Summer People (11 page)

Her clasped hands suddenly opened with spread fingers to indicate that she was at a loss for any other explanation. She shrugged and smiled apologetically as Nathan watched in stunned silence. Did she actually expect him to believe her? Or was she expecting him to see through this explanation, but hoping he would demonstrate enough forgiveness or cowardice to permit her to save face?

“I thought it was the other way around.”

Kendra stared back at him blankly. “How do you mean?”

“I thought you wouldn't take me sailing because you figured out who I was.”

“Oh, of course not, Nathan. I was just so preoccupied with trying to get everyone on the boat that I didn't know who anybody was!”

Her rounded cheekbones were flushed and her eyes were filled with pleading and resentment. Nathan glanced past her. Fluffy white clouds drifted over the fairway toward the horizon, where an older woman in a blue tracksuit was powerwalking near the Point.

Kendra looked down and stroked a few blades of grass. “Anyway, I'm sorry about the confusion. Maybe you can go out with us another time.”

“All right,” Nathan said, nodding. He did not want to carry on this uncomfortable conversation any longer, particularly in Ellen's presence. He sensed her watching the tennis match in front of them with somewhat feigned concentration. Kendra stood and moved to Ellen's side to face the golf course. With arms folded across her chest, she appeared to be contemplating her exit, but then she raised a hand to her mouth. “Oh, there's Franny Buchanan, the poor thing.”

Nathan followed Kendra's gaze to the woman he'd noticed earlier, in the blue tracksuit, still tramping around the coastal edge of the fairway.

One of the two men in Kendra's party stepped away from where he'd been talking behind Ellen's chair. Kendra introduced him as her husband, and the tall man said to Nathan, “I'd shake your hand but I don't think you want my sweat all over you!” His blond arm hairs were still slick with perspiration, but when he touched his wife's shoulder, she reached up and patted his hand affectionately.

“We're going inside to get drinks, hon,” he said, swinging his racquet casually beside him.

“Oh, I'll go with you. I'm dying of thirst myself.” Kendra picked up her racquet and bent down to kiss Ellen's cheek. “Bye-bye, you two,” Kendra said, walking backward and smiling, as if everything had been resolved and she was once more carefree. She turned and skipped to catch up with her party, laughing once again as she followed them up the front steps of the clubhouse.

Tennis matches were still being played on three courts, so Nathan and Ellen stayed awhile longer. Then Ellen widened her eyes hopefully, asking, “Are you ready to go?”

Walking back across the lawn, they saw a man with a closely cut beard standing on the far side of a black Toyota pickup parked behind Ellen's car. In the bed of his truck stood a tripod and camera with a telescopic zoom lens. The man vanished momentarily in the shadows of a large maple tree, but then pulled his face back from his camera to glance at Ellen and Na
than. He was wearing a tan photographer's vest, with lots of little pockets, and said he was taking photographs for
Down East.
Nathan had never heard of the magazine, but months later, during a drizzly gray November, while at a newsstand, he would look longingly at the sunny places featured on the covers of travel magazines, and pick a copy of
Down East
from the rack. The cover story was “The Ten Best Places in New England You've Never Heard Of” and the cover photograph was of the Alnombak Golf and Tennis Club. Beneath the perfectly puffy white clouds and surrounded by impeccable landscaping, handsome men and women played golf or tennis and looked very good doing it. It was the kind of photograph that can make your own life seem hopelessly joyless and plain, and Nathan felt something like relief when he noticed in the far right-hand corner, where the golf course met the sky, the profile of Franny Buchanan moving determinedly over the earth.

 

W
hen Eldwin arrived at Ellen's house that evening, he smiled the close-lipped smile of a man amusedly aware of his appearance. Dressed in a black wet suit, which covered his body from wrist to ankle, he looked like an overweight superhero.

Nathan followed him up Harbor Avenue toward the aluminum shed abutting the east wall of Eldwin's house. The blue tandem kayak lay on its side against the doors. The two men grabbed hold of the carrying rope on either end, portaged it across the gravel, then set it down in Ellen's yard.

Crouching over the storage compartment at the front of the kayak, Eldwin pulled out something black and rubbery. “You might want to wear this old wet suit of mine. I can't fit into it anymore, but it might fit you.”

Nathan held the wet suit in both hands. “Yeah?”

“It's not full size—with arms and legs—but you'll be a lot warmer with it on if we tip over.”

“Are you thinking we might tip over?” Nathan said, baring his teeth in a pained expression.

“No, but sometimes the water gets a little choppy. Have you been in the water?”

“I put my foot in far enough to know it's damn cold.”

“Yeah, it's about fifty degrees during the day, so it'll just be safer to have it on.”

Reluctantly Nathan crept back upstairs to his bedroom, careful not to awaken Ellen, and pulled off his sweatshirt and shorts. He was uncertain whether to remove his boxer shorts, but the idea of resting his testicles where another man's had once lain disturbed him. Pushing his legs through the wet suit, the rubber felt cold and damp and he began to suspect that he was not supposed to be wearing his boxers. The rubber was like a second skin, except that it only extended as far as his thighs and elbows. Zipping up the front of the wet suit, encasing himself like a link of sausage, Nathan stared into the mirror with shame. He looked skinnier than he'd thought possible. Folding his arms across his chest, he persuaded himself for a moment that he was in fact more robust, but the utter blackness of the wet suit made him look vampire pale. Sighing, he let his arms dangle, as if drained of their blood. He pulled on his sweatshirt and turned in front of the mirror a few times. Then he stepped into his shorts and hurried back out to the lawn.

Standing up where he'd been squatting beside the kayak, Eldwin said, “You're not going to put it on?”

“No, I've got it on.”

Eldwin stared at him.

“Underneath.”

Once on Parson's Beach, they donned their life jackets. Eldwin explained how to paddle, what to do if the kayak flipped, and so on, and asked Nathan if he preferred the front or back seat. Nathan opted for the back and walked behind Eldwin as they eased the kayak into the harbor and helped each other to climb aboard. The water was dark and frigid, and in his seat Nathan rubbed his soaked tennis shoes together to try to warm up his toes.

When they had settled into a steady rhythm of paddling, Eldwin said, “There's going to be a funeral service for Carl Buchanan on Sunday at St. Michael's, so you should probably plan to bring Ellen.”

“All right,” Nathan said, nodding. “I actually met him a couple of
times. He and his wife came over once to visit.”

“What was he like?”

“You never met him?”

“I may have shaken hands with him at church or at some party, but I don't remember meeting him. I've been talking with Pastor Russell and other people to try and learn a few things about him so I can say something meaningful during the service.”

Nathan gave an account of Franny and Carl's visit to the house and of Carl hurling his wineglass at the ocean. Toward the end of the story, Nathan wondered why Eldwin's shoulders seemed to be shaking, but then Eldwin's big head tilted back and he let out a deep, full-throated laugh.

Nathan grinned. “What's so funny?”

“I was just imagining the expression on your face.”

Lights from the coastline reflected off the water as they paddled toward a narrow quarter-mile stretch of land, named Stone Island, located near the mouth of Albans Bay. Rocks and seaweed hugged its shoreline, and Nathan used his oar to help navigate while staring at the island's lighthouse. It was the kind of white, conical lighthouse seen in children's drawings or Maine postcards. Towering above clusters of shrubbery on the island's edge, the lighthouse's luminous eye slurred across the Atlantic and then away, as if both fascinated and horrified by the empty vastness of the ocean.

“You want a beer?” Eldwin asked. He rested his paddle on the kayak and rooted around in the compartment in front of him.

“Uh, sure,” Nathan said.

The popping open of the cans echoed loudly across the water as they let the kayak drift along next to shore. A warm, pine-smelling breeze blew over them from the island, and Nathan leaned back in his seat to gaze up at the silvery clouds gliding across the moonlit sky. Eventually, he asked, “So what have you learned from other people about Mr. Buchanan?”

“Let's see…he served in the Second World War…worked at Boston College for thirty years, even though with his wife's money—she's heir to the Goodyear fortune—he didn't need the job to pay the bills. They had
one daughter who died of leukemia in her thirties. He did not like to travel on planes…loved reading about art history and apparently did like to drink…and he was very fond of Ellen.”

“Who told you that?”

“Russ—Pastor Russell—the guy I'm replacing.”

“What did he say exactly?”

“Well,” Eldwin said, sighing. He sipped his beer, perhaps contemplating how much to say, but then continued, “We had finished talking about Carl, and I was just telling him how glad I was that Leah had found a friend here, and I mentioned who you were—that you were up here taking care of Mrs. Broderick, and that's when he told me about her driving her car into that boulder.” Eldwin tilted his head back to finish his beer. “You finished with yours?”

“Uh, no, not yet.”

“All right, well try and drain it so we can circle around the island. The tide's going out, so we're going to be fighting the current.”

“All right, but what does Carl have to do with why Ellen drove her car into the boulder?”

Eldwin paddled a few strokes in silence and then told him that by the time Ellen's husband died, she had already been having summer affairs with Bill McAlister. When she came back to the Cove the summer after her husband's death, Carl had asked her to marry him.

“Did Franny know?”

“I don't know, but Ellen had been having the affair with Bill and was apparently more interested in marrying
him.
Bill had only been separated from his wife a short while, though, and apparently wasn't ready to get married again right away.”

“How does this guy know all this stuff?” Nathan said, frowning.

Eldwin said, “When you're pastor of a church, it doesn't take long to learn about the lives of your congregation, particularly in a gossipy community like this one. Russ was also a good friend of Carl. He wants to be here for the funeral, but I don't think he's going to be able to come.”

“So, what, Ellen drove her car into the rock because Mr. McAlister
wouldn't marry her?”

“I don't think that's it entirely. When Russ saw her at the hospital after the accident, he said she seemed disoriented, as if she was having a nervous breakdown, probably due to the combination of everything that had happened: her husband dying, the pressure of Carl wanting to marry her, and Bill not wanting to…it just seemed like maybe she felt isolated and abandoned and was just trying to find some way of escape.”

Nathan sat staring back at the yellow porch light of Ellen's house and listening to the quiet rippling of the water around him.

“You still nursing that beer?”

“That's crazy,” Nathan mumbled. He finished his beer in a few gulps and felt a slight buzz in his head as he stuffed the can beneath his seat and began to paddle. The current was stronger than he'd expected, and his shoulder muscles were soon burning. On the far side of the island, the world existed in a wedge of darkness, cut off from the reflected house lights of Brightonfield Cove, smelling of pine trees and brine. They paddled wordlessly for several minutes, and when they rounded the east corner of the island, they were once again on the glimmering surface of the harbor. The dotted house lights along the coastline were a comfort, allowing Nathan to feel away from town, but still within shouting distance. Eldwin said they could let the tide carry them for a while and asked Nathan if he wanted another beer. As they drank, Nathan asked, “Did you always know you wanted to become a pastor?”

“No,” Eldwin said, shaking his head. “I don't think anybody who knew me growing up would have thought I was going to be a pastor. I didn't.”

“What did you think you were going to be?”

“I don't know. A musician, maybe. I didn't come from a very religious family and I got pretty involved in the punk scene growing up. I had the liberty spikes,” he said, gesturing with one hand to demonstrate the foot-long horns of gelled hair that had once run down the middle of his head. “I was a bass player in a punk band and I got pretty involved in everything that went along with that, including drugs.”

“Whoa, so how did you become a pastor?”

“It took a long time. I've only been a pastor for three years. I was in graduate school in philosophy at the University of Michigan, but I just didn't feel that what I was studying was addressing life as I was experiencing it. I didn't feel like there was any accounting for the possibility of the miraculous. So I started attending an Episcopal church and talking more and more with the pastor there until she said the church would sponsor me so I could go to seminary if I wanted to.”

Nathan said, “Are you glad you made the switch?”