The Addams Family.
Age-darkened vertical planking covered the walls, wainscotted halfway up with a plate rail full of mauve, floral-painted china. The dark floors were covered with thin, worn, old orientals and islands of dismal straw matting. The walls held portraits that had either faded badly or needed their glass washed; I could make out no faces. What light there was came from antiquated old wall-mounted or hanging fixtures grudgingly wired for electricity, and from a few table and bridge lamps set about. The light they gave out was the color of pale urine. The furniture was dark, ornate, antimacassared or shawled, and looked milit-antly unsittable. Curved and balustered stairs in a corner led up to an open upper gallery from which a series of closed doors led into what I assumed were bedrooms. In the immense, murky space above the first-floor living room hung a great, grotesque chandelier made exclusively of antlers.

Looking farther, I could see that mounted heads of who knew what were

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hung around the room, just under the gallery. I thought you might well find a griffin up there in the gloom, or a unicorn.

“So where’s the staff?” I said. “Hanging upside down from the ceiling waiting for dark?”

“Don’t I wish,” Livvy said, striding through the dark room toward the front of the house. I followed her.

“I’d gladly take a staff of vampires over none at all,” she said over her shoulder, “but I’ve only got a lady who comes to clean once a week. Caleb thinks servants are ostentatious on the island. Of course his family’s got about a hundred in Boston. But Mamadear, his virulent old grandmother, never had them here; said she came to rusticate, not to live like she did at home. So of course I can’t have them either. Old bat.

I guess it doesn’t really matter. Nobody ever goes into the back drawing room unless there’s a big party. We live in the front of the house and upstairs, and even Caleb is smart enough to shut up about preserving that.”

We went through another dark old door and I saw what she meant. Here at the front of the house, overlooking the invisible water, were low-ceilinged, bright rooms full of shabby rugs and comfortable rump-sprung furniture, with beamed ceilings that bounced back the light. Even on this close, dark day, they glowed with warmth and use and life.

A cluttered kitchen full of scarred 1950s fixtures and potted geraniums gave on to a long, window-walled room where the family obviously ate and lived: gut-spilling wicker easy chairs, cockeyed ottomans, shelves disgorging dog-eared books and games and puzzles, islands of soft faded rag rugs and one or two dingy

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sheepskin ones, a big trestle table surrounded with unmatched chairs, racks of sailing and tide charts, and small tables holding models of sailing vessels of every sort. Half models hung about the walls, rubber boots and sneakers and Top-Siders were scattered everywhere about the floor, and above the doors and a great, smoke-stained fireplace laid with a waiting fire hung paddles and oars and transom plates and quarter boards from vessels gone but obviously not forgotten.

Beyond this room was a small paneled library so jammed with books and newspapers and magazines that only a couple of spavined morris chairs were free for sitting, and beyond all of it, outside the small-paned casement windows, the big porch held more old wicker and a hammock and a swing, and looked out into the white blankness that Livvy said was Katama Bay. I loved all of it, instantly. The knot of anxiety loosened and the cold sweat on my brow dried. I could find a lair here.

“It’s perfect,” I said. “I’m so relieved. I thought the whole Bowen family was richer than God, and I’d have to tiptoe around Palladian windows and gold-plated fixtures.”

“Oh, they’re richer than God, all right,” Livvy said, touching a match to the fire. It sprang to life and began to lick at the chill with hungry little tongues. “Or we are, I guess. This is Vineyard rich. Not like Newport at all. Not even like Nantucket. No ostentation allowed. God forbid anybody add any comfort to the old places, much less luxury. The only thing that’s permissible to spend money on is a fund to save the piping marsh doohickey, or one of the land trusts. And even then, you do it anonymously.”

“Where’s the fun in that?”

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“Precisely. Oh, well. Snuggle down in that throw in front of the fire and I’ll bring the Bloodies. There’s lots of fun in that.”

There was. We had our Bloody Marys in front of the fire, and then had seconds, and we talked and talked and talked.

Or Livvy talked, of her summers here, and of the men and women and children who peopled them, and of the places on the Vineyard that were dear to her, and of the gradual rhythms that one slipped into here, if one spent a long enough time: rhythms laid down, not by a clock, but by the comings and goings of the light and the sea. I lay on the old chintz couch wrapped in damp mohair, watching the flames and listening to her spin out her fabric of summer and sky and ocean, a fabric that did not include me in its warp and woof, and so was as detachedly fascinating to watch as a movie unfolding: What would happen next? I felt mindlessly content, slung hammocklike between worlds, rocked in the rhythm of her words, lulled with fire and vodka.

We ate our chowder before the fire, too, when the pearly light went out of solid white nothingness outside and the fog was lost to larger dark. Just before we went up to bed, Livvy opened the door on to the porch and leaned her head out and sniffed.

“Wind’s changed,” she said. “I can smell the open ocean.

It’ll be fair by morning.”

I got up and went and stood behind her, and took a long, deep breath, smelling it for the first time, that salt-sweet, kelp-heavy, infinitely fresh breath of the sea that I have since come to need as my own breath: the breath of Martha’s Vineyard.

It was like plunging your hot face into a wet, cool spray of spume. There were other notes in it, flowers, I thought. But I did not

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know what they were. I exhaled and drew in another breath.

“It smells heavenly, doesn’t it? I’ve never smelled anything like it.”

“There’s not anything like it,” Livvy said.

My room upstairs was a small, low-ceilinged cave up under the eaves, with rough, white-plaster walls and pine beams weathered the color of smoke-dark honey. A narrow iron bed was piled high with down pillows and covered with an old white pelisse spread. A mottled, ivory feather pouf lay folded at its foot. There was not much furniture, just a curly rattan writing desk and chair, a wardrobe with an organdy scarf and white china jars and bottles on it, and a ridiculous and wonderful chaise lounge made of wicker, facing the casement windows and piled with pillows and a blue plaid throw. Beside it a table held magazines and books and a rowdy bouquet of zinnias in a blue vase.