Up Island (40 page)

I let it go. My father would take care of it. I laughed at myself as I ladled soup into our bowls; how many times in my life had I thought just that: My father will take care of it.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” I called out to him

“I am, too,” he called back. “You’re terrific company for an old man, Miss Molly. Young one, too, come to that. Tee is the dumbest ass in six states.”

Tee…for just a moment I simply could not think who he meant.

The day that he took Dennis to the doctor in Oak Bluffs was the day that the weather turned and my Dickensian Christmas died. The morning had been white and still, with a thick felting of gray-white clouds piling in from the northeast over the Sound. The air felt wet and sharp. By the time my father returned home in the truck with Dennis, the first flinty little flakes of snow were skirling down, and the temperature had dropped twenty degrees.

My father’s face was grim. He was quiet for the balance of the morning and spent the early afternoon hours hunkered on the dock in silent communication with Charles and Di.

Neither, yet, would follow him up to the UP ISLAND / 345

nest under the porch, though they trailed him everywhere else. When he came in for our pre-dinner drink, he was still abstracted and closed.

“How bad is it?” I said finally. I had shrunk away from asking before. With the start of the snow my dream of my perfect woodland Christmas had bloomed like a flower; I did not want anything dark or sharp to intrude on it. But eventually I had to ask.

“He’s not doing very well, I don’t think,” he said.

“Has it come back? Is he going to lose more of his leg? Is he dying?” I prodded.

“I don’t think they know yet,” my father said. “He’s due for some more chemo right before Christmas. I know he was hoping to avoid that, so I guess they’ve found something else. Or maybe it’s just precautionary. He doesn’t say much about it. And he doesn’t want either of us to come by tonight.

He has enough food, and he wants to sleep. Today tired him a lot. The effort to walk with those crutches is exhausting.”

“I don’t know why in the world he won’t consider a pros-thesis,” I said. “He’s in good shape; he’s an athlete. It would give him back a lot of mobility.”

He looked at me.

“There’s no sense doing it yet if they’re going to have to take more of the leg. And it could well be that he just doesn’t have enough time left to justify it.”

We had a silent dinner that night, and he went to bed early.

I lay before the fire with Lazarus, too lethargic to stir myself to get up and do the dishes. I hadn’t gotten around to it yet, but it was in my mind to ask Dennis Ponder to share Christmas dinner with us and Teddy and Caroline and her family. All of them had agreed to come. But now I did not want to mention Christmas to him. It might sound trivial, or at worst, heartless. Some

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of the enchanted glitter flaked off my dream holiday and drifted to the ground.

At nine-thirty Teddy called. He chattered and beat around the bush until I said, “You aren’t coming, are you?”

“Oh, Ma…I can still come if you really, really want me to.

But here’s the thing, see. Dad is spending Christmas in Aspen, and he wants me and Barry to come have Christmas there, and then he’s going to treat us to a week of skiing. Everybody out here skis, Ma. I need to learn. And I haven’t seen him since…well, I haven’t seen him. And you’ve got Granddad there with you, and Caroline and them are coming…”

He fell silent. My heart twisted with pain.

“Teddy, I can see why you’d want to go skiing. Aspen sounds wonderful. But the idea of you spending Christmas with them…this Christmas, especially…”

“I don’t think there’s any ‘them’ to it, Ma,” Teddy said.

“She’s not coming. It’s just Dad. I think she’s going to spend the holidays with her family, or something.”

I was silent. Not bloody likely, I thought, not the Eel Woman. Not in that trailer in the Georgia wire grass with those cold, whining people. What should I make of this, then?

“I know she’s not in our house any longer,” Teddy said, surprising me. I hadn’t known that he knew about that.

“Well…that’s a relief. I’ll have to get the fumigators in.

So…yes, of course, sweetie. I think that sounds like something you’d enjoy. And you’re right, Caroline’s family is coming, and Daddy’s here. We’ll miss you, but this will be something really special for you.”

If I sounded like I was playing Mildred Pierce he did not notice.

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“You’re the best, Ma,” he said. “How about if I spend part of the summer with you? If you’re still there, I mean. And how about if we call you Christmas Day?”

“Summer would be fine,” I said heartily. “And sure. We’ll look forward to hearing from you on Christmas Day.”

I was halfway expecting the next call, and it came an hour later.

Caroline’s voice came over the wire, sharp and anxious. I thought for one startled moment that it was my mother.

“Are you snowed in? The weather said New England was having a terrible blizzard,” she said.

“Nope. It’s beautiful,” I said gamely, but I had not looked outside since dinner. Now I could hear that the wind had risen, and was moaning around the chimney. All of a sudden I was cold.

“Well, listen. We’re going to have to cancel. The baby has had a fever that will not come down, and I just can’t drag her out to some remote island with no medical facilities. Not in a blizzard. I mean, what if you lost power? Didn’t you say you only had woodstoves? I just can’t take the chance, Mother.”

“You’re probably right,” I said, my heart sinking slowly like a stone in viscid mud. “But the Vineyard has fine medical facilities. There are a lot of quite wealthy people here, Caro.

They insist on the best and they get it. If she gets better, she’d be quite safe here. It’s not the Yukon, you know.”

“I just can’t, Mom. Would you have taken me or Teddy there when you were a young mother?”

“I guess not,” I said, feeling as though I had never been a young mother.

“We’ll call, of course. On Christmas Eve and
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Christmas Day and everything. Lord, I wish you’d come on home and live like a human being, especially now that Dad’s little doxy is out of the house. That’s where we all really ought to be having Christmas.”

I did not even ask her how she knew Sheri Scroggins had left our house. If Teddy knew, in far-off Arizona, surely the jungle drums had reached Memphis. I hung up and lay for a while thinking how much my ideas of comfort, even of luxury, had changed since I had come up island. To me this place felt more soothing and secure than the Ansley Park house ever had, more totally mine.

Before I went to bed, I opened the front door and put my head out. The bone-chilling wind almost knocked me backward. I saw, in the yellow glow of the security light my father had put up, that the ground was deep with drifted snow, and the branches of the nearest trees were weighted with it. The wind’s voice was huge and old and wild, and I slammed the door against it. As I got into bed in the under-stairs cave, my bed lamp flickered, then went out. I got up again, built up the fire, pulled more blankets out of the cupboard and laid them over my sleeping father, and piled more over me and Lazarus. My Christmas dream sank without a bubble.

It took until late afternoon the next day for the power company to get the lights back on up island, though I heard on the transistor radio that Edgartown never lost power.

Well, of course not, I thought sourly, dragging more wood.

And if they had, they could just burn money for heat and light. When I said as much to my father, he smiled faintly and said that I sounded like a proper up islander.

Dennis Ponder had his first chemo treatment three UP ISLAND / 349

days before Christmas. By late that afternoon he was vomit-ing. By nightfall my father and I were taking turns holding his head and wiping his face. I came home when he finally fell into an exhausted sleep, looking waxen white and already dead, but my father stayed the night, dozing on the sofa and listening for Dennis’s call. He was better in the morning, but only a little. I stayed in his camp until after lunch, making soup and putting it in the freezer for him, listening to see if he needed me. He did not. He only wanted, he said weakly, to be left alone. Finally I did just that.

I had planned to take Christmas dinner up to the farmhouse and share it with the old ladies, but on Christmas Eve they called to say that they were both down with something that entailed nausea and diarrhea and coughing, and so I went out again, in the teeth of still another nor’easter, with groceries and aspirin and cough medicine, and spent the night making chicken soup and Jell-O and the things that I remembered from Teddy and Caroline’s childhood sicknesses, and dozing in the cold guest room. Daddy spent the night on Dennis’s sofa once again, with Lazarus on the rug beside him. On Christmas Day we met at our camp about two in the afternoon, red-eyed and scratchy-throated ourselves, looked at each other, rasped “Merry Christmas,” and went to bed. I never cooked the turkey I had bought and stuffed, and we never even opened our presents.

“I tell you what,” I croaked as cheerfully to my father as I could, “let’s open them on New Year’s Eve. New Year’s Eve is always awful, no matter where you are or how you feel.

That’ll cheer us up. Maybe Dennis will feel better and he can join us. Let’s just call this Christmas a wash and sleep through the rest of it.”

“Done,” my father said. “You don’t know how I’ve
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been dreading this day. Now it’s almost over. Thank God for small blessings.”

“I love you, Pa,” I said, tears welling in my eyes, not for my mother but for the maimed man she’d left behind her.

“Love you too, baby. You’re my best Christmas present,”

he said. “You always were.”

I crept into bed, intending to think about the Christmases at home with my mother, and of the ones in Ansley Park with Tee and the children, to begin to probe those deep, dark wounds, but instead I fell asleep and slept hard and dream-lessly, and when I woke it was to near darkness and swirling snow and a kind of hard joy that we had, indeed, gotten through.

We did, indeed, get colds, my father and I, and the week between Christmas and New Year’s passed in a kind of snow-felted fever dream. Dennis was better, though weak; he did not want us, and we did not dare take our colds into his house. The old ladies had the visiting nurse, complaining bitterly about the intrusion, but insisting that we not bestir ourselves on their account. I could literally hear Bella’s lungs filling with fluid as we spoke on the phone, but for once did not rush to check on her. Whatever we had might well kill her, and surely a registered nurse would serve them better than either my father or me. We slept, we read, we sipped soup and tea, my father and I, and we watched endless daytime television. Except for feeding Charles and Di, who still stubbornly refused to come to the nest under the porch and circled mulishly in a smaller and smaller circle of unfrozen pond, neither of us went out for several days. Even though the house was chilly, and I could never seem to build the fire high enough or get the

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stoves hot enough, I was not cold, and I don’t think my father was. We lay about cocooned in camphor-smelling wool, surrendering gratefully and even happily to what could not be helped. I remember being, in those few days, quite content. I think my father was, too.

On New Year’s Eve we got drunk. There isn’t any other way to put it. Perhaps it was that all three of us were weak and hollowed out by illness, and deliriously grateful to be up and about again. Whatever it was, I, who had not been drunk since college, before I married Tee, got so sodden with bourbon and flown with joy that I did a bump and grind in the middle of the hearth rug to the habañera from
Carmen.

My father, whom I had literally never even seen tipsy before, told stories that, he said, he had heard forever around the fires at night in the fishing camps he loved; they were so childishly and good-humoredly obscene that Dennis and I laughed until tears rolled down our helpless, foolish faces.

And Dennis Ponder, whose drinking habits I had no ideas at all about one way or another, sang. He stood propped on his crutch before the fireplace in the little house he remembered from his childhood, his head thrown back to show his corded white neck, and sang opera. He sang “Nessun Dorma” and “E Lucevan le Stelle” and most of the tenor arias from the Puccini operas, and he even sang snatches of Wag-ner, from
The Flying Dutchman
and
Tannhäuser.
He had a startlingly beautiful voice, and he spilled it effortlessly out over us. For perhaps the hour that he sang, he looked and sounded as well and young and vibrantly alive as any man I have ever seen, and I realized, when he stopped and looked at us almost

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shyly, that more than anything in the world, I wanted to go over and kiss him. So I did.

“Thank you,” I said weepily into his hair, which by now nearly brushed his shoulders. It smelled of shampoo and wood smoke. “It was a great gift you just gave us. The gift of self…” only I said “shelf,” and he laughed, and so did my father, and then so did I. After that, we laughed at everything.

“Being drunk is the only way,” I remember pronouncing.

“The only way. We should have done this ages ago.”

“We’ll do it from now on,” my father said owlishly. “There’s not enough bourbon on the Vineyard to hold us.”

“We don’t have to sober up at all,” Dennis said. “Not until…not until we want to. Maybe never.”

This was brushing too close to things under our glee that hurt, so I cried, “I know! Let’s tell secrets! Everybody has to tell one thing that he’s never told anybody else before. It can be anything, as long as nobody else has heard it.”

They laughed and cheered. Encouraged, I poured myself another glass of bourbon and said, “I’ll go first. Nobody on earth knows this, now. It’s a complete secret. But you know, the night Tee told me about ol’ Sheri Scroggins? The very night the Eel Woman entered my life? Well, that night, when Tee came in from out of town, I met him wearing nothing but three rolls of Saran Wrap. Isn’t that incredible? Three whole rolls it took to wrap me up. Can you blame ol’ Tee for running off with a lawyer?”