Up Island (15 page)

He went without saying anything else. In a few moments I heard the front door shut.

Teddy and Lazarus came home around dusk. I was still sitting on the patio. With his newly developed antennae for trouble, Teddy knew at once that something was wrong. I told him about finding his father and Sheri Scroggins on the patio when I got home from Memphis.

I thought that he would be outraged, but he was not surprised. My mind made one of those in-the-air connections it seems to make when pain and crisis have sharpened it.

“They’ve been here before, haven’t they? When I’ve been away? Did you tell them when the coast was clear?”

It wasn’t fair, but I was past that.

“They’ve only been here once,” he said, sitting on his spine and regarding his long legs stretched out before him. Tee sat that way often. “That I know of, anyway. I didn’t tell them anything. It was the afternoon you left for Caroline’s. I don’t know how they knew you were gone.”

“And you just let them in.”

He lifted his head and stared at me. There was a too-old weariness on his face.

“He holds the deed, Ma. He can come in whenever he wants to, and bring whoever he wants to,” he said.

“And you were here the whole time?”

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“Yep.”

“With her.”

“I don’t even think about her.”

“This is
our
house, Teddy,” I said, foolish tears starting in my eyes. I struggled to keep my voice steady. “This is
our
home. This is the family place.”

Suddenly he was on his feet, shouting.

“I miss him, Ma, okay? I love him and I miss him. I can’t…just because you…Ma,
listen
—”

“Teddy—”

“No. Listen. Go on and do it, Ma. Just go on and do it.

This way…it’s just…it’s not going to change anything, and I can’t stand it any longer! Give him the goddamned divorce and let’s get us some lives! I can’t look after you anymore, Ma!”

I could not get a deep breath.

“Of course you can’t,” I whispered finally. “I wouldn’t want you to. I’ve never wanted you to do that. I mean, your trip, school…I
want
you to do those things. You know I do, don’t you?”

He scrubbed his fists angrily in his eyes.

“Ma, how can I do those things until I know you’re able to…get on with things? That you’re looking at some kind of life ahead of you? Dad isn’t coming home, you know that.

Don’t you know that? I’ve tried to be around as much as I could, until maybe you do know it, but, Ma…I can’t take his place.”

“Oh, God, baby, I
never
wanted you to do that,” I said in pain.

He just looked at me.

The next morning I called Livvy and got the name of the lawyer from her, the one she had said could make mincemeat of Ken Rawlings. I called and made an appointment. And then I called her back.

124 / Anne Rivers Siddons

“Were you serious about having a guest at the beach?”

“Is the pope a Catholic?”

One month later, almost to the hour, I huddled in a bucketing seat behind a seemingly teenaged pilot on a seemingly toy Cape Air commuter plane out of Boston, peering through the open curtain over his shoulder into a wall of solid, swirling, white fog. In my cold hands I clutched my mother’s big black hat. Behind me a dozen or so other passengers read or napped or fussed over children; no one but I seemed convinced that death was imminent. Just behind me two whining children accompanied by a grim-faced man un-wrapped a ribbon-tied box of Godiva chocolates and began to demolish them.

“Fine,” the man said. “I’ll just tell Mrs. Michaels that you ate up her hostess gift.”

Divorced daddy, I thought through my terror, glad to be distracted from it. “Got the kids for a week’s vacation and wishes he didn’t. I don’t know who I pity the most.”

The plane gave a great, wallowing lurch, and I stifled a small scream, and shut my eyes, and when I opened them the fog was parting and I could see, far below, the lights of a tiny runway winking steadily. The plane banked sharply and plunged toward them.

“Spencer Tracy and Van Johnson and I thank you,” I said to the baby pilot, voluble with relief.

“Yeah?” he said. “Well, you’re welcome. Glad to oblige.”

I knew he had no idea at all who I was talking about.

When he had bumped the plane down on to the UP ISLAND / 125

tarmac and brought it to a jack-rabbiting stop, he opened the door and held his arm out to me so that I could step out on to the flimsy metal steps. Down here the fog still swirled.

“You have a nice time on the Vineyard, now,” he said, and I thanked him and ducked my head and stepped out of the little plane into nothing at all.

L
IVVY PICKED ME UP at the stark little airport that serves the Vineyard, and drove me through the stunted, fog-shrouded state forest in the middle of the island, over to Edgartown and Chappaquiddick. She drove a battered, old green Jeep Cherokee that lurched and bucketed over the pitted tarmac, and all the way to Edgartown and then to the Chappaquiddick ferry she chattered. Livvy did not chatter at home; indeed, she denigrated, in her dry, honking, rich-Yankee voice, all our friends who did. Since that included most of the women we knew jointly, Livvy honked about it quite a lot. I might have pointed this out to her in other circumstances, but on this fog-haunted drive I was so over-whelmed by the pervasive strangeness of everything that I could only sit and watch the sliding, shifting landscape lurching past outside, and listen to her tumbling spate of words.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it, in the fog? Well, it’s pretty all the time, but I like it especially when it’s foggy. It might be a hundred or two hundred years ago, any time at all, really. I miss these fogs in Atlanta. I’ve never seen one on a Southern beach, not in summer. The water’s too warm. They’re caused by warm, wet

126

UP ISLAND / 127

air meeting cold water, you know. Our water’s pretty cold out there, especially on the Atlantic side. Look how the trees press right up to the road; what does that remind you of?

Almost every part of the Vineyard reminds people of different places…”

“Transylvania?” I ventured. The gnarled tree trunks and dark chiaroscuro of leaves outside, seen through scarves and skeins of drifting fog, did look eerie. Anything at all might appear out of that mist; you might hear the breaths and cries of anything…

She grinned.

“A lot of people think it looks like the Black Forest, or the Vienna woods. I always think of Sweden when I drive through here. I spent two interminable days on a train going through Sweden, right out of college, and I swear it looked just like this. Scrub oaks and pines, with some taller pines thrown in.

Endless trees, as flat as a flounder. I thought I’d die of boredom till we got to Stockholm. We played bridge all the way.”

“Of course, Sweden,” I said acidly. “What was I thinking of?”

I had never seen the Black Forest or the Vienna woods, nor the monotonous forests of Sweden. The traditional postgraduation European tour I might have taken was pree-mpted by my June wedding to Tee and our Ocho Rios honeymoon. Caroline came along the summer after that, and in due time, Teddy, and then our traveling was limited to places toddlers would be tolerated. Later we traveled to Mexico and Canada and several places in the Caribbean, but these, too, were family sorties; we had been saving Europe because we knew that there was a very good possibility that Tee would be posted there. I had thought we would have ample time then to see Europe’s magical

128 / Anne Rivers Siddons

places from a base in London or Paris or Rome. Now they would shed their magic on Tee and the Eel Woman. I wished, suddenly and fiercely, that I had insisted on the graduation trip my parents had offered before I rushed to the altar, and took only a modicum of comfort from the fact that the one who might most have savored saying “I told you so” was past saying anything at all.

Livvy took no notice.

“There’s a part of the Vineyard that looks almost Caribbean; that’s our part, with the blue, blue water and all the white sails and the flowers and the white sand. And there’s a part that looks for all the world like Bermuda, right around Edgartown, and a part that looks like the English Lake Dis-trict. And there are parts that could easily be the Scottish moors, up island…”

“Up island?” I said. Somehow the word wrapped itself around my chilly heart like warm, cupped hands. It sounded remote and unreachable, safe above the swarming countryside, kissed by sun and air.

“Up island…” I repeated it.

“The west part of the island, back that way,” Livvy said, gesturing. “I forget why it’s called up island and the east part down island. It’s mainly where the year-rounders and the old families live. There are some awfully grand summer houses up there, but mostly the summer people congregate around Edgartown and Oak Bluffs and Vineyard Haven, down island.

I guess it’s because there are so many good places to keep a boat. A lot of up island is wild coast and rocks. Summer people tend to be boat people.”

“Are you and Caleb boat people?”

I had never heard Livvy talk much about sailing, UP ISLAND / 129

or anything else that she and Caleb did in this chameleonlike place. It seemed a destination so apart from her life in Atlanta that I thought she simply saw no point in speaking of it. Now I wondered how we could have become so close without my knowing whether or not, in her summers, Livvy sailed a boat.

“Yep,” she said. “I have a little catboat that’s really the kids’, but I sail it more than they do. And Caleb has a Shields. He’ll take us out when he gets up here, but you’ll like sailing with me in the catboat better. It won’t scare the piss out of you like the Shields when he puts it on its lee rail. The cat’s a nice, fat, wallowy little boat just perfect for gunk-holing.”

“Gunk-holing…”

“I think it means just messing around. I don’t hear it anywhere but up here.”

“You’ve even got your own private language.”

“Oh, you bet. For example, I’ll show you some beetlebungs in a little while. And if you were here in the spring, you could hear the pinkletinks.”

“I’m not going to ask. It all sounds insufferable,” I said, meaning it.

“Well, I’m not going to tell you, so there,” Livvy said happily, and turned right; suddenly we were out of the misty countryside and in the heart of the barely controlled chaos that is Edgartown in high summer.

“I don’t think I ever saw so many people in such a small space,” I said, turning my head this way and that to take in the tangle of crowded, cobbled streets and lanes that converge downtown in that primmest and prettiest of little New England towns.

“It’s the rain,” Livvy said. “Brings them into town in droves.

Merchants love rain.”

Scrimmed with mist and occasional rain showers,
130 / Anne Rivers Siddons

the cobbles gleaming wetly, the street lamps, lit against the dark day and haloed with iridescent collars, the town center might have been a slice out of another time, a preservationist’s fondest dream. But the blatting, honking, barely creeping tide of automobiles jockeying for nonexistent parking spaces belied the dream, as did the well-lit shop windows displaying antiques, upscale casual clothing, fancy foodstuffs and wine, and an astronomical number of realtors’ signs given the size of the town. The people hurrying through the slanting rain, their heads ducked or shielded by golf umbrellas, might have belonged to another time, though, shrouded as they were with billowing raincoats or slickers and hats—except for their feet. Surely no former citizens of Edgartown, corporeal or otherwise, ever wore deck shoes without socks. Almost every foot I saw that morning, however, was Top-Sidered and sockless. I glanced down at Livvy’s feet; she, too, wore weathered brown deck shoes that left her tanned ankles bare.

My sturdy navy Ferragamos almost itched with wrongness on my sodden feet.

“I don’t have any deck shoes,” I said. “Will I have to go home?”

“No, but you can’t go out anywhere,” Livvy said. “You’ll embarrass your hostess beyond belief. I think there are some around the house that will fit you. They get left behind in droves.”

“I could buy some.”

“Oh, God, no. They can’t look new. You really
couldn’t
go anywhere then.”

“I thought you said we weren’t going anywhere anyway,”

I said. “That was the whole point, just to kick back with you.

No social stuff.”

UP ISLAND / 131

“Well, there won’t be any strictly social stuff,” Livvy said, not looking at me. “Just drinks now and then with some people you’ll like, and maybe some sailing, and sunning at the beach club. Real laid-back. It’s just us, Molly.”

I was silent. Livvy’s “just us” was no one I knew. I felt a faint stirring of anxiety, down deep where the numbed rage slept. I had never considered that there was a whole other Livvy Bowen who was old-shoe familiar to people I did not and probably never would know. The anxiety stretched and flexed. What if she was another Livvy altogether? What if my Livvy, the one to whom I had fled for refuge and peace on this strange, misted island, no longer existed?

“You don’t have to put your head out the door if you don’t feel like it,” Livvy said, waving at a couple who huddled on a street corner, laughing. “But I think it would be good for you if you did. Nobody up here knows you as the other half of Tee; they’ll take you at face value, and they’ll love you, and that will do more for your spirits than six months of therapy. You’ll go home ready to lick your weight in tigers, not to mention the loathsome Eel Woman.”

The anxiety gave a savage lunge and made it into my upper chest, almost bursting out of my mouth. Before I had come to the Vineyard I had, at Carrie and Charlie Davies’s urging, had a couple of sessions with a psychiatrist who was a med school buddy of Charlie’s. The doctor pointed out that the sudden wildfires of anxiety that had begun to overtake me at unpredictable moments, ever since I had called my new lawyer, were almost surely manifestations of the rage and sorrow that I could not seem to express, and that until I had worked through the original emotions,
132 / Anne Rivers Siddons