Up Island (36 page)

In this dream she was, for the first time in many weeks, back in her subterranean barred room, only this time she did not importune me silently. This time her eyes were fixed on the back of my father’s head. He sat in the seat in front of her, staring straight ahead. I knew that he had not seen her yet, but I also knew that he soon would, and would turn to her…

I woke myself up sobbing with fear, and got up and called Kevin’s house in Washington. I knew that they had all gone to Sally’s parents for the day, but thought perhaps they had already gotten back. I needed to hear my father’s voice more than anything I ever remembered needing.

When he answered, I was a little surprised. He literally never answered Kevin’s phone. I remembered that he would not answer ours, either, when he was at our house in Ansley Park. It was part of his old-fashioned
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gentleman’s code, not to intrude his voice on to another’s telephone.

His voice sounded as thick and weak as if I had wakened him from a long sleep, and I asked if I had.

“Caught me in the act,” he said. “I was trying to slip in some zees before everybody gets back and the ball games start.”

“I thought you were going with them,” I said.

He was silent for a moment, then he said, “I really didn’t want to, baby. I had some paperwork I needed to catch up on. And I got it done, so I’m that much ahead.”

I knew then that they had not wanted him, and he had caught the scent of that as surely as if it were painted on the air. I made some loving, senseless chatter and called Kevin back late that night.

“You didn’t take him with you for Thanksgiving,” I said without preamble. “What’s next, a boarding-house on Christmas Day?”

“Hell, no, we didn’t,” Kevin snapped. “And have him sit in Sally’s folks’ house crying all day? He cries now, you know, Molly. He just sits there with tears running down his face, looking at nothing. Happy Thanksgiving, huh? Sally and Mandy cry all the time, too. You think you can do any better with him, you come do it.”

“I damned well can do better than that,” I said, my voice shaking with fury. “Put him on.”

He sounded his old self, but then he always did, to me.

“Daddy, could you possibly come and stay with me for a while up here?” I said. “There’s so much to do to this place that I just can’t do; I need somebody who knows something about building, and wiring and

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things. And Lazarus misses you awfully, and so do I, and there’s this pair of outlaw swans I’m stuck with feeding twice a day, and they almost beat me to death with their wings when I try, and they run Lazarus right into the water, and I just don’t know what I’m going to do when winter comes…”

My father chuckled. It was his old chuckle—wasn’t it?

“Swans, huh? I heard they could be mean. Run old Lazarus right into the water, have they? I reckon I’ll have to see that.”

“You mean you’ll come?”

“I reckon I will. For a little while, anyway. If you’re sure—”

“Oh, Daddy, I’m sure!”

I began to plan our Christmas the instant I put down the phone, ours and my father’s. We would cut a tree from the surrounding forest, gather branches of holly and fir, and string cranberries for the birds; I would show him all of up island, and we would sit before the fire, drink his favorite Scotch and eat popcorn, and listen to the old carols, and we would, finally, talk…. And it would snow. Of course it would snow.

By the time I went to pick him up at Logan, my fantasy of Christmas had reached towering, tottering Dickensian pro-portions. It even did, indeed, on the night before he came, begin, ever so gently, to snow.

But it was not my father who got off the plane in Boston and stood, blinking in confusion, looking around for me.

Not a father I had ever known, not one I could even imagine.

This man wore my father’s face, but it was a sagging mask, pale and slack and decades older. And he was thin, so thin, and he shuffled, and

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his smile when he saw me never did reach his eyes. And though he listened attentively as I prattled of this and that, and showed him the landmarks on Cape Cod and on the road from the ferry in Vineyard Haven toward up island, he did not often speak, and I was not sure he heard me. And when he saw the glade and the pond and the house, with the electric candles in the windows, glowing in the early blue dusk, and the fat, ribbon-tied wreath on the door, and Lazarus leaping with joy at the door, he could manage to say only,

“Well, now, this looks homey.”

And when I took him upstairs to the big bedroom where he was to stay and he saw my mother’s hat on the hat rack, he began to cry.

I
HAVE ALWAYS BEEN INFAMOUS in our family for delayed reactions. Tee always used to tell Caroline and Teddy to call him, not me, when the grease fire spattered up, the fuse blew, the pipe broke.

“Otherwise we’ll be treading water by the time your mom realizes there’s a problem,” he’d said.

He would have simply shaken his head at me in that awful moment when I stood in my upstairs bedroom and held my sobbing father in my arms. For it was only then that I realized that my mother was truly and finally dead.

I realized on the pulse of the instant that he was gone, though. The man I knew as my father died to me at the instant my mother did, and became, incredibly and grotesquely, my child. I became, in an eye blink, both an old orphan and a new mother. It was as bad a moment as I have ever had.

A terrible white, roaring noise filled my head. When it faded, I realized that I was patting my father’s back as I had Caroline’s and Teddy’s, when they were small and in distress.

It was pure instinct, and I dropped my hand as if his poor back were burning.

He lifted his head presently and looked at me, and 313

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his face was melted and ruined with grief and hopelessness.

“I can’t be of any more use to you, baby,” he whispered.

It was not his voice, not even his whisper. “Something’s broken. I can’t stop this goddamned crying. It’s absurd and obscene and it scares the people I love most and me, too, and I can no more stop it than I can fly. I wish with all my heart that it had been me.”

“No!” I cried, knowing what he meant. Terror and desper-ation took me over. “I couldn’t stand that! Don’t you ever, ever say that again! I need you any way I can get you! If you never lift another finger, if you cry for the next hundred years, I still need you! Don’t you know that? If you say that again, I’ll run away; I’ll just…leave! I promise I will!”

We both stopped, he crying and me shouting, and looked at each other, then began to laugh. Run away?

“As long as you don’t hold your breath till you turn blue,”

he said, and we laughed again, far longer and louder than was warranted. I didn’t care. It got us past the moment.

Presently he went over and sat down on the freshly made bed and looked around the room. I had lit the fire in the iron stove, and had brought in armfuls of bittersweet berries and a little pot of blooming paperwhites; the last of the sun stained the long windows vermilion and gold, and struck silver and pewter off the pond’s surface and the Bight beyond it. The room looked both lovely and loving, I thought. My house would wrap its arms around my wounded father.

“It’s a pretty room,” he said. “You’ve made a real pretty place up here. But I know it’s your room; isn’t there anywhere else I could sleep? I can’t turn you out of your bedroom.”

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I shook my head.

“There’s another bedroom up here if I wanted to sleep in it, but Laz picked us out a little nook under the stairs, and I really love it now. It’s like hibernating for the winter. I never could sleep up here, somehow, and Laz won’t. You’re not putting us out.”

He looked around some more, then back at me.

“Do you dream about her? Does she come to you up here?

Is that it?”

I stared at him. He smiled faintly.

“Yes,” I said finally. “It’s not a good dream. I don’t seem to have it so much downstairs.”

His smile was as sweet and wistful as a child’s. Tears dried on his cheeks.

“Maybe she will to me, up here. She hasn’t, yet. She hasn’t to Kevin either, he says.” He chuckled. “He’d be furious if he knew she’d picked you over him.”

“He’s going to be furious anyway, just as general policy,”

I said, taking him by the arm. “Come on downstairs. Sun’s over the yardarm. I got you the Macallan.”

He followed me down the precipitous steps, pausing to rap his knuckles against a joining or inspect a load-bearing beam here and there, nodding as if satisfied.

“You don’t want to be too hard on your brother,” he said.

“He’s mad because it’s her he wants and me he got. I don’t imagine he even knows why.”

“He’s a jerk, and I can be as hard on him as I want to,” I said.

We had reached the bottom of the stairs, and he turned to me to say something else, but a great battering, hissing, flapping uproar started on the porch. Blows rattled the door.

Lazarus sprang at it, snarling and barking angrily.

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“Godalmighty,” my father exclaimed.

“It’s the damned swans,” I said, running for the barley bucket and stick in the pantry. “I completely forgot to feed them this afternoon.”

As if to illustrate my words, two beautiful, furious heads appeared at the long window beside the door, darting back and forth, pecking at the rippled old glass. Great wings battered and battered. My father sat down on the bottom step and began to laugh.

“Does Walt Disney know about this?” he said.

I opened the door an inch or two and the space was filled with a snowstorm of feathers and stabbing orange beaks. I slammed it again.

“They’ve never done this before,” I said. “Just marched on the house like this. But I’ve never been this late feeding them, either. What on earth are we going to do? They can break bones…”

“Give me the stick and hold the dog,” my father said. “And get over there behind that chair.”

“Daddy, they really can hurt you; I know a woman who got her wrist broken…”

He opened the door and walked out on to the porch, into the sea of whirling white. He slammed the door behind him, and I watched, breath held, through the glass of the window, holding the hysterical Lazarus firmly by the collar.

My father raised the stick and struck the porch a mighty blow.

“Shut up,” he said mildly.

Charles and Di did. Not only that, but they stopped the vicious, bullying attack and stood looking at him, tilting their V-shaped heads this way and that. Their wings were still lifted over their backs in the classic busking position that I had learned meant trouble, but

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they did not flap and hiss and grunt anymore. Very gradually, they lowered their wings and stared. My father gestured for the bucket, and I handed it to him out the door and shut it again.

“Where do you feed them?” he called to me, not taking his eyes off Charles and Di.

“Down on the edge of the pond, right down that path beyond the reeds,” I called back.

“Okay,” he said to the swans. “Now. If you want to eat, you’re going to have to act like ladies and gentlemen. No fighting, no pushing, no hissing, no flapping. Got it? Let’s go.”

And he turned his back on them and marched down the steps and along the path, into the gathering dusk around the pond. Charles and Di waddled ponderously along behind him like imprinted ducklings. Lazarus stopped lunging and barking and sat down. I simply stared.

“How did you do that?” I said when he got back to the house. “I thought the next step was an AK-47.”

He sat down on the sofa in front of the fire, rubbing his hands and grinning. It was the phantom of his old grin.

“Swan psychology.”

“No, really.”

“I went to the Library of Congress and read up on swans when you first told me about them,” he said. “Interesting birds, swans. These are mutes, you know. They don’t have caws or cries. They are not, however, your typical swans.”

“So I gathered. What
is
typical?”

“Well, sometime when you’ve got a day or so I’ll tell you what I know now about mute swans. Meanwhile, you better let me do KP.”

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“Why do you think I inveigled you up here?”

We sat sipping Macallan until the sun was long gone and the moon rose, cold and high. I had made a pot of chili, but neither of us was very hungry. It was enough, for me, to sit in my warm little house, wrapped in firelight and the comfort of my father’s presence, and hear his voice answer mine.

Presently he said, “So tell me about all this,” and I did. I told him about the uneasy August on Chappaquiddick, where I could find no shelter, and about the pure solace of finding up island and this small, lost world, and about the colors and tastes and smells of autumn here, and about the deep, clean, pure solitude that so nourished me. I told him about Bella Ponder and Luzia Ferreira, and about Dennis Ponder, and about their place in my new world and mine in theirs. I talked of moonlight on the water off Menemsha, and stars that fell flaming from a crystal sky into my pond, and about the fires that burned in the beetlebung trees and the magic in the old gray stone walls of Chilmark, and about guinea fowl and geese and swans and gargantuan dancing statues, and the clean silver smell of newly caught fish on Dutcher’s Dock, and about the rich, silent past that still lived and breathed in the old houses and little gated lanes up island.

He listened and nodded, and occasionally he smiled or said,

“Mmm-hmmm.”

When I wound down and stopped to take a long swallow of my Scotch, he stretched mightily and rubbed Lazarus’s head and said, “Now tell me about back home. About where it stands with Tee and all that. I gather from Kevin that you don’t feel like you can go back and live in your house, but that’s all I do know. Teddy’s too full of the desert country to be much good as a source of unbiased information, and Caroline’s too full

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