The Guest Book

by Sarah Blake

  “It smells like a barn,” Priss said.

  Despite it all, Kitty couldn’t get the image of Goldilocks out of her head. It was so clearly someone’s house. So clearly had held a family, many families, in its rooms. Where were the Crocketts? The light coming in through the windows patterned long squares on the painted floor. She walked through into the pantry, where there were dishes stacked on three open shelves, and farther into a dark kitchen, where a tiny window at the back had lost its glass. The hump of a great rock loomed through the window like the shoulder of a white whale.

  The others’ voices scattered throughout the house, first Ogden’s, then Dunc’s. Kitty wandered over to the narrow stairs to the second floor, resting her hand on the worn knob of the banister before climbing. The rooms above were furnished with beds whose mattresses sagged and split, cane chairs, and china washstands, the white curtains torn. The sink was crusted with dirt, and brown water spat out of the tap when she turned it. Spat and stopped. It had been a long while since someone had slept in the house. Still, the hard, clear light of the midday sun through the side windows along the floorboards had a peace in it. The house waiting. She stopped in the middle of one of the bedrooms and imagined a newly painted bedstead in the corner, fresh curtains hanging in the window, and a bedside table tucked next to the bed.

  She reached and tied the curtain sash and came slowly down the back stairs into the kitchen and out the door over to the flat rock behind the house, where Priss and Dunc had arranged themselves, Priss leaning against Dunc’s knees, her legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles. Ogden came around the other side of the house carrying the bag with the bottle and the tin of sandwiches.

  “No water inside?” Dunc asked.

  “It’ll have to be gin for the babe, I’m afraid.” Ogden set the bag down, pulling out the bottle and the four silver shot glasses.

  “Oh well.” Priss took the one he filled. “Just a smidge.”

  They ate their sandwiches under the shadow of the house in quiet. The crickets played their tune. And the heat and the gin made them all sleepy. Kitty lay down in the grass.

  Ogden’s hand closed on her foot. She opened her eyes, rolled onto her elbow, and smiled at him. He squeezed her foot. She sat up. “Let’s take a walk,” she said. “Come on, you two.”

  “You go on,” Priss answered drowsily. “I’m going to take a little snooze.”

  “Right.” Ogden was on his feet and pulled Kitty to hers, keeping hold of her hand as they set off away from the house toward the crowd of trees that bordered the field at the edge of the lawn.

  The graveyard they had seen from the boathouse lay just up a rise on the way to the woods, and they stopped outside the iron railing that ringed the four Crockett graves. Someone, Kitty noted, had recently mowed around the headstones. Rufus, Ship-Builder, and his brother Increase, Captain and Farmer, were buried at the front of the tiny yard. And then, just behind the brothers, were two others:

  Here lies Louisa, aged 31,

  Died August 31, 1840 and her two children,

  Stillborn

  and

  Henry, b 1846, d 1863

  Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

  Far from home

  They stood a minute, and then Kitty reached for Ogden’s hand and they turned away and through the field. A narrow path appeared, and they entered the cool interior woods, sunlight catching on the green branches. He pulled her closer, wrapping his arm around her shoulder so they walked side by side, stepping over the moss-covered roots spread like tendons across the path.

  Deeper in they went, away from the house, from Dunc and Priss and the world. The moss was so deep it swallowed their footfalls, and though they walked on granite boulders, they made not a sound. For now, it seemed to Kitty that the two of them walked right out of the picture, into a thick, deep dark, so when Ogden paused a moment in the middle of the path, she was nearly breathless with wanting to shut her eyes and have him kiss her right there. Stop time.

  She put her hand on his chest, and Ogden pulled it up to his mouth and kissed her fingers. And with the other hand he pulled her close to him, against him, and she smelled the gin on his breath and smiled under his lips.

  He buried his face in her neck as he stirred against her. She smiled languidly and let herself be kissed. He grew more insistent, holding her tighter.

  She smiled. “Ogden.”

  “Come on,” he said huskily, pulling her forward. She saw the trees thinning ahead and the light of the afternoon bouncing off the water. And there the path stopped. They stood hand in hand at the edge of a flat clearing that sloped down to an apron of granite. It was a turning tide, and the water sucked softly at the rock. One could still slip in and out of the sea easily from those giant rocks, though the black rim of mussels was starting to show.

  He drew her back a few steps into the partial bower of the forest’s edge, a pine screen.

  “Let’s make a little island baby.”

  “Here?” She was smiling.

  He ringed her waist with both hands, pulling her against him. “Here,” he said, and then slowly drew her blouse free of her slacks, and she lifted her arms, letting him draw the cotton over her head. “Kitty,” he said. And she nodded under his lips and his hands, as he unsnapped her bra, her skin alive in the air. She unbuttoned her slacks and let them fall so she stood against him, her eyes closed.

  “Kitty,” he whispered, sliding her panties down and gathering her in. All the longing of the morning rushed through her, and she shut her eyes and went with him.

  * * *

  ONE BY ONE her senses returned. The breeze moved across their bodies, carrying the smell of the sea. They lay together side by side, his hand resting on her hip, lazing in the dappled sun. They had left the dock in Rockland and sailed somehow here, where the world pushed away, and had returned to each other.

  An osprey called and the wind pulled through the tops of trees above where they lay. Ogden’s heart thumped against hers.

  She opened her eyes and saw he was watching her.

  “Hello, darling,” he said quietly.

  She touched his face.

  “Promise me,” he whispered, “promise you’ll never leave like that again.”

  Her eyes filled.

  “Here is the beginning,” he whispered, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Our beginning.”

  “Of what?”

  “Our lives.” He smiled down at her. “All of it. All that is good. We’ll buy this island and begin. Again.” And gathering her close, murmuring into her hair, he began painting pictures in the air. Moss and Joan would learn to sail and pick mussels for their supper. They would dream of this place all winter long, he murmured, this would be their nugget of gold, what they buried inside them, what made them Miltons. And when they arrived again at the start of every summer, when they tumbled off the boat and stood here and saw this house and the dock, and that obelisk in the graveyard—all exactly as they’d left it—they would have cheated Time. Just a little bit. Over and over.

  “Hush.” She cast a glance upward. “You can’t cheat Time.”

  “Life”—he touched her face—“cheats Time.”

  She turned her head. Through the trees, the grassy clearing unrolled green to the great rocks. He was calling her forward, taking her by the hand away from the last year. Away from Neddy. And she must choose. Forward or back; it was very clear. Not which way, but that she must.

  A chunk of her heart dropped down and lodged. She turned back and stared up at Og.

  He leaned and kissed her arm, then rolled and reached for his trousers, pulling them on swiftly and standing up. Sunlight blared above his head, blacking out his face.

  “Come on,” he said, smiling down at her.

  Nodding, she sat up. The air chilled her skin, and pointing to her tossed blouse, she kneeled and found her trousers. Beside them, Neddy’s car had slid from the pocket and settled there in the moss, a yellow spot in the green. A finch on a bough. A child ali
ghting.

  He dropped down beside her. For a moment the mother and father were still. Then, gently, he bent forward and took the car, reached for her hand, and turned it over, placing the car in the cup of her palm, closing her fingers around the yellow metal.

  The tears rising in her throat, she slid the car back into the pocket of her slacks and reached for her blouse, buttoning in silence. Then she stood too and pulled on her slacks, zipping them to the top of her waist.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  She looked up at him and nodded. He wiped the tears off her cheek with his thumb. And then the two of them turned from the water and moved back inland through the trees hand in hand, emerging from the woods into the suddenly blinding sun, where they stood for a minute. There was nobody about. The topmost eave of the house cut a black angle against the sky, and it seemed to Kitty they had been away for years.

  Ogden squeezed her hand. The kitchen door stood open, and they went inside, Ogden pulling the handle shut behind him, already caring, already owning. They wandered back through the pantry, the dining room, and into the front hall that was blue, Kitty now saw, a china blue.

  “But who on earth is that?”

  At the end of the lawn, Priss and Dunc were standing by the boathouse talking to a woman in a narrow skirt and yellow cardigan.

  Ogden stopped behind her.

  She looked up.

  “Ogden?”

  With one swift motion he pushed open the screen door and passed through. The door slapped in its wooden frame.

  Dunc pointed, and Priss and the other woman turned around. Ogden took the steps of the house two at a time, starting down the lawn.

  The woman was slight, her small face shining out of a mass of black curls. She raised one hand to shield herself from the sun, her eyes on Ogden.

  From behind her, a small, exuberant boy dashed out from the door of the boathouse into the silence, laughing, and pulled on his mother’s hand. Then he catapulted past her up the lawn, throwing himself on the grass and rolling back down, his arms crossed over his chest, his delighted cries rising and lowering in tufts of sound.

  Kitty reached for the branch of the lilac that grew there by the door, her gaze faltering at the sight of the quick, small body, the joy barreling down in the sunlight.

  “Mama!” the boy cried, lying at his mother’s feet.

  But the woman didn’t look down at him. Her eyes had never left Ogden walking toward her, his hand outstretched. She stepped forward.

  Kitty watched as Ogden stiffened, hesitating an instant, and saw that this woman was a shadow on the lawn somehow, wanting something, a shadow stretching across Ogden even as he started forward again and took the woman’s hand, pulling her forward, his head bending toward hers as he leaned to kiss her cheek. There was a concentrated coil in his body, Kitty recognized. They knew each other, and quite well.

  Oh. Kitty looked past them toward the water at high tide, lapping the white rocks in the cove, and stood frozen in the doorway of the house. Begin again, he had whispered to her not half an hour ago. She shuddered.

  Harry Lowell emerged from the boathouse with a picnic basket, lazy and watchful as a man who is playing his hand.

  “Hullo, Milton.”

  She couldn’t hear what Ogden said.

  The boy had picked himself up and started running again, his legs pumping in short pants, his arms spread, flying in a Fair Isle sweater through the blue air away from his mother, flying now up the hill toward Kitty.

  No, she thought. No, no. Get away.

  But he was running headlong, laughing, released. Upward, forward, making a low, steady noise in his throat Kitty recognized. A plane. A car. A train. Look at me.

  He stopped dead and stared up at her, the tall woman in the doorway of the old house.

  He had the same crop of wild black curls as the woman down there. The collar of his shirt was half-pinned under the neck of his green woolen sweater.

  “Ich bin Willy.”

  He was smaller and darker than Neddy had been. Not as tall. Though the same waiting expression. The same abandon—

  “Und”—he turned around and pointed—“das ist Mama.”

  Kitty stared down at him. She couldn’t speak.

  The boy wheeled round and ran away again, down the hill back toward Ogden and the woman. And the hungry longing on Ogden’s face as he watched the boy run toward him hit Kitty with the force of a blow.

  She couldn’t bear that the boy was not Neddy. She couldn’t bear that boy running over the grass, where Neddy should have been. She slid her hand into the pocket of her trousers and felt for Neddy’s car.

  “Kitty,” Og called to her. “Come and meet Elsa.”

  Eleven

  A LITTLE OLDER THAN Kitty, perhaps a little older than Ogden, Elsa was not beautiful, Kitty decided. She was not tall. She had curly hair and a fluid, vibrant face, full of silent exclamation, her thoughtful dark brown eyes anchoring a smiling mouth. She would miss nothing, Kitty saw. She had taken Kitty’s hand when they first met with a frank appraisal.

  “You are just as they described.” Elsa smiled at her.

  “Who is ‘they’?”

  “Milton,” Elsa answered, glancing at Ogden, “and Harry.”

  “Elsa is an old friend,” Ogden remarked. “I do business with her father.”

  “When did you arrive?” asked Kitty.

  “Last week,” replied Elsa, watching Ogden drawing Kitty tight against him.

  “And will you be here long?”

  “Not long.”

  “How long?” asked Kitty.

  “Until I have completed my father’s business,” she said, lifting her eyes to follow a fish hawk crossing the open sky.

  * * *

  “I HADN’T EXPECTED to see her,” Ogden answered Dunc, later that afternoon, as the four of them sailed away from the dock. Elsa and Harry and the boy had gone on ahead. “I’d forgotten Harry knew her.”

  He seemed to have completely recovered himself; the moment of shock Kitty had felt in the doorway might never have happened. Kitty watched him, the line for the mainsail tight in his hand. And yet she saw he had been shaken. It was not sexual, not romantic, but something else. This woman hovered somewhere in her husband’s heart.

  “Go on,” Priss prompted Ogden in the boat. “Why is she here on her own?”

  Ogden drew the tiller in close, leaning low below the boom to watch the water line.

  “She’s married to a Jew. I’d guess it has to do with her husband—” Dunc said.

  “He’s been arrested,” Ogden said.

  “Hang on.” Dunc turned all the way around to stare at Ogden. “Bernhard Walser belongs to the Party. He’s the head of German Steel.”

  Ogden pulled his pipe from his shirt pocket, tapping it against the hull. “That’s right.”

  The sail was luffing.

  Kitty kept her eyes on Ogden, who worked the tiller back and forth to catch the breeze.

  “You’d think Hoffman would have been protected.” Dunc’s worry was audible.

  “So that little boy is a Jew?” Priss asked.

  Ogden nodded. “Fully.”

  “Fully?” Priss looked at him. “Elsa’s a Jew?”

  “Her mother was a Jew. But Walser is an Aryan,” Ogden explained. “With money. And clout. So she is protected.”

  “It won’t be enough, Ogden,” Dunc answered. “Elsa is a Mischling.”

  “Let’s hope it won’t get that dark.” Ogden put the stem of the pipe in his mouth and looked at Dunc, clearly troubled.

  “Where is Hoffman now?”

  “Sachsenhausen,” Ogden answered.

  “What is that?” Kitty frowned.

  “A detention center. Just outside Berlin.”

  Dunc held Ogden’s gaze, a pained expression on his face. “It won’t be enough, Ogden,” he repeated.

  Kitty frowned. Her cousin had a taste, approaching a hunger, for tragedy. He always had.

  “See that, Dunc.
You always see black, when brown will do.”

  “Damn right.” He gave Kitty a slight smile. “Though in this case, I’d take the black over the brown.”

  “Ready about,” Ogden called, and pointed them close to the wind, moving them swiftly along the chop, the roof of Lowell Cottage appearing through the trees at the end of its point, surrounded by others of North Haven’s summer colony.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME they emerged onto the great veranda of Lowell Cottage, having freshened up and changed, it was evening. The foghorn in the bay had started calling, and the first tendrils of an evening mist snagged upon the spruce tops. Harry was mixing drinks with his father, Harry Sr., a jovial, solicitous man with a broad face beamed by eyebrows that winged up and away from his open, interested attention. Elsa was nowhere to be seen.

  “What can I get you in a glass?” Mr. Lowell cried.

  “Vermouth.” Kitty smiled. “On the rocks.”

  “Ogden?” Mr. Lowell asked.

  “Something brown”—Ogden had taken Kitty by the hand—“and lots of it.”

  “A man after my own heart.” Mr. Lowell turned to the drinks cart cheerfully.

  They fell into a loose semicircle, the women placed in rattan chairs, the men standing, all of them facing the sea. The sun lowered farther down, a cooling breeze picking up the sleeve of Priss’s dress, lifting and replacing it like a thoughtful suitor. Beside her, Dunc rested his hand on the back of her chair. The broad expanse of the bay lay before them, the mainland in distant view.

  Famously as expansive and eclectic as the facade of the house around him, Harry Lowell Sr. was credited with singlehandedly having procured for the Harvard Library one of the six extant copies of the Gutenberg Bible, the first folios of Shakespeare’s histories, and just lately, a pristine copy of the first printing of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Having now scored the coup of the Walser collection for the summer exhibition, the man was irrepressible. It was to him, Kitty learned, that Elsa had been charged with bringing her father’s library, the reason for her visit among them just then, the old man explained, handing Kitty her vermouth.