Vineyard Fear (8 page)

“You have a long memory, Babar. It's one of the things I like about you.”

We ate at the Shiretown, where I've never had a bad meal. Rack of lamb for me, salmon in a croissant-like crust for Zee, washed down with very satisfactory wine. Coffee, brandy, and a chocolate torte for desert. The bill came and I paid with cash. Zee stared, aghast.

“All that?”

“ ‘Farewell, paternal pension,' ” I said. “But it was worth it.” The J. W. Jackson criteria for judging restaurants are three: good food, reasonable price, and good service. If I get two out of three, I'm content. If I get three out of three, I'm in heaven. If I get one or less out of three, I figure I got ripped. That goes for every kind of place, from a hot dog stand to a four-star restaurant. I explained all this to Zee.

“Gee,” she said, “what a sophisticated thinker you are. Tell me, have you ever actually been to a four-star restaurant?”

“I saw a picture of one once in the
Globe
food pages. Does that count?”

“Close enough for the likes of us,” said Zee. “Let's go walk on the docks.”

We did that, looking out at the lights of the anchored yachts and at the house lights on both sides of the harbor. Summer people were in the streets behind us, looking in shop windows and doing business at the ice cream stands and the clam shops. Zee's arm was in mine.

“It really is a beautiful place, isn't it?” said Zee.

“Yes.”

“You can see why all these people come here.”

“Yes.”

“I'm going to miss all this.”

“New Hampshire is beautiful, too.”

“I know, but . . .”

“But it doesn't have an ocean? Yes it does. Down by Portsmouth.”

“It doesn't have one where I'm going in the mountains.”

“No, I guess not.”

“I'm going to miss you, too.”

“Good. The more, the better.”

We walked up to North Water Street and then out to the Harborview Hotel, where we leaned on the railing beside the street and looked out toward the outer harbor. The Edgartown lighthouse flashed its endless message to the sea. There were lights on Chappaquiddick and stars and a sliver of moon in the sky. After a while, we walked back, got in the Land Cruiser, and drove to my house. The next morning Zee ran naked out to her Jeep and brought back a shiny clean white uniform.

“Smart,” I said, reaching for her. “You nurses are smart.”

She danced away. “Don't do that! This is my only clean uniform! Get away! I've got to go to work!” She ran around the room, snatching up pieces of her underwear. Then she stopped suddenly and put up her lips. I kissed them and slid my hands down her sleek brown body. “I really do have to go to work,” she said a little breathlessly.

“I know.” I held her a moment longer, then let her go and stepped away. She pushed a hand through her thick, tumbled hair, looked at me thoughtfully, sighed and smiled, and went into the bathroom to ready herself for the day.

I saw her almost every day for the rest of the month. We fished in vain from beach and boat. We fought the friendly crowds at the West Tisbury book fair and later those at the Chilmark library book sale. We brought home treasures from both. We went shellfishing and hit the Saturday morning yard sales. Then one morning she drove her little Jeep onto the early morning ferry to Woods Hole, and the world which had seemed such a good place was now, of a sudden, weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.

For two days I fished in the fishless sea, made complex meals which were tasteless in my mouth, and tested previously untried beers which I found as flavorless as water.
On the second night after Zee left, the phone rang. It was John Skye.

“Well,” he said, “my bags are packed and I'm ready to go. I've got a reservation for the seven o'clock boat tomorrow morning. You still want to come up to Weststock with me?”

“I'm ready to roll,” I said.

It takes forty-five minutes for the ferry to cross the sound between the Vineyard and Woods Hole on the mainland. By eight o'clock the next morning we were in the line of traffic emptying from the boat and headed for Falmouth. From there we went north to the Bourne Bridge over the Cape Cod Canal and finally fetched 495 North and drove toward Weststock, which lies northwest of Boston and not too far south of the New Hampshire border.

It was a foggy, warm, damp day on the island and I was glad to be elsewhere. The ride in John's nice, new blue Wagoneer was smooth as a baby's behind and the countryside rolled past us like a motion picture image. It was quite unlike the rattle and bang of travel in my rusty Land Cruiser. “As we drove north, the fog and haze of the shoreline were left behind and we came out into bright sun. There was a lot of commuter traffic on the highway, but it moved along at its normal ten-miles-above-the-speed-limit pace and after a bit we were out of most of it. Green fields and trees flowed by us.

“I've got a luncheon meeting,” said John. “At Weststock we like to clothe our business meetings with food whenever possible, since it seems to be true that food hath charms to soothe an academic breast, to soften deans, or
bend a knotted prof. Personally, I'd probably be more cooperative after a cocktail or two, but some of my colleagues get spiteful and too honest for their own goods when they tipple, so we eat instead of drink. Probably it's for the best. The drinkers can always meet later down at the Duke of Ellington, and usually do. Anyway, the meeting will probably last for a couple of hours, so I thought you could drop me off at the college and then go on up to the house and get yourself settled in.”

“Sounds okay to me.”

“Of course, if you'd rather come to the college, I'm willing to pass you off as a visiting scholar. You can walk the ivied yards and ogle the women like the rest of our younger colleagues.”

“No thanks. I'll go to your place and then maybe take a stroll around town. It's been a while since I was up here.”

“A wise decision. This evening, I'll take you to supper at the Duke and afterward we'll go upstairs to the Higher Realm and play some poker with the chaps.”

“My poker-playing skills are pretty rusty.”

“You'll be in good company. Most of the gang who play are good scholars but terrible poker players. They leave their brains in their briefcases and are easy picking for guys like Lute Martingale. You'll meet Lute tonight, if you decide to play. He's a sort of permanent part-time teacher and grad student here, but actually supports himself playing poker with rich undergraduate kids who've had a floating game on campus for as far back as I can remember. As long as you don't let Lute sucker you into a big pot, you'll be okay. The rest of us are suckers.”

“Sure.”

“You can trust me, I'm a professor!”

Two hours after leaving Woods Hole, we turned off 495 and drove north into Weststock, a lovely little village nestled near the large mill towns along the Merrimack River but untouched by the grime and smudge of those once
thriving industrial centers. Instead of great abandoned mills and rows of sagging tenement houses, Weststock's winding streets were lined with clean brick homes, white houses with flower gardens and green lawns, and small stores catering to the college community which dominated the town.

The college itself was a Georgian collection of brick and frame buildings built around yards and scattered with green playing fields. It had been established almost two hundred years before by enterprising New Englanders who thought they could produce a college at least as good as Harvard and Yale and who had been right. Weststock College was much smaller than either of its famous rivals, but bowed to neither in its claim to academic excellence, particularly in the liberal arts. It was, in fact, almost idiosyncratic in its insistence upon studies which, in John Skye's words, “taught its graduates nothing whatever which would help them earn money,” but which nevertheless produced notable figures in the humanities and theoretical sciences.

It was not quite my kind of place, but it was ideal for John. I followed his directions to the college building of his choice and accepted the key to his house.

“I'll walk home after this is over,” he said, getting out. “I'll see you there, probably about three or so. Stick the vodka in the freezer. Your room is the one in back, by the garage.”

“Gotcha.”

I drove across the campus, looking at the summer students in their shorts and sandals, books under their arms, small packs on their backs. Some walked the brick sidewalks, some sat on benches; others lay on the green lawns, books and satchels beside them. They talked, studied, lazed, and looked young and healthy. I tried to remember what it had been like to be that age.

One reason that it was hard for me was that when I
had
been that age, I'd been going to, living in, or being
shipped back from Vietnam. I'd come home after a very short tour with some metal in my legs, the gift of a Vietnamese artillery man or mortar man who had lobbed a shell right next to me while I was blundering around in the dark looking for his friends. Even now small pieces of the metal occasionally worked their way out of my skin. I hadn't gone to college until I was older, and when I had gone, it had not been to so pastoral a campus as this, but to Northeastern University in Boston, where you combine work and study as you go. My work had been as a Boston cop. It had all happened quite a while back, and none of it had happened in places as pretty as Weststock.

I turned up Main Street and drove up the hill past the town center, where youthful buyers were spending their parents' money in neat shops—clothing stores, bookstores, record stores, eating emporiums, furniture stores, and stores selling expensive objets d'art and decorations for the abode of the modern college student or academician. Weststock had long since bowed to economic reality and unabashedly directed its sales to the members of the college community.

Similarly, it had politically more or less given up the notion of town versus gown identities, although there were, of course, still a few hostile locals who felt oppressed by the college and whose youths occasionally engaged in fisticuffs with Weststock boys or, better yet, struck an even more wicked blow at Privilege by dating and mating with college girls. Lingering manifestations of this division were two bars which catered almost completely to clients in the particular camps. The Millstone was the bar of choice for townies, and the Duke of Ellington was the college pub. Some of the town's most famous fights had started when members of one group accidentally or purposefully entered the wrong bar. This had resulted in the hiring of large bouncers who now guarded the doors of the establishments.

John Skye, naturally enough, attended the Duke of
Ellington, whose owner, Morey Goldthorpe, was an ex-teacher of English literature. All descent English teachers, John had explained, secretly want to own a pub. Not just a bar, but a pub in the English tradition. And not just a pub in the English tradition, but a pub in the English tradition
as it ought to be,
not as most English pubs actually are. That is to say, it should have broad beams in the ceiling, should serve drawn beer, should have a dart board, chessboards, and dominoes, and should be a place where a man or woman could have a companionable pint without risking reputation, life, or limb. Morey Goldthorpe, unlike most other dreamers of pubbish dreams, had actually quit teaching and bought a bar which he had then transformed into the Duke.

Over the mirror behind the bar was a large sign announcing that drunks and loud arguments were not allowed, and that the management reserved the right to forbid service to anyone who disliked real ale. Instead of television, the Duke of Ellington, as its name and the namesake picture on its sign suggested, offered live jazz five nights a week. The Duke's clients were not obliged to listen to the music, but those who did not received silent frowns of protest from the regulars. If you liked jazz, you could come and listen even if you were a townie. Morey could not refuse service to a jazz fan.

Upstairs were the Goldthorpe quarters and two rooms known as the Higher Realm to which only members of the college faculty and their guests were allowed admittance. This undemocratic practice was Morey Goldthorpe's bow to his past profession and was strictly enforced. Weary professors could escape from their students and others by withdrawing upstairs to a private bar, a lounge, and several oak tables at least one of which served as the site of the faculty game, an illegal poker game such as the undergraduates' famous floating game, both of which the police overlooked because no one ever complained about them or admitted that they really existed.

I drove past the Duke and, two cross-streets later, turned left onto the avenue where John's large frame house sat back behind a large lawn and flower beds. I turned into the driveway, parked, and got out my bag. It was a clean, comfortable, tree-lined street of faculty homes. In the hot summer sun, the shade of the lofty trees was welcome.

I went inside and down a hall and found my room. The house was old-fashioned and had many fireplaces. There was one in my room with an ancient gas burner disguised as a log. The kind you lit with a match after opening a valve. I hadn't seen one of those in years and didn't even know they still had them. Only an antiquarian like John Skye would have such a thing in his house.

One thing I didn't need on an August day was a fire in the fireplace. I opened a window to air the room out and had just put the vodka in the freezer when the phone rang. It was John Skye.

“I was in Weststock but my brain must have been in Colorado,” said John. “I left my briefcase in the Jeep. Can you run it down here for me? There's a secretary just inside that door I went in. She'll shuttle it on to me. Fifteen minutes?”

“Fifteen it is.”

“You're a good man, Charlie Brown.”

I locked the door and went out to the Jeep. It was a beautiful day, so I decided to walk to the campus. I got John's briefcase and stepped along. I wondered if a passing stranger would take me for a professor. Did professors wear pink button-down shirts found in the thrift shop? Did they wear chino shorts and Teva sandals without socks?