The Guest Book

by Sarah Blake

  The day was glorious. They were to sail through to lunchtime and make a picnic at one of those islands ahead of them before arriving at Harry Lowell’s summer place for the weekend. The plan seemed to have been conceived in one of the sudden bursts of enthusiasm Ogden was given to, and which Kitty had learned to give in to, though the Lowells were tiresome. They had an overly high opinion of themselves, as if the air they inhaled was purer, their morals unimpugned, the very blood that ran through Boston veins, bluer. Mrs. Lowell had been a Saltonstall, and she dropped the names of her forbears every twenty feet, like the buoys now marking the channel out of Rockland Harbor.

  It was absurd, Kitty thought. Especially now, when it was men like Ogden, the New York bankers, who had steered the country through the Crash, and the collapse, and into the New Deal. They had all been spared because of that farsightedness. That clarity. Everyone agreed. Ogden had seen above the fray, past the mess—into the future. He always did. She studied him from the curve of the cockpit.

  Ogden lounged on the tiller, his shirt rolled up to his elbows, his long legs stretched along the cockpit, crossed at the ankle, his body falling into easy, perfectly rendered lines, as though he had been put together by an excellent draftsman. There was a suppressed excitement about him, a jauntiness that made her smile. He was up to something. She pushed herself forward into the prow of the cockpit, the smile still on her lips. He was up to something good.

  “Darling, the jib,” Ogden said, his eye on the sail.

  She turned to grab the end of the line, pulling the smaller flat sail tight till it caught air. The Sheila shot ahead into the waves. Kitty lightly cleated the jib line and sat back down, lifting one trousered leg up on the bench across the cockpit to balance herself.

  There wasn’t a bird above or a boat on the horizon. The sea around them was as vast and open as a meadow.

  On the bow, Dunc’s fingers crept up to rest just underneath Priss’s collar, and the soft blue cambric of her shirt set off his lean tan. He was famous for these small gestures of attention, always had been. And her whole life, Kitty had been a little in love with her own cousin because of this. She slid back down on the seat, closing her eyes, her long neck arched toward the sun.

  “Can we please, please not talk about Germany?” Priss’s voice drifted back. Dunc answered something Kitty couldn’t hear.

  “Because,” Priss said, “it’s all the way over there, and we’re all the way over here. And you can’t do anything about it this minute.”

  Kitty opened her eyes.

  “Or Roosevelt,” Kitty added, sitting up. “I don’t want to hear about the wealth tax, the president, or the bank this weekend.”

  “Anyway, whatever’s going to happen will happen,” Priss said.

  “At the bank?” Kitty asked.

  “In Europe,” answered Priss.

  “Not if I can help it,” Dunc murmured.

  Kitty frowned. Her cousin always ran a little hot, leaping forward to take the reins as though life were a runaway coach and he the only one who could save it. It was admirable, even noble, but she thought he took things too far for his own good.

  “Heard you hired Weinberg,” Dunc said. “That true?”

  “True,” Ogden replied.

  “Sol Weinberg?” Priss said lazily.

  “Yup.”

  “What’s he like?” Priss asked.

  “He’s a Jew,” Kitty observed.

  “A brilliant Jew,” affirmed Ogden. “As good as they come.”

  “He was at Princeton, wasn’t he? With Dick Sherman? Class of ’twenty-five?” Dunc asked.

  “Yup.” Ogden trimmed the sail. The prow of the boat dipped and rose.

  “I hear he’s after Susie Bancroft,” Priss continued.

  “That won’t fly,” Kitty remarked. “Her mother would never even invite someone like him to a dance.”

  “Someone like him?” Dunc repeated.

  “Don’t be exasperating, Dunc,” she said. “You know what I mean.”

  Duncan turned around and draped his long legs into the cockpit, facing Ogden and Kitty now. “If he does all right, dots his i’s and all that, will you bring him into the firm as a principal?”

  “Absolutely.” Ogden nodded. “A good man is a good man.”

  Kitty pushed her hair off her forehead, considering her husband. Do business with anyone, her father would say, but only sail with a gentleman. Their world was quite clear about where that left Sol Weinberg. No matter what Ogden said, no matter what his enthusiasms, a good man would not help Susie Bancroft if she married Sol; she’d always be the girl who married a Jew. That’s how it was. Men never seemed to look directly at a thing like that. They wanted to slide around, make adjustments. Talk. And then women had to live the life they had made.

  The sail filled.

  “But that’s all just words,” Kitty said firmly. “You know it doesn’t really figure in. That’s not the way of the world. You wouldn’t ask Jo’s boy to step in and run a company.” Jo was Granny Houghton’s gardener.

  “Not without training,” Dunc said.

  “Even with training.” Kitty shook her head. “Solly Weinberg, for instance,” she appealed to Ogden, “no matter what you say about him, will never get the girl because he always behaves as though he’s up against some kind of door.”

  “He is up against a door,” remarked Dunc.

  “That may be, but without the right girl a man like that will never get through. It’s not fair, but it’s just how it is. It’s all in whom you marry.”

  “Just how it is,” Ogden repeated, his eyes resting on her.

  For a brief second, Kitty thought she’d overplayed her hand.

  “He’s part of the change ahead,” he said.

  “Change for what?” she pushed.

  “New fields.”

  She shook her head.

  Ogden raised his eyebrows.

  She could see it all so clearly. The talk of what was best didn’t leave her cold; she understood the need. Still, it was just talk. Just chatter. What was needed was to hold tight to what was best, what had been proven best. And to make sure everyone saw it. Saw these men and how good they were, how right. These were the men who had their hands on the tiller and knew what to do. They always had.

  “Listen, you and Dunc are the very finest there is. We don’t need new men. We need more of you.”

  On the bow, Priss raised her hand in a silent mock salute.

  But Kitty knew she was right. Men had to be guarded from their enthusiasms. Women had to hold the chalice high, sometimes hold it up out of men’s reach so they didn’t break it in fits.

  “You ought to speak to Harry Lowell about that.” Dunc smiled at her. “He was positively gleeful at the club the other night. Did you hear him, Og? The moneymaking classes having seen their end, and all that.”

  Odgen nodded.

  “How very pink,” Priss observed.

  “Though it’ll never be level,” Dunc put in. “And Lowell, of all people, knows it.”

  “The club,” Kitty murmured inconsequentially. “I didn’t think the Lowells ever left Boston.”

  “Sure they do,” Dunc said cheerfully. “They like to get out of town every so often and see New York.”

  “The Harvard Club is hardly New York.”

  “Why do you think the entrance is fifty steps from the doors of Grand Central?” Ogden grinned, pulling the jib sheet tight, and pushed the tiller close to his body.

  Kitty laughed.

  “There.” She squinted, smiling, through the sun at him. “You’ve broken my rule.”

  “What’s that?” he answered, his voice light.

  “No talk about work or the world, and here you are. First thing.”

  “It’s not respectful,” Priss chimed in. “It’s not kind.”

  “Dearest, marital politics are never kind,” Dunc advised.

  “Oh you,” Priss drawled at her husband. “You think you can get off with a quip?”

&
nbsp; “I do.” Dunc’s voice dug down, rich and low below his slow smile. “As you know, I’m a quipper.”

  He was staring at Priss, his love for her right there for anyone to see, and she reached up and touched his face, and the look between them bolted through the air and struck Kitty to the core. She turned to find Ogden, and there he was watching her.

  “Listen to you.” Ogden cocked his head. “You sound like Mother with all that talk about rules.”

  “I’m not a bit like your mother,” she said, and smiled, holding her hand up off her face to shield the slant of the sun. “I’m a realist.”

  “What in heaven’s name are we talking about here?” Priss asked.

  “Nothing,” answered Kitty, her eyes on Ogden. “Are we, darling?”

  Ogden pushed the tiller away, the flash of a smile starting over his face, and he shook his head, his hand loose on the tiller, his head tipped to check the mainsail. Her heart stuttered up in her chest. It was as if she’d stumbled out of the woods of the past year and found him. Here we are. Oh, here we are. Ogden. She raised her arms above her head and stretched, overtaken by this startling, brooding happiness, catching Ogden’s eye and smiled.

  He winked. And she felt it right in her middle. She winked back and pushed herself up on the seat, her heart surging forward with the bow of the boat reaching through the blue chop toward the gray and green humps ahead, slowly now distinguishing themselves into the separate islands.

  “Where are we headed?” she asked.

  “Just here.” He pointed generally to the names marked on the chart. He had anchored it on the wooden bench of the Herreshoff with the aluminum tin of sandwiches and the bottle of gin, and between them she read: Vinalhaven. Swans Island. Crockett’s Island. North Haven.

  She nodded and rested her elbows on the gunwale. The waves slapped against the boat.

  “Ready about.” Ogden eased the tiller and let the sail out, running before the wind so it carried them on a long run forward, fast and forward into the lee of the islands, past the first stony point of Vinalhaven, the largest of them. An osprey nest, heavy in the tallest tree, tilted to the right, seeming to Kitty like a stick figure doffing his hat.

  The boat shivered as they shifted and stalled. Ogden tacked again, and then the wind caught and slowly they slid forward on the angle, arrowing toward the center of the Narrows, the watery passage marked on the chart as a fairly shallow way through. Ogden pulled the sails in tight, and Dunc reached for the oar stowed under the gunwale, clambering up to the bow to push off if they got into trouble on the rocks.

  They nosed forward easily now toward what looked like one unbroken stretch of land until suddenly the Narrows opened and an island sprung free of the low line, uncoiling, its long, rocky beach curving toward the four in the boat. Great chunks of granite made natural causeways down to the sea from the forest hanging at the water’s edge. Along the curve, thousands of smaller granite stones covered the beach with a pebbled hide. And dead ahead, at the end of a cove, a narrow dock extended out from a shingled boathouse.

  Ogden gave a low whistle. “Take a look at that.”

  In one tack, he nosed the boat easily down the lee and into the dock.

  Dunc leaped from the bow, holding the boat while Og released the line for the mainsail. The sail came shuddering down in folds around the boom, the sound like bird wings beating water. Priss uncleated the jib line so the jib sail lowered too. And then it was quiet. After the motion, after the wind on the bay, it was as if they had fallen off the world.

  Nailed to one of the pilings in front of them a hand-lettered sign read:

  FOR SALE—R. CROCKETT

  Behind the boathouse, a grassy slope led up to a large white house perched high on top of a hill, its two chimneys rising from the steep black roof like the cutouts of castles against the summer sky. Unexpected and grand, the house had the serene solidity of having clearly occupied that hill, this lawn for at least one hundred years.

  “But what would anyone do with a place like this?” Priss asked.

  “Own it,” Ogden answered promptly.

  “Own it?” Kitty glanced at him, startled.

  “Why not?” He smiled at her broadly.

  “All the way up here? Everyone’s miles away.”

  “They’d come to us.” He leaped out of the boat, tying the line to the iron ring on the dock.

  “It’s all part of the plan,” Dunc advised her, a conspirator’s smile on his lips.

  “Plan?” She searched Ogden’s face. “What plan? Ogden, what are you up to?”

  He held out his hand for her to come.

  “We can’t just go up there,” she said. “We can’t just go in.”

  “Sure we can,” Ogden urged. “Come on.”

  “But what about the people who live here?”

  “We’ll introduce ourselves,” he said gaily. “Come on.”

  Slowly, Kitty took his hand and stepped over the gunwale and onto the dock. Priss and Dunc slid down from the bow, and the four of them walked up the gangway to the pier. Inside the boathouse, lobster buoys hung from pegs beside coiled tackle lines and lanterns, smelling of wet wood and salt and the sharp bite of kerosene in barrels, clear evidence that someone was using the place. Wooden oars leaned against the wall above an old rowboat turned on its side. The sound of their feet on the old wooden planks repeated the slap of the water on the rocks below.

  They emerged through the open doorway onto the green lawn stretching up to that house at the top. The slate roof cut the blue sky. Eight windows stared down, flanked by dark green shutters. A lilac grew to the side of the door, where granite blocks were set for the front stoop. It was simple and ample, a dream of a kingdom. All of a piece. All of a place.

  “Do you think there’s electricity?” Dunc mused.

  “Or hot water for a bath?” Priss addressed Kitty, slipping her hand into Dunc’s and pulling him forward. The two of them wandered up the hill with the boiled eggs, the tin of sandwiches, the thermos of coffee, and the bottle of gin slung from Dunc’s shoulder in the canvas bag.

  Kitty and Ogden remained at the bottom of the lawn in the shadow of the boathouse. To the left of the house and up a small hill a granite obelisk and the rounded tops of four gravestones rose. A family of graves. She had a short, sudden shock of looking ahead into the years to come, here. The house on the hill, the spruce line behind it, these wide verdant fields whose grasses waved like girls at a fair.

  And Neddy was dead. Her eyes clouded. Neddy would always be dead.

  Ogden wrapped his arms around her from behind, and she leaned against him and felt his breath in her hair.

  “It’s yours if you want it.”

  “If I want it?” She glanced up at him. There was salt caught in the corner of his eyes, which shone sharp blue just then. He had gotten some color in the sail over this morning.

  “I want this place,” he said quietly. “I want this house to be ours. And everyone sailing by would know it stood for us. It would mean something. They’d see it and think, there’s the Milton place. Kitty and Ogden Milton. The Miltons of Crockett’s Island.”

  He looked back down into her face, willing her to shift off all the sorrow and quiet of the last year, willing her forward toward the flank of granite beach, the spruce trees and this light.

  “Come on.” He squeezed and pulled her up the lawn with him. And she felt the shock of seeing forward, how many times they would walk up the hill to that house with their children, and perhaps their children’s children. Ogden’s dream in place. Ogden’s dream right here. And Kitty walked toward the house on the hill, a spot in time she would return to like a stone in her pocket she could reach for and rub, over and over in the years to come.

  Nine

  EVIE TURNED DOWN Bleecker Street, heading home, the thick force of the afternoon recalling all the Junes she had lived through on this street, just this way, the damp heat suddenly dropped like a curtain to walk through—spring done, summer here. And, as
it always did, the city’s summer heat conjured its opposite: the path into the woods on the Island, the fog covering the meadow between the Big House and the barn, the steady call of the foghorn in the bay. All her life that contrast had underscored her summers, the cool patch underfoot. Always, shining there at the end of the heat, at the end of the grime and heavy city nights there’d be the promise of Maine. At the end of the summer there’d be the Island.

  With a pang, she fingered the strap of her satchel on her shoulder, Hazel’s words rankling.

  The Big House needed a new roof. The dock needed new floats. The barn was sinking into the field, foundationless. In the thirty years since her grandparents had died, the place had limped along—beautiful, threadbare, and inexorable in its need, Joan and Evelyn waging a fierce and inscrutable battle over change or improvements of any kind—Joan resisting Evelyn and winning in the end, surviving her sister by a year. But now that she had died, the Island and its upkeep had passed down to Evie and her four cousins, only one of whom had had the wherewithal to go into a profession that made any money. So Crockett’s Island floated up there in Penobscot Bay, curled like a question, or a fist, depending on how you saw it.

  They were caught like flies in amber in the place where time had stopped. There was the tarnished silver ice bucket inscribed with Evelyn’s initials, September 1959, a wedding present. There were the buoy doorstops. The furniture her grandparents had bought in the thirties recovered, repaired—though even that had last been done sometime in the early seventies—but never replaced. The Island collected and then contained their summer days. Seth’s rock collection lined up on the windowsill in the upstairs yellow bedroom, adding to Evie’s cousin Henry’s, which had, in turn, marched beside their uncle Moss’s. Children there rowed boats, climbed trees, picked mussels, ending every summer day cleaned up and carrying the ice in the silver bucket, the Goldfish crackers, and the Scotch, down to the dock at six, where they’d stand ranged along the splintering wooden boards looking down at the white bodies of the flashing fish, while the grown-ups behind them drank as the sun fell into the sea. The Miltons of Crockett’s Island.