Up Island (32 page)

Finally he looked up at me. I saw, with shock, that
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his eyes were reddened, as if he had been crying. But the dying fire was rolling its smoke out into the room, so it could have been that. I went over and piled more logs on it and poked it up, and the chimney did its work and sucked the smoke away.

“Thanks,” he said from the floor. “I was about to do that.

Sometimes it just seems simpler to choke on the smoke.”

It was the first time he had mentioned anything at all about the difficulty of his situation.

“That’s why I look in twice a day,” I said. “I wish you’d let me tend to things like that.”

He made a dismissive gesture with one hand and the long mouth twisted slightly.

“The prostheses they make these days are hardly short of miraculous,” I ventured, trying to sound neutral and professional. “I’m sure your doctor has told you that. It would make getting around a thousand times easier. Have you considered it?”

“Is that so, Mollycoddle?” he said and smiled. I would just as soon he hadn’t. “Do you just happen to have one out in the car? Want to run and get ’er and let’s strap ’er on and have a trial run? Care to dance?”

I was silent. My face flamed.

“I used to be a runner,” he said, and handed the photograph up to me. I looked: He knelt there, captured forever on a track in the sun of what looked to be the Northwest, misted mountains and evergreens dark behind the track and a huddle of corrugated iron outbuildings. He was crouched in the classic runner’s starting position, one hand ahead of him touching the cinders delicately. His head was up, facing the camera, and his hair hung in his eyes. He was smiling and squinting into the sun, and he looked UP ISLAND / 275

thin and young and so handsome it hurt your heart to look at him.

“Was this in college?” I said.

“No. That was Harvard. This is after that, when I was first in Seattle. I ran relay then, and I still ran until…recently. I was an Olympian, in fact. We didn’t medal, but we were there. Mexico City. I remember that high, thin air and the sun…”

“I’m sorry,” I said softly.

“Me, too, I didn’t mean to yell at you. Are you going to report me?”

“To whom? The paraplegic police? No. I’m not going to tell your mother on you, if that’s what you mean.”

The “Mollycoddle” had stung me.

“But you are going up there.”

“Yes. They need some things from the grocery store.”

“Listen, Molly…would you get something from there for me?”

“If it’s okay with your mother,” I said prissily.

“She’s got…I think she’s got my running stuff. Some shoes, and shorts and things, and the medals and stuff. Loretta…my wife sent them to her sometime after we separated. If she’s kept them, I’d like to have them back. Will you get them?”

“Dennis…why don’t you just pick up the phone and call her and ask her for them? This is ridiculous. You don’t have to see her if you don’t want to. She can’t get down here and you can’t get up there. I don’t like being a go-between.”

His face closed. “It’s okay. I really don’t need any more stuff lying around here. I don’t know what I’m going to do with all this.”

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I sighed. “All right. I’ll ask.”

“Thanks,” he said gruffly, and went back to his sorting.

“Do you need a hand with that?” I said from the doorway.

“No.”

Bella Ponder thought she had the running things in the attic, but she didn’t think she could get up the stairs to get them. I offered to go, but she said hastily that I’d never find anything in the jumble up there, and she’d get her cleaning lady to go when she came next.

“Why does he want those old things? Did he say? He sure isn’t going to use them,” she said, looking avidly at me. She was pale and perspiring today, even though the air outside was brisk. The sitting room was heated to near tropical stuffiness. Her eyes looked like currants sunk in rising dough.

“He didn’t say,” I said. “I guess he’s just trying to get his things all together. He must have been really good, to be an Olympian. It must be hard to be that good and know you can’t run again.”

She swung her big, dark head away.

“There’s worse things,” she said.

I got up to go, but she went on talking, looking out the lace-scrimmed window across the meadow and down toward the water. I stopped. She sounded as if she didn’t know she was speaking.

“He could always run like the wind,” she said. “A lot of Portuguese can do it. I was as fast as lightning when I was little, though you’d never know it now. It was one of the things they never forgave him for, just another sign of his being half-Portuguese. That was the sin, you know. Up here, that’s the worst sin there

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is. Oh, we can do their work, all right, but mix our blood with theirs? They wouldn’t have anything to do with me and my cousin and my boy from the beginning, those almighty Ponders and Rakestraws, and so ons. Come from a long line of little old bowlegged, spavined farmers and sheep grubbers, most of them do, and we come from a thousand years of kings, but they didn’t know that, or care. I don’t reckon Ethan ever told them, either. I’m not sure he ever believed it himself. They weren’t talking to him much, not after he brought a Portagee over here to live in their middle and have their grandson. After a year or two there wasn’t any contact between us. I can snub, too, and with a lot more justification.

“So they don’t know my son, none of them, and he doesn’t know them. Doesn’t know his father, either, I don’t guess, unless he remembers from when he was two years old. Ethan just…left us. For a long time he sent money every month, until Dennis went over to the mainland, I guess, but I never heard directly from him again. I don’t know if Denny did or not. So far as I know, I’m still married to him, unless he’s dead. He probably is.”

“Bella…” I spoke, to stem the spate, but it was as if she did not hear me.

“We moved to a little old rented house up on Pilot Hill, Luz and I and Denny, and Denny started to the West Tisbury School, and Luz and I did whatever we could find to do to keep food on the table. I baked for the stores around here.

When I feel like it, I’m as good a cook as there is on this island. Luz was a seamstress for a long time. Nobody had hands like those little ones of hers. We did fine, the three of us. The Miaras and Ferreiras can do honest work even if the blood in

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our veins is blue. But then, when Dennis was about eight, it seemed to me like he was losing his feeling for his Miara people and wanting to be a Vineyarder, and I wanted him to keep his heritage above anything else, so I sent him to my family in West Bedford. I wrote him every day, and they sent letters and photographs, and I sent what money I had, and my father and mother did what they could for him, and the rest of the family—there were lots of us there then—just doted on him. He was smart, and handsome, and such a funny, sweet-tempered little boy. He made all A’s in school, and got real big scholarships to Harvard, and worked in the library to help put himself through. But in all that time, he never came back over here. Somehow I wasn’t all that sorry. It would have killed me if they’d gotten him, those Ponders. I always meant to go over there to see him, but somehow we just didn’t…and then he graduated and went out West and started teaching school out there, and later on he married some California woman, and they had a daughter—they call her Claire, I think; I don’t imagine his fancy wife cared to have a Portuguese name in her family. Rich, I think they were. Not that I care. I’ve never met her, nor my…granddaughter. I’ve never even had a letter from them. Not even a picture.”

“All that time, and you never saw your son?” I breathed, in pain for her and Dennis Ponder, too. I could not understand. Family; they were family…. “All that time, and you were so near each other? It can’t be more than…what? A hundred miles? Two hundred?”

“A long way longer than that,” she almost whispered.

“Does he remember this house?” I said.

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“I don’t see how he could. I don’t think he was ever up here. This was Ethan’s mother’s and father’s house. When the old lady died, a letter came from an attorney in Chicago saying my husband wanted it to come to me and then go on to Denny. The deed was in it. I called his office, but all he would say about Ethan was that the instructions about the house were given to him years before, by letter, and that he didn’t know where Ethan was now. So we moved up here, Luz and I, but most of the time we still stayed down in the littlest camp. Well, I told you. Later on we stayed there all the time, till Luz fell. I expect Denny does remember the camps. He stayed with us there until we left, in the littler one.

Yours. The bigger one, where he is now, was his father’s private property. Ethan used to go down there and stay for days and weeks at a time sometimes. I’ve never been in it. I didn’t know what he did there. I don’t think Denny’s been in it, either, until now. But he knows the place. He knows the pond and the Bight. He always did love it. Always.”

She stopped talking then, and got up and went ponderously into the kitchen. I waited for a bit, but she did not return, so I kissed the dozing Luz on the forehead and left. I felt endlessly, wearily sad for them, and vaguely annoyed, and baffled by the enmity that had led to the estrangement. But I was really not curious. I did not want to know any of this. What a sere, minimal way to live; what a huge, ongoing fee this angry, ridiculous old woman insisted on paying for her life.

What a huge fee she exacted from others.

On the appointed day I went to Boston to get Lazarus. He was so ecstatic to see me that he wet the floor of the baggage section, and capered in circles, and howled and barked and panted, and knocked

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over baggage and me and a dour little man in a bowler hat, who started to protest, then looked more closely at this huge, hairy, grinning maniac of a dog and stalked away.

I hugged Lazarus and rubbed my face into his grizzled coat and inhaled his doggy, disreputable smell that no disinfectant soap could ever completely banish, and cried and cried.

“Old goofy,” I sobbed over and over. “You big, stinky, old goofy. What took you so long? Did you walk all the way?

Oh, come here, goofball, and let me smell you; you smell like J. Walter Puppybreath, and I’ve missed you so much…”

It was after dark when we got home, and I had to drag him by his straining leash up the steps of the little camp. He was wild to dash off in all directions at once, to search out the genesis of each new smell and sound, who knew, maybe to slay swans with a joyous vengeance. I would have to be careful with Lazarus and the swans. I fed him and ate my own dinner, and we settled down on the sofa, where he promptly went to sleep on my legs, as he had a thousand times before, making disgusting little snicking, snoring noises, waking every now and then to discharge the duty that had so distressed Carrie Davies: the loving licking of his balls.

Home. I was home. Or, rather, home had come to me. I fell asleep, too.

Eventually we stumbled off to bed, Lazarus and I, in the nook under the eaves, but he refused to sleep on the folded blanket I had put down for him beside my bed, and there was obviously no room for both of us in the little bed. So finally, reluctantly, I led him upstairs and we settled into the big maple bed. No sooner had I drifted into a dog-soothed sleep than my mother came.

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This time I woke before the dream played itself out, and had no clear image of her in my mind. Only the sweat and the fear lingered. Lazarus’s big head was lifted, and he was staring into the corner where the slipper chair sat. Of course it was empty; what had I expected? But his grizzled upper lip was lifted ever so slightly, and the ruff of his neck stood up in little stiff spikes. My own hair stood up.

“I’m not going to put up with this shit anymore,” I said to Lazarus, and got out of bed, stomped downstairs, got the black straw hat off the hat rack and brought it up and hung it on the wall over the chair. I hung it with thumbtacks, and impaled the brim every two inches so that it would not fall.

“Come get it if you want it,” I said to the corner of the room, and went back to bed. Lazarus waited for me, looking sleep-drugged and put upon. He curled into the curve of my waist, an inert behemoth, and did not wake again until the dazzle of the morning sun lit the long windows. I didn’t, either.

W
HEN I WOKE THE NEXT MORNING, I knew before I opened my eyes to the dazzle of water light that something profound had changed about this place. Then I felt Lazarus stir against my hip, and heard the groan that meant he was waking up. I smiled, eyes still closed, and waited. There it was: the sibilant fart that meant the waking-up process was completed. I leaped out of bed before the smell could smite me and ran around it and hugged him.

“Morning, stink-dog,” I said into his neck. “Your first fart in your new home. How was it? Did the earth move? Oh, I am so glad you’re here! I have so much to show you!”

It is Lazarus’s special gift not to be dismayed by changes of scenery. He is amazed, delighted, or puzzled, depending on the circumstances, but he is never afraid when he finds himself in a place new to him. This morning he took off in circles around the room, sniffing everything and thumping his scrofulous tail. Then he worked his way through the upstairs, skidded down the perilous steps, and circled the first floor, his nose and tail working overtime, his tongue lolling out goofily. During the entire tour he grinned his doggy 282

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grin, making little busy, cataloguing sounds in his throat.

Apparently the cottage was going to be an endless source of enchantment to him. I followed him, as ridiculously pleased as if he were a favored human approving my new nest.

Like most animals, I knew that he would also find his own special place, the one that would become, if he was not repeatedly ousted from it, the nest he retreated to for sleep, meditation, and the occasional sulk. It was where he would be when he was not doing anything else. After three or four sweeping explorations of the downstairs, he trotted into the little niche under the stairs, sniffed it mightily, and curled up on the single bed there, sighing in contentment. I sighed, but I knew that if I wanted the comfort of his company in my bed, it would have to be down here in this dark-golden cave.