Up Island (53 page)

They glistened as if they had been dipped in liquid crystal.

But the big swan behind her would hiss and grunt and thrust at her with his beak, and she would start forward again.

Charles. There could be no doubt, either, that the big, dingy cob was

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Charles, and that he was bringing his new pen to see my father. I sat down on the path and began to cry.

My father stood still until Charles had prodded and flapped and hissed the young pen to a position directly in front of him. Both swans stopped then, and Charles stationed himself behind the pen so that she could not bolt, and simply settled himself into his great, battered wings, tucked up a black foot, and looked up at my father. The pen settled herself, too, though she kept darting her head around, and her wings stayed in constant slight motion, like voile blowing in a spring wind.

Slowly, slowly, my father sank down on his heels into the crouch that I knew from a thousand days of my childhood, the one that he could maintain for hours. He looked at the swans, and then he said, in the voice I had not heard for a long time, my father’s voice, “You old fool. Where the hell have you been?”

E
ASTER WAS AS LATE THAT year as I can remember, and it came in on the wings of a great nor’easter that seemed to say to the Vineyard, after we had basked gratefully in a string of perfect spring days, “Gotcha!”

Afterward, the old men at Alley’s said that there had not been such a spring storm since most of them could remember, though a few of the very oldest claimed they had seen worse.

I didn’t see how there could be worse.

We had known it was coming, and I, as well as most of the up islanders who could drive, had stocked up on tinned food and sterno and wood and propane and candles.

“Will you be okay?” said Pat Norton, whom I had run into at the A&P in Vineyard Haven. “You’re sure to lose power down there.”

“I’ve got all the stuff for both camps,” I said. “And Daddy has tightened some shingles, and I left him and Dennis trying to decide whether to board the windows. Dennis wants to do it, but Daddy is afraid he can’t keep an eye on the damned swans if they do. I think I know who’s going to win that one.

There’s not a one of us who can stand up against those swans.”

461

462 / Anne Rivers Siddons

“I’m so glad he’s better,” she said. “All I was hearing at Alley’s for a while was how much everybody missed Tim Bell. It seemed to me you just plain had more than you could handle, but I didn’t want to pry—”

I hugged her impulsively, and she smiled shyly, though she flinched away from the hug. I laughed.

“I keep forgetting I’m not in the South,” I said. “Yes. He
is
better. Oh, Pat. What on earth would we have done without you?”

She shook her head impatiently, but then she said, “Stay, Molly. We’ve gotten sort of used to you. All us Ponders have.”

I drove home in the stiffening wind, feeling as if I had been given the keys to up island.

The storm hit in earnest early in the blackness of Easter morning, and by dawn the glade had indeed lost power. I had cooked a ham the day before and made a drunken, lop-sided coconut cake from scratch, and bought potato salad from Back Alley’s deli counter, and I put it all out on the back porch to keep. The wet cold that came back with the storm would keep it better than the dead refrigerator. At ten A.M. I heard a crash that meant the telephone pole that served the glade was down, and shortly after that Dennis, swathed from head to heels in oilskins, knocked on the door and shouted above the roar of the wind and rain that he wanted to bring Luz down to our camp.

“It’s warmer down here,” he yelled. “I can’t keep her warm up there; the fire won’t reach into her bedroom, and for some reason the living room confuses her, and she cries for Bella.”

His concern was real, although it was hard to UP ISLAND / 463

gauge the meaning of it. His relationship with Luz was complex, but it seemed comfortable to both. Whatever it was, I knew it was born, as he had been, of Bella Ponder, and that she was with him still, every day. He did not often speak of her, but she lived in the camp with him as surely as Luz did. She lived in my camp, too. Bella was vigorous and palpable in the glade.

My father put on his foul-weather gear and went out into the gale with Dennis, pausing to look under the porch, where the swans were huddled in their straw bower, fussy and miserable. Charles had one great wing fanned over Persephone, who had her head and neck tucked almost completely into her own shining feathers. The straw was wet, but the wind did not reach in so badly. Together, Daddy and Dennis brought Luzia, completely wrapped in blankets and oilskin, back in a fireman’s hold. I have no idea how Dennis managed it; I could not bear to look. Both men were drenched when they came in, but Luzia was snug and dry, and so enchanted to be back in the little camp she remembered that she forgot to fuss constantly for the swans. I put her on the sofa and covered her and built up the fire, then sent Dennis and my father up for showers in the remain-ing hot water, and dry clothes. They were my father’s, and they hung loose on both men. It did not matter. I was absurdly glad to have them here. I had planned to take Easter dinner up to Dennis’s, but this…this was better.

The storm raged all afternoon. We could hear occasionally the crashes of trees going down in the woods, but it was impossible to see through the solid curtain of howling silver rain. When I did look out, the air was full of flying green as the wind stripped the new leaves from the oaks and hickories and hurled

464 / Anne Rivers Siddons

them aloft. The pounding of the waves over on the Bight and the Sound was audible, even through the wind, when the door was opened. We didn’t do that often, needless to say.

For some reason, I was never worried. It simply never occurred to me that we might lose our roof, or suffer a direct hit from a tree.

At two in the afternoon I served the ham and potato salad before the fire, and we had cake and coffee made in the spatterware pot over the flames. I brought out a bottle of Napoleon brandy my father had brought from Atlanta and we opened it. We had made a considerable dent in it when there was a great, furious flapping at the door and my father rushed to jerk it open and Charles and Persy literally blew into the room, wet and truculent and aggrieved. After a skit-tering skirmish with Lazarus, my father herded them into a pile of old blankets behind the sofa, and there they settled, fussily, to wait out the storm. My father put barley and water there for them, and occasionally went and crouched down and talked softly to them, and from time to time we all heard the great, liquid splatting that meant swan excrement.

After the first splat, I simply closed my ears to it.

“Relax,” Dennis grinned. “Pat will surely know what gets swan shit out of chintz.”

By late afternoon the wind was beginning to drop, as it often did when darkness fell during a nor’easter, and though we all knew it would pick up again with the coming of the next day’s light, we stirred and smiled at one another, and I passed the brandy again, and threw a log on the fire. Dennis had put Pachelbel on his little battery-powered cassette recorder, and he and my father sat at the crooked table in the corner playing chess and sipping cognac. Luzia snored softly UP ISLAND / 465

on the sofa, murmuring every now and then in Portuguese.

Lazarus slept on the hearth rug, groaning deliciously, one ear cocked toward his feathered adversaries behind the sofa.

They had not fussed or rustled or splatted for some time now.

I sat in the wing chair drawn up to the fire, nearly gone into sleep and cognac. I thought that I could sit there, just so, forever.

A log burned in two, then collapsed in a shower of sparks, and Lazarus twitched; behind the sofa a swan grunted crossly.

The smell of pent-up swan was beginning to curl ripely into the warm room. I did not care about that, either. I sat up and stretched, and walked to the front door to look out at the storm. It seemed to catch its great breath for a moment before shouting on.

“It you’re going into the kitchen, bring us back some of that Chunky Monkey,” Dennis said lazily from the chess table.

“I packed it in dry ice, but it’s going to melt if we don’t eat it.”

I was suddenly pierced through with such a blade of pure knowing that I literally doubled over with it. Then I straightened up and began to laugh, softly.

Right now, I thought, just for this minute right now, we are a family. A six-foot Southern Betrayed Wife and her widowed father and a senile old Portuguese lesbian and a one-legged schoolteacher and a mongrel dog and two aberrant swans—we are a family. That is what we have made together.

For just this moment, we are as real as any family anywhere in the world. Maybe one of us is dying. Maybe more than one. Or maybe not. Maybe one or more of us will fly away.

Or maybe not. It doesn’t matter. Right now, we are us and we are here.

Still smiling, I went to the hat rack and took my
466 / Anne Rivers Siddons

mother’s black hat from it and opened the front door. The wind howled hungrily. I looked at my father, and he looked back at me for a long time, then nodded slightly and smiled.

“What the hell are you doing?” Dennis Ponder said.

“Throwing my hat in the ring,” I said back.

I opened the door and walked to the edge of the porch and stopped.

“It’s not forever, Mama,” I said aloud. “Just for right now.

It was never really mine, anyway.”

And I gave the hat to the wind, which took it and whirled it away over the lashing trees, toward Gay Head, all the way up island.

Acknowledgments

Ann Nelson of The Bunch of Grapes bookstore in Vineyard Haven has probably been thanked by so many authors that she could start her own literary society, but to all that gratit-ude I would like to add mine. She literally gave me “her”

Martha’s Vineyard, that up-island world of old families and secret places, and in addition, a great deal of her time and a great many of her own treasured personal books. This book is, in a unique way, hers; its errors of fact and interpretation are strictly mine.

E-BOOK EXTRA

Family Binds: A Reading Group Guide
Up

Island
by Anne Rivers Siddons

“My generation of women didn’t have any notion that we’d ever have to take care of ourselves. When something like a divorce happens, it’s devastating.”

Topics for Discussion

1. What role do the swans, Charles and Di, play in the lives of each of their human caretakers? What do they represent for Luzia, Bella, Tim and Molly, respectively? And what do they give back to the humans in return for food? Why do you think Tim and Luzia are able to communicate with the swans better than anyone else? What is the significance of the fact that they are a rare breed of mute swans?

2. When Molly’s mother dies, her ghost begins visiting, first Molly, and then Tim, in their dreams. What is Belle’s ghost trying to say to them? What does she want? And does she get it? What does Belle’s hat mean to Molly when she first arrives on Martha’s Vineyard? What does the hat come to mean for Molly?

3. What kind of understanding of “family” did Molly inherit from her Mother? Did it change when Molly had a family of her own? How does her up island experience change her notions of family, and in what ways? How might her new understanding help her cope with loss and her husband’s betrayal?

4. Livvy says to Molly, “that’s what middle age is, one loss after another…Didn’t anybody ever tell you?” All of the people in Molly’s Vineyard “family,” her father, Dennis, Bella, Luzia, and herself, suffer from one or more devastating losses.

How do they each cope differently with their losses? What enables each of them to ultimately find renewal and hope?

5. Molly muses that her son Teddy was not losing his father from the divorce, “only I was losing. From the perfect skin of The Family, only I was being ejected. How could that be?”

How does her separation and potential divorce from Tee ir-revocably alter her relationships with her children, friends, and parents as well? How is it that only she “was losing?”

And does that still hold true by the end of the novel?

6. Molly agrees to stay in the small up island cottage on the condition that she is not required to become emotionally involved with the Ponders and their mysterious quarrels and struggles. What is it that draws her into the lives of her wards? When does Dennis Ponder cease being an abstract cancer patient and become “real” in her eyes? What kind of relationship do Dennis and Molly arrive at by the end of the novel? How would you characterize it?

7. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” What is the significance of Thoreau’s passage for Tim, Dennis and Molly?

About the Author

Anne Rivers Siddons
has written fifteen bestselling novels, including
Outer Banks, Colony,
and
Up Island,
which are available from PerfectBound e-books.

By Anne Rivers Siddons

Fiction

Heartbreak Hotel

The House Next Door

Fox’s Earth

Homeplace

Peachtree Road

King’s Oak

Outer Banks

Colony

Hill Towns

Downtown

Fault Lines

Up Island

Low Country

Nora, Nora

Islands

Nonfiction

John Chancellor Makes Me Cry

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

AND

UP ISLAND

“Engrossing…. Affecting.”

—People

“Exciting…. A wonderful story…. Keeps you turning pages…. Siddons has returned to what she does best: give us a book full of laughter and adventure that has enough soul to leave us with something to think about after we finish reading.”