Up Island (51 page)

442 / Anne Rivers Siddons

“I’m so glad to see you,” I said simply, not wondering, at that moment, how she had known to come.

“My oldest son is one of the EMTs who took the call,” she said, laying her coat on a chair and coming over to sit down beside me. “He called me just after they got your call. I’ve been sort of waiting for this; Jeremy knew to call if he was on duty if and when it happened. Do you know anything yet? Does Dennis know?”

“I don’t know what it is; Luz called, and when we got here Bella was almost unconscious, but I’m nearly sure it’s a heart attack. Dennis went with her to the hospital. I stayed with Luz, of course…”

“Well, I’ve come to sit with her if you want to go on to the hospital. I expect you do. You’ve been the closest thing to family Bella has had for a while, and Dennis won’t know anybody over there. He’ll need some backup. How is he doing about it, by the way?”

“It’s hard to say. You probably know they’ve been sort of reunited for a little while, but it’s hard for me to tell how he feels about her. It’s been wonderful for her, of course. I know that he was…singing to her in Portuguese just before the ambulance came…”

Patricia’s gray Ponder eyes filled with tears and she smiled.

“Then she’ll be okay whatever happens. But he may not be.

You go over there, now. I’ve called some of the others and there’ll be somebody along to spell me directly. Come on back here when you can; we’ll be here. If there are…plans to make, we can help you do that. We’d go on over to the hospital, but none of us knows if Dennis would want us or not. I’ll let you be the judge of that. But we’ll be here.”

“I don’t know why,” I said, my own eyes at last UP ISLAND / 443

beginning to fill with tears. “She’s frozen you out her entire adult life. And Dennis has simply…written you off.”

“I remember him so well,” she said softly. “He was my best friend for a year or two; I never had another quite like him.

He was all laughter and mischief, the best of the Ponders, before his grandmother’s cold spite could kick in. We all remember him, and some of us remember Bella, too, when she first came to the Vineyard. I barely remember, but I know I never saw anybody so beautiful, or so vivid and full of life.

It was a Ponder who brought her here and a Ponder who made her what she is. Seems to me Ponders ought to hop to now and see if we can help fix things for Denny. There aren’t enough of us left that we can afford to lose one.”

I pressed her hand with mine; it was warm and rough and felt somehow like my father’s, though she could not have been much older than I.

“I’ll let you know the minute I know anything,” I said, and went out into the just-born morning. Behind me, I heard Patricia Norton begin to read, taking up where I’d left off: “

‘The Wart walked up to the great sword for the third time.

He put out his right hand softly and drew it out as gently as from a scabbard…’ ”

Isabel Miara Ponder died in the hospital at Oak Bluffs at 6:14

that morning. She was dead when I got there. When I came hurrying down the corridor, Dennis Ponder was sitting in the dim, scruffy waiting area off the elevator lobby, his hands folded in his lap, looking down at his lone foot in a boot to which the rich black mud of spring still clung. When he heard
444 / Anne Rivers Siddons

my footsteps, he looked up, and I saw in his face, white and still and oddly formal, that she had gone. But still I formed the words with my lips, though no sound came: “How is she?”

“Gone,” he said in a neutral voice. “About fifteen minutes ago. The doctor’s in there now doing…whatever you do.

Then I have to do…whatever you do. Thing is, I don’t know what you do. Do you? I guess you do; you just went through this with your mother, didn’t you?”

I nodded slowly. I felt numb and so tired that I did not think I could stand up any longer. I sat down on the cracked Naugahyde sofa beside him.

“Bad year for mothers,” he said.

“Dennis, I’m so very sorry.”

He reached over to my hand and patted it absently. I don’t think that he knew he held it.

“I know you are, Molly. She was a lucky old woman, to have you to be sorry for her. She just as well could have had nobody.”

“She had you. You’d have been here whether or not I was.”

“No,” he said slowly. “I really don’t think I would have.

Listen, are you hungry? I’m starving. Do you think there’s somewhere around here to get a bagel or something? I guess it’s okay to leave. She’s sure not going anywhere.”

“Let’s go back to the farmhouse,” I said. “There’s somebody waiting for us there you’re going to remember, and she’ll make us some breakfast. Just tell the nurse at the desk.

Bella…your mother…I think she’s supposed to stay here until the, you know, funeral home people come and get her. The nurse will know that.”

“I don’t know any funeral home people, not here UP ISLAND / 445

and not anywhere,” Dennis said, hopping beside me down the hall. His crutch made a rubbery, squelching noise on the dirty white tiles.

“Your people know. They’ll take care of it. They already know about your mother.”

“I’ll bet they do,” he said. “Ding dong, the witch is dead.”

“They’re not like you think, Dennis,” I said. “They never were. They’re nothing like your mother taught you they were.

If you don’t know anything else about this island, you need to know that.”

He was silent until we got into the truck and headed out of Oak Bluffs. I cut through the fabled camp meeting grounds, silent like a Victorian Brigadoon in the still, chilly morning, and drove along the beach road through Hart Haven into Edgartown and onto the Edgartown—West Tisbury Road, heading up island. The morning sea was like a silver-pink mirror except for an early ferry wallowing west toward Woods Hole. The main street of Vineyard Haven was just coming to life. Over everything the sharp, cold air of early spring breathed quietly.

“Do you know what she told me in the ambulance?”

Dennis said.

“What?”

“She told me that after that time—that I saw them together, you know about that—that after that, I was over at the Peaks’

sheep farm playing with the little Peaks like I did sometimes, and we were playing around the corral with some of the grown-ups watching us, and Mr. Peak’s old ram mounted one of the ewes, and I laughed and pointed and yelled, ‘My mama and Aunt Luz do that!’ And old Mrs. Peak asked me,

‘What do you mean, Dennis?’ and I told everybody
446 / Anne Rivers Siddons

what I had seen them doing. Mrs. Peak must have gone straight to my grandmother, because Mother said that that night Grandmother came to the house on Music Street and told her that she knew about her and Luz, and that she was going to take me away from her and raise me herself, as a proper Ponder, and see that Mama never set eyes on me again. Mama said Grandmother threatened to run her and Luzia right off the Vineyard. I was sent off island less than a week later.”

He fell silent, and I simply drove, numbed and stupid with pain. Then he said, “She said she sent me because she knew they’d take me away, that they could do that, and so that at least, if I was with her family, I’d stay part of her. But it was the wrong thing to do if that’s what she wanted, Molly, because if I’d stayed on the Vineyard, at least I’d have seen her now and then. I’d have
had
to at least run into her…”

“She did the only thing she knew to do to keep you,” I said around the aching lump in my throat. “Maybe it was wrong, but she didn’t know any other way. You have to remember that in spite of being a married woman, she was still very much a girl, and a pretty simple one at that.”

“She could have sent Luz away and kept me with her.”

“No. She’d have lost you to her mother-in-law anyway, and then she’d have been totally alone. And if she’d gone back to her people, what sort of life could she have had?

Having to pretend Luz was nothing to her but a nice, accommodating cousin…and you’d have grown up and gone out into the world anyway, and there she would have been, growing old without you
or
Luz, with only those fanatic old Catholic royalists around her. By then she’d gone too far beyond

UP ISLAND / 447

that, don’t you see? You can’t ever go back to what you were before you’ve loved somebody…”

“That time at the sheep farm,” he said, as if he had not heard me. “That was when I buried Luz’s underwear in the sheep manure and the ram dug it up. You remember, I told you about that New Year’s Eve? I don’t mind so much that they told her what I said about seeing her and Luz, but I hope before God they didn’t tell her that I made a joke of it…”

“I hope so, too,” I whispered. It was all I could think to say.

Back at the farmhouse, Patricia Norton met us at the door, looked at our faces, and held her arms out. After a long moment, it was Dennis who walked into them, not I. They looked at each other, he and Pat, out of the same rain-gray eyes, and after we had eaten Pat’s pancakes and drunk her coffee and looked in on Luzia, who slept peacefully in a clean gown under clean sheets by a newly built fire, he reached out and tweaked the back of Pat’s sandy hair, where it straggled over her collar.

“It used to hang down almost to your waist,” he said. “You wore it in two pigtails.”

“And you dipped the ends of them into the inkwells at school,” she said. “My mother had to cut five inches off it.

She was furious, but I was delighted. I hated those damned braids.”

“It’s been a long time, Pat,” he said. “I wonder if it’s just plain been too long.”

“No,” she said. “Not to us. We’ve all wondered if we’d ever get to know you. Whether or not we do now, we’ll at least get a look at you. The eyes are all

448 / Anne Rivers Siddons

Ponder, of course, but the rest of you is her. It’ll be nice to have that of her still.”

“I’m not real sure what happens next,” he said.

She laughed. “That’s one thing we Ponders do know, how to bury other Ponders. Unless you want to take her back to America and bury her where her people are, we’ll take it from here. With your approval, of course. There’s a whole tribe of us in the Chilmark cemetery. We outnumber John Belushi about three hundred to one, but of course he gets all the press.”

He smiled then.

“I’ve missed you, Pat. I wonder why I didn’t know that,”

he said.

“About Luz…” I began.

“My sister Hannah is coming in to sit with her in a little while,” Pat Norton said. “And some of the others will spell her. Luz seems okay, considering. I don’t think she comprehends, do you?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t seem that way so far,” I said.

“Thanks, Pat. When I’ve looked in on my father and cleaned up, I’ll be back to take over.”

“Molly,” she said, putting an arm around my shoulders,

“let us do it. God knows we did little enough for them while Bella was alive. Maybe they wouldn’t have let us, anyway, but we could have tried harder. This is ours to do now.”

Then what is mine to do? I thought desolately, but did not say it aloud. It seemed an almost unimaginably selfish thought.

On the way back to the pond, Dennis laid his head against the back of the seat and, despite the truck’s drunken lurching, slept. Or I thought that he did. But just as we reached the cutoff down to the Ponder camps, he said, eyes still closed,

“They weren’t what she told

UP ISLAND / 449

me. I don’t think they ever were. Just my grandmother, and I guess my father. In the long run they could have accepted her and Luz; maybe they knew anyway. They’ve accepted more than that in all the hundreds of years they’ve been in this place. She could have had some kind of life here. I could have…”

“You still can,” I said softly, but he did not answer.

Though it was nearly nine-thirty when I got home, there was no sound from my father’s room upstairs. Lazarus lay quietly on the rug in front of the dead fire, waiting for me.

He thumped his tail and rose to meet me, and went with me up the stairs to wake my father and tell him about Bella Ponder. But the curtains were still drawn, and he was still asleep. I shook him gently.

“Let me sleep,” he murmured, not opening his eyes. “She’s here. Let me sleep.”

I went back downstairs and shucked off my clothes and slept, too.

They buried her in the old cemetery on a day so warm and still and tender that you could almost feel the leaves pushing out of their woody prisons, the first flowers stirring and fretting to be born. The sky over the Sound was a fresh-washed blue, and small, puffed, silver-limned clouds sailed slowly in from the south. From all the moist places up island the pinkletinks chimed. Every now and then the querulous honk of a returning goose broke the late-morning silence, and up at the edge of the cemetery one of the small roving herds of guineas darted and gabbled and dipped their ridiculous pin-heads into the grass.

450 / Anne Rivers Siddons

There were perhaps twenty assorted Ponders, plus their spouses and progeny, on hand, standing quietly around the newly-dug grave as the young minister from the Congregational church in Chilmark read the simple old service for the burial of the dead. I stood alone at the back of the small crowd; Dennis stood in the middle, obviously uncomfortable in a dark, rumpled suit that hung on him like a scarecrow’s.

I had helped him pin the left trouser leg up that morning, so that it did not flap. There were no hymns sung, and no one said the elegiac words over the dead that I had dreaded. It would have seemed a sacrilege. No one seemed to expect Dennis to say anything, either, and he did not. When the short service was over and the concluding prayer done, the Ponders who remained up island shook his hand gravely, and some of them patted him awkwardly on the back, and Pat Norton, who stood beside him, said, “We didn’t think a get-together back at the farmhouse would be a good idea, with Luz there and all, but all of us will call you in a day or two. You’ll have more dinner invitations than you ever had in your life. And there are people lined up to sit with Luz in eight-hour shifts for two or three days, until you can decide what should be…you know, done about her. I guess you don’t know any more than we do about any family she might have left in America. If you want to see about nursing homes on the island, or some other kind of facility, I think we can help you there. There are one or two state-supported places.