Up Island (23 page)

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I was about to turn away, my raised fist not, after all, having knocked, when a voice from inside called, “Who’s there? I know somebody’s there.”

I sighed. After that I could not simply drive away.

“I’ve come about the sign down on the road,” I called. My voice sounded huge and hollow in the vast, windy silence.

“Oh, how lovely,” the voice called back, and I smiled in spite of myself. It was a sweet, high voice, like a child’s, but there was something unchildlike in it, too, a kind of timorous fragility that you hear only in the voices of the very old or the ill.

“Push the door open, it sticks. I can’t come to you,” the voice said, and I did, and stood in the cavelike darkness of a room that seemed enormous and smelled of camphor and dust and trapped summer heat. After the dazzle of the hillside, I could see nothing, and stood blinking for a moment.

“Are you in? I can’t see you for the glare. Come over here where I can see you,” the voice said, and I walked slowly toward it, feeling my way and bumping into looming, clifflike pieces of furniture. In the middle of the room I stopped, as blind as if I were an eyeless cave creature, and then a dim yellow light came on in the far corner, and I could see again.

I stood in the middle of what must have been a living or drawing room once, but now was a sickroom, or at least the corner I could see was. A hospital bed stood there, beside a round table spilling over with books and magazines and glasses and saucers and spoons, and in the bed a tiny woman lay, propped up on piled pillows of linen so old they were ivory yellow, like old teeth. On the other side of the bed, a tall window looked out on to what must be the backyard, but an

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old-fashioned roller shade was pulled down so that no one could see in or out. On a table, a small lamp was lit. There were vases and glasses and jars full of flowers everywhere, some fresh, some drooping, some completely brown and dry.

Among them, under the yellow covers and against the yellow pillows, the little woman looked as tiny and sere as the mummy of a child, and as yellow, almost, as the bedclothes.

Her tiny face was crosshatched with delicate, fine lines and wrinkles, the skin a polished ocher against which wisps of silvery white hair stood out like dandelion fuzz. Lord, she was old; she looked too old to be alive, almost, in her high-buttoned white nightgown and the sparse nimbus of hair.

But her black-dark eyes burned with joy, and her smile was as white and delighted as a young child’s. I smiled back; it was impossible not to.

“The swans? You’ve come about the swans?” she said.

“Well, I saw the sign and I was curious…”

“Would you come a little closer? I can’t find my glasses and I don’t see well anymore…”

I walked forward, into the circle of light from the painted china lamp. She drew in a breath, and her face seemed to flame with a kind of rapture.

“
Portugués?”
she whispered. “You are
Portugués?”

Before I could answer, another voice called from the back of the house, “
Ingles, Luzia, se faz favor.
Speak English.”

It was such a deep voice that I thought at first it was a man’s, but there was something feminine in it, something fruitful and dark in its depths.

“But, Bella, she is
Portugués
and she has come for the
cisnes.
The swans, I mean…”

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“I’m afraid I’m not Portuguese,” I said hesitantly, for it seemed of enormous import to her that I was. “But I did want to know more about the swans, and the camp…”

She peered up at me and then shook her head.

“I see now that you aren’t. Your eyes are blue, of course…it’s just that you are so big and so dark, and your teeth are so white. There are a lot of Portuguese women who look like you. But never mind, you’re here about the swans and that’s all that matters.”

There was the sound of heavy feet and an enormous woman came into the room from somewhere back in the house.

I gaped; at first she seemed to me simply a mountainous black shape looming over me, a creature as much of the dark as the other little woman was, somehow, of the light. But at second glance I could see that she was simply a painfully obese, very tall old woman dressed in black stretch pants and a black overshirt, with her dark hair wound in braids around her head and black, soft shoes on her feet. She leaned on a cane and smiled at the little woman and at me, and the im-pression of menace faded, though her smile was chilly and formal.

“I am Isabel Ponder, and this is my cousin, Luzia Ferreira.

I’m sorry I didn’t hear you knock. Luzia must have given you a turn, crouching in here in the dark like a little old toad.”

The smile widened and sweetened for a moment, then melted back into its polite chilliness.

“No, it’s all right. I really hadn’t knocked yet. I saw…I saw your sign a few nights ago, and I thought I’d come and see about the camp. I think I might be staying on the Vineyard for a while, and it sounded…

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it sounded charming. I mean, the bit about tending the swans…”

I knew I was babbling, and fell silent under the weight of that fixed smile and the still, dark eyes.

“I thought that up! That’s my line! I said it and Bella wrote it down,” the little woman bubbled, and this time we both smiled at her.

“It’s a nice line. It’s the reason I stopped,” I said, as you would to a child, and she clapped her hands. What was it, I thought, early Alzheimer’s? Illness and weakness? Just the onset of extreme old age?

“Yes. It is,” Isabel Ponder said. “Well. So you’re interested in the camp? Please sit down and tell me why you are. It’s terribly isolated and the winters can be very hard here, and I can tell you aren’t an islander. You’re not even a Northerner, are you?”

We sat down on a sagging sofa in front of the hospital bed. I clasped my hands together in my lap and faced her as you would a headmistress, or one to whom you were applying for a job. She was panting for breath by the time she had settled herself, drawing great, hoarse, laboring breaths that whistled in her chest, but she was still formidable.

“I’m not a Northerner, no,” I said with as much composure as I could muster. “I’m a Southerner. From Atlanta. I came up to visit friends and I…I thought I might stay for a while, and I didn’t want to impose on them; they’re over on Chappaquiddick, and they need to close the house…and when I saw your sign it just seemed to be…I thought…I liked the look of it.”

What was the matter with me? This woman needed to know nothing except that I was interested in looking at her camp. I owed her nothing else but my UP ISLAND / 199

name and my interest. But I found myself anxious to please her.

“My mother’s name is Belle, too. Was, rather,” I said.

“Ah. She is not alive, then?”

“No. She died…not long ago….”

How can that be? Mother, where are you?

“Oh. And you are alone now.”

“No. I have a son and a daughter and a husband…well, not exactly a husband, not for long…and my father is still alive, and I have a brother in Washington…”

“But you still want to spend the winter in a camp on Martha’s Vineyard,” Isabel Ponder said. Her words seemed to mock me, if not her tone, which was perfectly neutral.

“I…yes. I think I do,” I said crisply. “Depending on its suitability, of course.”

“It is quite suitable,” she said, unsmiling. “You said you don’t exactly have a husband, or won’t have for long. You’re separated, then? You’re being divorced?”

“I’m doing the divorcing, actually,” I said lightly and desperately. Why could I not just stand up and go? This inquisition was unthinkable.

“Ah. Was he cheating on you?”

This time I did stand up.

“I’m sorry to have taken your time—”

“Bella! You say you’re sorry right now!” the little old woman in the bed cried out in such anguish that I turned to her instinctively. “It’s all right,” I said softly.

“Luzia is right. I’m being terribly nosy and impolite,” Bella Ponder said, but she said it heavily and roughly, as one would who was not used to apologizing.

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“It’s just that…I sympathize, you see,” she went on. “My husband left me, too, when my son was only a baby. That’s when Luzia came to help us out. I know how hard it is. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“No, she didn’t. She really, really didn’t,” Luzia Ferreira said from her bed. She was actually wringing her hands together. It was for her that I sat back down and said to Bella Ponder, “It’s very recent. I’m still having a hard time getting used to it. But it’s the main reason I might like to stay on here for a while. My father is with my brother in Washington, and my daughter lives in Memphis with her husband and baby, and my son is at school out West. I just didn’t feel like going home yet, somehow.”

She nodded, studying me.

“So…no family at home. You thought you might have a little adventure in a different place, get your head straight, all that. Tell me, are you tough? Can you take bitter cold weather? Can you take isolation? Can you cope with being snowed in, and power failures, and weeks and weeks without the sun, and mud up to your knees, and spring looking like it will never come?”

“I’m tough,” I said, a pallid anger stirring at last, deep down inside me. “I can’t think of anything this island can hand me that I can’t take. But I don’t see any point in talking about it anymore. You’ve obviously got serious doubts about me. I think you’d be much happier with someone from the island.

Surely there’s someone, a member of your family, who could tend your swans. My friend says yours is the oldest family on the island, and that there are lots of you around—”

“We can’t have anybody from the island,” Luzia wailed, and I turned to look at her. Great tears were UP ISLAND / 201

sliding slowly down her little brown walnut of a face. I stared in surprise and pity.

“I am not close to my husband’s family,” Bella Ponder said.

“I will not ask them for help. Whoever takes the camp is going to have to do some things for Luzia and me, too, and there are other caretaking duties that will be involved. I need to know that whoever is in the camp is strong and capable, and will stay for…as long as I need them. Several months, at least.

How do I know that you won’t get homesick for your family, or that you won’t go back to your husband in a month or two? It’s not going to do me any good if you are going to do that.”

“I can’t promise that,” I said. “I don’t have any idea how long I want to stay. I’d thought I’d try it a month at a time, and just go from there. Of course, if I did agree to take it and I’d promised to do specific things for you, I wouldn’t just go off and leave you in the lurch. I’d wait until you got someone else, if I decided to go back home…”

“We can’t do that,” Luzia cried. “Don’t you understand?”

“Hush,” Bella Ponder said to her cousin without looking at her. “I guess that’s fair enough. There wouldn’t be much work involved in helping us out, just a few groceries gotten in once or twice a week, and driving us to the doctor when we have to go. Luz has been in bed since she broke her hip three years ago; got osteoporosis, too. And my heart doesn’t seem to want to go like it once did. Too damned fat, that’s for sure. I can’t walk much. Can’t do stairs, can’t carry things.

But we never did go out much. You wouldn’t be burdened by us. And those sorry swans; well, mainly they have to be fed, and the water in the pond has to be broken up
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twice a day so it doesn’t freeze up on them. Spoiled old fools won’t leave that pond, not even in winter when all the others are down on the deep salt ponds where it doesn’t freeze.

Won’t even go back to wherever it is that they belong in the summer like they’re supposed to. Luzia has spoiled them to death, and now she can’t take care of them, and I can’t either…”

“Please look after Charles and Di,” Luzia said in her sick child’s voice. “It isn’t their fault I spoiled them so. I never thought about making them dependent on me; I just thought it was so nice that they wanted to spend their time on the pond with us…well, you’re a mother. You understand how it is to worry about what happens to your children when you can’t take care of them any longer…”

I looked over at Bella Ponder, a quick, alarmed glance.

Surely this crippled old woman did not think of the swans as her children?

I caught a fleeting expression of what, amazingly, looked to be anguish in Bella’s dark eyes before she sensed me looking at her and rolled them indulgently.

“Luz never had children of her own, and that’s hard for a good Portuguese girl,” she said, smiling her wintry smile.

“She loved my little son, and when he went off island to school she missed him terribly, so when these two took up with us down at the camp, she just adopted them. Miserable, overgrown turkeys, it was like having two devil-possessed toddlers around the house, only these never grew up. They’re still as cantankerous today as the day they flew in. But they’ll come running for Luz like lost children; I try to take her down to the camp a few times during the summers. It’s been three years since we spent much time down there, but they don’t forget.”

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“Well, of course they don’t,” Luzia Ferreira said. “Have you forgotten
your
mama?”

“Charles and Di,” I said. “Are they royalty?”

In the yellow bed, the tiny woman beamed. “They are, sort of. They came the summer of the royal wedding, and since they were still youngsters then, and a new couple—you could tell that—I named them Charles and Diana. They’re devoted to one another. You should see the way he hovers over her, and brings her the best food, and hisses and beats his wings when he thinks anybody is too close to her. Still in love after all these years…”

“Not like their namesakes,” I said, smiling. “You aren’t afraid they’ll have a scandalous breakup one day?”

“No,” she said seriously. “Swans mate for life. They’re not like us about that. Loyalty and faithfulness mean everything to them.”