The Map of True Places (12 page)

Coming back one moonless night, Melville stopped the boat to look at the sky. Stargazing had once been his hobby, especially in the long months at sea when he was in the merchant marine. He owned a telescope, and he often set it up on their deck at home, finding specific stars and planets, showing Zee and Finch. “I always wanted to learn to navigate by the stars,” he told them one night. “But I'm afraid it's a lost art.”

The only place Melville refused to take her on their outings together was the house on Baker's Island, which had been left to her by Maureen. Both he and Finch refused to go there, but Melville would sometimes drop her off on the island on his way out to fish and then pick her up again at the end of the day.

Finch didn't understand why she would want to go. He wanted to sell the place, especially if it made Zee sad. He refused to pay the taxes on it. But Melville got it. It was Melville, finally, who kept the taxes paid and hired someone to maintain the old place, keeping it shuttered but in good shape in case she might want it someday when she grew up and had a family of her own. “New life chases away old ghosts,” he once told her.

 

S
HE STAYED AT
M
ELVILLE'S FOR
an hour and a half. “I have to go,” she said at last. “I have to pick up some groceries. And some Depends.”

“Walgreens has the best prices,” Melville said.

“How long has he been incontinent?” she asked.

He shrugged. “For a while.”

“You sure you want to come back?” she said.

“Don't even kid,” he said.

“Let's maybe give it a couple of days,” she said. “Wait until the medicine completely clears out of his system.”

On her way out the door, Zee walked past Melville's suitcase. Something akin to an electric shock ran down her spine. She stood stunned and staring. When she could move again, she bent over and picked up the book of Yeats poems. It was right there in the top of his suitcase, its spine jutting out from under a green cable-knit sweater. She was surprised she hadn't seen it before. “Where did you get this?” She stared at him.

“It's mine,” he said, gently but quickly sliding the book out of her hands.

“It belonged to my mother.” It was the book Zee had gone to get from the island the day Maureen killed herself. She would recognize it anywhere. The book was white, but it had a purple mark down the front cover where one of Zee's crayons had melted. Zee pointed to the stain. “It's the book that Finch gave her on her wedding day.”

Melville looked surprised.

“Where did you get this?”

“From Finch,” he said, his surprised look slowly morphing into a wounded one.

She stood looking at him for a long time, the impact of his statement sinking in. The anger that she had once felt for Finch, that she thought she was finished with a long time ago, surfaced in her once again.

“I don't believe this,” she said.

M
AUREEN
A
MPHITRITE
D
OHERTY
F
INCH
was a writer of fairy tales, not simple happily-ever-after stories that lulled children to sleep but much darker tales with wildly implausible happy endings, usually involving rescue from incredible odds. Very seldom were those rescues performed by handsome princes. Maureen often declared that she was allergic to princes, by way of being Celtic and Irish and fresh off the boat. She wasn't fresh off any boat that Zee knew of. She'd come to America just after she had turned sixteen, after her brother Liam was killed, and there were no boats involved in their crossing. They had all traveled to Boston by plane. But there was no arguing with Maureen when she was telling a story.

Being Finch's daughter as well as her mother's, and more governed by logic than her maternal heritage might suggest, Zee had always tried to point out that there were Celtic princes Maureen could have written about, like Efflam and Treveur, as well as great warrior kings to choose from, like Cormac or Cadwallon. Zee suggested the latter two because she knew that her mother had always had an affinity for great warriors. But Maureen would simply reply that the Irish valued poets more than kings and princes.

Zee listened to the stories. The fact was, in those days she had loved
listening to her mother's voice. And during Maureen's manic phases, when the urge to talk became something that seemed to take her over, Zee had become smart enough to realize that letting Maureen's monologues continue uninterrupted would sometimes prevent the more drastic acting-out that she became prone to at such times. Occasionally her mother would stop, upset by something she'd just revealed, and Zee, who'd heard the same stories over and over again for years, would pitch Maureen ahead into her monologues, avoiding the parts that upset her, like an old vinyl record with a scratch that launches it midway into the next song.

Even in those manic times, Maureen was a much better storyteller than she was a writer, and the stories Zee loved were not the fairy tales at all but the real stories about growing up and meeting Finch.

 

M
AUREEN TOLD
Z
EE THAT SHE
and Finch met at Nahant Beach, the long stretch that connected what were once islands to the mainland and more particularly to Lynn, where the family lived now, in a house owned by Maureen's new stepfather.

Maureen had just turned nineteen and was celebrating with her friends, three girls from the shoe-box factory where she worked as an elevator operator. The other girls worked on the machine line, but Maureen, being more beautiful than most, had been plucked from the line and trained to run one of the two elevators that took the executives to their seventh-floor offices. She was good at her job, if not enamored of it. She didn't like being inside, in a moving box inside a much larger box, she said. She was accustomed to much harder work than this—suited to it, actually. Still, she knew the privilege of being chosen, and if she would have preferred the line, she simply had to listen to her friends, who daily offered to trade places with her, to appreciate what a lucky girl she was.

Her shift ended at three. Every afternoon, winter or summer, she walked Lynn Beach, not on the esplanade as most walkers preferred but far below it, on the sand itself. She loved the ocean. Living so close to water made the move from Ireland bearable, though she would have preferred staying there, moving south from Derry to a town in the Republic, maybe, to Ballybunion, where they had traveled once as a family, while her father was still alive and before they lost Liam, and everything changed so terribly, and the Dohertys moved to America and another coastline that, while wildly different and strange, was at least in the end a part of the same ocean.

The day Maureen met Finch was exactly five years to the day that she had stood with her brothers on the cliffs at Ballybunion. It was the first day of summer, and though there were no cliffs in this new world, there was a beautiful beach. Although the water was cold, one could actually swim here, in the protected crescent of bay that stretched toward Nahant. The Irish beaches that Maureen knew, with their wild tides and rough waters, had always been too dangerous for swimming.

On the day she met Finch, Maureen had not been swimming, though two of her girlfriends had. The waters were still too cold. It would take until July for Maureen to go into the water.

She noticed him immediately. He was wearing linen pants and a light cotton shirt, dressed more for a garden party than the beach. He had photo equipment with him, an old eight-by-ten plate camera on a worn wooden tripod. It was very old-fashioned, as was he. “Elegant,” is what her girlfriends called Finch. He had a Gatsby-era quality more suitable to the twenties than the seventies, but lovely just the same, maybe all the more so for its strangeness.

He had noticed all of them. But it was Maureen he approached.

“May I take your photograph?” he asked.

Her girlfriends smiled.

Maureen stared.

“I beg your pardon,” he started again, “but I wonder if you'd allow me the privilege of taking your portrait.”

The girls started to giggle.

“Are you a photographer?” she asked, because she wasn't sure what else to say.

“Alas, no,” he said.

The girls fell into gales of laughter. “‘Alas'?” one of them repeated.

Finch's face turned red.

“Why?” Maureen asked, realizing she was making it worse.

“You can take my picture,” the girl called Kitty said. “You can take my picture anytime.”

“Why would you want my photograph?” Maureen asked again, ignoring her friend.

“Because you are by far the most beautiful girl I have ever seen.”

Having brothers, she was not used to such flattery, and she was certain that he was making fun of her.

Convinced she had just been insulted, she turned away from him, but, as she did, she caught an expression on his face that broke her heart. He looked so stricken.

“You should go,” she said, not meeting his eyes.

But the look had caught her friends, particularly Kitty. “You should pose for him,” Kitty said. “Maybe he could make you a model or something.”

Maureen ignored her friend. Kitty was a silly girl who had no place giving advice to anyone. Maureen became aware that Finch was still standing in front of her. She could feel his eyes on her. He hadn't moved.

“Oh, for pity's sake, Maureen,” her other friend said after it became apparent that Finch wasn't going anywhere. “Let him take your damned picture.”

Maureen confessed to Zee that she had allowed Finch to lure her beyond the shore to where the tall beach reeds and the wild roses grew.
He told her the light was better there, and the photo would gain a certain texture.

At this point in her rendition of their love story, Maureen would always turn to Zee and say, “You, my darling, will never be talked into such a thing by any boy. Going off into solitary places with a boy you do not know is the kind of unfortunate choice that leads to rape and murder.”

It was the only part of her story that ever rendered Zee speechless. She found herself unable to breathe until Maureen continued, laughing.

“Of course, we didn't know then, did we, how absolutely harmless Finch was in that area.” Sometimes she would choke as she said it. Sometimes she would laugh.

Finch was older than Maureen—thirty-five, maybe, she said—and had always seemed to be from another era. Later, when she saw the way he had grown up, she would understand. There was a bit of the outsider about him—he always held himself a bit apart—which was something she understood well. In a time when the world was changing fast, they both seemed to belong to some other time and place.

When Finch won her heart, she said—and he did so quickly—it was not with his photographs but with poetry. Not Hawthorne, she said, but Yeats. Yeats spoke to her soul in the same way that Hawthorne spoke to his, and he had guessed this about her. He knew her soul, she said.

The night she finally knew she loved him, Maureen told Zee, they were out on Nahant, by the old coast guard station. An early hurricane was predicted, and already the winds were whipping around them and waves crashing white and foamy on the rocks below. Finch stood in profile, far too close to the edge, and recited “The Harp of Aengus,” his words delivered back to her on the wind.

Maureen and Finch married at City Hall in Salem, with Mickey as best man and Maureen's mother conspicuously absent. Not only was Finch not a Catholic, but as far as Catherine Heaney (she had quickly remarried and left behind the name of Doherty in favor of the name of her well-to-do Irish-American husband) could determine, he wasn't much of anything. A service that was not in the church was a slap in the face. Never mind that he had agreed to raise the children Catholic, a civil ceremony was tantamount to mortal sin. At the very least, they should have been married at the rectory, and by a priest.
No good can come of it,
she declared, and stayed away.

Maureen told Zee she had spent a week's wages on the outfit she was married in, a pastel suit perfect for the trip to Niagara Falls the couple had planned. But on the day of the wedding, Maureen refused to go on their planned honeymoon and begged Finch to take her instead to the cottage on Baker's Island, a place owned by her wealthy stepfather that had once belonged to his first wife. A generous man who was embarrassed by Catherine's treatment of her daughter, he had presented the cottage to the couple as a wedding gift. And though Finch hated being on the ocean and was seasick for the ferry ride from Manchester,
he canceled their trip northwest and took his new bride to honeymoon on Baker's Island.

Her two-week vacation came and went, and when Maureen didn't return to the factory, they replaced her with another of the young Irish girls, and life in the elevator went on without her.

Days and nights blended. Finch and Maureen lived by the sun and the tides. Food was delivered by boat, though Maureen insisted that they lived on love and never ate a bite. Pies made from wild blueberries were left on their doorstep by neighbors whose families had summered on the island for generations. The couple never came ashore until October 12, when the ferries and shuttles stopped running and Baker's connection with the mainland was severed.

Every time Maureen told Zee the story, the honeymooners stayed longer and longer on their island. “We made love by starlight,” she often told her daughter. “We lay naked in the roses.”

When they got back to Salem, Maureen went on to say, she had changed from a girl to a woman. She was happy and contented. But when they settled in the house on Chestnut Street with its staff of native Irish, Maureen was mostly stunned. In the time they had courted, Maureen had no idea where Finch lived. She knew that his parents were no longer alive, and, being a proper Irish girl, she hadn't thought it right to visit him unchaperoned. So she had never seen the old mansion with the twelve bedrooms and the staff kitchen in the basement and a cook named Brigid (of all things) Doherty, a slap in the face to both Maureen and the middle-aged servant who looked at the new lady of the house with immediate disdain.

The furniture in the house reminded her of the best that she had seen in Ireland, nothing like she'd ever been accustomed to growing up. It illustrated their class difference to her in a way that she hadn't noticed when Finch was courting her. How had this happened? Only here in the New World would a wealthy gentleman such as Finch have anything to do with the likes of her. This kind of match would never have
happened in the old country. Best that his family was dead, she heard Brigid say. If they had been alive, they would have stopped such a union before it ever started.

Maureen was miserable. Though the house was only a few blocks inland, she missed the smell of the ocean and the pull of the tides. She began to have bouts of insomnia and periods of panic where she almost believed that Brigid was trying to poison her, to punish her for over-stepping her bounds. She pushed back against these thoughts, and the reasoning of logic prevailed. She found that she could talk herself out of such thinking. Still, she ate little at all, and nothing prepared by the Irish cook. Maureen grew thinner and weaker as the months wore on.

If Finch noticed the change in Maureen, he never said so. Smitten as he seemed, he spent the winter photographing her and the rest of the time either teaching his classes on Hawthorne and the American Romantic writers or in his darkroom. And during that time Maureen started writing.

When she found the house on Turner Street, Maureen said, she convinced Finch, who would do anything in those days to make her happy, to purchase the old building and move there, getting rid of the mausoleum on Chestnut Street and firing the staff. He did it to please her, but the fact was that it pleased him, too. The house she had found was only a few houses removed from the ocean, which surely made Maureen happy, and it was almost directly across the street from Hawthorne's famous House of the Seven Gables. Since Finch had recently been awarded a grant to study Hawthorne's journals as well as his letters from Melville, he could think of no better place to be.