The Guest Book

by Sarah Blake

  “Are you in?” The door to Evie’s office had opened.

  Evie turned around, not sorry for the distraction. Her colleague Hazel Graves stood in the doorway, her arms crossed over the enormous mound of her belly, in the eighth month of a pregnancy that had taken over her body like an occupying army.

  “Hey.” Evie smiled. “What’s up?”

  Hazel hesitated in the doorway. “I had a thought I wanted to run by you.”

  She sounded a little nervous.

  “I’m flattered.”

  “You may not be, once you’ve heard it.”

  Though she was ten years older than Hazel, had championed Hazel’s hire and mentored her through the first two years of teaching, theirs had grown into a rich collegiality of equals that had only stumbled a few times over the course of the past ten years, the two women finding in each other a close and attentive ear.

  Lately, however, if Evie was honest, Hazel seemed to have the persistent ability to remind her that though her work was considered groundbreaking, even foundational, both ground and foundation were places buried in the dark, and that she, Hazel Graves—younger, black, brilliant, and now pregnant—clearly held the torch.

  “Sounds ominous,” Evie remarked dryly. “Come on in.”

  She pointed Hazel to one of the comfortable chairs and sat back down at her desk.

  Hazel moved heavily out of the doorway and paused under the clothesline, distracted by the photograph of Kitty and Ogden.

  “That wasn’t there last week. What’s this?”

  “The Twilight of the WASPs,” Evie answered without thinking.

  “Polo shirts and jodhpurs and all that?”

  It never failed. Bring up WASPs, and everyone went at it with great hilarity, the one group Americans could comfortably laugh at, about whom nobody really knew. Unless, of course, one was one. Evie considered her colleague.

  “Polo shirts have nothing to do with WASPs.”

  “No?” Hazel pressed.

  “No,” Evie said firmly, “that’s Ralph Lauren.”

  Hazel nodded, unconvinced.

  “Who are they?”

  “My grandparents.”

  “They look happy.” Hazel studied the image. “When was this?”

  “Nineteen thirty-six,” Evie answered with a wry smile. “The day they went sailing, took a picnic to an island off the coast of Maine, and bought it.”

  Hazel turned around. “An island?”

  “He bought it to keep her happy. That’s what we’d always heard.”

  “How nice for her.” Hazel was arch.

  “One could do things like that in the thirties.”

  “If one were wealthy and white. That was the middle of the Depression,” Hazel retorted.

  There was an edge now in Hazel’s voice. Evie looked at her.

  “Fair enough.”

  Hazel turned her eyes back up to the image. “And did it?’

  “Did it what?’

  “Did the island keep her happy?”

  Evie thought about this. Happy was not a word she’d assign to her grandmother Kitty Milton. Then again, neither was sad, or angry, or any number of adjectives that might ruffle the surface of a pond. Satisfactory, she could hear Granny K pronounce, pleased. All of a piece.

  “It kept her,” she said.

  Hazel nodded, still staring at Kitty and Ogden.

  “All these people inside us,” she said softly. “No wonder this country is fucked.”

  Evie stiffened. “What does that mean?”

  “You’ve got these two in you who can sail away and buy an island while the Klan is on the rise and seventeen million people are out of a job—”

  “Well, they weren’t Bourbons, for god’s sake,” Evie interrupted.

  “They don’t need to be, do they?” Hazel was quiet, her hands on the small of her back.

  Evie had to fight the urge to pull the photograph off the line and out of her reach.

  “And you?” Evie was wary. “Who’s inside you?”

  “The invisibles.” Hazel turned around. “All the ones these two wouldn’t see.”

  Evie looked at her for a long moment. “And never the twain shall meet?”

  Hazel didn’t smile.

  “Not always,” she answered. “What’s over is always under. And you never know, do you, when it will pop up?”

  Evie shook her head. “You can’t reduce it like that. You have no idea who these ‘people’ are—”

  “Can’t?” Hazel turned around. The two women regarded each other.

  They had stumbled into the gully that opened between them every so often. White. Black. Evie exhaled.

  “Okay, Hazel. What did you want to run by me?”

  “It can wait.”

  “No,” Evie prodded, wanting to pull them out of this uneasy quiet. “Go on.”

  “Okay.” Hazel nodded, and started in.

  “For the Festschrift.” She made her way over to one of the chairs. “In honor of her twenty-five years, I was going to revise your Anchoress slightly.”

  “Oh?”

  “Slightly.” Hazel hit the note again, light but determined.

  “Go on.”

  “Your reading of silence, that is.”

  Evie waited.

  “What if power comes not—as you proposed then—in the anchoress’s silence, but in her choice of a husband?”

  “How’s that?”

  “Take the vow of the anchoress literally. When she becomes the bride of Christ, she marries—up,” Hazel suggested. “Way up.”

  The idea sliced through the last twenty years of feminist theory, returning as it did to marriage as a source of power. Avant-garde and retroactive in one stroke. Elegant. It was all about whom you married.

  Looking at Hazel just then called to mind a plant in summer, thrusting her exuberant branches into the garden with that vegetable abandon—alive, I am alive, and growing. It made Evie tired.

  “Revise me?” Evie raised her eyebrow. “That’s more like burying me.”

  “No, no. Don’t you see? It’s an homage. It’s an extension of your thinking.” Hazel shook her head, alight with her idea, smiling at Evie and expansive now. “It’s just that the more I thought about it, the idea of a woman gaining power through keeping quiet seemed so—”

  Hazel stopped, frowning as she tried for the right word.

  “Quaint?” Evie offered.

  “Wishful. Too neat, actually,” Hazel finished firmly.

  “Perhaps.” Evie leaned back and crossed her arms. “But we all know power is passed on in all the unspoken rules of the game, passed on by the rule keepers. How one ought to behave, who belongs in the club—”

  “Such as?”

  Evie cocked an eye at Hazel, pointing up at the photograph.

  “Enter every room with a smile, my grandmother taught us. Speak to everyone, regardless of their place, as another human being, a reasonable person—so as to create an atmosphere of goodwill around you.”

  “That’s just manners—”

  “Yes. And manners were the sign.”

  “Of?”

  “Good breeding. Ill breeding.”

  “Ill breeding?” Hazel raised her eyebrow.

  “When one has money, one ought never talk about it, and one ought to think about it as little as possible,” Evie recited, sure of her footing but not entirely sure of her point. What was she arguing? she wondered. “One doesn’t mention Money or one’s Good Fortune. Or Bad Fortune. One’s Place in the world. One doesn’t speak of oneself, draw attention. One doesn’t want to seem to be flaunting one’s fortune in the face of the less fortunate. One doesn’t want to make others feel ashamed, or remind them of what they don’t have.”

  “And so one can cover it up.”

  The edge was back in Hazel’s voice.

  Evie frowned. “Say more.”

  “The truth. The gap. The code that holds the whole structure. You pretend it’s all equal. You hide it under manners. You a
ll are involved in a vast conspiracy, a cover-up. Silence protects a white woman’s story and—”

  “And condemns her,” Evie pushed back.

  “Only if she chooses.”

  “Come on, Hazel,” Evie snapped. “Is it a cover-up simply not to speak of it, every time? All the time? Honestly, I am not certain it was ever that simple, and it certainly isn’t now.”

  Hazel’s eyes widened. “Are you serious, Evie? You know it is. You’ve spent your career pointing this kind of silence out.”

  It was true. If you see something. Evie had hung one of Homeland Security’s anti-terrorism posters on her clothesline, years ago. Say something.

  “Perhaps,” Evie answered, not wanting to give Hazel an inch. She watched as Hazel pushed herself out of her chair, making for the door, having done due diligence by way of her senior colleague. It’s about power, idiot, Evie reminded herself; she had just been told she was going to be revised.

  Evie listened to Hazel’s footsteps echoing down the marble hallway. For an instant, she could almost retrieve the feeling of being heavily pregnant and yet still so light, ready to charge, sword in hand. At thirty-eight she too had been ready to shape the future in her own image. Ready to take on the field with that kind of urgency, fueled by the belief that you and you alone saw it clearly. Hazel reminded Evie of the sweet weight of that clarity, that sureness.

  That thievery—she grimaced—called revision. A truck backed up outside her office, the steady beep beep beep a percussive to her thoughts. Evie lifted her face and stared up again at her grandmother in the photograph on the line.

  Never mind. Kitty’s voice rose in Evie’s head. Never mind all that.

  Eight

  THEY WERE AN ATTRACTIVE group, thought the harbormaster’s wife, watching from the doorway of the ferry office when the Ogden Miltons and the Duncan Houghtons descended early one morning at the end of June on the public landing in Rockland, Maine, having ridden the overnight train from Manhattan. The men hoisted the weekend’s bags upon their shoulders and disappeared down the gangway toward the boat, leaving the wives to unbend after the long night’s ride. The two women divided neatly into tall and short, slender and plump, fair and dark. Mrs. Winslow noted the high-waisted, wide-legged trousers that were all the fashion in the magazines and decided the short one looked like a pirate, the other, like a pirate queen.

  That one appraised the clear sky, the steep shingled roof of the ferry ticket office, and then gazed down on the dock where the Sheila was tied up, the bronze fastenings shining against the wooden deck, an American flag snapping in the wind off the stern. And everywhere, the smell of the sea.

  “God knows what’s in that.” Kitty shook her head at Priss, who had turned to her, holding up a canvas bag, zippered and bulging. “Probably lunch. Let Dunc take it.”

  Priss nodded and put it back down.

  “Anyway, you oughtn’t lift anything,” Kitty observed dryly. “In your condition.”

  “I do love that part,” Priss admitted, sinking into one of the old dock chairs, “though I’m growing fat as a pig.”

  And so she was. Kitty smiled at her old classmate, now married to her cousin. Beef consommé and saltines had never been enough for Priss, and certainly were off the menu now that she was finally and safely pregnant at last.

  “‘Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet’?” Kitty suggested.

  Priss chortled. “I don’t need to slenderize; that’s the beauty of it all. Though I wouldn’t mind a cigarette right about now.”

  She pulled the book she had been reading onto her lap and opened it.

  Kitty nodded. The woman in the ferry office had gone back into the little watchhouse at the end of the landing. Her dog thumped its tail in the sun outside. Kitty’s attention wandered back to their husbands down on the dock.

  Ogden was inspecting every inch of the yawl, rubbing it down as one would a horse, nodding in agreement to something Dunc called from the bow. What nuts they were, she thought, idly watching. So serious about knots and lines and hooks. Everything in order. Everything in its place. As if any of it mattered.

  No. She halted. No, I mustn’t.

  “I don’t care what you say.” Priss sighed luxuriously and closed her book, her finger lodging her place. “I love a good secret.”

  Kitty blinked and struggled to return. It was a conversation the two had begun sometime after midnight on the train from Manhattan, sitting up and sleepless in the tiny unlit compartment, the dark world outside sliding by. Sprawled on the opposite side of the compartment, Ogden and Dunc lay, hats over their faces, arms folded across their chests, passed out cold.

  “Not if it isn’t told,” she observed.

  “Especially if it isn’t told. Precisely because it isn’t told.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense. If it isn’t told, then you don’t know there’s a secret.”

  “Yes.” Priss smiled. “But it festers. Deliciously.”

  “Festers?”

  “Oh, don’t be such a snob.” Priss rolled her eyes. “Yes, festers. Yes to the Dark, to the Deep, to Red festering Life.”

  In spite of herself, Kitty smiled. Dunc and Priss went to parties in Greenwich Village, where the neckties were red, the ashtrays overflowed, and the conversation roamed hot and furious on topics from Moscow to Montauk. The two of them did not just dip their toes in life, they dove. And sometimes Kitty envied them.

  “You realize, don’t you,” she said, “that you’ve begun to speak in capital letters. It’s a contagion—”

  “It’s honest,” Priss demurred, arching her back. “We are living in a time of capitals. You ought to try it.”

  “I might just,” Kitty tossed back lightly, “you wait and see.”

  Priss snorted. She had known her since boarding school. Kitty Milton would never join the throngs gathering in back gardens in the Village after five, drinking gin and lime and battling hourly over the End of Civilization, the Beginning of Truth, the emergence at last of the Forgotten, the Downtrodden, the Masses, though the anger flashing on the streets anywhere you looked this summer was evidence that History’s bright sword was flaming now, cutting swaths through the sheaves of the mystifying past.

  “Honestly, though, do you tell Ogden everything?” she asked, turning her gaze down onto Dunc and Ogden.

  “Of course,” replied Kitty without blinking.

  “Too bad,” Priss reflected, turning away, “because I’m willing to bet that a good marriage relies on secrets.”

  “Oh, for god’s sake, Priss!”

  Priss chuckled.

  “Secrets are the stuff of books,” Kitty pronounced.

  “Good books.” Priss slid the book into her bag.

  “Not if they rely on secrets to keep the story humming. Life doesn’t work that way.”

  “Oh, well—life,” Priss snorted.

  “Yes,” Kitty affirmed. “Real people don’t have secrets, because real people can’t keep them.”

  What a liar I am. Kitty flushed, sliding her hand down into the pocket of her trousers to feel for the little yellow toy car she had carried with her since Neddy had died.

  On the dock below, Ogden had taken the end of a line and was running it along his tongue, wetting it so it would thread easily through the bronze eye straps along the boom. And his care, his absorbed attention, made her sad.

  They had carried on all through the year in quiet, the name Neddy unspoken between them. She’d grown used to his eyes flickering over her and past in the quick investigating way he had developed, checking on her, reading her as if he could tell what was in her heart simply by the cast of her head or the tip of her shoulders.

  And when he’d appeared in the doorway of the nursery, weeks ago, the train tickets in hand, and asked her, hesitantly, wouldn’t she like to take a trip, a little voyage without the children, his voice gruff, his eyes fixed on her, she had heard, clear as if he’d said it aloud, Come back.

  “Darling, it’s perfect.” She l
eaned forward now, calling from the top of the gangway. “It’s all just perfect.”

  “Lord love a duck, Kitty’s right,” Priss drawled. “Is it safe to board yet?”

  Kitty started down the gangway to the dock. That hadn’t been what she had meant at all, and she didn’t want Og to think so. Kitty hadn’t meant hurry up, let’s go. She stepped off the end of the gangway and onto the wooden dock, the day’s warmth just starting on the boards. She didn’t want him to misunderstand. Especially now. She meant to make the most of this weekend. She meant to try.

  She looked up and saw her husband smiling at her.

  “Come on.” Ogden reached his hand to her across the gunwale, and her heart stirred. He’d understood. In three steps Kitty had taken his hand and climbed over into the cockpit of the boat. He gave her arm a little squeeze.

  “Hang on, you two,” Priss said. “Let me take a picture.”

  Kitty and Ogden turned and smiled for Priss, standing still. Out of the corner of her eye, Kitty watched the woman in the ticket office light a cigarette and toss the match in the harbor as she looked on.

  “Got it,” said Priss, and lowered the camera back onto her chest, her eyes on her husband, who stood on the bow, his hands on his hips.

  “Say there—” she called out merrily to him. “Are you planning on leaving the dynasty behind on the dock?”

  Dunc Houghton straightened and turned around. Kitty shaded her eyes, watching the expression on his face soften. Rangy and dark haired, his dear bony face as familiar to Kitty as her own, he had become a Somebody in the New Deal, working in a dusty regulating office in charge of an obscure but vital agency somewhere in Manhattan and doing what a Houghton had always done—pitching in. He leaped off the bow and onto the dock beside his pregnant wife and grabbed the bag at her feet, took her elbow, and piloted her up and onto the bow deck.

  And then they were off. Ogden at the tiller, Kitty beside him, and Dunc and Priss up in the bow, their backs against the mast as Ogden tacked his way carefully through the harbor pocked with the great boats of summer families not yet arrived. Cabot, Lowell, Hallowell, the boats bobbed at moorings painted with the names of Old Boston. Clearing this thicket, Ogden made straight out past the breakwater, pointing the Sheila’s prow out into Penobscot Bay, where a low line of islands lay just visible on the horizon ahead. The waves slapped soft against the hull as the Sheila cut the water, bouncing a little in search of the wind.