The Guest Book

by Sarah Blake

  “Hello.” Kitty extended the other hand. “I’m afraid you’ve come just in time to help with the piano.” She smiled.

  “Levy?” A man Len’s size stood in the open doorway. “Is that you?”

  “Hello, Pratt.” Len nodded at him easily and crossed the rest of the lawn to shake his hand as Dickie came down the front steps.

  “My sister, Evelyn.” Joan pointed to the girl at the bottom of those steps who Len was greeting now.

  Reg saw the same expression on the sister’s face as had rested upon her mother’s. A vague worry, smoothed away.

  “But where on earth have you come from in this fog?” Kitty asked him.

  “Reg!” Moss shouted from the doorway, grabbing Evelyn from behind and moving her gaily down the steps and out of the way. “You came. I don’t believe it! You’ve come!”

  He put his hands on Reg’s shoulders and grinned, elated.

  “You asked.” Reg grinned back at him, shaking his hand, the door in his heart kicked open.

  “That I did.”

  “We heard you needed a hand with a piano?”

  “That we do,” Moss answered him happily, “and a whole hell of a lot more, besides. You brought your camera! Good.

  “Hello, Len,” he added, giving Len’s shoulder a squeeze.

  “All right,” Ogden announced. “I hate to say it, but if we are going to move that piano, we’ve got to start now.”

  “Where’s it going?” asked Len.

  And when Ogden pointed at the barn at the top of the hill, Len didn’t hesitate. He nodded and walked over to the cart, picking up one of the long wooden handles.

  Not to be outdone, Dickie stepped forward, and then Moss and Reg, the four of them grabbing hold of the wagon and advancing, slowly, foot by foot across the lawn and around the corner of the Big House. The mahogany form—still and somber against the gray moving air—gave the procession a reverence out of all proportion to the thing itself, like the elephant in Aida, Joan thought, crossing the vast stage of the Metropolitan Opera and turning its slow head toward the audience beyond the lights. It was fantastic. Impossible. Absurd. She smiled as she and Anne and Evelyn followed the piano bumping slowly up the hill, until they were at the top and the angle softened, and Len lowered the handle and they could wheel the wagon right up to the barn doors and set the handles on the haying ramp to the side of the door—and suddenly it was done.

  “Thank god,” Dickie gasped, and grinned at Evelyn.

  “Good job, darling.”

  Moss threw himself down and spread-eagled his arms and legs in the grass. “Christ,” he sighed.

  Len and Reg leaned against the wagon, catching their breath.

  “All right?” Moss asked.

  “Looked like you might lose the whole thing back there.” Ogden came into view.

  Len straightened up. “Almost did.”

  “But we figured it out,” Dickie corrected him smoothly, “didn’t we?”

  “They did,” Evelyn exclaimed to her father, “they were terrific, oh, isn’t it the nuts, Dad—we’ll have music tonight, after all.”

  Tonight? thought Joan, her eyes sliding off Len’s back and darting away. How could she think about a tonight, or even an afternoon, with him here? What was he doing?

  Ogden grabbed the handle of one of the barn doors, pulling it open on its runners. Moss got on his feet and grabbed the other door, pulling it in the opposite direction, so they all stepped up and into a vast open space, the roof pitched three stories above the floorboards where they stood, the great crossbeams stretching overhead like the spars of frigates, fifty feet up. Inside it was empty, wooden, and yet somehow sepulchral, Moss felt—had always felt. The sudden opening, the stumbling into air and light. Along one side of the barn, where stalls once held cattle, benches had been built to hug the three walls of each stall, and cushioned in a gay yellow stripe, around a table set in the middle of each. Extending down on a long rope from the crossbeam, a lantern hung above each of the three tables. The effect was that of a makeshift lounge, comfortable and rakish all at once. It was the kind of charming arrangement Kitty excelled at. The piano was to go in the corner at the edge of one of these booths.

  The men pushed the piano safely over the doorjamb onto the smooth wooden boards and across the floor, the heavy piece moving easily on its caster wheels, and set against the wall at last.

  Clap. Joan pushed the wooden shutters off the far windows at the end of the barn. Clap, clap. She folded them back and now the gentle gray light of the fog pushed through from the other side of the barn, the room filling with the low glow. She felt the heat of Len’s attention on her back and turned around. And for a moment, the longing on his face was so clear, so naked, Joan wanted to put her hands on either side of his chin and kiss him. The moment ticked. Something was happening right that second. Here she was. There was Len. She felt him in her knees.

  Oh god, what will happen? she thought. What will happen now?

  Moss raised the lid and lowered his fingers down, and the full chord of a middle C rose up. There, he set them again, and the chord repeated. Anne pulled over a chair and Moss sat, without letting his hands lift, running up and down the keys, in shivering sound, one note tripping over the other, up and down, looking to settle, a little variation, a little repetition, this note, that one, he roamed, and the notes laughed into the exorbitant empty possibility around them, up and down the keyboard, finally settling once again on that C.

  Through the kitchen window, Kitty watched them all coming back down the hill. Trailing the men, Joan and Evelyn were walking arm in arm, a habit they had never left behind in childhood, and even now the fact that the younger sought the older’s arm made Kitty glad. She pushed open the screen door and went out to the sunny patch of granite just behind the back door and stood there waiting for the triumphant group to arrive.

  Moss walked slowly, his hands in his pockets, saying something to the Negro man, who leaned toward him, listening intently. He laughed. The other appeared not to hear, perfectly at ease here with his big bones and his broad shoulders; she saw that Ogden set great store in him. He stood a little too tall in his shoes for her. She watched him carefully now.

  And so she saw it then, saw Mr. Levy glance backward up the hill at the girls. As though he had left something behind. Something irretrievable. And the quick, sharp turn of his head, the easy assurance of a great man’s body in the world, checking something behind him while still in midstride coming toward her reminded her, improbably, of Ogden. As though he were his match, his equal, his inheritor.

  No, she thought. I don’t like it—

  “What’s that?” Og came up behind her.

  She flushed. She hadn’t thought she’d spoken aloud.

  “I don’t like lunch to be kept waiting.” She managed to smile at him. “As you know.”

  Thirty-two

  “SO WHAT’S OUR PLAN?” Min asked as they stood on the dock watching the Fenwicks putt slowly off into the Narrows.

  Evie didn’t answer right away. In fact she didn’t have an answer. She watched Anne and Eddie’s boat disappear around the point on Vinalhaven where the Narrows met the larger waters of the bay and wished Paul had seen them standing there in the middle of the big empty room in the barn. He might have understood something that she couldn’t put her finger on. Something other than that the Fenwicks were a lovely old pair. She turned around.

  “Our plan? I don’t know. I thought you weren’t coming until the day after tomorrow.”

  “Yes, well, I’ve come today. Hand me that, will you?” Min had lowered herself into the dinghy tied up to the end of the dock. She pointed to the hand pump that Jimmy Ames kept down on the dock.

  (“Min,” their grandmother had observed to her mother, sitting in the blue chairs above the dock, “likes to get things done around here.”

  “As does Evie,” Joan had protested.

  “Evie likes to think,” Kitty demurred.

  Evie, who had listene
d quietly to this kind of conversation shuttled back and forth between her grandmother and her mother and her aunt all her childhood, the three women totting up the children—who was this, who was that, what this one had, what the other did not and never would—and who had never once let on that she heard, turned around on the dock and stared at her grandmother. She was seventeen. In two weeks she would leave for college. Enough, she thought to herself hotly, was enough.

  “Hello there.” Her grandmother had answered Evie’s stare mildly.

  And Evie, who had not yet learned that venom is best defanged by calm, had thought somehow she had won. It was only much later she understood that she had been handled.)

  The water sluiced from the pump out of the bottom of the rowboat in a dirty stream. For a long while the two cousins stood in silence, the regular, even slap of water hitting water between them as Min emptied the boat of its winter bilge.

  “How did we get here, Min?” Evie asked quietly.

  Min didn’t look up. “How do you mean?”

  “Here. To the end of the Island.”

  “We ran out of money. Full stop.”

  Min stood with the pump between her legs, the long hose trailing off the gunwale into the water, and started pumping again. The water burbled out once and then gushed in a thick, steady stream over the side of the rowboat into the sea.

  “That’s it?” Evie sat down on the end of the gangway and watched. “I can’t help thinking there must have been a starting point where it all began to go wrong, when we started to lose this place from under our feet.”

  Min looked up at her, curious. “Why do you want this place so badly?”

  “Why don’t you?” Evie stared.

  Min held her gaze a moment and then looked back down at the pump.

  “We didn’t lose it, Evie. We made other choices. Choices that don’t involve making money, for instance,” she added wryly.

  “Except Henry. He can afford to buy us all out.”

  “Henry?” Min kept pumping. “Henry is a fabulist.”

  “Is he?” Evie asked. “Was he making up what he said about something your mother said my mother did? Something that happened?”

  Min looked at her. “Would it make it easier if something bad had happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “Something we were all being punished for?”

  “In a way, it would.” Evie nodded.

  “It would mean that things don’t just come to an end. It would be part of a drama, in some way or another. With a meaning.”

  Evie looked at her. “You sound like Paul.”

  Min raised her eyebrow, diverted. “How is Paul?”

  Evie folded her arms. “Paul is fine.”

  Though we may not be, she thought.

  Min looked back down and started pumping again. “Let me tell you something: there are no hidden secrets that will burnish our story, nothing romantic or gothic or whatever the hell flavor you want. Life is simply this. Just this. Two people.”

  “Arguing?”

  “Arguing, sitting together. Making love. Not making love. It’s always this, ordinary and simple.”

  Evie studied her. “You realize, don’t you, that you may be the only shrink on the planet who has come to the conclusion that life doesn’t revolve around untold secrets. That life is caught best by its—surfaces.”

  Min shook her head impatiently.

  “That’s what I’m trying to say, Evie. This is not a surface. This is it. But no one wants to admit it. If I’ve learned anything at all in all these years of listening to people, it’s that the urge to see causality, the need for A to lead to B, and then, blindly and without fail, to C, is stronger even than the urge for sex.” She looked up at Evie with a broad grin.

  Evie smiled back.

  Min shoved the lever down on the pump to clear it, shaking it dry. “It’s just the end, that’s all. Our time is up. We’re history. Toast.”

  “You sound glad.”

  Min turned around and looked at her. “I suppose I am. I mean, look at it. We could limp along like this—killing the place teaspoon by teaspoon, this belongs here, that belongs there. We don’t replace the teapot, we don’t use the floats; if the roof leaks, put a bucket under it and move your chair. We could do all this wryly, gaily as we were taught. Oh, never mind. Oh, don’t bother yourself about me. Oh, I’ll be fine. Just fine…” Min’s voice trailed off. “Or we could sell it. We could let it go. We could let it go. And we could move on.”

  “Then who would we be?”

  “Ourselves.” Min shrugged. “With a little more money.”

  Evie followed her cousin up the gangway and into the boathouse, where Min tucked away the pump. The wide rectangle of the boathouse doorway framed the Big House. The lilacs were in bloom beside the door. A fish hawk lifted off the top of one of the spruce by the barn. How could they let this go?

  When her cell phone rang in her pocket it took several seconds before she registered the sound.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Mom.” Seth’s voice curled through the phone.

  “Hey.” She smiled, and nodded at Min, who kept going up the hill.

  “How’s the Island?”

  “It’s good.” She watched Min touch one of the limbs of the lilac before opening the screen door. “Great.”

  “Foggy?”

  “Not a cloud.”

  “Okay.”

  She waited.

  “Okay.” He yawned. “I just wanted to say good morning.”

  “It’s almost lunch.”

  “Mom.” He was patient. “Are you familiar with the concept of summer?”

  “I am familiar with the concept of sloth,” she teased. “Anyway, sweetie, hearing your voice is the best thing ever.”

  “God, Mom, I hope not.”

  She smiled. “Is Dad there?”

  “Yup. Do you want to speak to him?”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Bye, Mom. I love you.”

  “Love you too.”

  Two lobster boats raced through the Narrows at full throttle, heading for the wide waters at the end of Crockett’s, the turrets of their radars flashing through the gaps in the trees. Min was clipping blooms from the lilac out front. She did look like their grandmother, Evie thought.

  “Hey.” Paul came on. “How is it? How are you?”

  Her throat closed at the sound of his voice.

  “Haunted,” she answered.

  He was quiet.

  She cleared her throat. “It’s okay.”

  “Okay?” he asked.

  “Min’s here,” she said, lowering her voice.

  “That’s good,” he answered. “She can help.”

  “I don’t really want her help.”

  “It’s a big job.”

  “Yeah.” She didn’t want to talk to Paul about this. She didn’t want to hear it was a big job and Min was a big help. She wanted him to understand something else—that she was standing in the boathouse door looking out at the yellow grasses waving under a midsummer sky, the Island around her. And that when she was here, here was all there was. That was what she wanted to say, though it said nothing. Words said nothing at all, at times. Words were just empty boxes stacked on a shelf.

  “Did you tell her about the photograph?”

  “Which photograph?”

  “Which photograph.” Paul was incredulous. “The one I showed you.”

  Evie straightened. “No.”

  “Why not?” Paul pressed.

  Because, Evie thought. Because I don’t believe it.

  “What would it explain?” she asked.

  “It doesn’t have to explain anything.” Paul was impatient. “It’s a fact. Min might have something to say. She might have heard something growing up.”

  Evie didn’t answer.

  “Evie, this is a big deal—”

  “All right,” she said. “It’s a big deal, all right. I can see that.”

  He didn’t answer.


  The phone was pressed so tight against her cheek, it hurt. “Paul?”

  He let out his breath. “I don’t know what you see sometimes, when it comes to that place, or your family up there—”

  “He was not a Nazi sympathizer, Paul.”

  “I’d want to know for sure. I’d want—” He stopped himself.

  “Tell me this, Paul. Explain this,” she pushed back at him, her voice catching. “Why do I feel I have to hold on to it—this place, all of it—at all costs?”

  He was quiet.

  “Evie,” he said so gently, she closed her eyes.

  He stayed with her, on the other end.

  “Listen,” he said, after a little, relenting. “I’ve been digging around on your Mr. Pauling.”

  “He’s not my Mr. Pauling—” Evie drew in her breath. “Wait.”

  “What?” Paul asked.

  “This morning, Aunt Anne was here, and Uncle Eddie mentioned him.”

  “By name? What did Anne say?” Paul pushed.

  “No, no. It had to do with the piano in the barn.”

  “And?”

  Evie frowned. “We were looking at the piano, and Eddie remembered ‘the Negro,’ as he put it.”

  “That’s it?”

  “No,” Evie realized. “The way he said it, I thought he meant that Pops had a black man working here, but Eddie corrected me. Apparently, he was a guest.”

  “It could have been Pauling, then.”

  Evie nodded. The thrill in his voice was taut. She could see him holding the phone, his elbow sticking straight out in his excitement.

  The sun splintered on the water, bouncing in light pockets in the waves.

  “You would have thought you’d know about a black man coming onto the Island,” he said.

  “Yeah, well.” Evie was wry. “Same old story—isn’t that what you were telling me and Daryl that night you got back from Berlin?”

  “How’s that?’

  Hazel’s word rose up in her head. “The invisibles.”

  “The invisibles.” She heard his smile. “Market that one—the unsung action heroes.”

  “Unsung,” she said, and smiled back, “doesn’t even begin to describe it, and I can’t claim it. It’s Hazel’s.”

  “Riffing off Ellison,” Paul remarked.