Spartina (45 page)

Dick cleared his throat. “I know who you mean. I don’t think I’ve seen her, but Eddie’s mentioned her.”

He heard his own voice come out far off like an echo. For a second he feared he’d said, “Elsie’s mentioned her.”

May said, “She looked at me when they were all looking at her. She just took a quick look sideways.”

May didn’t say anything for a while. Dick didn’t see what he could say.

May said, “She didn’t get dressed up to come here. She was wearing a checked shirt and slacks. Her hair was nice, all clean and fluffed up. She had on a little bit of eye makeup. And a little bit of lipstick. Her hands were pretty. Her slacks were kind of baggy with pleats, but she had this wide belt so her waist was pinched in. You could see her toes in her sandals. She didn’t paint her toenails but they were nice too. She had little tiny pearls in her ears—”

Dick said, “Well, hell, May, she did get dressed up.”

“No, she didn’t. It’s not just getting dressed up. It’s every day. She takes care of herself. She gets her hair cut right. Her shirt was just a regular checked shirt. It had brown and pink and white and real little blue lines, but it was just right for her. Of course her skin was good anyway. She just knows how to take care of herself.”

Dick said, “Well, she’s a divorcee.”

May looked at him until he felt dumb. She said, “That makes a woman better-looking, does it?”

“All I meant was—”

“You spread that secret around, everyone’s going to try divorce.”

“All I meant is, she don’t have much else to do all day.”

“If you mean she’s not cleaning up after a bunch of oafs tracking low tide through her house, you’re right about that.”

Dick said, “The boys not doing their share around here?”

May sighed. “The boys’re doing their share all right. And Eddie does a lot. Cooks some too. I have more free time around here than I ever had.”

“Well, good, May, you deserve it.” Dick thought of the goddamn dishwasher again. And then of the free time May would have to think about things.

May said, “You got your boat now, and when you’re ashore you got the boys and Eddie to do your will. And you go to the Neptune, and you’ve got Parker to get into trouble with. When I picked crabs at Joxer Goode’s, I at least had all of the other pickers to talk to. He didn’t mind us talking so long as we filled our boxes. You told me to quit, so I quit. Here comes this divorcee of Eddie’s, she says she likes living alone. Alone! She sees Miss Perry every Sunday, she’s friends with both Buttrick girls, she goes to their parties. She’s friends with the librarians and the teachers, and she goes to see friends in Boston. That’s on top of Eddie running up there as soon as there’s something she can’t fix herself. Alone!”

Dick didn’t say anything.

“The boys’re getting grown up and on their own,” May said. “Tom’s fifteen. When school’s out, he and Charlie spend more time with Eddie than with me. They work with him all day, every Saturday.”

“Pretty soon we’ll all go work on our house together,” Dick said. “The insurance money’ll come through.…”

“Did you ever ask what I thought about your spending three weeks out of every month at sea?”

Dick was stung. He was about to say, “What the hell you think I was building a boat for?” He swallowed it. May got up from the bed and looked at her watch. She said, “The boys’ll be back from school in an hour. You want to take your shower?”

“Eddie still out?”

“He comes back late these days. Around six.”

Dick didn’t want to go to bed with May in her state, but he was afraid he’d cause more trouble if he didn’t want to. He said, “Maybe you’ll feel better back in your own house.”

May didn’t say anything for a while. Then she said, “It’s funny. I didn’t think I’d like living at someone else’s place. But it’s nice here.”

“It is,” Dick said. “Eddie’s handy at making things homey. Steady Eddie. You ever think you’d have been better off married to someone like Eddie? Nice and homey. Good disposition.”

May surprised him by laughing.

“Poor old Eddie,” she said. “He’s never going to get anywhere with that woman. It’s not just on account of her being up there with the big-house people. I don’t know about that. But if she
was
interested, he’s too nice. It’s okay the way he helps you out, the way he is with the boys. But with her he’s too bent-forward and agreeable.”

Dick couldn’t believe her mood had changed so suddenly—she sounded almost cheerful about Eddie’s problem.

“He gives up his own mind,” May said. “He just turns into a feather pillow for her. I think she had more fun out of Tom than out of Eddie. Tom got a little sassy, and you could see her perk up. I don’t know what she would’ve done if you’d come in the door in one of your slam-bang moods. Probably gone down on her knees to help pull your boots off.” May laughed again. She’d brightened up entirely.

Dick said, “I thought your complaint was I was too disagreeable.”

May said, “I’m saying that to show what she’s like, not to encourage you.” She added, “Nobody wants things all one way or the other. Go take your shower.”

T
hat fall Dick and May spent in Eddie’s house was companionable.
Spartina
brought in pretty good hauls. Even with time out for some November gales, Dick got out more pots, found a window of bright, cold, calm weather in December. He’d hired an old Portuguese who suited Tran and him fine. The food on board was excellent—both Tran and the Portuguese, Tony Pereira, took an intelligent interest in meals on board. The food at Eddie’s was good too. Eddie took out his crossbow and shot another swan for Christmas dinner. Dick had never figured on how cheering good meals could be.

But Dick still hadn’t told May about Elsie. That worry would swoop in on him so that he was stabbed with panic. But then it would leave quickly. Later he realized the sharpness was dangerous: it made him think he was actually paying a price for things’ going well; when the stab of panic was over he was lulled back to regular life.

He told May in January. There’d been a foggy thaw and all of them had gone down to their house with Eddie. The insurance money had come in and was enough so that Eddie and what was now Eddie’s regular little building crew could do quite a bit more than just shore up and patch the old house. They were going to add a little greenhouse on the south side, and a screened-in porch off the kitchen. May was very pleased. Eddie went back with the boys to start supper. Dick went down to check the wharf. When he
came back, May was poking in the garden with a spade fork. There were beads of foggy dew on the nap of her new wool coat and on her cut-short hair. Her cheeks were pink from the little bit of digging she’d done. Dick told her she looked pretty good. She stopped digging. “It’s not just those beauty treatments,” he said. “Maybe it’s things looking up. That was a bad patch last summer. I see now it weighed you down too. Maybe even more than it did me. I was almost crazy with getting that boat in. It’s sometimes easier to get through something like that when you’re a little crazy. But that made you the one had to be normal, had to keep things going. I can see that must have been hard.”

May was happy to hear this. She took his arm, brushed the water drops off the cuff of his slicker.

Dick said, “That stuff with Parker. God, I got up to crazy stuff. You were right to get me to go to Miss Perry after all. I damn near missed that on account of her going into her spell. But you were right to get me to do it.”

“You won’t have any trouble making that payment, will you?”

“It’s not till the end of next August. Even with a bad swordfish season, it’s no trouble.”

“And you don’t have to deal with Parker.”

“Parker taking me on his boat is how I made some money. I didn’t actually get money for his little smuggling deal.”

May said, “Well, you’re clear of him. And you won’t have to do a clambake for Sawtooth Point. And you won’t have to fool with that fellow that was making the movie, that friend of Elsie Buttrick. I heard things about him.…”

“We did get him to pay for the spotter plane. Some of that turned out lucky. Even poaching clams out of the bird sanctuary made some money. But that was another piece of craziness.”

“Wasn’t it the movie fellow that caused the accident where Elsie Buttrick fell overboard?”

“No, that was her getting the outboard foul of the line.”

May said, “Well, even that turned out to the good, then. She ended up lending you another thousand. And your boat came through the hurricane.”

Dick said, “Elsie’s going to have a baby.”

May seemed to know everything just from that.

She walked off a short way, then came back to face him. She looked at her watch. “We have to get back soon. It is your baby?”

“Yes.”

“So all that about how near crazy you were, you told me that by way of an excuse.”

Dick hadn’t thought of that, but now he saw it might be true. He didn’t say anything.

May said deliberately, “You better tell me some more. One thing you better tell me is how come an up-to-date woman, gone to college, gone to two colleges, how come she gets pregnant? Or was it out on Parker’s boat? And she didn’t …”

Dick said, “I guess she made a mistake.” Dick could see anger move up May’s face. But May didn’t explode.

May said, “This was last summer? Before you put the boat in? How long did all this go on?”

Dick looked away. “Once or twice. No, two or three times.”

May laughed at him.

Dick felt that. He said, “I’ll tell you exactly. It was right after Parker’s smuggling run. Elsie was on duty for two nights. She was riding her bicycle home and I gave her a ride. It was raining.”

May shook her head. Dick heard her teeth grind.

Dick said, “Then Parker was in New York, so when he wasn’t back after a week or so, I took his boat out. And it was all over with.”

“Then she loaned you the money.”

“That’s right. She loaned me the money. She was taking care of
Miss Perry, and she talked to Miss Perry and set that up, and she talked to her brother-in-law and got another thousand.”

“She’s a real friend of the family,” May said and went to her car. She opened the door, paused, and added, “When she came to Eddie’s to tell us she’d seen
Spartina
, I guess she knew she was pregnant then, she knew she was carrying your child.”

May started the car. Dick barely had time to get in and shut his door before she pulled off.

During supper May scarcely showed signs of trouble at all. She talked to the boys and to Eddie perfectly naturally. She went straight to the bedroom right after the washing up. Dick listened to the NOAA weather forecast. Not good. He watched the first half of a Celtics game with the boys and Eddie.

May was lying in the middle of the bed. Dick went back out and got some extra blankets to use as a mattress.

When he came back in and dumped the blankets, May said, “And what about the baby?”

Dick was surprised at her tone. She didn’t sound mad. She sounded worn out.

She said again, “What are you going to do about the baby?”

“What do you mean? You want her to get an abortion? It’s too late.”

May shook her head slowly. “I don’t mean an abortion. I mean you taking care of your baby. How do you plan to do that? No matter what—even if you got a divorce you’d still have three kids and two mothers. That’s what you got, no matter what.”

Before he got alarmed, Dick had the funny feeling that he was playing checkers with May, and May was making two moves each time it was her turn.

It was the mention of divorce that alarmed him. He said, “This is my family. What we got here. You and me and Charlie and Tom. I never said divorce. I never thought it.”

“What are you going to do about your baby?”

“Look. Elsie was planning on having a baby all along. She’s getting Mary Scanlon to move in with her, in that new house with her, and the two of them were going to adopt a baby. They found out it was too complicated. So when this came up, they figured they’d take this one. They’re going to say it’s adopted. When Elsie comes back from Massachusetts, that’s what they’re going to say.”

May was silent. For an instant Dick thought this time he’d been the one that got in two moves. Then he saw he was worse off.

May said, “So Elsie didn’t make a mistake.”

Dick fumbled a minute before he said, “It was a mistake, and then they figured they’d go ahead and take advantage of it.”

“ ‘They,’ ”
May said. “I’m too tired to go on listening to you. I’ve never heard you so shifty. You sound like Parker. I can’t pay attention to it. You go back out on your boat and think about this—what are you going to do about your baby?”