by Ian Woollen
Before the ceremony, Constance Wangert helped Mary put the earrings on in the powder room. She said, “I bought these from Madame Marlovsky. Did you know her?”
“Of course,” Mary answered, “every little girl in town took ballet lessons from Madame Marlovsky.”
“When she first arrived here in the ’20s, before she got the dance school started, she lived by selling off pieces of jewelry, one by one, that she said belonged to the czarina.”
“Ah, funny, I met a woman in Moscow who claimed to be the czarina’s daughter. She’d be happy to have these returned!” Mary joked, admiring her finery in the mirror. She had not yet learned how to humor her mother-in-law, who, in this era before pre-nuptial agreements, replied, “Oh, no, dear, these earrings will go back in the safe-deposit box tomorrow.”
At the reception, Ernesto the barber banged on his wine glass, and with some assistance, climbed on a chair to make a toast: “When I first come from Napoli, my mother she didn’t like. She asks how I can live so far from the sea? My friend, Ward Wangert, he teach me what to love about Indianapoli! I tell mama that in Indianapoli there is ocean of tall corn and ocean of biggest tomatoes, bigger than in Napoli. My mama asks how I can live without the old places, without the history. I tell her that Indianapoli is surrounded by ancient Indian mounds, older than Napoli itself. My mama asks how I can live without the street life, the passeggiata? I tell her about the great Circle downtown in the middle of Indianapoli, where even the rats walk on two legs! And mama, she very impressed to learn that Indianapoli rats walk on two legs!”
Mary’s father, Fred Stark, guffawed too loudly and his cigar fell out of his mouth. Fred grabbed at his porkpie hat to keep the wind from taking it. He wiped spittle from his chin onto his seersucker lapel. The senior Wangerts guided him and Loretta over to the receiving line. Loretta was known as ‘painfully shy’ in an era before the word ‘agoraphobic’ existed. She clutched her husband’s sweaty arm.
A few whispers were heard among the parents’ set about the shotgun nature of the wedding. Most people judged that Mary Stark had simply come to her senses and made a wise choice to leave Communist Hell and become Mrs. Ward Wangert Jr. Among the younger crowd, Ward and Mary’s friends were very confused by the unlikely match. The Pfeffinger twins sobbed softly.
“Are you sure you want to go through with this?” Mary asked Ward again at the reception. He was demonstrating his expertise with a martini shaker—a silver Tiffany chalice that had arrived earlier in the day. It was a surprise wedding present from He Who Remains Classified.
“It’s about time you dropped that question,” Ward replied, “and I’ll try to accept that for reasons of national security you can’t tell me about you-know-what.”
“I’m just afraid you have a rescuer complex,” Mary said, “and it can’t last.”
“And I’m afraid you’ve been reading too much Freud.”
“Really, I’ve noticed a tension around your mouth,” she said. “Your jaw looks so tight.”
“It’s my determination,” Ward explained. “Our Maine plan is going to be my brave leap into the future.”
The unannounced part of their plan was to remain in residence at the Maine cottage on Great Tusk Island until Mary gave birth. The story, to be spread about later, was that Ward had taken a leave of absence from the family business to give novel-writing a try. And local record-keeping, especially in the island’s county of jurisdiction, was loose enough that Ward felt confident he could arrange for a birth certificate that would protect both their families from shame.
“Look there, at our folks,” Ward pointed.
The photographer, holding a flashbulb in his mouth, attempted to pose Fred and Loretta and Constance and Ward Sr. for a group portrait out of the wind. The women sniffled and Constance handed out paper cocktail napkins to staunch their tears.
Fred muttered, “Shit, Loretta!” A phrase that for them was a term of endearment. Loretta pulled the thick glasses off her nose and cleaned them with a crumpled hankie, then shoved it back up her sleeve.
Great Tusk Island lay four miles off the coast. A single-lane road looped around the perimeter, eighteen miles from cove to cove.
The Wangert cottage on Great Tusk had been acquired as an investment in 1940 on a tip from one of Ward Wangert Sr.’s Yale ’21 classmates. He and a group of Boston doctors purchased a large tract on the eastern, open-ocean side of the island, two miles from the fishing village at the south end. The shoreline section was planned for development, and a large interior section was donated to the National Park for tax purposes. The elder Wangerts got off on a bad foot with the locals, when Constance complained about the noise of the seagulls and hired an island boy to shoot them.
No one mentioned to Mary that ‘cottage’ meant an enormous shingle-style dwelling, one of several constructed among the spruce trees, attached by boardwalks to an even larger clubhouse. The Wangert cottage was decorated in high-Adirondack style, complete with moose antlers, double-deck porches, and carved walking sticks. It also featured its own private cove, fifty yards to the east.
Low tide revealed a sloping sand beach. Two deer grazed in the fern meadow, surrounded by bayberry and the omnipresent spruce that fronted a path down to the shore. An osprey circled and dived and plucked a gleaming fish from the shallows.
“I feel like I’m in a painting,” Mary said, “Does the cove have a name?”
“I don’t know,” Ward said, “I’m still considered a newcomer here. There’s a lot I don’t know about this island. The natives are notoriously tight-lipped.”
“Let’s call it, ‘Zippy Cove.’ ”
“So be it,” Ward agreed. As a wedding present, he had offered her a new poodle, a furry companion on their island adventure, but Mary wasn’t ready for a replacement dog.
“I’d like to make some inquiries about volunteering at the school,” Mary said.
Ward said, “I met the teacher at the church lobster bake last year. She’s a battle-axe named Miss Betty. She uses a switch. Be careful about trying to introduce any newfangled educational theories out here.”
Mary retorted, “You really don’t know me very well, mister.”
Ward said, “It’s on my list. ‘Get to know wife,’ right along with ‘pump up bike tires’ and ‘untangle fishing lines.’ ”
He reached for her hand. Since disembarking from the ferry at the Great Tusk town dock, they had engaged in a lot of hand-holding. Almost a tethering, as if the other person might float away, and then Mary and Ward would each be forced to confront the real consequences of their recent decisions.
Both Mary and Ward were secretly concerned—along with a few doubters back in Indianapolis—that after all the drama subsided, an extended period alone on a sparsely populated island with no telephones or electricity would prove to be a mistake, as the imminent discovery of their foibles and flaws and personal irritations would have no social buffering.
And, yes, initially, some notable fusses occurred. Mary’s habit of conversing from three rooms away and expecting Ward to hear every word was frustrating for both. When Ward questioned the origins of this habit, Mary explained it was a survival tool with her brother: it was safer to deal with him from a distance. Their bodies also struggled to establish a mutually acceptable pattern for mealtimes and bedtimes and what toiletries go where in the bathroom and the physical effects of early pregnancy. One source of friction was the bathroom, which was only that—a tub and washstand. The outhouse stood twenty yards away into the woods. Mary refused to employ the porcelain chamber pot at night, preferring to hang acrobatically off the porch and pee in the tall grass.
“What if somebody sees you?” Ward protested.
“Who the heck is going to see me?” Mary countered. “One of the deer? There’s nobody around for a mile.”
It was true. The Boston rusticators had decamped after Labor Day. The clubhouse was shuttered and closed for meals. The island population dropped from three hundred in August down to
fifty. Church services had been suspended. The mainland minister only came out from May to September. Unless they went into town on an errand, Mary and Ward could go entire days without seeing anyone.
Their fusses usually ended with a swim at the nearby pond or a walk under the stars. Water, sky, forest, stars. The absence of civilization nudged forth insights. “Whoever said that the universe tilts toward justice may have been mistaken,” Mary observed, “but it does feel like nature tilts toward peace.” The star constellations were especially captivating. By 1951 urban light pollution had dimmed the heavens for many cities. Mary and Ward, wrapped in blankets, sat out late on the porch with star charts. They took nightly bike rides to the pond. They biked without a flashlight, guided on the road through the forest by a winding beacon of stars overhead. Ward mused in a letter to his parents, trying to sound mature, “As a child of the Great Depression that became a Big War that looks like it may become an Atomic War, I am relieved to report that there exists a natural world humming along, separate from all those crude world events.”
The villagers, as expected, were initially standoffish. Marsden, the shopkeeper, spoke in vague grunts to the Midwestern interlopers on their weekly forays into town for groceries. Inside the front door of his shop hung a needlepoint sign that advised against purchasing his merchandise: “Use it up. Wear it out. Make it do. Or do without.” Marsden wore jumper cables for suspenders. All the men wore suspenders to deal with a prevalent bodily feature that was popularly termed the “Great Tusk gut.”
In the third week, Ward accidentally started a fire near the gas pump outside the store. The above-ground tank stood across from the boat ramp. The top half of the ramp was covered with a layer of black pitch from the seiners tarring their nets. Two kids had just filled a gas can for an outboard and must have spilled a little. When Ward, with an unnecessarily manly flourish, flicked away his cigarette before entering the store—poof! A flame kicked up on the ramp. Normally, a little spill would burn off quickly, or be easy enough to stamp out. But the weather had been exceptionally warm and dry. The tar itself began to smoke and melt and soon Ward was desperately dancing around in black goo, yelling loudly for help.
Mary watched, aghast. “Fire! Fire!”
Marsden and another customer lumbered out of the store. A small crowd gathered. Someone said, “Some gusty, is he!” Marsden grinned and finally signaled for the other fellow to hoist the sand barrel that was used for winter ice on the ramp. They poured the sand down over the flames and rescued poor Ward, who apologized profusely.
The next week, Mary stumbled into a faux-pas during a check-up with the local physician, Dr. Stone. She’d been out scything the path in the front meadow and reported to the old doctor that the noon heat made her feel like taking off her shirt. The denture-clicking doc frowned and grunted something unintelligible. Ward came to Mary’s aid by commenting, “Fifty years ago, the sight of a woman’s ankle was considered taboo, so maybe fifty years from now, a shirtless woman cutting her lawn might not be such big deal.”
Dr. Stone muttered, “Maybe, maybe not. I never sucked on an ankle before.”
Despite this gaff, the village doctor liked them and came to their aid socially. As a boy in the 1920s, Dr. Stone had started coming to Great Tusk with his vacationing Rhode Island grandparents. He explained, “There’s always one member of the summer crowd who goes native—that was me.”
Never a stickler for patient confidentiality, Dr. Stone believed it would help the Wangerts if the townspeople knew about Mary’s condition. “They’ll respect you for consulting the local medicine man, rather than running to the mainland.”
He ordered Miss Betty, one of his oldest patients, to accept Mary as a teaching assistant. The schoolmarm hated to acknowledge that she needed physical help, especially during the afternoons when the students became unruly.
Mary gently broached the idea of afternoon field trips for science class. Twice a week, exploring tide pools and birds’ nests, before the weather turned cold. Miss Betty resisted the plan, but Dr. Stone overruled her.
The students loved the outings, especially Johnny Salter, the lanky, lame boy with polio who knew more about nesting habits than anyone and demonstrated his drop-o-kerosene method for snuffing out mosquito larvae in the swamp. Mary grew attached to Johnny. She tried to invite him and his parents to dinner at the Wangert cottage, but could never get any dates firmly scheduled.
“The locals will warm up to you more come winter,” Dr. Stone predicted, “They want to know if you’re going to stick it out.”
The pond remained swimmable through October, at least for brief, bracing dips. The gnarled orchard produced plenty of pie apples. Civilization was not that far away. Their radio, powered by a car battery, picked up live broadcasts of the Boston Symphony. Mary corresponded with a nearby college friend, Breezy Merritt, who’d landed a reporter job with the Portsmouth Eagle. The Indianapolis newspapers—which arrived a week late—were fun to read aloud, with an occasional tone of homesickness, and also a little sniggering at the society pages. In November, after a suitable period, the young couple finally announced the pregnancy to their parents by letter.
Using the ocean’s daily deposit of crates and curios on the shore, they assembled a jury-rigged beach patio. Mary read and napped in the shade and ate canned peaches. She craved canned peaches. Ward cast for mackerel at the mouth of the cove. Mary would have liked to fish too, but the short hike out along the ledges could be slippery and she didn’t want to risk a fall. Her pregnant belly swelled and slowly approached Great Tusk proportions.
On lucky days, Ward returned with a striped bass. Mary contributed buckets of mussels to their larder. All fried up in butter on the kerosene stove with a few late squash poached from the garden behind the clubhouse. They ate supper out on the porch, early, before sunset.
After dark, they retired to the library’s silk-covered ottomans for snuggle time, which could go a number of different directions, depending on how Mary was feeling.
Although their fledgling, meet-cute marriage encountered serious challenges in later decades, this couple never had a problem in the bedroom, or on a picnic blanket in a nameless cove surrounded by maidenhair ferns.
Chapter 6
The Problem
The problem was Ward’s novel. It went nowhere. Coffee turned cold in the cup. Determination crumbled into despair. He missed belt loops and wore mismatched socks. During Mary’s hours away at the village school, Ward parked himself in one of the upstairs rooms overlooking the ocean. He muttered to the invisible mice scratching in the walls. He scribbled notes and prayed for inspiration.
Nothing came. He tried a different room, one that looked into the woods. Pine boughs brushed against the window. The brushing noise bothered him. He found a ladder and handsaw in the barn and spent a day trimming the trees.
He ditched the fishing wars theme as too old-fashioned. He decided to switch to something more contemporary, perhaps involving their recent Moscow saga. But that brought up disturbing thoughts about the unknown biological father of Mary’s baby, a subject Ward had promised was closed. Ward considered a novel about German U-boats on Great Tusk. The islanders told many stories of U-boat visitations during the war. Miss Betty still spent weekends claiming to spot them off Lighthouse Point. Those thoughts tilted Ward toward perverse worries about Mary’s time alone away from the house. Was she really just looking for science class tide pools? Ward grew concerned about a particular look in Mary’s eyes, a dull, dark faraway stare. Was she thinking of someone else? Was she indeed a spy? It was ridiculous.
Mary wisely stayed silent about the progress of the novel. It was a side of Ward she didn’t understand yet. As with his intelligence, she needed more time to appreciate it. The man was obviously struggling, as evidenced by the increasing number of half-smoked cigarettes she found crushed in clamshell ashtrays around the house. She wondered if his aspirations to be a novelist were prompted by youthful male ego or a desire to please her. Did
her husband think she wouldn’t find him worthy otherwise?
Mary felt relieved when Ward finally broke down one evening at the end of October and confessed that not a word had been written.
He growled, “Mary, would it bother you if at the end of this wonderful time here together, we go back to Indianapolis with our new baby and stick our heads in the sand like everyone else?”
Mary leaned over and kissed him. She said, “Sometimes that’s exactly what needs to happen.” His jaw appeared to relax a bit.
He groused, “I can’t seem to latch on to anything. Just a mess of crazy ideas.”
“What sort of ideas?” she asked, cautiously.
“Promise you won’t laugh,” he said.
She crossed her heart with a forefinger.
Ward explained, “I go over and over the strange comment that Colonel Dmitri made about the atomic bomb and Chekhov, about Uncle Anton not knowing what to make of an atom bomb. I was thinking about the unwritten novel that he never produced and out pops this silly notion: what if Chekhov did write a novel in 1900 predicting the atomic bomb?”
Mary did not keep her promise. “Uncle Anton’s Atomic Bomb,” she said and laughed.
They chuckled together for several minutes, releasing a few residual tensions. Ward prepared one of his special nightcaps. Under the bedcovers, rubbing off the chill, Mary and Ward began brainstorming characters and plotlines for Uncle Anton’s Atomic Bomb. None of it was ever put down on paper, because Ward did not want to risk mucking up the delightful spontaneity of their nightly sessions about a maid named Lubya and a chauffeur, Mikel, who worked on a grand estate near the Caspian Sea.