The Map of True Places (8 page)

“Your daughter will have to keep a close eye on you in the morning,” the doctor kidded.

She wanted to tell the doctor that she didn't live with her father, that it was Melville he should be telling all this to, but Melville hadn't
come home last night, and she had no idea where he was. When she had asked Finch where he was, all he would say was that Melville was gone.

The doctor started to the door and turned back. “Do you have ramps and grab bars?”

“He has one grab bar,” she said. “In the shower.”

“I'm going to send over an occupational therapist to check the house. The OT can tell you what you're missing.”

The doctor extended his hand for Finch to shake. “Nice to see you again, Professor,” he said too loudly, as if he were talking to a deaf person and not someone with what Zee had just now come to realize was advanced Parkinson's. She wasn't certain how Finch and Melville had kept that fact from her.

“I'm sorry the meds didn't work out,” the doctor said. “Not so bad to be Nathaniel Hawthorne for a day or two, though, all things considered.”

Finch didn't smile back. He took Zee's arm as they left the office together.

“You lied to the doctor about the freezing thing,” Zee said. “I've seen you freeze.” She remembered the last time Finch had come to Boston for one of his checkups. As they were leaving the restaurant, he'd frozen on his way out the front door. He couldn't move forward and he couldn't move back. They had all stood helplessly waiting for the freeze to break, freeing Finch to step out the door.

“Not for a while,” he lied. “I haven't frozen once since the last time he asked me that damned question.”

F
RIDAY-AFTERNOON TRAFFIC NORTH FROM
Boston was brutally slow. Zee dialed the house again from her cell, hoping that Melville would answer. She was really starting to worry about him.

“Did he go to see his family?” she asked. Melville had family somewhere in Maine, a sister and two nieces. They weren't close, but he'd been known to make occasional visits.

“No,” Finch said.

“Well, where the heck is he?” Zee was frustrated. She had asked Finch where Melville was at least ten times and was tiring of his one-syllable answers.

Melville had seldom left Finch's side for the better part of twenty years now, a fact that Zee found difficult to comprehend in these times of trial marriages and soaring divorce rates. The two had become a couple long before her mother's suicide, though Zee had been too young to realize it at the time. When they'd first gotten together, Zee had believed her father when he told her that the reason they spent so much time with each other was that Melville was his best friend. It wasn't a lie, it just wasn't the whole truth.

Zee's mother was the one who told her about Finch's preference for
men. As with many of the inappropriate things Maureen had told her during her manic episodes, Zee would only understand the full impact of the statement in retrospect. At the time the professor had begun to hang out with Mickey and his pirate-reenactor buddies on weekends and during school vacations, and Zee supposed that was what her mother had meant by a preference. Zee was very aware of how much partying they all did together. The pirates drank and they sang, and Finch, who was usually almost prim in his New England reserve, drank and sang with them. Sometimes she would hear him singing as he made his way into the house late at night, the clichéd songs of the gutter drunk that she recognized from the old movies she watched with her mother. Finch was the singing, tippling, happy drunk of 1930s comedies. His joy at such times, especially as it contrasted with Maureen's growing depression, made Zee believe she understood why her father preferred the company of men. Men drank and sang and had fun. Her only wish at those times was that
she
could be one of them.

Maureen, being Maureen, eventually told Zee intimate details of Finch's predilection for men. Much later, when Zee was old enough to have a reference point for such things, she began to understand what her mother had meant and why she had told the stories with such anger. Finch's misrepresentation of himself to Maureen had become the major betrayal of her mother's life.

In Zee's mind, Maureen's unfulfilled dream had always been to experience what she referred to as “The Great Love.” It was what she wanted most in life and what she had sworn to have from Finch when they first met and when they spent the early days of their marriage on Baker's Island. She often spoke longingly of the night he had recited aloud to her—not the dark lines of Hawthorne but Yeats. On their wedding night, he had presented her a copy of the book the poem had come from, and that book became one of the treasures of her life. She kept it locked on Baker's Island in the room where she'd spent her wed
ding night and which had since become her writing studio. That she no longer found such passion in her everyday life with Finch was her cross to bear. Being Irish and Catholic, Maureen Finch was all too familiar with the idea of burden, and hers had become an increasingly loveless marriage within the confines of a religion that vehemently discouraged her escape.

After it became clear to her that Finch had turned to men, a time Maureen referred to as “The Betrayal,” Maureen had holed up in her cottage on Baker's Island and had begun to write the story she'd never been able to finish, which she had entitled “The Once.” Finch marked this as the first sign of her impending insanity, though when Zee thought about it now, it was more likely a very bad case of postpartum depression, and one from which Maureen had never fully recovered.

It had been a difficult pregnancy and an even more difficult labor and delivery. The fact that Maureen hadn't bonded with the child she'd borne him was no great worry to Finch—he had bonded well enough for both of them. The birth of his beloved Hepzibah was the single factor that kept him in his marriage, for, not being a Catholic himself, he was more inclined to believe that the mistake he'd made with such a hasty marriage might be easily remedied.

The days leading up to Maureen Finch's death had been so terrible that Zee and her father had never talked about them. Zee
had
talked with Mattei about them many times during her sessions, but never with Finch. In retrospect she wondered how many of those days Finch actually remembered, his drinking having progressed, on many occasions, to the blackout stage.

What Zee remembered only too well was a late night, not long before Maureen's death, when Finch, drunk and dressed in his pirate garb, stood in the kitchen and recited Hawthorne in a voice loud enough to fill one of his lecture halls: “‘No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without fi
nally getting bewildered as to which may be true.'” At the time Zee had believed that he was talking about being a pirate. Now, of course, she knew better.

Whether Finch remembered the day of the suicide or not, Zee would never forget his face. Coming home from his revelry, singing up the alleyway, he was instantly sobered by the sound of Maureen's screams. He rushed into the house and up the stairway to find Maureen bent backward, spine arched in backbend until her head was almost resting on the floor. Her arms stuck straight outward parallel to the floor as if she were performing a gymnastic feat of great difficulty. He stood in the doorway staring, then watched as his wife collapsed. It was such a bizarre and frightening sight that Zee thought of demonic possession and even of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.

Zee stood helpless and distanced, praying that the 911 ambulance she had called would arrive in time. She did not dare touch her mother's body. A moment before, her touch had started her mother's third convulsion—she was certain of it. Zee and Finch stood back, staring in horror, completely helpless as they watched Maureen die.

Ironically, it had been the wail of the approaching ambulance that had sent Maureen into her final convulsion.

 

F
OR THE NEXT TWO YEARS,
until the day Melville came back for good, Finch had dedicated himself to the process of totally anesthetizing himself, leaving Zee stealing boats and otherwise fending for herself.

They didn't talk about Maureen's death, not directly anyway. One night almost a year later, Finch turned to Zee and invoked another quote from Hawthorne, speaking of “‘That pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere. The firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the
illusive stage-scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the chasm.'”

Finch was clearly distraught. Family life, strange though it might have been with Maureen, was nonexistent now. So when Melville came back and moved into the house to stay, with him came a certain peace that Zee had not previously known. Finch stopped spending all his leisure time with Mickey and the pirates. And he slowed his drinking to a pace that was quite respectable for a seacoast town in New England—that is to say, more than moderate but not too extreme. He didn't sing anymore, but Zee could see that Finch was truly happy.

One day in Zee's freshman year of high school, she came home and announced, “My friend Sarah Anne says that our home is not a normal place.”

Finch thought about it for a long moment before he spoke. This time, instead of quoting Hawthorne, he quoted Herman Melville:
“It is not down in any map; true places never are.”

Zee recognized the quote immediately. Though Finch usually quoted Hawthorne, he had schooled his daughter well in all the American Romantic writers.
Moby-Dick
was her all-time-favorite book.

Zee had to admit that, for the first time she could remember, there was a semblance of family in the old house on Turner Street. And though it might seem an odd situation to the outside world, it was far more normal than anything Zee had yet experienced in her young life.

 

F
OR HIS PART
, F
INCH SEEMED
rather to enjoy shocking people with his new status, a fact that ultimately turned Mickey against him. Taking it up a notch, Finch often introduced his new partner to people he'd known his entire life, telling them that Melville was not only his live-in lover but an ecoterrorist as well. Actually, Melville was a journalist. Before he met Finch, Melville had been investigating a Greenpeace
splinter group that was trying to interfere with minke whaling off the coast of Iceland. The nickname Finch gave him stuck. Everyone in town now called him Melville.

He wasn't a bad guy. In some ways Melville was easier to be around than Finch. Her only real objection was that Finch always let Melville run interference for him. Melville handled everything that Finch found difficult in life, which was a lot. And although Finch was happily letting the rest of Salem know of his relationship with Melville, he had never really talked to his daughter about it. It had been Melville, finally, who explained the kind of love that he and Finch had for each other, though by the time he got around to talking to her about it, she had pretty much figured things out for herself.

Finch and Melville had started seeing each other during her mother's final and longest hospitalization. The way Melville explained it, Finch had led him to believe that Maureen was probably never going to get out of the hospital. Zee always wondered about that. It was the opposite of what Finch had told Zee on their Saturday trips to see her mother. Every Saturday, on the way to the hospital, Finch assured his daughter that Maureen would be coming home soon and that they shouldn't give up hope.

Still, she believed Melville when he told her that he'd been misled by Finch. It seemed important to Melville that she know this, desperately important somehow that she not think he was a man who would intentionally break up a family. Surprisingly, she believed him. Zee knew all about The Betrayal, though she was certain that Finch didn't know she knew. Maureen was a talker, particularly when she was in one of her manic periods. Over the years she had told Zee much more than was appropriate to tell a daughter about her father. And Zee could do nothing with the information her mother had given her. Maureen had sworn her to secrecy. So Zee became aware, as Maureen had intended, that her father was sometimes less than honest and forthcoming when
it came to getting what he wanted. She didn't fault him for it. Zee knew better than anyone how difficult Maureen's illness had become. But she noted it.

When Maureen had finally come home from the hospital, it was Melville who had disappeared, accepting a writing assignment that took him first to California and later as far away as the Aleutian Islands. He didn't return to Salem until two years later. By that time Maureen was dead, Finch was spending his summer vacation drinking with the pirates, and Zee was out stealing boats.

Finch immediately sobered up, quit pirating, and moved Melville into the house.

Months later, when Zee was caught stealing a cuddy-cabin boat, it wasn't Finch who came to post bail but Melville. It was also Melville who accompanied her to court and Melville who made certain that her juvenile records were sealed.

And when she was required to go to therapy in Boston, it was Melville who drove her. Finch, who had no idea she was stealing boats to get herself out to Baker's Island and the house her mother had left her, not only was disgusted by her behavior but accused her of being just like her mother.

“You don't understand,” she heard him say to Melville. “This illness runs in families. She's showing the same kinds of signs, doing the same kinds of dangerous things. She's skipping school. She's stealing boats. I can't have it,” he said. “I'll send her away to school before I will deal with this again.”

And so Melville took her to a therapist and waited for her in the waiting room. The therapist found no signs of manic depression. While it was clear that Zee was acting out, the therapist thought it was a cry for help, or at least for attention from her father.

If the therapist was correct and it
was
a cry for help, it had been Melville, and not Finch, who answered it.

“He's threatening to sell your mother's house on Baker's Island,” Melville told her on the way home from her session with the psychiatrist.

“He can't do that,” Zee said.

“He can. You're a minor, and Finch has been paying upkeep and taxes.”

Zee panicked. The house was the last thing she had of her mother's. “I'll get a job,” she said.

“It wouldn't be enough.”

“I'll quit school and get a job.”

“If you quit school, he will sell the house immediately. Don't even think about quitting school.”

“What am I supposed to do? He can't sell my house.”

“If I were you,” Melville said, “I think I would learn to behave.”

It was simple advice, and she heeded it. From that day on, Zee didn't steal another boat. She didn't skip school again. And, to the best of her ability, she tried to learn to please her father and do what was expected of her.

 

T
HE RIDE BACK FROM
B
OSTON
had taken forever. Finch was weary, and so was Zee. She turned the car onto Turner Street, stopping to let a group of day-campers, who had just come from the Gables tour, get back onto their yellow school bus. After they passed, Zee pulled the car into the driveway next to Melville's boat. Dusty, the cat next door, who had become the mascot for the House of the Seven Gables, was sunning himself on the bench in the stern. He looked up, yawned, then stretched and settled back into a more comfortable sleeping position.