Up Island (20 page)

“He has agreed to it,” my father said. “Teddy called him first. Tee thinks it’s a great idea. He’s already said he’d be glad to handle the cost—”

“Well, goddamn him!” I cried, rage swamping me. “Of course he said that! Anything to get back on Teddy’s good side after what he’s done! And besides, it’ll get Teddy off his back, won’t it? He won’t have Teddy’s accusing eyes on him everywhere he turns with that snaky bitch…”

“Another reason I said I’d tell you first was so that you could get this out of your system before you talk to him,” my father said. “I know how hurt and angry you are at Tee. So am I. But I hope you’re not going to let that interfere with Teddy’s welfare. Molly, he sounded so happy. Happy like a man is

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happy, not like a teenager being giddy. I hope you’ll think about that before tonight, when he calls. He needs to make a separate life with his father, no matter how you and Tee resolve it. And frankly, if it’s going to be a long, messy process, I’d think he might be better a little apart from it. I know how you’ll miss him, but this way you can plan what’s right for you, without having to factor in Teddy’s immediate welfare—”

“Teddy is my family! You are my family! Both of you are…and both of you want to leave me! What have I
done?”

I could hardly see for the fog of red that danced in front of my eyes.

“Honey, you think about it, and you talk to Teddy, and then you call me back here in the morning. Nobody’s leaving you, not really. I think of it more as maybe freeing you to look after yourself. You’ve never really been able to do that before. Here’s your chance—”

“I don’t want to be free!”

I shouted so loudly that I could hear my own voice reverberating in the still, hot kitchen. I wondered, in the ringing silence that followed my outburst, precisely where my father was calling from. I realized that I could not remember all the nooks and crannies of Kevin and Sally’s elegant Georgetown row house, the one that so suited a going-places TV anchor and his perfect wife and child. Wherever he was, I knew Daddy would be alone, that he would not risk anyone else overhearing what he had to say to me. Alone in a strange house, by himself in an overdecorated corner of his son’s home, reaching out in his solitude to smooth things over for me…

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“I’m sorry I shouted,” I said in a low voice. “I must sound like a spoiled brat. I think it’s an awful idea, but of course I’ll listen to Teddy when he calls. It’s just that…I feel so alone, Daddy. From…being connected to everybody to all by myself in one summer…”

“I know.”

I winced. He did know.

We said our good-byes and I went back out on the porch and sat down in a wicker rocking chair to think about it. I knew I would not get back into the hammock.

Daddy must have called Teddy in Phoenix immediately, because I had not sat there for more than half an hour before my son called.

“You having a good time?” he said. He sounded as if he were in the next room, and suddenly I missed him with a pull I could feel in my very womb.

“Yeah, but I miss you,” I said, determined not to whine, weep, or lay any other burden on him.

“Miss you, too. Listen, I know you’ve talked to Granddaddy, and I know you’re not too red hot on my staying out here. I just wanted to try to tell you how it is, what it means to me. It was so sudden, Ma, and I guess it sounds hasty and un-thought-out to you. But it’s…I can’t explain it right. It’s like all of a sudden I literally saw the thing I was supposed to do with my life. Everything from here on out fits. It’s like I was just born, somehow…”

My father was right. Somehow Teddy did sound, not like a boy, but a man, a man newly confronted with a passion that he knows is going to change his life. His voice made the fine hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I remembered his anguish the night I came home to
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find Tee and Sheri Scroggins in my house, the night I had accused him of letting them in; I remembered the cry that had seemed literally torn out of him: “Let’s get us some lives!

I can’t look after you anymore!”

“Teddy,” I said, “if that’s really what you want to do, then you must do it. I only…I just don’t know about the expenses, for one thing. Your dad says he’ll be glad to handle them, I know, but he could change his mind and then where would you be? I don’t know what I’m going to have in the way of money, exactly; and it might be that…Sheri…won’t want him to spend the extra money, and then you’d be out there and have to come back, and that would be
so
hard…”

“No, Ma, she’s all for it. She got on the phone when I called Dad—I guess she was listening in—and she said by all means, I should follow my bliss. She’s talking about this TV thing she saw, about this guy Joseph Campbell—”

“I watch PBS, too, Teddy,” I said, hating Sheri Scroggins even more for making New Age twaddle out of something that had moved me deeply. “Well, I’m not surprised. That’s one less of us for her to have to contend with…”

He was silent, and then he said, “Ma, the only reason I called Dad first was because I didn’t know who would be, you know, handling the money and stuff, and I figured he probably would, and I wanted to get it all arranged without having you worry about it. I didn’t want to talk to her, and I wouldn’t have if she hadn’t gotten on the phone. But she was decent about it, Ma. I still think she’s a bitch, and I always will, but she was…not bad about this.”

“Well, then, so be it,” I said, my head literally spinning, as if with vertigo. I put out my hand to the UP ISLAND / 171

kitchen table, to steady myself. “I guess I’m going to have another Philip Johnson on my hands. You are coming back before you start out there, aren’t you? To get your clothes and things?”

“Well, I’m coming back, sure, but probably not for a while,” he said. “School starts sooner out here. I’m already registered, and I’m staying with this guy I met, Grady McPherson, until Dad’s check comes and I can get a place and some stuff for it. I had enough to cover registration. I’ve got a lot of work to make up. So it’ll probably be nearer Thanksgiving. Listen, Ma…I can’t tell you…I mean, I need for you to know what this means, this country and all. Ma, I want you to be okay, too. I’ll probably see almost as much of you as I would have at Tech. And if you really need for me to, I can always come home…”

“I’m perfectly okay, baby,” I said. “I’ll miss you, but I’d miss you at Tech, too. We’ll do fine, me and Lazarus. And Granddaddy will be around…”

But where will he be? And who?

“I love you, Mom. You know that, don’t you?”

“I love you, too, Teddy.”

I was still sitting at the kitchen table, staring at nothing at all, when Livvy and Gerry Edmondson came in from Boston, laughing and griping good-naturedly about the traffic in Edgartown and on the ferry.

“My God, what happened to you?” I said, looking at Gerry.

Her left wrist was in a cast.

“I’ve been swanned,” she said and grimaced, laughing a little.

“Swanned?”

“Yeah, and I know better, so I got what I deserved. There’s a pair of swans on the Mill Pond, they’ve been
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there forever, and everybody feeds them, including me, so they’re not really wild. I was up there yesterday to get some stuff at one of the roadside vegetable stands and stopped for lunch at Alley’s and after lunch I took my leftover sandwich down to the pond for the swans, and there were some of the babies right up on the bank, and they came running and I started to feed them, and all of a sudden the old cob was on me like a duck on a june bug, flapping his wings and hissing.

He literally broke a little bone in my wrist before I could get out of there. I forgot how fierce they are about their families.

You think swans are so graceful and serene and noble, but they’re meaner than hell when somebody threatens the nest or one of the babies. They mate for life, you know. You’d think I was going to swannap those babies…”

“God, that’s just wonderful,” I breathed. “About the way they feel about their families, not about your wrist. Lord, that must have hurt. I had no idea they were so strong. I’d love to see them sometime. Where did you say they were?”

“They’re all over the Vineyard, but this particular pair are in West Tisbury, up island, and I wouldn’t recommend it unless you know judo.”

Up island again. Up island, where the roots of the old families went three hundred years and more deep, where the last glacier had left a near impregnable fortress, where stone walls and old forests gave order and shelter.

Where even the swans fought savagely to keep their families intact.

The tears that I could not seem to shed prickled in my eyes and nose, and I turned away so that Gerry and Livvy would not see them.

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“I’d love to see those swans,” I said again. “I tried to get up island today, but Clinton was out sailing and the ferry wasn’t running. Nobody could get off Chappy. How long is he going to be here, anyway?”

“Through the weekend,” Livvy said. “He leaves the day Caleb gets here. Listen, if you really want to see swans, I can show you those and twenty more besides. And the prettiest part of up island, to boot. It’ll mean going to a party, though.”

“It might be worth it to see the swans,” I said. “What kind of party?”

“Well, a pretty big one, I’m afraid. But nice people. Really interesting. It’s for the Clintons, as a matter of fact, the night before they leave. A thing at the Hartnells’ in Chilmark. You know, he’s the historian and she’s the one with the fabulous gardens that’ve been in every magazine in the world? I think he was a Rhodes scholar too, though it would have been before Clinton. Their house is supposed to be incredible and, of course, her gardens. I’ve never seen them. We got invited because I was on a committee with her last summer for a literacy action thing to benefit the Tisbury Senior Center. The invitation is for me and Caleb, and since he won’t be here, you’ve just got to come with me. That’s one house I’m not about to walk into by myself. Will you, Moll? I promise we won’t stay long, and I won’t leave your side, and we’ll stop and see the Tisbury swans and then I’ll take you down to see hers. Their house is right on Chilmark Pond, and there are lots of them down there. Come on. You don’t have to speak to another soul but me if you don’t want to.”

“Please come, Molly,” Gerry said. “You’ll be the one other person there Peter and I know besides Livvy.”

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I doubted that, but I thought suddenly how ridiculous I must seem to them, hiding in Gerry and Peter’s den because they were talking of people I did not know, having to be coaxed with swans and gardens and the promise that I would have to speak to no one at a party for the President of the United States.

“I’d love to go,” I said. “I don’t suppose there’s a chance in the world I’ve got the right thing to wear, but I’d love to go anyway.”

“Wonderful,” they cried together, and we all laughed. Soon after that Gerry left, and Livvy and I spent the best night we’d had together since the one on South Beach, drinking Merlot and eating linguica and pasta and talking of everything in the world except the fact that come autumn, Teddy as well as Tee would be gone. Somehow I never got around to telling Livvy that.

So far as the swan situation went, the trip up island was a disappointment. The fabled pair that inhabited the pond in West Tisbury was nowhere to be seen, though Livvy did point out to me the big mound of dried grass and straw on the far shore that was their nest.

“Probably out maiming small children,” Gerry said sourly.

She looked wonderful in a white linen sundress, her brown shoulders shining in the last of the light over the pond. She wore high-heeled sandals and had a rich paisley shawl thrown over her arm. She was, suddenly, a different woman from the one in the faded bathing suit I had laughed with at the beach club for many days. I did not know this woman. Livvy, in black silk palazzo pants and a silk halter, UP ISLAND / 175

was more familiar; I had seen her dressed for a party many times before. But somehow, standing here on the verge of this old village pond, with a scattering of tall white houses and village buildings behind her, she was different, too. There were shadows about her that were of otherness as well as twilight and old trees.

Even without the swans, I loved up island. It was exactly right, just as I had imagined, had somehow known it would be. Traffic here was sparse. It was still and silent in the sunset light from Vineyard Sound to the west; the land gave away none of its old secrets, but it reached out for you, too, took you in. Something inside me that had been clenched and anxious, though I had not known it, relaxed. I took a deep breath and smelled rich earth and wood smoke from somewhere, and flowers drying in the sun, and somehow the earthy musk of animals. The sense of the sea was far away here. West Tisbury might be a small New England village hundreds of miles inland.

We had come across the island on the same road I had come in on, past the airport, through the state forest. Even in the fading light, the scrub oak and pines seemed dark, dwarfed, exaggerated, an operetta forest. Breaking out into the village, I seemed to breathe easier. The orderly old white farmhouses, the Congregational church and the post office and police station and town hall all spoke of a real and ongoing life, of work done and rest taken, of families who lived on the land as well as played on it.

“It’s charming,” I said. “It looks like everybody’s dream village, the way you imagine perfect, old-fashioned life to be.

Is it mostly farms around here, or what?”

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“It was once, I think,” Livvy said. “Not so many people farm or raise sheep anymore; to own a lot of land up here now is to be taxed to death. Lots of the old families have sold off most of their land to off-islanders and summer people.

People do carpentry and plumbing and building and whatever, or have regular jobs in Vineyard Haven or maybe Edgartown and Oak Bluffs. It’s not exactly idyllic. There’s a lot of outright poverty on the Vineyard. Winters up here are killers. There’s some money, of course; some of the old families are land rich still, if nothing else, and some of them have a lot of summer rental property. The Ponders—they’re the island’s oldest family, came here on a Crown grant in the middle 1600s—have about fifteen houses they rent out, I’ve heard, and about nine more in the family compound. You’ll see and hear Ponder all over the Vineyard. The first ten generations of them were preachers, I think, and every one of them seems to have been a selectman at one time or another.”