The Guest Book

by Sarah Blake

“Kitty? Mrs. Hoffman?”

  “Coming,” Kitty called back. Though she did not move.

  Behind her, the wicker creaked as Elsa sat forward.

  “I have seen how you’ve watched Willy.”

  Kitty drew in her breath. For there was Neddie turning on his pillow in his little bed, sleepy. There was Neddie, Good night, Mama. There he was asleep in her arms.

  “Take him, Kitty,” Elsa said, low and fast, bowling the three words into the quiet.

  “I beg your pardon?” Kitty turned.

  “Take him.” Elsa reached across Willy and put her hand on Kitty’s arm, her face white. “Keep him. Can you keep him from the war?”

  The war? Kitty was speechless, standing before Elsa. “There is no war,” she heard herself answer.

  “The war that is coming, the war that will take us all,” Elsa insisted. “He is the same as yours.”

  The same? Kitty stiffened. Neddy was blond and tall, with a smile he tossed at the world like a coin, everything this boy was not, this one who was dark and slight—and a Jew.

  “But he is not the same. He is not at all the same.”

  The two women stared at each other.

  “Where would he sleep?” Kitty asked.

  “Where would he sleep?” Elsa repeated, bewildered.

  Kitty flushed. “Ogden and I wouldn’t know what to do with him. Surely you’d want him to be with people who knew better how to raise a—”

  “Oh.” Elsa gave a shudder of comprehension. “That’s it.” She hugged her boy toward her, as if Kitty could hurt him, as if she were hurtful.

  And all the stupidity of the last year rose in Kitty, all the replies to all the people who had imagined they understood, all that she had folded and boxed and shoved away rather than taken out and waved, shaken free in front of them—rose in Kitty now as she faced this woman who dared to imagine she knew anything at all about her.

  “That’s not it. Nothing is it,” Kitty retorted. “How dare you turn me into that. You don’t know what you ask.”

  “How dare I?” Elsa rose slowly, with Willy heavy in her arms. “I dare everything. I dare it all—all.” Her voice trembled. “While you go around buying islands, kingdoms in the sea.”

  “Kitty?” Ogden stood in the doorway.

  “For god’s sake, it’s not so simple.” Kitty was fierce.

  “But it is.” Elsa looked at her, her voice catching. “It’s very simple. It always is. And the right hand pretends it does not see what the left hand does.”

  Then she turned and without a word walked past Ogden into the house, leaving Kitty standing there on the dark veranda, shaking.

  And in the morning Elsa and Willy were gone.

  Twelve

  THE MILTONS HAD the big white house painted, had the spruce trees that marred a view to the water cleared, planted geraniums and daisies in the old sheep’s corral, and arrived the following summer with Moss and Joan and the new baby, Evelyn—our baby of the rocks, as they thought of her—followed by their nurse, and Jessie, the cook. Moss darted like a sparrow straight off the boat onto the dock, running, laughing up the hill, released onto that wide green, and Joan not far behind him. It was more beautiful than Kitty remembered. The broad white rocks, the dark woods whose trees hung with a light green moss the color of a witch’s hair. Everywhere was magic for the children. Ogden had been right.

  They passed through the boathouse and onto the lawn, walking slowly up the hill, Ogden pushing the loaded wheelbarrow. And as Kitty approached the house again, there in her mind’s eye were Priss and Dunc, standing in the shadow of the great roof as they were last year, Dunc laughing, holding Priss tight against him. And when she reached the house herself and stood on the granite steps, turning round, there was Elsa at the bottom of the lawn, and Willy rolling down the hill, his laughter catching.

  It would always be that first day here, Kitty realized with a start. Every arrival, every year would have them in it. The island would hold them all.

  “Mum!” Moss came round the side of the house with a rock the shape of an arrow. “Mum!” he cried. “Mum, look!” And there was her boy. She smiled at him.

  They painted the walls white and the floors gray, kept what furniture of the Crocketts’ was usable; they slept on new mattresses and sat in old chairs, and ate that first summer off a set of china they had found stacked in the attic under the wide rafters. Kitty planted rhubarb and lettuces between the granite ledges behind the house, and What a marvel friends from the city cried as they walked up the lawn. What a knack you have.

  Not at all, Kitty would demur, standing in the doorway, pleased.

  Mornings, the sea air stole through the open windows with the first light, hovering along the beadboard in the bathroom, upon the scrubbed linoleum on the kitchen floor, pulling the Miltons awake, the first sound that greeted them the single foghorn’s note far off in the bay. And the summer days proceeded as if by sorcery. Lobsters were delivered into wooden crates tied to the dock every evening, and bacon onto the dock every morning with the milk. The Miltons woke and descended to the smell of eggs and toast, sharp coffee, and went out immediately into the sun if there was sun. They sailed. They climbed along the great rocks, found picnic spots. Swam in the cove. Knitted. Rowed across the narrow Thoroughfare to walk. And at twilight, they gathered again at the dock, or down on the rocks at the picnic grounds, and drank bourbon and vermouth, and cracked nuts. Darkness didn’t fall up there, it took its time, it ceded glory to daylight, which lingered, longing to stay.

  They became the Miltons of Crockett’s Island. It set them apart, it marked them. In the living rooms of Manhattan, on the tennis courts of Long Island, the island, their island, clung round Kitty and Ogden Milton with an enhancing glow. And though the city claimed them every winter—the dinners, the dances, nights at the theater, Ogden leaving every morning and returning, school shoes, school, the boy and the girls descending in the elevator—one of them could come round a corner in January and a shaft of light through the library window on the green sofa recalled the dark, deep green of the woods. The Island sounding through their city life like the beat of a drum. The Island like a bell.

  So the days rose up, stretched wide, and unrolled into years. June after June, the house was opened by Crockett’s daughter, Polly Ames; the white organdy curtains starched and returned to flank the windows, the flies swept from the windowsills, the window glass wiped of the salt blown up from the sea’s winter rages, and Mrs. Milton’s guest book sent from the city, unwrapped, and placed on the table in the front room, ready for the new year: 1938. Crockett’s lobstering gear stored in the boathouse rafters gave way to white sails wrapped around mahogany booms. A deeper well was dug. 1939. The curtains blew in and out on the breeze and the fog drifted across the lawn, and when the Milton children tumbled off the boat each summer, they saw again the obelisk of Crockett’s gravestone, the crooked ridge of spruce, the fish hawk’s nest cradled in the top of the tallest tree, as it always was.

  And when Kitty turned on the threshold each September, pulling shut the door against winter in the house—the unimagined winter—there was the tug in her heart: Will we return?

  (Her eye fell upon Ogden’s khaki cap hung on its peg after yesterday’s sail. Should she put it away?

  It hung there, the long brown bill of the visor like the beak of a duck. She turned. Left on its hook it was a promise—a sail always in the offing. Tomorrow. The next day. Or the next.)

  * * *

  AND IN THE house, the children grew. Here they ate breakfast in the fresh mornings, bare feet kicking at the wooden legs of the chairs. The oven baked and went cold, the dishes were washed and rinsed and stacked in the drainer. Someone in the front bedroom upstairs might shout, and the pair in the front sitting room trying to read grumbled and poked at the old stove. The house held their place. Here was the spot at the turn of the stair where Evelyn tripped that morning and gave herself a nasty bump. (But no one heard her—they were all outside—though s
he cried and cried. And after a little while she had pulled herself up on the banisters, wiped her nose, and went on slowly down to the bottom.) The stair remembered, the stair remained, so that as she grew, Evelyn hurried past the spot as if it could hurt her, without remembering why.

  There was the summer Moss built a shack of driftwood and ropes, directing the girls to gather mosses and shells for the windows, and Joan’s chimes hung from a lobster pot washed up and flickered in the breeze, the shells clacking. At night in July, in the dead middle of summer, every window pushed open through the short hours of the dark, Joan and Evelyn lay in the twin four-poster beds asleep and awake—it was so hot—the dark undersung by the moan, the endless lonely note of the foghorn. And then, in the quiet right after, the sea pulling back over the pebbles of the shore. Rocks and sound. Sleep. Joan turned again in her bed.

  There was the war going on, over there. Mrs. Ames’s boy was over there.

  Across the Narrows there was a boy named Fenno Weld. He came with his parents. He’d row over, and the three Miltons would look up and he’d be standing, waiting. Hello, Weld, Moss would say. What’s doing?

  There was nothing to do and not enough time to do nothing in. Day after day. Joan made a map of her father’s paths and the four children named the great broad central path down the middle of the Island the Broads. The round-the-Island loop was named Circle Puck.

  Why Puck? fumed Evelyn, already the one of the three who always asked why, though perhaps it was just a sturdy insistence on the literal, the steadying demands of what was real. Why not? Moss answered, paying her no attention.

  Why not? Why not take the boat out at midnight to the center of the Narrows, lay there with your head in the triangle bow seat and watch the night sky heave itself down in great billows, shooting stars dropping and racing, the black electric with motion. Why not paint a pale blue binder of rocks along the picnic grounds. Why not? thought Joan.

  After the war, after the rationing, Ogden brought a generator from the mainland and installed it in one of the chicken hutches on the granite ledge behind the house. And then that year, and the next, there were parties. Then there was light pocking the summer air. Moss brought college boys, and there were girls with short hair and bare legs who talked Plato and played tennis and threw cardigans around their sunburnt shoulders and went down to the dock where there were drinks every night at six. And there was singing. There were square dances in the barn up the hill from the Big House, there were charades in the front room lasting late into the summer nights, and friends clapped through the screen door into the darkness, turned out into starlight, the sound of low engines and women called one to the other across the night water. There were moonlight rows out to the middle of the Narrows, there were morning swims, and fog-bound, drifting sails.

  Summer nights along the Thoroughfare, the Big House shone light from all eight windows facing front, and one could see it from Vinalhaven, if you were on a boat and coming around the point. Those lights shimmered on the dark and, stretching out, seemed to promise nothing but still water ahead. Nothing but light and water and clear sailing all the way across the broad blue of the fifties. Though looking back, everything lay just under the surface, just under the skin.

  * * *

  THERE, MRS. AMES thought, taking the first of Mrs. Milton’s summer packages wrapped in brown paper and tied firmly with knotted cord from Frank Warren in the post office. Mrs. Milton’s guest book. She placed it in the basket of the curtains ironed and ready to be rowed out to Crockett’s. It was still cold. She pulled the sheets off the horsehair sofa, the three stuffed chairs, eaten, she saw, by mice, and moved to the dining room, where the chairs were pushed in tight against the broad table, at attention. “At ease,” she muttered to them. Years ago, her son had come home with a piece of France in his leg. He’d been running, he’d said, running in the dark and the rain one night, that’s what he remembered, he said, the rain, and he was going to make it to the edge of the field, to the barn they were all making for, and he was nearly there, nearly there, when the barn exploded into the air, the beams javelining out at all angles, laying waste to the boys around him. He’d never run again. At ease, he tried to tease her back then. My boy. She laid the dark green leather volume stamped with the new year on the table in the front room by Mrs. Milton’s Morris chair and shut the door. My poor boy.

  It was the first of June, 1959.

  A Cappella

  Thirteen

  “HERE,” JOAN MILTON PRODDED, “right here.”

  Fenno Weld glanced at her, dubious.

  “Go on,” she said, coming to a halt at the edge of the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. “Test me.”

  The day had been a scorcher. In the park, the heat smelled of grass, and through the shade and the trees’ slow shifting—in the flash of silver Buicks, a blue Pontiac on the avenue—the city appeared to her distant as a bright river.

  He fastened his attention on a point past her shoulder, too uncomfortable to look directly at her.

  “Cunt,” he began.

  “Cunt,” she repeated, keeping her voice even, toeing the pavement of the path.

  “Cock.” He grew bolder.

  “Cock,” she said.

  “Slick,” he countered, dropping his eyes to rest on hers.

  “Slick,” she managed, feeling the hot flush rising in her cheeks. “Damn it,” she chuckled.

  Fenno’s expression softened, curious. “You balked at slick? Why?”

  She shook her head and crossed her arms.

  “Why?” he pressed.

  She shrugged.

  “You’re blushing,” he said, studying her.

  “Am I?” She raised her face. “That’s no good.”

  “Exactly my point, though.” He was earnest. “Adjectives are the triggers. Pull that trigger and it shoots, it hits you in the heart. But Cunt. Cock. Prick. Clit. Just words. Just bullets. Nothing.”

  “Filthy bullets,” she pointed out.

  “Filthy bullets,” Fenno agreed. “But only because someone has led us to think so. Lawrence called the obscenity watchers ‘censor morons.’”

  “He also thought a woman who was not a bit of a harlot was a dry stick,” Joan observed, “which seems a bit much.”

  He nodded, a little deflated.

  “Go on.” She raised her cheek. “I’ve got to get home.”

  Fenno leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. He smelled of cigarettes and aftershave.

  “So long,” he said.

  She wrinkled her nose at him as he pulled away, nodding her goodbye, then stood a minute watching him go off. Tall and loose-hipped, he walked as though he had never quite taken possession of his body, as though he had rented it. His voice was very deep. She remembered the summer it had changed. He hated attention, and that voice mixed with his dark curls could bring a room to a halt. He’d spent most of that summer in a furious silence.

  She turned away toward the edge of the park. Fenno Weld was right in every way, which made him wrong. He was, she reflected, eager—too ready to step up, to step in and offer help, an arm, a cigarette, a drink, too attentive. She recognized this trait in most of the boys she’d grown up with, knew that they simply didn’t have a choice—Moss had been raised to do the same.

  Though Moss had something else, she thought. Something hidden, some secret place he seemed to go to and visit and emerge from, slightly changed. It was his appeal. He promised the same world they all lived in, seen anew. One never knew for certain what he’d make of anything.

  Poor old Moss, she thought reflexively, crossing out of the trees, the jig is up for him.

  It was the beginning of the last real summer, “the end of the beginning,” as her father was fond of quoting Churchill. The fall would touch off the new part, the next part for all of them: Evelyn was getting married, Moss was going to start work for Dad at the firm, and she had finally convinced her parents to let her take the job she had stumbled into.

  The traffic ran swiftly
down the avenue as light after light turned green. She walked quickly, keeping in the shade.

  “It’s just typing,” Joan had replied when her father had asked. “But it keeps me busy.”

  “Why on earth would you want to type all day?”

  “Pin money.” She’d smiled up at him opaquely.

  “I cannot make sense of the feminine mind.” Ogden Milton had regarded her. “No amount of school appears to give a girl reasoning.”

  But she had carefully and clearly been able to argue her case, and he had come around, a fact which she totted up on her side of the ledger of quiet triumphs for 1959. Just yesterday, she had signed the papers for an apartment in a brownstone on East Eighty-first, one block from the Metropolitan. The key lay at the bottom of her pocketbook, and nothing gave her more satisfaction than that little piece of metal. She could close a door and lock it. It was all hers.

  Twenty-five years old, in a wide skirt and a narrow cotton blouse belted at a slim waist, she could have been any one of a number of girls who had come out at the Plaza, gone to college at one of the Seven Sisters, and now came in and out of the city for some fun. But she wasn’t. She had gone to Farmington like her mother, Kitty Milton, sung the school songs, worn the white dress, and tossed her daisy bouquet into the air, just as her mother had done—and her mother before that. But Joan Milton was not her mother, nor her grandmother. She was determined about that. Life stretched wide before her, and she meant it to be interesting. She meant to do something purposeful in the world, since she couldn’t marry.

  Her steps slowed as she slid that thought away and pulled out the next. It couldn’t be helped. She couldn’t have children because of her condition. She was barren, the doctors agreed. And so she needn’t choose. The choice had been made by her body, her incorrigible body. A man expected a wife and children to put in a house. And she couldn’t. That was that. It was unfair to ask any man to give that up. So she wouldn’t marry.