Up Island (19 page)

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that drifted from the kitchen softened considerably after that.

“I guess there’s no sense asking you if you had a good time,” Livvy said as we were getting out of the Jeep back at her house. We had not spoken until then.

“Not much,” I said. I was foolishly near tears, and could not have said quite why. And then, suddenly, I did know.

“It was really true what you said to me back home, when I first told you about Tee, wasn’t it?” I said thickly. “Once you’re a solo act you automatically become a threat to every other woman you know. I felt about as welcome as a bastard at a family reunion! Did she think I was going to snatch Peter up to bed right before her eyes?”

“That’s simply not true,” Livvy said tiredly. “You’re being paranoid. Gerry and Peter have one of the best marriages I know. How could they make you feel at home? You never said anything, not a word. It’s kind of hard to draw somebody out who just isn’t going to be drawn.”

“Be fair, Livvy,” I said. “You know all you-all talked about was people I’d never heard of. What was there for me to say to that?”

She rubbed her eyes with her fists.

“We’ve been yanging at each other all day,” she said. “Let’s go to bed and when we get up, let’s start over. I don’t want to fight with you. I love you.”

“Me, too,” I said. “Let’s do that.”

But when I got up the next morning, to a day of wild wind and tossing gray seas but no rain, there was a note in the kitchen that said, “Gone sailing with Trish Phipps. You’d hate it in this wind. Heat up the chowder and let’s have it for lunch.”

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And I did, and we did…but we shared it with Trish, who came back with Livvy. They laughed and babbled about the wildness of the wind and water, and about their ineptness, which I knew was gratuitous talk; Livvy was a good sailor and she had told me that Trish was the first woman com-modore of their yacht club back home. I was silent once more.

Resentment burned deep inside me like a gas flame on low.

That evening the phone rang twice, and twice Livvy said, briefly, “No, I don’t think so, but thanks anyway. Maybe later.”

After the second call I said, “If you’re refusing things because of me,
please
don’t. I’ll feel awful if you do. I don’t have to be with you all the time, Livvy. We’re not joined at the hip.”

“It’s not anything I much want to do, anyway,” she said.

“If I really want to go somewhere and you don’t, I’ll go, I promise. Both of those were great, huge things for the Clintons. You knew they were on the Vineyard again this year, didn’t you? They’d be terrible mob scenes, and besides, I met them last summer at the Styrons’. It’s not like I’m one of his groupies.”

But she was, or almost; of all my friends, Livvy was the one who, with me, not only thought Bill Clinton the better of many evils, but really liked him. I knew that she probably did want to go to his parties.

For the rest of the night I felt vaguely guilty, and could not seem to think of anything to say.

Just before bedtime, she said that she thought she might run into Boston on the early ferry with Gerry and see if her hairdresser could cut her hair.

“You’re welcome to come, but you’d be bored silly,” she said. “Gerry’s got the dentist, and I can’t UP ISLAND / 161

think of anybody left in town who could show you around.

And Gerry got the last two reservations on the ferry, though you could always try standby…

“I don’t think so, no,” I said, knowing that she did not want me to come, or she would have insisted. “I think I might like to go and see what up island is like, though, if you don’t need the car.”

“By all means,” she said. “But I warn you, you’re probably not even going to be able to get through Edgartown. There’s secret service everywhere, and Gerry says lots of the main routes are just plain blocked off.”

“I think I’ll try it, anyway. I love the way it sounds: up island…”

“Good luck,” she said, smiling.

The next morning she was gone before I even stirred.

Feeling like a child left behind by the adults, I got into the Jeep and clashed its gears off toward the On Time Ferry, headed up island, bound for that part of the island where, she had said, the old island people lived.

“The real people,” I said aloud, not without spite.

But after all, I never got there. The harbor was so thick with boats that it looked like a field of drying laundry, and the On Time Ferry seemed permanently lodged on the Edgartown shore. After waiting in a honking, steaming line for nearly half an hour, I got out of the Jeep and walked up to the head, where a tall man in the official Vineyard men’s uniform—khakis, polo shirt with an alligator on it, sunglasses—seemed to be in charge. I did not recognize him, but that meant nothing; he had the unmistakable air of one who would tell you what you could do when.

“Is there a problem with the ferry?” I said.

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“It’s been delayed indefinitely,” he said pleasantly and neutrally. I could not see his eyes behind the black-mirror sunglasses.

“Why?” I asked, I thought reasonably enough.

Izod, or maybe Lacoste, smiled and shrugged. Neither the smile nor the shrug was large.

“Because the President is out sailing with one of the Kennedys and there’s a million-to-one chance he might come into the harbor, and everybody in Massachusetts with a boat has come over to gawk,” an exasperated woman behind me said. I thought I recognized her from the beach club, but if she knew me she gave no sign.

I looked back at the alligator man, who simply shrugged again. All of a sudden the whole thing made me very angry.

The thought of getting out of Edgartown, of finally reaching up island, shimmered with glamour and charm.

“So we’re stuck over here until he gets done with his little sail? What if there’s an emergency?” I snapped.

He looked at me steadily.

“Is there?”

“No, but what if there was? There are children on this island—”

“If there’s a real emergency, we can have a helicopter over here in five minutes,” he said. “The ferry should be operating again in time for people to finish their errands and whatever before nightfall.”

“Oh, perfect,” I said, and stomped back to the Jeep and maneuvered it out of the line and turned around. I went back to Livvy’s house, clashing the gears petulantly.

It was very hot and still after the two days of rain and wind, and the water looked like rippled blue silk. I thought how good it would feel, cool and tingling on UP ISLAND / 163

hot skin, and decided that perhaps I would swim. But then I stretched out in the porch hammock and watched the boats bobbing, a solid mass stretching from shore to shore, until their motion, and that of the hammock, lulled me into a deep, thick sleep. It was not the kind that refreshes you, but the sort that imprisons and exhausts. Sometime during it I dreamed again of my mother and the barred window under the city sidewalk.

This time it was I who stared down at her silently, and she who addressed me. She still wore the black hat, the same one, I saw, that I had up in my bedroom, and I could not see her eyes under its brim, but I could see her mouth clearly, red with shiny lipstick and talking, talking. Her teeth looked bone white, perfect. Her lips moved and moved.

“You have to get up,” she said. “It’s very late. Why do you always do this on a school morning? You know I don’t have time to keep calling you. It’s the third time this week. Get up, Molly. You’re sleeping your life away. Get up, get up, get up…”

Since I was not sleeping at all in the dream, but standing there looking down at her, I was puzzled and agitated, and tried to bend down to tell her it was not early morning back in the Peachtree Hills house and I was not in bed, but in the manner of such dreams, I could not move. The sensation of straining to do so was so strong that I could feel the ache in my arms and legs, and thought, This is no dream. But still I could not move or speak.

“Molly!” she said, loudly and sternly. “You get up this minute! I’m not going to tell you again! Getupgetup getup-getup…”

She accompanied this litany by running the metal
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clasp of her clutch purse along the bars of the grating, making a loud burring sound. For some reason I found it nearly in-tolerable. I made a superhuman effort to move my muscles, and finally did, and was in the hammock again, sweat running down my neck and back, heart pounding. The burring noise turned into Livvy’s kitchen phone.

I reached it on what must have been the eighth or ninth ring, stumbling and thick-tongued. It was my father. I was so stupid with sleep and the residue of the dream, so drugged with the almost palpable sense of my mother, that at first I could not think.

“Daddy, where are you? Are you here?” I said.

He laughed. “Woke you up, didn’t I? No, I’m at Kevin’s.

That’s one reason I called. I wanted to let you know I’ll be here for a while.”

“At Kevin’s…what for? Are they okay?”

“They’re fine. I just thought it was time I came to visit. I never really have, you know, not for any length of time. And Kevin had a little vacation time left, and we thought we might take Mandy to Jamestown and Williamsburg and maybe do a little fishing in the tidewater. Sally’s doing the decorations for some kind of charity thing and this is a good time to get out from under her feet…”

He fell silent. For a moment I could not think of anything to say. Certainly there was no reason why my father should not visit his son and his family; but still I felt uneasy about it, as if he were play-acting his enthusiasm, talking too volubly about it. I also felt a small, unmistakable curl of what could only be jealousy, and under all of it was the formless but nevertheless firm certainty that there was something wrong with his voice. For the first time I could ever remember, UP ISLAND / 165

even in the days just after Mother’s death, my father sounded tentative, almost frail.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Sure I am. Can’t I go visit your brother for a couple of weeks without you thinking something’s wrong?”

“Of course. But…two weeks? You’ve never stayed away from home that long…”

After a pause he said, “Well, baby, your mother never could seem to get away for very long. Now I’ve got the time and nothing to keep me here. You’ll be up there for another two weeks or so, won’t you? And Teddy’s not going to be around.

I’m finding…I’m finding that I don’t think I can stay in the condo, Molly. It didn’t bother me when she was…you know, alive, but somehow I just can’t stay there now. I’m going to stay up here awhile, I think, and Ralph’s going to look for a little apartment for me—he knows what I want—until I decide where to light. Don’t you worry about me. This is just what I want to do.”

“Oh, Daddy, you know you can stay with us! With me—you know we’ve got all that room, and you’d be near everything; you could walk wherever you wanted to—”

“We’ve been over that, baby. I’m not going to live with you and Teddy. It’s not right, and neither of us would enjoy it. I’m not at all sure you ought to stay in that house, come to that—maybe you’re the one who ought to be looking for a smaller place, that you can handle alone—but at any rate, it’s done. I’ve put the condo on the market. Ralph’s doing that, too. It ought to move pretty fast. With any luck I’ll have a new place before I wear out my welcome here.”

“Daddy…oh, Daddy…” I said, tears near the surface, though I couldn’t have said why. It was only
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that always before, I’d known where to find him, had a place where he was to run to, if I should need it. But I could not run to him in Kevin’s house.

“Well, will you stay with us some this fall? Maybe on weekends, when Teddy’s home? Will you do that?”

“Well…another reason I called, Molly, is about Teddy. He called last night, and asked me to talk to you about this before he called you. I didn’t want to at first; he needs to fight his own battles, but after I heard, I think it makes some sense.

So I said I’d put my stamp of approval on it, for what it’s worth, and then he’ll call you. He’ll probably do that tonight…”

“My God, what is it?”

“Relax, it’s nothing dire. Pretty good plan, in fact, I think.

Molly, you know they stopped in Phoenix? Spent a couple of days there with that friend of Eddie’s? Well, while they were there they went to a party given by some friend of the friend who’s studying architecture at the University of Arizona, and he and Teddy clicked, and the next couple of days Teddy went around with the friend of the friend, seeing the department and the work they were doing, and some of the new stuff going up in the Southwest, and the countryside, and the upshot is that Teddy is on fire to stay out there and study architecture. I never heard him this excited about anything, Molly. I’ve always sort of worried because he’s been so cool about everything, but he’s just eaten up with this.

Not just the field, but the country, the Southwest…he wants to design for the high desert, as he calls it; I think he really does want to do that. In fact, I think he’ll find a way to do it whether or not any of us approve. So I thought I’d see if I could smooth the way a little with you, because I know you UP ISLAND / 167

were counting on having him around the next few years…”

I took a deep breath while I tried to assimilate this. Teddy?

Studying in Arizona? In love with the high fawn and purple cliffs of a place utterly alien to the country of his home?

Building houses for that strange, inhospitable land; perhaps staying to live among its people? What on earth was he thinking; what was my father thinking, to give his approba-tion?

I let the breath out in a low, controlled stream, and said,

“Well, he can think again. I never heard of such a thing. He’s all set at Tech; I’ve paid the tuition, he’s got a room and a roommate, he’s signed up for rush…if he has to study architecture, and this is the first I’ve heard of it, he can do it just as well or better at Tech. They’ve got a world-class department. And besides, it would cost at least twice as much to go to school out of state, and I think architecture’s a five-year course…I don’t think his father would ever agree to that.”