Up Island (49 page)

“ ‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,’

” Dennis read in his deep voice. Or perhaps he was reciting; I could not see his face in the shadows. “ ‘…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.’ ”

He let his voice trail off, and sat for a moment with the book in his hands.

“That’s enough for now,” he said. “A little Thoreau goes a long way.”

The old women did not beg for more, but sat quietly, turned inside themselves. I turned away and moved softly into the kitchen so that none of them would see that I, too, like Bella, was crying.

On the way home we were silent, and finally I said, “My father was reading that, too. He quoted just that passage to me not long ago. I wish…I wish he would go with you sometime when you go up there to read. He used to do it all the time. They loved hearing

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him. Oh, I wish…I wish.” I fell silent. There was no use talking about it.

“Do you know the rest of the quotation?” Dennis said after a moment. “ ‘I did not wish to live what was not life, nor did I wish to practice resignation unless it was quite necessary.’

Maybe for Tim it’s quite necessary right now. I know from experience that you have to get down to the resignation, to get done with everything that isn’t life, before you can begin to see what is. I think that’s where he is right now. You can’t go there with him. Nobody can. He’s the one who decides when to go on from there.”

“
If
he decides to go on from there.”

I had hoped that Dennis would rush to allay my worst fear, but he did not.

“If he does,” he agreed.

We did not speak again until he got out of the truck at his camp, and held the door open so that Lazarus could come bounding into it. I did not go in with him; I had not done so since that first day. He was as good as his word. He had not pressed me to stay, or for anything else. Often, like that evening, I wished he would. I needed his warmth and his touch, but I could not bring myself to ask. In my mind I could hear my mother on a long-ago Saturday when I had been thirteen and called my friend Dickie Hembree up the street to come over and go to the movies with me: “You never,
never
ask a young man to take you anywhere, Molly. It’s cheap. It sounds desperate. It sounds like you can’t get a date any other way. With your height and those big breasts, you’re always going to have to be careful not to look desperate. A real beauty can get away with it, maybe, but the rest of us ordinary girls have to be very, very careful not to look desperate.”

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And she had given me her brilliant, quicksilver smile to show that she included herself in the pantheon of ordinary girls. But I had long known that she lived in that other world, and felt even larger and more graceless than usual. I called Dickie back and said never mind, and never asked a boy or a man for attention again. I could no more have asked Dennis Ponder to make love to me than I could have asked him to grow a new leg, no matter how badly I wanted to. Somehow, I realized that night, I had expected him to know that. I was obscurely angry with him because he apparently did not. I was irritated with his homilies about my folks, too. I wanted him to feel my fear, not quote Thoreau at it.

The day after that, everything changed.

In an odd way, my father was better. He was sleeping well, he said, and suddenly felt like an outing for the first time in months. After that, he was out and about once more, as he had been before the awful deadness sucked him down. On the first day or two he took the truck when I wasn’t using it, but a day came when both old ladies had doctors’ appointments and I had to drive them into Oak Bluffs, and the truck was not available to him for a full day; that evening he came home from Menemsha with a disreputable old blue Toyota that he had bought from a sign posted in Poole’s Fish Market.

“You need the truck, and I thought I might do some exploring down island, go check on some of the old farts at Alley’s and the senior center,” he said. “See how they wintered over.”

I simply stared at him. It was an enormous change UP ISLAND / 427

from the terribly diminished man he had been, of course, but somehow he seemed even stranger to me now: abstracted, oddly exalted, with a kind of luminosity about his face that had never been there before. He seemed to be constantly listening to something just out of my hearing range, and often he smiled at it.

“It’s a fine car,” I said heartily when he brought it home.

“And you’ll never know how glad I am to see you feeling better. Why don’t you take it up and show it to Bella and Luz? They’ve been asking about you. And take Dennis with you, why don’t you? Do you remember that I told you he was seeing his mother again? You go and tell me what you think about that; I can’t tell what’s going on with them, and he sure isn’t talking about it. He misses you, too…”

“I’ll look in on them in a day or two,” he said. “And Dennis needs to get on with his work. Later on I’ll spend some time with him. Yes, I recall that you did tell me about him getting back together with Bella. That’s fine, isn’t it? You tell him I’m happy for him.”

And he would kiss me on the cheek and go out to his old car and lurch away down the lane, hideously rutted now from the deep freezes and melting snows of the hard-dying winter, and I would not see him again until after dinner.

“What did you do today?” I would ask, heating up the food I had saved for him.

“Oh, sat in on a game of pool at the center,” he would say.

“Took three dollars off of Martin Golightly. Went over to the big hardware store in Vineyard Haven and looked at some roof tiles. We’re going to have to do something about this roof when the weather warms up a little. Cost about twice what they do back home; maybe I’ll do a little comparison shopping.

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No thanks, baby, I had something to eat at Back Alley’s. You wrap that up in foil and I’ll have it tomorrow.”

And he would climb the stairs to his bedroom and prepare for bed. Oh, perhaps he would sit for a half hour or so and watch some television with me, but never more than that, and though he smiled and replied to my chatter with his old banter, I could tell that he was tired and wanted only to go to bed. And because he had so very much sleep to make up for, I did not object when, in a very short time, he kissed me on the cheek and climbed the narrow stairs. I should have been reassured with the change, and on one level I was, but underneath the relief something did not seem right, and I pushed the strangeness as deep as I could simply because I did not think I could stand any more worry.

One noon I ducked into Alley’s to pick up a jar of mayonnaise and turned when I heard someone say, “Molly? Molly Redwine?”

It was Martin Golightly, the man to whom my father was closest up island, the one whose snooker expertise was le-gendary at the senior center and around the stove at Alley’s.

“Well, hello,” I said, smiling at him. “I hear my father finally beat you. He must have drugged your root beer.”

He looked at me oddly.

“How is Tim?” he said. “We’ve missed him. We all thought you must have been so wintered in down there on the pond that you couldn’t get out, but it’s not like him to let a little weather keep him away from the snooker table. Is he okay?

You tell him there are at least three guys waiting to whip his tail.”

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My face felt stiff.

“I’ll tell him,” I said. “The roads have been pretty bad down our way, but they’re softening up now. He’ll probably see you in a day or two.”

“Glad to hear it,” Martin Golightly said, and turned back to the stove and his coffee. I went home and waited for my father. When he came in, long after dinnertime, I called him on it. My heart was beating violently. I was terrified without quite knowing why.

He sighed and sat down beside me on the sofa.

“She comes every night now, Molly,” he said, his face translucent with the strange joy that had played over it for the past week or so. I stared at him. When had he gotten so thin? He looked as if he were being consumed by something inside him as fiery as a nebula.

“Oh, Daddy,” I said, my voice trembling.

“Every night. At first I thought it was just a fluke, but she comes closer and closer every night. I knew it was just a matter of being able to sleep at night. And now that I can…now that I can…Molly, she looks beautiful. And she’s happy. I can tell that. She stays longer and longer; it’s like she’s playing, teasing me like she used to do when I first met her. I know I shouldn’t have lied to you, but I was afraid that it wouldn’t last, and it would have been worse if she didn’t come back and I’d told you about it…”

“But where do you go if you don’t go to Alley’s or the center? What do you do all that time?” I said, my voice quivering.

“I drive around. I walk. I walk for miles. I’ve been places I never knew were on the island; this afternoon I spent hours and hours on Lucy Vincent, and yesterday I went up on the Gay Head cliffs. It’s all so beautiful. It’s
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like I’m seeing it through her eyes, showing her the Vineyard for the first time…”

“Daddy…”

“Don’t start on me about this, Molly,” he said fiercely. “I have her back. I never thought I would. I love you like the light in my heart, but I’m not going to let you meddle with this.”

And he turned and went upstairs. I sat looking after him, drowning in his strangeness.

After that I left him alone, and he slept through his nights in the company of my mother and wandered alone in the soft gray days, and a morning came when it was finally spring.

It was a time of glittering white frosts in the morning, and clear, pale, earlier dawns, and the silvery clatter of the cardin-als and redwings in the scrub forests. The lyrical pinkletinks called and called, in the brushy swamps. There was no green yet on the tracery of the wet black branches, but you could feel it was down there, deep, pushing slowly upward like blood toward a beating heart.

On one of those first soft evenings, Tee called.

I was alone. My father was out on God knows what wild hill, and Dennis and Lazarus had gone down to the pond, Dennis to throw sticks and Laz to retrieve them. I had seen little of Dennis since I had learned where my father went in the daytime and how he spent his nights; somehow I simply could not tell Dennis about that. To voice it would have made it too real. Like my father earlier, I found myself increasingly consumed by a need to sleep, and now that I had more free time on my hands, that is what I did. I slept in the afternoon while my father roamed and Dennis worked or went up in the truck to read to the old

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women, and I slept longer in the mornings. Whenever I think of the coming of that spring, I think of it through a haze of sleep as tender as the first flush of pale green on the lilac bushes up island.

I was dozing when Tee’s call came, and for a moment I could not think how to respond to the voice on the telephone that was at once strange and as familiar as my own heartbeat.

It seemed to come out of a time and place as far away as my childhood. For weeks now I had heard no voice from Atlanta.

Missy and Livvy both had finally told me, in annoyance, to call when I had some idea of what I was going to do; they were tired of calling and getting the same hedging answers from me.

“How you doing?” Tee said, his voice warm with his old, intimate interest, and I said, stupidly, politely, “I’m just fine.

How are you?”

“Well…you know,” Tee said. “Not so fine. Stewing in my own juice, having fucked up yet again.”

He laughed, the deep, lazy laugh that had been the first thing I had loved about him. Suddenly I had a flash: Tee at twenty-four, sitting in the sun on the beach at Sea Island, his hair bleached gilt, laughing at me and lighting the world up with it. It had been the first time after our marriage that we’d gone there. In the background Charlie and Carrie Davies laughed about something.

I blinked, and the vision went away.

“What have you fucked up, Tee?” I said. For a preposterous moment I could not think what he might mean. It was an expression he used a lot, capable both of charming and disarming.

“What haven’t I?” he said. “Listen, I just wanted to see how you were doing. Nobody has heard from
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you. I got your number from Missy, who, incidentally, is about as pissed at me as it is possible for one human to be at another, closely followed by my mother. I’ve been thinking about you. I missed the family at Christmas.”

I said nothing, thinking that he had been with Teddy then and wondering if he didn’t count his son as family.

“So when do you think you might come home?” my husband asked.

“Why on earth do you care?” I said, almost amused at him.

“Is this about the house? You-all can have the house. I told Missy to tell you that. Did she not?”

“Yeah, she told me. Moll…there’s not any more us-all, I don’t think.”

He waited for an answer, and when I did not, he said, “She isn’t here anymore. Sheri. I’m not seeing her anymore. She’s transferred to marketing in New York and asked for Europe and will probably get it. It’s with my total blessing. I’m the one who, I guess, broke it off.”

“Hmmm,” I said. “And just what is it she’ll be marketing in New York and Europe?”

There was a silence, and then he said, “I deserve that, of course,” but I could tell that he did not think he did.

“What I mean is, I’m not going to marry her,” Tee said.

“It…turned out to be just what my mother called it, a bad itch in the pants. You probably called it worse than that, and I don’t blame you. I think that I was just plain and simply afraid of getting old, and she came along just at the time I was most vulnerable.”

“Poor baby,” I said.

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“Okay, okay. There’s a lot more you need to say to me, and that I need to hear. I don’t blame you for that, either. I called to see if we could start to talk now. I’d hoped you’d come on home now that the house is empty again…that was a stupid damned thing, I know…but I could come up there one weekend. I’ve already checked about planes and ferries.