Up Island (21 page)

“Will any of them be at the party?” I asked.

“I doubt it,” Livvy said. “I don’t think they’re very interested in the goings-on of the new people, even though the Hartnells have been here since the mid-fifties. I’ve never met one of them in all the summers we’ve been coming here.”

Which meant, I knew, that the old families had never been asked to the parties on Chappy and most probably vice versa.

That knowledge made me obscurely happy.

“What about the Portuguese? Do they mingle?”

“No. Not with us and not with the old Vineyarders. Not much, anyway, that I know of. It really is a pretty striated little island, when you come right down to it.”

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“Awfully small not to know your neighbors,” I agreed.

“Well, that’s true anywhere, don’t you think?” Gerry said, rather sharply, and I realized she must have thought I was criticizing the Vineyard as a place where prejudice ruled.

“Of course,” Livvy said. “You know it is at home, Molly.

How many times do you go to parties in Vine City, or vice versa?”

I was annoyed, even though I knew they were both right.

“I don’t think they have many parties in Vine City,” I said.

There was a crisp little silence, and I retreated under the shade of my mother’s hat brim. The hat was, after all, a mistake; perhaps the entire evening was. Somehow I could not seem to put a foot right these last few days. I did not know if the fault lay with me or them, but assumed, as I always had, that it was mine. In strange country, I always seemed to defer to those who were not strangers.

Like the hat.

“Oh, wear the hat,” Livvy had caroled when I had come downstairs in the only fairly dressy thing I had brought, a black-silk knit pants suit in which I traveled, that showed no wrinkles even if I slept in it. It was serviceable and respectable, but not much else. The only dress I had brought was denim. The black did need something to give it panache.

“Do, it’s wonderful,” Gerry had agreed. “So go to hell.

You’ll be a sensation.”

So I had put the hat on, and unbuttoned the jacket a couple of buttons to show off the chunky gold necklace I had borrowed from Livvy, and did indeed look,
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at least in the watery old mirror upstairs, like a carefree woman going to a big party on a summer night. I had gotten my tan back during the long beach club mornings, and it and the shadow of the hat made my eyes burn blue and my teeth flash white.

“Not bad, for an abandoned wife,” I said to myself, leaning over to see if the cleavage the neckline revealed was too…cleaved. It looked pretty good to me, for a party. I had never lacked ample cleavage.

But now, in the silence and shadows of up island, I felt that the swooping hat was silly and theatrical, and the unbuttoned suit jacket just plain tacky. I hitched at the jacket to pull it higher, and started to button it up again, then stopped. I had meant no criticism, and I wasn’t going to let Gerry Edmondson’s touchiness intimidate me. She had been dour from the beginning of the evening; Peter, she said, had gotten tied up in Boston and couldn’t make the party. We were, this night, three women without men. I knew that Livvy and Gerry felt the absence, but I liked it. It rather leveled the playing field.

“Let’s go find some more swans,” I said.

Out of West Tisbury the countryside changed again. It became wild and craggy and sweeping, a place of salt meadows and stone walls and great glacial boulders, bare and wind scoured and beautiful. Like Scotland must be, I thought.

Here along South Road you could see the old houses, crowning the moors or nestled into the folds of the cliffs to the east that gentled themselves down to the ponds and overlooked the wild beaches and the sea. In the center of the island, around West Tisbury, you could see only the little overgrown lanes that led to the houses. I liked this land of gnarled openness, but it was the little hidden UP ISLAND / 179

forest roads that seemed to call out to me. If I lived here, I knew that I would make for the forest like a captive wild creature finally released.

Just before we reached the turnoff for the Hartnells’ house on Chilmark Pond, just past the cemetery where, Gerry said, John Belushi was buried, there was a long driveway on the right, leading up to a tall, gray-shingled house near the top of the glacial ridge. It sat alone in a cluster of leaning outbuildings, and you could tell, even from the road, that it was very old. At the roadside, beside the driveway, a hand-lettered sign read, “Furnished camp available, free in exchange for caretaking and light swan-tending duties. Winterized. Call,”

and it finished with a telephone number.

I was enchanted. “Swan-tending! What a magical come-on; who wouldn’t want to spend a winter tending swans?

How do you tend swans, anyway? What’s a camp?”

“You tend them with a lot of respect and an AK–47,” Gerry said, but she was smiling, good humor restored. “Camps, I think, are these really rustic little shacks or something that some of the year-rounders have, mostly around Menemsha, where they go to rough it beside the water and fish and stuff.

I think a lot of them live in their camps when they rent out their houses in the summer. That’s a Ponder house, so it must be a Ponder camp. I’ve never heard of one being winterized.

And I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. Peter says they’re neat, like a boy’s playhouse or tree house or something, but I don’t think I’d want to spend a Vineyard winter in one. And I don’t know why you’d be tending swans; they usually spend the winters in the saltwater ponds along the shores, where they’re
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protected from the wind and the water doesn’t freeze. If they don’t migrate. I think a lot of them do.”

“A man could do worse than be a tender of swans,” I said, paraphrasing Robert Frost.

“Not much,” Gerry said.

A cluster of balloons fastened to an inconspicuous mailbox on our left marked the entrance to the Hartnells’ road, and we turned in and followed the bumping dirt lane down toward a thick fringe of trees. Beyond them I caught the glitter of water, and beyond that the dark blue line that was the Atlantic. Unlike most of the other up-island houses, I could not see this one, and realized that it must be a low house, built to nestle in the trees.

“Have we got the right night?” I said. There was no sign of life from the twisting lane.

Then we turned the last sharp curve and there was a meadow with perhaps a hundred or more cars parked in it, being guided in by young men in dark pants and white shirts, carrying walkie-talkies. Beyond the meadow, out of a nest of old shrubbery and stunted waterside trees, the tiled roof of a long, low house raised its peaked head. Even from here I could hear the soft boom of percussion, and a low hum that must be conversation, spiked every now and then with laughter. Without any warning at all my mouth went dry, and my heart began to pound.

“I think I’d do better with swans,” I said faintly.

“Don’t be silly. It’s the party of the year. Come on, you’ll know all the Chappy people,” Livvy said, and took my arm and marched me across the meadow toward the house. On my head my mother’s hat flopped uncomfortably, as if a large black bird were perched there, deciding whether or not to take off.

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We walked through a hedge of dark old rhododendrons and the house came in sight. It was a replica of an English stone cottage, I saw, or what might pass for one: mossy gray walls, tiled roof with more moss growing from it, mullioned and leaded windows, small cottage gardens rioting with perennials. I saw that the gardens sloped down to the shore of the pond in a series of small, roomlike spaces enclosed by stone walls and arbors thick with vines and tall hollyhock and sunflower fences. There must have been half a dozen of them. The last few were out of sight below the trees that fringed the pond. Benches and garden lights and bits of old statuary and birdbaths sat about, looking not at all like the miniature golf courses Livvy had said she bet they did.

“Trolls,” she had said. “I hear she has garden trolls beside her koi pond. Too twee for words.”

But there was nothing twee about these gardens, or the house they surrounded. Both were absolutely charming in the light off the twilit sea, looking more like a painting or a dream than a place where people lived and worked and spread manure and swatted mosquitoes.

In and about the gardens and on the wide terrace that fringed the house on all sides there must have been three hundred people. At one end a small orchestra played. Old-fashioned Japanese lanterns glowed in the arbors and trees that hung over the terrace. I could see another knot of people gathered around what must be the bar, at the other end of the terrace. White-coated waiters floated through the crowd like butterflies, bearing trays of drinks and hors d’oeuvres.

“I think I’ll walk down to the water and see if the
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swans are around first,” I said through the cotton in my mouth. “Anybody want to come with me?”

“Molly, what on earth has gotten into you this summer?

At least come and meet your hostess…oh, all right,” Livvy said and sighed. “Come on. I’ll walk down with you. Then you’re going to have to mingle. I said I wouldn’t leave you, didn’t I?”

But she did leave me. The words weren’t out of her mouth before a swarm of women in bright silks and cottons detached themselves from the crowd and bore down on us, chattering and peeping like birds. Before I could blink my eyes they had surrounded Livvy and were bearing her away.

“Where have you
been
all summer?” they trilled. “We’ve been looking all over for you! Do you realize it’s almost time to go home and we haven’t even had lunch? I heard you had a guest; has she been ill, or what? Has she gone? Come talk to Dink. Toby…Stuart…Potter…they’ve been asking all summer where you and Caleb were…”

Over their heads I saw Livvy looking back at me, her mouth making sounds.

“Come on, keep up with us,” I thought she said, but could not be sure. I turned to Gerry, but she was no longer there.

I started after them like a clumsy duckling trying to keep up with a flock of—yes, swans—but a waiter with a tray backed into me, and by the time he had apologized and brushed the white wine off my black lapels, the swan pack had disappeared into the general maw of the crowd. Pure terror pinned me suddenly to the terrace, where I stood. I took a glass of wine from the waiter and drank it down and looked about me, smiling broadly, like a woman who will soon be joined by a hundred incomparably chic and interesting UP ISLAND / 183

friends, and waited. Surely when the tide cast Livvy up, she would come back for me.

When she hadn’t, perhaps half an hour later, I found a waiter and swiped another glass of wine and slipped off the terrace and down the path into the darkening garden. To the west, the sky over Menemsha was vermilion and purple and pink and gold, but down here on the opposite shore, the soft, thick night was falling fast. By the time I had stumbled through three or four garden “rooms” it was completely dark, and all the little ground lights had come on. Stars chipped the sky, but there was no moon yet. I remembered that it had risen late these past few nights. As soon as I reached the fourth garden room, the crowd of strollers had thinned, until I was alone. Only then did I slow down and take a deep breath. The path made a sharp turn and went down a flight of shallow stone steps, and I was in the last space, a trellised square with vines hanging low over a small pond, and an incredible smell of earth and dampness and flowers. Something like jasmine scented the night, but I did not think jasmine grew this far north. Whatever it was, it soothed my pounding heart and hot face like cool water. There were stone benches encircling the trees nearest the pond, and I sat down on one that girdled a huge old oak, so thick that I could not have put my two arms around it. Letting my breath out in a long sigh, I drained my glass and put it down on the bench, and stared at the dark water. Dark shapes and flashes of gold and orange wheeled and darted in its depths: the famous koi.

Where were the trolls?

“Hey, you stupid fish,” I said aloud. “I don’t like your party.

I want to go home.”

And I did, wanted it with the simple, consuming,
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one-pointed misery that I had felt as a child the first time I was sent to Camp Greystone, homesick and too big and knowing no one among the flock of girls my mother had de-creed I share my summer with. I purely and simply wanted to go home. To whom was not, at that moment, important.

I did not think that far ahead. Later I loved camp, but not that first time.

As clearly and grotesquely as if the koi had answered, I heard my mother’s voice. It was not the impatient one, but the lazy, indulgently amused one that stung infinitely worse.

“You’re hiding again, aren’t you, Molly? How many times have we talked about that?
Never
run.
Never
hide. It looks so craven, darling. You are just plain too big to shrink away from things. Even small women should never do it. I would not dream of it. Now get up and go back up there and show those tacky women what your mama taught you.”

I sat still for a moment, pinned to the bench with shock and anger. And then I got up and tossed my glass into the lush plantings around the pond. The koi roiled and splashed.

“You shut up,” I whispered, and then said aloud, “you just shut the shit up.”

By the time I reached the terrace again, I was trotting smartly.

I was almost back to the first garden room when I heard Livvy’s voice. It was sharp with annoyance and, I thought, worry.

“I can’t imagine where she’s gotten to. I never saw her after you-all shanghaied me. Are you sure none of you did?”

I opened my mouth to call out to them in the darkness.

But then Gerry Edmondson’s voice said, “Are UP ISLAND / 185

you kidding? In that hat? If we’d seen her, we’d know. So would everybody else. They’d still be laughing.”

Once again I froze. I felt as if I’d been struck in the stomach. It had been Gerry who had urged me, along with Livvy, to wear my mother’s hat. It suddenly burned my forehead as if it had been set alight. I shrank back into the shadows of a group of slender poplars. I stood in the Italian garden room, screened from their view by poplars and tall urns.