Up Island (34 page)

For those few days I explored in a cocoon of delight and anticipation, never once feeling tentative or unwelcome. Even after Lazarus and I had blundered into one or two private driveways and had to turn around under the level eyes of householders; even after he had scattered the cranky swans on the Mill Pond in West Tisbury and a roving flock of guineas on the lawn of the Chilmark Congregational Church, I did not feel timid or constrained to flee, as I would have before. A woman alone in the places we went would be an unspeakable intrusion; a woman with a great, gamboling dog on a leash was somehow natural and acceptable.

“You’re my ticket to ride,” I said to Lazarus at the end of one of our days of sightseeing. But that evening, before the fire, in the time when introspection came, I thought that it was not a terribly admirable thing, to have lived my way almost to my midcentury mark, and still need a reason, some sort of permission, to go and see what was around a corner or over a hill.

“Well, at least it’s getting better,” I said to the dog. I said quite a lot to him in those first days. “Before it was my mother’s permission, and Dad’s, and then Tee’s and Caroline’s and Teddy’s and the entire boards of directors of half a dozen worthy organizations. Now it’s just one dumb dog.

Maybe I can do it by myself when I grow up; what do you think?”

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It was an autumn of unearthly loveliness, at least to me, accustomed as I was to the humid, muted autumns of the Southeast. Every morning was born scarlet and silver over the pond and the Bight, and the sun was soft and cool on bare forearms and heads in the noons. Blue dusks came quickly and died in incredible conflagrations of rose, purple, orange, and silver over the Sound. Nights were so clear and cold that the stars looked like chips of diamonds, like Scott Fitzgerald’s silver pepper. I went often and sat on the little dock with Lazarus, wrapped in one of the hefty blankets, and stared up at the sky, seeing the crystal constellations appear as if out of developing fluid. I kept Laz on his leash, for the swans, bedded down somewhere in the forest of reeds, would often wake and grumble and flap in the darkness, but they never came storming over to see why their tormentor and their serving wench were abroad in the night. Once there was a meteor shower so vivid and close that Lazarus barked and rushed at each luminous, streaking trajectory, and I simply sat still and let them fill me with their cold fire.

Everything up here on this New England island was sharp and clear and light-limned, I thought; there was none of the sense I often had back home of slogging waist deep through some allegorical, as well as physical, swamp. Up here, I lived and walked up on the very surface of the earth, almost able, if I stood on tiptoe, to touch the great, open skies.

“The most wonderful thing is,” I said to my father sometime that autumn, on his weekly phone call from Kevin’s house in Washington, “that the only things you smell are earth and water and sky things. Salt and pine and spruce and smoke and that cold, dark smell that I think is the way the very earth up

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here smells. You know how, in the winter at home, you start to smell stale air and automobile exhaust and piled-up, rained-on garbage? Up here it’s just natural things.”

“Sounds okay by me,” he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “You get some pretty natural smells down here, too, though. I went with Sally to dish up lunch at a soup kitchen the other day; she does it once a week. Not a deodor-ant user in the bunch. Couldn’t get much more natural than that.”

I laughed heartily at this little joke. Kevin kept telling me how depressed our father was, how low he had sunk. But I heard none of it in his voice. On some level I knew he would not allow me to hear it if he could help it, but on another, higher one, I simply put it all down to Kevin’s continuing campaign for first place in our mother’s heart. Her death did not seem to have stopped that war in the least. I might have seen, had I been more clearly attuned to such things, what message my determined chirpiness was sending my father: Do not disturb this fragile thing I’m building. Do not dare to tell me that you hurt. But I was not attuned, and I did not see it. Anything outside the small, careful circle of my days did not seem real, and I was determined that that would continue.

I kept Atlanta at bay by simply refusing to think about it.

“Later,” I would say to myself or perhaps aloud, for I was talking as freely to Lazarus now as I ever did to Tee or Teddy or Caroline. Dear Lazarus; he talked back only with his endorsing tail.

“Later. I know I have to think about it; I know there’s a lot I have to deal with. But I don’t have to do it now. I’ve damn well earned the right to heal in my

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own way, and right now what I need is just to…forget it. All of it. Right now is for here and for me.”

Eventually, I said it often enough that I actually believed it. I was quite able to keep my stubborn other life at arms’

length. I was blithe and flip with Livvy and Missy when they called; I literally never called them. I talked little to Caroline; her litany of pain and outrage at her father never varied and never abated. I listened, I said “mmm-hmmm” and “of course.”

Often, I thought with irritation, Get a life, my child. Or go and look after the one you’ve got. A husband and a new daughter and a new house ain’t chopped liver. It wasn’t you, after all, who got left, literally, without a roof over your head.

That it had not been me, either, not literally, did not occur to me.

I talked even less to Teddy. He was in love with his courses and his life in the Southwest; the few times I did catch him, the burning joy in his voice made me both joyous for him and cold with loss. I told him about the camp and Lazarus and our days in the wild, as it were, but I do not think he heard me. Teddy had gone to live in the arid fire of the sun; the secret forest place I had found for myself could not exist in his burning world. I knew that he would hear me when he could. Until then I would not insist. With Teddy I merely listened and rejoiced.

Tee did not call. Missy could not find him. I did not care.

“But it’s getting better and better for our side,” Missy said in one of our conversations, at the start of November. “I have it on the word of somebody who was there that the Eel Woman threw a party at your place a night or two ago for her merry band of Cokies.

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Threw it all by herself, I mean; she was the sole host. The word is that Tee was in Santa Barbara or someplace
way
away. How do you like them apples?”

“Was it trick or treat?” I said, leaning over to pick a burr out of Lazarus’s ruff. We had been out on the beach at Squibnocket Point that afternoon, as far east as you could go until you set foot on Madagascar 3,000 miles away. It had been transcendent. My head still roared with it.

She laughed, but she said, “Molly, it’s your house. Don’t you care?”

“I must,” I said. “How can I not? It just doesn’t seem real.

It’s like you’re telling me about a movie you saw.”

“You’re trying to make it go away, I know, and I don’t blame you. Whatever it takes is fine, until we can get this thing to trial and you can come home again. But don’t drift too far away. You do have to come back, eventually, you know.”

No, I don’t, I mouthed silently to Lazarus. To her I said,

“I’m not trying to make it go away so much as I’m trying to make this stay. This hasn’t been easy, Missy. If I’ve got to be here, then the only way I can do it is to be all the way here.

I don’t have the focus or the energy to live in two places at once.”

“Well, just don’t get too comfortable,” Missy said.

But in those early days, with the splendid autumn, as exotic as old Persia, unfolding around me, I was as lulled and dreamish as if spellbound. Even Dennis Ponder’s overhanging illness and unchanged remoteness did not shatter the dome of contentment around me. Even Bella Ponder’s unsated hunger for her son, even Luzia Ferreira’s mothlike retreat into childhood, did not penetrate it.

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Even my mother could not come in. I had found a serviceable iron double bedstead posted on the bulletin board at Alley’s and had paid the son of the seller to bring it over and install it in the niche under the stairs, and there I slept now, with Lazarus by my side, arched over with the listing angles of the old stairs, wrapped around with the darkness of old boards and the lingering, piney dust of decades. Not much light of any kind, sun or moon or fire, made its way into my cave, and apparently my mother could not, either. She appeared at the edge of it many times in the lengthening nights, pale and frantic in the cold, but she did not come into my space, and I could no longer make out her expression, or see what her outstretched hands reached for. I hardly marked her coming before drifting into deeper sleep, and Lazarus did not seem to mark her at all. It was as if, like the light, dreams got left at the lip of the cave. I sensed more than I saw her, and the immediacy of anguish and horror she had brought with her were dimmed. I slept without tossing and without waking, and woke without weariness for the first time in many weeks.

But gradually a sense of something missing crept into the days, bringing with it a skulking restlessness, a sly anxiety that sometimes felt almost like guilt, and it was not long until I caught the sense of it. I needed someone or something to take care of. I had done what I could do by myself to the little house, my daughter and son were out of my reach, and my charities at home were, according to Livvy, purring along without me like great, contented cats with open-handed new owners. It was, I supposed, too much to ask that my essential nature would change radically along with my lifestyle; my mother’s legacy was too enduring,

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her conditioning too powerful, for that. The swans took merely minutes of my time, and I wanted no deeper connection to Dennis Ponder or to Bella and Luz; I realized that I knew literally no one else on the island. I was beginning to toy unenthusiastically with the notion of finding some volunteer work to do in Vineyard Haven or Oak Bluffs—surely Edgartown, blessed as it was among villages, did not need volunteers—when Dennis Ponder solved the problem for me.

Or rather, Lazarus and Dennis did.

On a gray afternoon in early November, when I was curling up for a nap in front of the fire simply because I could not think of anything else at the moment to do, Lazarus came bounding into the cottage barking as if he had treed all the raccoons in Massachusetts. I had left him off at Dennis’s that morning, at Dennis’s request, and I thought immediately that Dennis must have tired of his tongue-lolling presence and sent him home. But Lazarus would not stop barking, and finally he put his nose into my ear and gave such a yelp of anxious annoyance that I sat up, then got to my feet. Immediately he turned and ran for the larger camp, and I ran behind him, sure in my thumping heart that something was amiss with Dennis.

Nothing seemed to be at first glance; he sat on the floor in the living room, covered from the waist down with a blanket and dressed in a red-and-black jacquard turtleneck sweater that stained his high cheekbones with color, surrounded by a literal sea of books. All the boxes that had been crammed with volumes and piled against the walls were empty and overturned, and I saw that a few had been placed in the bottom of the bookshelves that flanked the fireplace. The fireplace

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itself was cold; the fire I had lit that morning had gone out and there was an obstacle course of boxes and books between Dennis and the hearth. The room was cold, and only one lamp burned. Even in midafternoon, it was as dim as dusk.

I could see that Dennis Ponder’s eyes were closed, and that he was massaging the stump of his leg through the blanket.

It was somehow such an intimate moment, a man alone with naked pain, that I closed my own eyes, then I said, “Can I give you a hand? Lazarus came and got me, and I was afraid something was wrong.”

He did not open his eyes for a moment, or speak, and I thought that he would dismiss me as brusquely as he usually did, but finally he looked at me, the black eyes dull, and said,

“I guess you could make a fire, if you would. I can’t get to the fireplace for these fucking books, and I can’t seem to get moving until I get warm. I guess you’d call it a conundrum.”

I threaded my way through the books and threw logs on the fire and lit them, and waited until a yellow blaze flared up. Then I went into the kitchen and put on the kettle for tea, turning on lamps as I went. The light seemed to banish some of the cold. Then I came back and sat down on Dennis’s sofa.

“You’re hurting some, aren’t you? What have you been doing, heaving these books around? It’s too much for you right now…”

It was a stupid thing to say; of course he had. How else would they have gotten all over the floor? I flushed and waited for the inevitable sarcastic reply, but he said only, “I couldn’t stand them a minute longer. I’ve been thinking I really ought to get them catalogued and on the shelves before I start my own work; otherwise I’m not going to be able to find things

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when I need them. I didn’t realize I had so many. It would take weeks even with two legs. It’s going to take me a year.

I fall on the floor twice for every three books I get on the shelf.”

It was such a flat, unemotional statement that I looked more closely at him in surprise. Instead of his usual white venom, I saw now simply defeat. The frail energy of anger was gone.

“I could do this,” I said, surprising myself profoundly.

“If you couldn’t find anybody else you’d rather have do it, I mean,” I said when he did not speak.

“I’ve done it before, for the public library’s literacy action program in Atlanta,” I went on, aware that I was babbling.

He still did not speak. “It was more than just a little charity project; we catalogued and shelved thirty thousand books that were donated for the program. And I had two years of library science in college. I never made under a B plus…”