Kathleen Valentine (7 page)

A car slides into a parking spot in front of the shop and its lights blink off. Hugh steps over the threshold, waves and starts to slide the door shut. "Pop?"
"Yes?"
"Maybe she won’t," he says in a voice child-like and hope-filled. "I bet she won’t."
Guy nods. "I hope you’re right, son."

THE HAVEN

"Tell about Uncle Stash and the narwhal," Lenore says as Rob tumbles her down into the white cloud of her new, big-girl bed.
He looks back at me over his shoulder and rolls his eyes. Lenore lies there smiling up at him with her tiny pixie face, her tawny skin flushed and rosy from her bath, her big black eyes and wild tangle of midnight black curls impossibly dark against the whiteness of her pillow. She laces her plump fingers together and slips the forefinger of her right hand between her sweet, little lips where she will pretend she is not sucking it. "Pwease," she adds.
"You’re turn," I whisper and he smiles that gorgeous wide white smile of his. Even now when the first dash of gray is shimmering through his own black curls that smile can make me giddy as a girl.
"Of course," he says, settling down on the edge of the bed and tucking the comforter around her little body.
"Uncle Stash was a mariner," he begins.
"That means he worked on a big ship in the Atwantic Ocean." She says it with perfect seriousness, her eyes watching his face enraptured.
"Yes," Rob says. "He worked on a big ship in the Atlantic Ocean. And sometimes that ship went up through northern seas where there are icebergs."
"Like whole big mountains made out of snow, fwoating in the watew," she adds.
"Yes." I can tell by the way his cheekbones rise that he is smiling. I cross the room to the wall of windows overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and gaze up at the long, spiraling tusk mounted in brackets above the center window. "And where the Northern Lights..."
"Wowa bow-alice," she corrects him.
"Aurora borealis shimmers in the night sky..."
From the windows in our daughter’s room you can see the gold flash of the lighthouse beam far off on the outer islands. The sun is gone now and the sky glows the color of the last violets clustered under the yew hedge bordering the sea cliff below. Stars emerge. It will be a glorious night—one of the last warm nights of this year.
"...and Uncle Stash said to the man, ‘hold up there, you can’t kill that...’"
"‘...hold up there, SON...’," Lenore insists. It is important to get every word absolutely correct.
"‘...hold up there, son, you can’t kill that, that’s a narwhal...’"
"One of God’s most be-yooo-tiful cweatuwes...."
"One of God’s most beautiful creatures." Rob agrees. Sometimes I wonder who loves this story more, Rob or Lenore? I reach up and dust the tips of my fingers over the surface of the narwhal tusk and am surprised, as I always am, at how fragile it seems. Though it is Lenore’s most cherished possession she is only allowed to hold it when she is sitting in Rob’s lap. I never hold it with her. I can’t. Now it hangs here in the pristine beauty of our little daughter’s fairy princess bedroom in our estate house on the hill. But once it hung over Stash’s narrow, bachelor’s bed in the dusty, tremulous silence of the Seaman’s Haven down on the waterfront where mariners from every corner of the planet escaped for a few nights ashore away from the rugged bleakness of their solitary lives.

Rob and I had been married for fourteen years when I met Stash. I knew him for months before I found out he and Rob were related. Rob had forgotten about him until I mentioned his name over breakfast one frosty February morning.
"Stash?" Rob said with a mouthful of scrambled eggs as he looked up from his Wall Street Journal. "Stash Cizik? You’re kidding me."
"No." In the pale wash of frozen sunlight Rob’s meticulous grooming and immaculate suit seemed like it could scarcely exist on the same planet as the harsh, burly ruggedness of the Seaman’s Haven and its shifting motley of inhabitants. "He’s a retired mariner who runs the Seaman’s Haven. I told you that."
Rob is staring at me, a surprisingly boyish grin on his normally serious face, "Big guy? Maybe six-two, six-three, real tough bastard?"
"Well, I guess you could describe him that way."
"Tattoos covering his arms?"
I nod. "Yes..."
Rob’s face splits into an enormous grin. "How the hell is the old pirate? Damn. I thought he was dead by now. He must be pretty old."
I shake my head. "He’s in his fifties, I guess. He’s a very good manager. He keeps the place in excellent condition. I don’t know how I would have gotten everything ready for this auction if he hadn’t helped. I’m going back down there today to meet an appraiser." I lower my eyes and pick at my spinach and tomato omelette. "I think we’ll be able to put a new roof on and replace those broken windows."
One of the obligations of being a society wife, I learned after marrying Rob, was involvement in a seemingly endless variety of community activities. In my Pennsylvania hometown wives without jobs might volunteer at the grade school cafeteria or at the hospital gift shop. But here in New England the arts and historical associations would not function without the dedication of those wives of prominent businessmen who had the luxury of both time and assets to contribute to their operation. Actually not much in my background had prepared me for this life. I was smart enough and clever enough to earn a generous scholarship to Salve Regina College in Newport. What I had that earned me the attention of a man like Rob I still wonder about.
His family made their fortune in the fish-packing industry. Rob’s great-grandfather, a fearsome looking immigrant from Portugal whose portrait hangs over our dining room fireplace, started his business by fishing from a two-masted schooner and carrying burlap sacks of fish through the cobbled stone streets selling them to shop and inn keepers with salt-water diluted fish blood soaking him to the skin and caked to his patched and leaking boots. Rob assumed the role of CEO of that business a few years back when his father retired but the closest Rob ever comes to the reality of fish is in PowerPoint presentations on new flash freezing methods.
Now, as he sits across the table from me in the snug little twenty-three room mansion on the hill afforded us by all that fish, he pushes back the sleeve of his Barney’s of Boston suit and checks the time on his Rolex.
"I wasn’t crazy about you spending so much time down by the docks there but I guess if you’ve got Stash Cizik looking out for you I won’t worry." He chuckles. "I hadn’t thought of him in years."
"I’m surprised you know him."
"Actually," Rob finishes his sausage but pushes the toast aside. No carbs these days. "Actually, we’re related."
I raise my eyes and stare at him. His face is split in a grin and he has an unusual, far-off look in his eyes. The resemblance between them suddenly stuns me. Rob is tall, too, though slim and elegant without Stash’s rangy working man’s muscularity. He keeps his dark hair cut so short that you would not notice the loose, abundant curls that, on Stash, are only slightly frosted with gray.
"When I was a kid," he says quietly, "he came to the house one time and I heard him and my Dad yelling at each other. That was back when the fishermen were fighting with the fish-packers over the price of fish, you know how Dad’s always talking about how it was back then?"
I nod. I’ve listened to a hundred such stories over Sunday dinners at my in-laws.
"Anyway, Stash was kind of a local legend at the time. He was smart, you know, and was kind of a spokesman for the independent fishermen. That was before they spent all their time fighting the government like they do now. My Dad and Stash were hollering at each other in the living room and I heard my Dad say ‘just because we’re cousins, Stash, doesn’t mean I owe you anything.’" Rob shakes his head. "My friends and I all thought Stash was great, of course, so I was really excited when I heard that."
"But..." I look down at my plate. "...if he was on the side of the fishermen against your father why would you admire him?"
Rob shrugs and chuckles. "I don’t know. I was a kid. Stash was the little guy going up against the big guys, you know. There was a rumor that he had once carried a two hundred pound tuna on his back into a boardroom meeting and tossed it on the table right under my Dad’s nose. People were afraid of him."
I am speechless.
He checks his watch again and, standing up, comes over to dust a shadow of a kiss over my cheek. "I have to fly. I’ll be in St. Pete’s until Thursday and then I’m stopping in Atlanta to play some golf with Chucker. You can reach me on my cell."
I nod and start to stand but he is halfway to the door. "Invite the old pirate over for dinner some night," he calls over his shoulder. "I’d like to see him again."
And before I can respond he is gone.

Despite my husband’s concerns about the neighborhood fronting the commercial docks I find this part of town easier, more comforting than the elegant area where we live. I coast out to the end of the state fish pier and shift into park. It is noisy here, winches clank and whir as nets full of herring are unloaded from mammoth, cumbersome looking ships tethered to the pier with ropes as thick as my forearm. Men spread out nets as long as a football field along the length of the pier to let them dry, inspect them for damage, and sit on orange plastic milk crates mending the damaged places. Forklifts scurry up and down the dock loading pallets of frozen fish onto block-long tankers that will carry them up through the northern seas to Russia and Scandinavia. Seagulls squawk and cluster diving for tidbits clinging to the nets or dropping from the cargo being unloaded.
My home town was a mill town, very different and yet somehow not at all so. Men wearing coveralls much like those worn by these dockworkers carried metal lunch pails through the early morning and late afternoon streets to the mills where they would spend their day amid the foul stench of paper being processed. The smell was so noxious, like week old fried cabbage wrapped up in dirty socks, that my mother refused to open the windows on the frequent humid days and hung her laundry on lines in the basement rather than outside in that putrid smelling air. Back then I couldn’t even imagine the life Rob has brought me to. Now when my parents visit us, even after the fourteen years of my marriage, my mother will pull me aside and hug me and say how proud she is of me for getting away from "all that". I sigh and grip the steering wheel trying to stop my hands from shaking. It is a fairy tale alright, I tell her. I have my knight in shining armor and my castle on the hill.
What I don’t have is a little prince.
During the first five years of our marriage we practiced birth control like most young couples. I was twenty-three when we married, Rob two years older. We had plenty of time. We did the things young couples do—traveled and played. Rob’s pretty step-mother Audra, only ten years older than Rob, took me to DAR meetings and day spas and meeting of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities.
By the time we celebrated our fifth anniversary hints were being dropped about an heir to the empire. Over the next few years the hints turned to nudges and then to regular and pointed reminders. I don’t know who annoyed me more—Rob’s mother with her detailed description of the hand-made cradles and baby furniture made by local craftsmen in her new home in the Southwest, or my own mother who mailed thick manilla envelopes filled with articles cut from recent women’s magazines on pregnancy, cures for infertility, and the devastating effect of childlessness on marriage. The only person in my world who seemed unconcerned by my failure to become pregnant was Rob.
"Chrissy," he would say when he found me moping over one of my mother’s articles, "I’m not that concerned about kids. You know that. If we have a couple it would be fine but I won’t be upset if it doesn’t happen."
Every year both of our mothers became more aggravating. My mother called monthly to tell me about the latest methods for in vitro fertilization or whatever else Oprah had recently done a program on.
"I’m telling you, honey," she would insist, "this couple was just ecstatic. They had been trying and trying to get pregnant for years."
I sighed. "What a shame. All that screwing for nothing."
There was a long silence and then my mother cleared her throat and continued undeterred.
Even Audra—childless Audra—got into the act in a less pushy, but equally obnoxious, manner.
"Do you think Rob is fooling around?"
She had dragged me to a fashion show at the Park Plaza in Boston and we were sipping Cosmos in the bar until rush hour passed.
"What?" I said lowering my eyes to the cocktail glass in my hand.
"Look," she crossed her long, ultra-aerobicized legs and leaned forward, her recently acquired cleavage glowing above her Dolce & Gabana silk camisole, "they all do it. The trick is to not let them know it bothers you. I mean, what’s the big deal? If you’re getting all you want who cares where they spread the rest of it." She giggled. "Rob’s smart enough to be careful where he puts it, isn’t he?"
I stared at her. Truthfully, I had wondered the same thing. Rob never gave me any reason to suspect him but he was gone a lot. Still our lovemaking was awfully good though lately he’d developed the mysterious talent of making love to me without touching me any more than necessary. I wasn’t sure what that was all about.
"Don’t worry," Audra laughed. She turned and flashed a smile at the good-looking young waiter who had let drop that he was a senior at Emerson with an apartment in the Back Bay. "You know, one of the advantages of being a woman today is that we can be just as bad as they are and, as long as you don’t get caught..." She shrugged. "...who cares?"
I tried to tell myself it didn’t matter. I tried to tell myself that I just had to relax and stop worrying and then Nature would take its course (my grandmother’s opinion). I kept myself busy with endless community projects—the chamber music festival, the community cupboard, and, now, raising funds for the Seamen’s Haven. Rob and I were attractive, glamorous, and involved. He was happy. I was the one who had to endure the questioning, sympathetic smiles and the well-intentioned meddling.
"Any news?"
"Have you talked to your doctor?"
"Lots of children need good homes..."
It never ended. Each comment on that part of our life was like a personal rebuke however gently offered. Once I invited a particularly annoying neighbor to join us in the bedroom one night and see if she could spot any mistakes we were making. She stopped talking to me. I heard later she told people it was a good thing we didn’t have children because heaven only knew what kind of a mother I would be.
But the horrible part was what I was doing to myself. I’d always known I wasn’t good enough for Rob—beautiful Rob with his prep school elan and his express ride up the corporate ladder—a ladder that his family owned. Despite his copious reassurances, my failure was becoming my most constant form of self-abuse.
That was before Stash. As I start the car and guide it slowly through the lines of tractor-trailers waiting for a container ship to unload, my heart begins to flutter. I have to wait until nine. That’s when the doors to the Seamen’s Haven are locked for the day and no one will be there but Stash.
The day is brilliant but frigid. Swirling ice in the sun-drenched air forms frosty rainbows. I pull into the narrow drive that snakes around to the back of the Haven and let the car idle, my head buzzing with my husband’s revelation just an hour earlier. Stash, I had learned in a quick call to Rob’s Great-Aunt Priscilla, was the love child of her sister Lenore and a Czechoslovakian sailor.
"Lenore?" I said as Great Aunt Pris paused to let the full horror of the scandal sink in. "I’ve never heard of her before." I mentally scanned the family photographs that had once crowded the walls of Rob’s parents’ house in Newport back when they were still together. I couldn’t recall a Lenore.
"No, you wouldn’t," Great Aunt Pris says in a tone I can’t quite decipher. "She was my youngest sister. The family disowned her when she ran off with that horrible man. No surprise that he dumped her once he got her pregnant. She moved to Charlestown or Everett, I forget now."
Great Aunt Pris may be eighty-seven but I’ve never known her to forget a single thing.
"Is she still there?"
"No." There was a long, heavy pause. Aunt Pris lives in Newport in one of the fabulous "cottages" there that has been converted into an assisted living facility. Of all Rob’s relatives she is my favorite. She is arrogant, affected, and a terrible gossip but, from the very beginning, she had been the most genuine and generous of Rob’s family in welcoming me into their circle.
"No, Lenore died years ago." Her voice was brittle and dry. "I tried, Christine. When I heard how sick she was I went to see her and I tried to get her to come to live with Hep and I but she was always so bullheaded."
Great Aunt Pris’s husband, a Boston Brahman with the ponderous name Hepplewhite Townsend Shaw, died long before I was part of the family but she still talks about him as though he is in the other room reading the paper and waiting for her to finish dressing for dinner.
"What became of the child they had?" I asked not sure I was prepared for the answer.
"He took after his father." She said it simply, as though that explained everything.
"What do you mean?"
The pause is so long that I wonder if she has dropped off to sleep, something she has a knack for doing. "He wanted no part of us. He was a sailor like his father. Bobby used to see him now and then." Bobby is Rob’s father. "I don’t think he amounted to much. I expect he’s dead by now, too."
Now, sitting in the driveway of the Haven, gathering my courage to go inside, I try to sort all this new knowledge out in my pounding brain. Stash is more than my husband’s cousin. More than the love child of Great Aunt Pris’s long-lost sister. Stash is my lover—the man who has turned everything in my life upside down. Stash has taught me how passionately it is possible to feel love.
Thump-thump. My head snaps up to a grin and a wave from Eddie, the short, bald, snaggle-toothed man who is Stash’s assistant manager. He is heading down the street to his day job as a guard at the whaling museum. Eddie likes me. He turns red and inarticulate whenever he tries to talk to me. Now he blows a cloud of blue steam into the frigid air, turns up the collar of his peacoat, and trots off.
I sigh, trembling slightly. This neighborhood, with all its wounds and warts has become warm and familiar. The cobblestone street slants down to the docks where deep-water fishing vessels sit rusting in the frigid sunlight waiting for the crew that will guide them back out to George’s Bank or the Grand Banks where their livings are earned. For men between bunks, in need of a clean bed, some hot food, and a friendly ear, the Seaman’s Haven is easily accessible and welcoming. The city established the Haven long before the Civil War when restless bands of homesick seamen were a nuisance, and possibly a threat to the city’s carefully cultivated peace. Today, civic minded groups continue to support the Haven though it seems to be less and less in demand. Still it is rare night when there is no one waiting when the doors open at five in the afternoon and sometimes all twenty-eight beds are occupied. It stands quiet now, its uncurtained windows looking fearlessly at the distant blue.
The first time I drove up here I thought the house was sad and a bit forlorn but now, thanks to the many hours of absolute ecstasy I have spent snug inside her, she looks splendid to me. A battered figurehead of an Indian Chief, from some long scuttled barque, arches ferociously above the door. Eddie will have locked the front door on his way out. The Haven is just that, a haven, and is closed every day from nine to five to discourage rootless mariners from becoming too comfortable here. But the side door will be open.
I slip into the warm silence and inhale the winsome fragrance of ancient wood, morning coffee, and men. Only two sounds invade the space, the steady tick-tock of a sea captain’s clock on the fireplace mantle in the common room and a steady thumping sound, crockery moving back and forth on wood, that comes from the kitchen.
He stands in the light-filled kitchen. Everything here is simple—plain, scrubbed wood, undraped tables, walls covered with unframed charts and maps. This could as easily be a Shaker meeting room or a monastery.
His back is to me as he bends over the table. His arms and shoulders move steadily, rhythmically, and I realize he is kneading bread dough in a glazed brown bowl sitting on a folded linen towel. Whish-thump, the bowl rocks back and forth on the table under the expert movements of his big hands. Whish-thump.
I step quietly toward him, slide my arms around his waist, and snuggle as close as I can get, pressing my face into the rough wool of his well-felted sweater.
"I smelled your perfume," he says and from the tone of his voice I know he is smiling.
"I couldn’t wait to get her today," I say, kissing his back between his big shoulder blades. "I’ve wanted you all morning."
He turns holding his sticky, dough-caked hands out and away. He sits on the edge of the table and lets me cuddle close wrapping his forearms around my shoulders. I kiss him. God, I love his face! It is hard and lined and bony with a nose and jaw that are too big and eyes that are like hematite nuggets set under bushy, untameable brows. Everything about Stash has a wildness to it, a rocky, brokenness just on the edge of ruin, and yet so delicious in its wanton imperfection.
"You didn’t come to work then?" he teases. His eyes twinkle and I am lost.
I kiss his mouth and he kisses back gently, sweetly. "I want to go to bed." I feel bold and wicked speaking my desires to him—a boldness I would never dare with my husband.
He smiles and turns back to his bread dough. It is a charming thing to me that this huge, wise, self-assured man shies in the face of my desire for him. It has been like that from the beginning. The man I met on my first foray into the no-man’s land of the Seaman’s Haven was warm, friendly and cooperative. If he felt desire for me he never let it show but now when I catch him looking at me he brims over with it.
I hang my coat on the hook inside the kitchen door and pour steaming coffee into a stoneware mug. We talk about the work I should be doing as I sit across the table from him watching as he pushes the air from the once-risen dough, divides and shapes it into loaves. He places them neatly on a wooden cutting board, patting them into the shape he wants and covering them with a clean towel. I look at the thick veins that stand out on the insides of his flour dusted forearms and squirm inside. My clothes seem too close to my skin. My thighs tremble as he rubs his hands together over the bowl crumbling the remains of the sticky dough off of his fingers. He is a quiet man when he is with me. Despite the severity of his stern, masculine world there are little touches of him everywhere—a battered copper pot sprouting spiky bright green chives sits on the windowsill. Leather Wayang puppets he carried in a sea trunk from Indonesia hang on the walls. A collection of scrimshaw pastry crimpers are arranged in a glass case in the dining room. He told me that lonely young sailors spent endless hours at sea carving them from whale bones to present to the young lady of their fancy when they returned. Hopefully, the young lady would be sufficiently pleased to then bake him a pie.