Up Island (31 page)

After that I went over to the Black Dog and bought bread and sweet rolls and had a bowl of Quahog chowder for lunch, then treated myself to a couple of sturdy Black Dog sweatshirts. The air, even at noon, had a pinch to it. They would feel good on chilly mornings. Walking back to the Ford I passed the Bunch of Grapes bookstore and, on impulse, went in. I had planned to find a library for my reading material; books were one expense I thought I could forego. But I came out laden with both paperbacks and hardbacks, thinking with delight of the moment when I slipped between my silky old sheets and turned on my new reading lamp and opened a new novel. Home: leisurely reading in bed would always be, for me, one of its cornerstones. Promising myself a modest shopping spree later for lamps and pottery and throw rugs and such, I loaded up the old car and wrestled it out of its parking space, turning it out on to the state road toward home.

I stopped in front of the larger camp and took
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Dennis Ponder’s groceries in. He was nowhere in sight, but music drifted softly from the closed door of the bedroom. I recognized “Vissi d’Arte” and smiled; unless I missed my guess, it was Renata Tebaldi singing. I loved opera, and Tebaldi’s
Tosca
had been my first recording. I had seldom listened to it at home, though. Tee and Teddy snorted at it.

This would give me something else neutral to talk to Dennis Ponder about at the times when contact could not be avoided.

He could hardly snarl at me for loving “Vissi d’Arte.”

I put the groceries on the table in the kitchen. A note there said he was sleeping and did not wish to be wakened. He had forgotten to put Scotch and wine on his list; if I had some, he would appreciate the loan. If not, I was to get him some single malt and four bottles of a good Merlot tomorrow.

He did not specify brands. Here’s where I mess up royally, I thought. This could well be a trap. Looking around, I saw that a bowl and spoon and glass stood draining on the sideboard, and a small saucepan sat in the sink. So he had managed some sort of meal for himself. I put away the perishables and tiptoed out, only then realizing that I had been holding my breath. One curmudgeon down, I thought, only two more to go.

The swans behaved no better when I took them their barley. This time they were out on the water, and I thought I might scatter it unmolested, but they were there in full flapping, hissing battle mode before I got the first handful cast on the verge of the pond. I picked up the stick and struck the ground with it so hard that dirt and grass flew. Diana shrank back for all the world like a vaporous Victorian virgin, and Charles advanced, hissing and grunting, almost to my ankles, UP ISLAND / 267

so I thumped the ground again and he drew back. But one of the great wings connected with my shin, and almost knocked me to my knees. I knew that I would have a monumental bruise there. I whacked once more, and he stopped his posturing and glared at me malevolently with his flat jet eyes.

“You and what army?” I hissed at him. He hissed back, but then turned away and began grandly to peck barley.

When I went back to the camp, neither of them followed me.

I refused to limp, though my shin hurt smartly, and felt only slightly ridiculous trying to save face in front of a pair of neurotic swans.

“Molly the Swan Killer,” I said aloud, and laughed. It struck me then that I was doing quite a lot of talking to myself.

Well, so what? Who was there out here to hear me?

That night the low sky began to weep rain. It started as I was heating mushroom soup and Black Dog bread in the gas stove, a soft pattering on the old cedar shake roof. It sounded wonderful, like a magic circle of protection being drawn around the little house. I poured a stiff shot of sherry into my soup and took my tray into the living room. I lit the fire and turned on the little radio, now engaged with something sinuous and symphonic, and ate my supper on the sofa by firelight. I could not imagine ever in my life being lonely again. Contentment almost smothered me.

The spell of the night lasted when I climbed the perilous stairs to my bedroom and slipped into the high maple bed.

I had brought a cup of cocoa and a new Anne Tyler, and I sipped and read until my eyes grew heavy and I turned off my lamp and slid into my first sleep in this place. The last thing I remember

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before the soft dark closed over me was the gentle tattoo of rain overhead.

Two hours or so later, I woke drenched with sweat and choking on my own cry. I had dreamed of my mother, not in her subterranean grotto this time, but sitting on the slipper chair across the bedroom from me. She wore her faded and darned leotard and tights, and she was so knobbed and corded she might have been carved from pale wood. Her arms were outstretched to me, hands curled into imploring claws, and her face was contorted with rage and terror. She was saying something to me, but I could not hear what it was; it was as if all my senses but sight were dead, for I could not move. The dream was in slow motion; my mother formed her poor, monstrous words as if under fathoms of deadening water. She cried, silently and awfully. I only knew that I was crying, too, when I realized I was seeing her through the silvery blur of my tears. What? I tried to say to her over and over, What? What do you want from me? What can I give you?

Then she was up and gliding toward me, slowly, slowly, her hands reaching, her mouth making the silent scream of need, her tears flowing, flowing. I tried so hard to shrink away from her touch that, just before she reached me, I woke myself with an enormous, sickening wrench. My cry of horror and pity still echoed in the room. There was no other sound.

Sometime during the dream the rain had stopped.

It was long minutes before I could get up and go into the bathroom and wash my face. My hair was matted with sweat.

My T-shirt was soaked. I changed it and drank a glass of water, and then, reluctantly, crept back into my bed and pulled the covers over my

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ears, leaving only my nose exposed. I did not dare look across the room where my mother had sat. I lay still, feeling so alone in the alien bed that my very skin cried out for touch, for the warmth of living flesh against it.

“Tee,” I whimpered silently, but then realized that it was not his touch that I wanted. That warmth flickered and died.

“Lazarus,” I whispered aloud, and felt peace and comfort steal over me like warm water. Less than a week now. In less than a week he would lie there as he used to when Tee was out of town, his big, slack, sweet, smelly body giving to me unstintingly its full measure of sustaining warmth. I felt the nightmare recede like a train going away.

I sat up and looked where my mother had sat, and saw now the trail of a white quarter moon on the water of Vineyard Sound, beyond Menemsha Bight. It looked as though you could walk across it, a bridge to somewhere magical, somewhere as remote and safe as the moon that cast it.

I lay back again, put my arms out to embrace the place where Lazarus would soon lie, and went back to sleep.

Thus ended the first day.

Grandma Bell was forever telling us grandchildren that the Bible said not to put old wine into new wine-skins. But I found that I was unable to get myself through those first days in the little camp without establishing a routine, making a trellis of sorts for them, and that the routine was nearly identical to the one I had followed all of my adult life. I slept in only on weekends. I woke with the light. I washed and
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dressed and had my breakfast, then I did my fixed chores: checking on Dennis Ponder, feeding the swans, checking to see if the old women in the big house needed anything, consulting my own lists. Then I would go out in the stately, bucketing old Ford on the business of procuring things: to the general stores at Menemsha, Chilmark, or West Tisbury if the various lists were minimal, to Vineyard Haven if they were longer or at all esoteric. I would come back then and deliver my groceries, usually stopping for tea or coffee with the old women, almost always putting groceries away in Dennis Ponder’s empty kitchen, with the strains of Puccini or Verdi drifting from the bedroom.

I would turn my attention to my own nest then. I painted, rearranged furniture, laid down scatter rugs, hung curtains and set out new towels, arranged flowers bought from roadside stands, hung the winter clothes that arrived from Missy in the scanty closet, organized shelves and kitchen cabinets, made lists of things I wanted to add as the little structure came gradually alive. The camp was like a child’s playhouse, my very own: no one’s needs to be met but mine, no one’s taste reflected but mine. I grew as fussy and particular about where to put what, which books should lie where, what cushion should grace what corner as a little old maiden lady.

I think that it was partly because there was so little space and I had so few things to mess about with; at home, where the flotsam and jetsam of all our lives and years was as abundant as dust, it was possible only to try and contain it all, never mind arranging it. Here, in this sparsity of space and objects, I found that I cared inordinately what trinket or pillow or vase went where, what color book jacket UP ISLAND / 271

sat next to another. Toward the end of the day I would find myself adjusting for the fourth time in an hour a new pottery pitcher I had bought at an antique shop, and would snort with disgust and stop and make coffee. Then I would check on Dennis again, determinedly waiting until he showed himself if I had not seen him that day, feed the swans again, and come home to what I had begun to think of as the “real”

time of the day, the time when I stopped doing errands and fiddling about and sat down to feel my way into my new life.

I usually lit a fire, for early autumn evenings chilled fast on the pond, and even the great sunset fires burned cold. I put an opera on the little cassette recorder that had been my first purely self-indulgent purchase besides books, and sank on to my sofa and put my feet up. I had it in mind, in these still blue hours, to savor the very particular tastes that made this place itself and none other; to truly and fully bear witness to the slow turn of the season; to try and bring the snarled yarn of the previous summer into some sort of order. I even thought, on those very first evenings, that if I sat very still and summoned my mother from the vault deep inside me where she was stashed in my waking hours, I might begin to come to grips with her death, if not, yet, her life. I might even, I thought once, early on, begin to make some peace with the Tee that had been and the Tee that would, from now on, be.

But I suspect it was too early for those things, and maybe even too early for any sort of interior journeying whatsoever, for I invariably fell asleep on the sofa and woke with a dying fire, a darkening room, a silent tape recorder, and a crick in my neck. In those first

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days up island, I seemed drowned in an uncharted sea of sleep. The daytime kind refreshed. The nighttime haunted.

My mother came to me for the first four nights that I slept in the camp. It was the same dream, with only minor vari-ations of circumstance: Sometimes I knew she was dead but she did not, sometimes it was the other way around.

Wakening from those latter dreams, I would wonder if it was simply what she wanted so desperately from me: simply my knowledge that she was dead. But then I would have the dream again, and her need seemed so consuming, so anguished and ravenous, that I thought it must be life after all that she sought, some sort of life that I could neither understand nor grant her. All the dreams ended in cold sweat and hammering heart and the hopeless black residue that such dreams leave. I grew tired and listless. On the fifth night I slept on the sofa downstairs before the fire, and I did not have the dream. I experimented after that, and found that for some reason I slept relatively dream-free in a nest of blankets in the tiny sleeping nook under the ground-floor stairs, so I dismantled the iron twin bed in the smaller upstairs bedroom and set it up there. The cubbyhole was neither as comfortable as my original bedroom nor nearly as pretty, and I saw no vista of light on sea when I awoke, only old, smoke-honeyed pine walls pressing over and around me. But I stayed, for my mother did not visit me there. Perhaps, I thought on the first morning, she still came nightly to the room upstairs with her silent screams and her weeping, to beckon and implore to emptiness. For some reason it was an awful thought. I found myself reluctant to go into that room at night, for fear that I might see her there.

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But my strength and spirits lifted. It seemed a fair trade-off.

Shortly before I was to go to Boston and pick up Lazarus, I stopped in to check on Dennis Ponder. The front door was unlocked, so I went in, as we had agreed, and found him seated on the living-room floor surrounded by open boxes of books and household clutter. He was pale that morning, paler than usual, and there were streaks of dust on his face and in his hair. He was looking down at something in his lap. His legs—or leg—was covered with a thick plaid blanket such as I had in my cabin, and a fire sputtered on the hearth, threatening to go out. There was an empty coffee cup overturned on the sisal rug beside him, and a drying stain on the matting. His eyes were closed and he sat very still. I thought he might be meditating or doing some sort of self-hypnosis, he was so still and seemed so far away. But I did not like the look of his face, and so I spoke, though reluctantly.

“Are you all right?” I said.

He did not lift his head, but he opened his eyes, still staring down into his lap. I saw that there was a framed photograph there, though I could not see what it was, and felt a stab of pity. His wife and daughter?

“Yes,” he said.

There was more silence, and then I took a deep breath and said, “The fire is dying and your coffee has spilled. You’re paler than death. I know we said I wouldn’t hover unless it was necessary, but it seems to me that it is, unless you’re willing to tell me why it isn’t. So I’m going to stand here until you do that. Then I’m out of here.”