The Guest Book

by Sarah Blake

  There was such a deep, abiding sorrow in his face, she couldn’t bear to see.

  “And those friends? Mr. Pauling? Mr. Levy?”

  He took a long while before he answered her. “They are good men.”

  “Who didn’t understand what’s what.”

  He raised his face and studied her. “What is what?” he asked.

  She rose and stood before him.

  “Come,” she said quietly. “It’s very late.”

  He looked up at her. She nodded.

  “Come,” she said again.

  * * *

  OUT ON THE moonless water, Moss was rowing toward the Welds’ dock. He could hear Reg and Len talking long before he could see them. Talking and smoking. Sitting close at the end of the dock, the light of their cigarettes moving up and down against their dark shapes. Moss shipped his oars and watched them, the water around him flat and quiet and calm.

  He could not hear what they said, but the ease and the comfort between the men, the long steady years between them, made it clear. He could never join them. Reg had been right. There were tribes. In that instant, all of what he had been after, all that he had imagined for himself, rose up and fell to dust. What had he thought? That he could write something that would change the world? The song was no more than a schoolboy’s wish—worse, it was a joke—the song leaped its borders; he had been a fool to imagine anything so tidy. He had been nothing but a fool, all along. It was bigger than him. It couldn’t be contained. There was no form for it. He could watch. He would watch. He felt sick. He would watch from a desk in his father’s office.

  And Reg would walk away.

  He shoved the oars back out, took one deep stroke to turn the boat around, and then started to row, hard, down the Narrows between the islands. He rowed his sorrow and his helplessness, pulling through the still water. He rowed Joanie’s white, exhausted face and Evelyn’s protective fury on the rocks. He rowed his mother on the threshold and his father’s doubt. He rowed the thing inside him that he didn’t feel, but had risen to his lips despite it all. Asshole. He rowed, rowing away from what he loved with every stroke, rowing so hard he was upon the rock ledge before he saw it, his oar catching so hard it lifted him out of the boat in one swift instant, his head slamming down on the wood as he fell, fell so hard and so clear into the water, so clear in his last terrified instant.

  Forty-one

  THE MORNING DAWNED bright and blue. Silently, Kitty raised the covers and slid her legs out and stood up. Her bathing suit lay in the top drawer next to her bathing cap, and she slipped out of her nightgown and pulled it on, and then wrapped her towel around her waist for warmth.

  There was no one in the upstairs hall, and no one she could hear stirring below. She walked down the stairs, slipping out into the day. The lawn was a little battered, and the big coolers sat upended by the flagpole. She wandered down the hill into the woods in the direction of the picnic grounds, the dew thick on her sneakers.

  The same disheveled, slightly beaten air greeted her as she moved past the tables, the vases, someone’s slipper left in the grass, to the rocks, to stand and look out at the water.

  Something was caught in the lobster car that had held the beers the night before, some fabric, no—she stopped where she was on the rock—a jacket. Someone’s jacket sleeve was wrapped in the netting. Her legs moved heavily forward. She tried to move forward but felt she was having to lift them over the rocks toward the water’s edge where the thing had washed up. It was a madras jacket.

  “No,” she heard what must have been her voice cry low and thick in her own throat.

  Quick. Quick. He might be down there, caught under there, under the water. She must get him. Quick. Now she was able to move, as if a spring had been released and she had been let fly. She scrambled down the rocks to the open lobster trap, her legs giving way beneath her, and sat heavily down on the granite. The sleeve was empty, she saw. How could she have missed it. So he must have swum free, he must have gotten out of the trap and swum free. She gave a little moan of relief, her breath coming out ragged and hard. Thank god. She sat catching her breath.

  The foghorn on the buoy in the Narrows sounded, and right away after the single note, the long sustained answer from the Vinalhaven ferry passing the end of Crockett’s Island, bound for Rockland. The two worked for her like voices of the place, calming, comforting, the notes of safety. She turned toward the comfort, toward the buoy and the ferry, and saw something broken on the rocks. Something white and thick, the size of a child’s mattress, thrown up on the wide granite face and soaking wet. It was a man in his undershirt, the two arms splayed on either side, but at impossible angles, as if they had been broken off and reattached.

  Forty-two

  THEY BURIED MOSS in the graveyard on the hill behind the house, next to the Crockett stones. A month later, Ogden walked Evelyn down the aisle and gave her away to Dickie Pratt.

  And nothing, Joan realized, looking in the mirror at the doctor’s office after he had given her the news, is as you had thought. She studied her face. Nevertheless, you take the cards you are dealt and you play your best hand. Very well. She turned and pulled the door open, nodding goodbye to the girl at the typewriter in the doctor’s office, so pleased to be pushing the carriage along, typing fast and cleanly upon the blank pages. Very well. Joan pushed out into the autumn afternoon, making her way to meet Fenno Weld in the park where he was waiting, Fenno with his dear deep laugh, his devotion. Joanie. He rose from the bench as she came toward him. She dipped her chin. Let’s not wait, she said.

  Joan married Fenno. They had a baby girl and named her Evelyn, after Evelyn, who kissed her sister with her own new baby, Henry, in her arms. Evelyn, after Evelyn, after Evelyn, after Evelyn, Evelyn murmured, delighted. Fifth in a row.

  In the house on Crockett’s Island, new children grew. Passing through the Thoroughfare, one might catch sight of the Miltons up on the lawn, the children running down the hill, or in the woods through the spruce, clipping branches, or simply walking. There had been that terrible accident after a party, someone slipped and it was said the son had tried to help—and drowned in the doing of it.

  Still, there they were out in their boats, the sisters and their children, at the picnics on the rocks, and in the market in their cutoff shorts and Fair Isle sweaters, old Mrs. Milton with her basket and Mr. Milton in his long-brimmed cap, tacking round the coves.

  There were cocktails on North Haven, or suppers across the way, and as the Miltons returned home in the Katherine through the near dark, skimming over the black water under the open sky, the grandchildren packed in the bow of the boat facing forward, the grown-ups ranged in the stern behind them, there was such calm, such surety. And here it is, Evie thought one night, a teenager beside her cousins, here it is, everything. This moment. She turned her head and found her mother’s eyes upon her and, reassured, turned back around.

  She would never tell her daughter, Joan realized then, her hip resting on the transom, aware of her mother and Fenno sitting in the stern with Evelyn. She couldn’t. It would be hurtful to them all—to her mother, to her father, and to Fenno, who had been so good—most of all.

  Joan stared out across the heads of the children in the bow as the island grew closer. But Evie would have this place. Joan crossed her arms in the wind. Evie would have all this.

  * * *

  AT THE END of the seventies, Milton Higginson was sold to Merrill Lynch, its offices closed at 30 Broad Street, the building Ogden Milton’s great-grandfather had built in 1855. Ogden moved his father’s desk into his new office in the high-rise in the middle of the city, rode the elevator up in the mornings, and settled in behind it. There was no one to pass the desk along to. There was no water, no boats, and nothing to see but the city out of the new windows.

  They buried Ogden the following summer, next to Moss.

  Henry, Evelyn’s oldest, took to wearing Ogden’s sailing cap that year. He was twenty. The old brim had long ago crac
ked and collapsed, and the khaki faded to dun. But it suited him, Kitty thought, watching as he pushed the wheelbarrow down the lawn to collect the groceries, proud of being the eldest, proud of knowing what to do.

  Ogden. Kitty shifted on the bench. That hat. It used to hang on the hook in the back hall. That summer every chair held him in it, every boat had him on it, every shout from across the field crossed in his voice. He had held his seat opposite her so long, the dining room table seemed to list without him, though they set a knife and a fork every night at his place and someone else would sit there.

  Across the way she could just make out Aldo Weld appearing on the dock. He had grown smaller as he aged, though his step was spry. Fanny had died long ago. The old man stood there waiting as Fenno rowed forward in a dinghy toward him. Fenno was a good son, she thought, watching the son ship his oars as Aldo bent and caught the bow. Poor Fenno.

  And when Fenno died very suddenly in the middle of the night eight years later, poor Fenno was what Kitty thought again, putting down the telephone.

  It was 1988.

  They arrived late in the evening that first summer without him. It was the first time they’d had to ask Jimmy Ames to ferry them out to the Island from Rockland in the boat. Ogden had always done it. Then Fenno had. Now Dickie ought, but Dickie couldn’t leave work.

  Kitty had stood at the bottom of the hill looking up at the house in the twilight and stalled. She could see them all—Priss in the circle of Dunc’s arm, Elsa, Willy, and—Ogden. Oh.

  “Come on, Mum,” Joan said, slipping her arm under Kitty’s.

  After breakfast, after the dishes and the putting away, Kitty took up her seat on the green bench, her bad leg raised on a tower of pillows brought up from the boathouse. Beside her she had her binoculars and her book. Evelyn sat in one of the big white chairs on either side of the bench, some needlepoint spread across her lap. Joan stood a few feet away with the garden clippers in her hand, eyeing the lilac.

  There were no boats for the time being. It was quiet in the Narrows. Kitty stared at the water. The day had begun.

  Most of the grandchildren were down on the dock, though Minerva was lying on the lawn, her hair fanned out in the sun. Evie sat beside Kitty on the bench, her knees up like a boy, her arms wrapped around them. Minerva’s legs raised slowly up from the ground in tandem, and back down again, performing some type of exercise.

  What did one do with these two? Kitty wondered. They made no sense to her at all. It was fine for them to go to their fathers’ colleges—but it was gilding on the lily. They were girls. Their place was to adorn, to protect—to guide, by example. Though neither one of them appeared in the least interested in that; both of them were in graduate school.

  “What are you working on, Evie?” Evelyn was threading her needle.

  Evie straightened, sitting forward a little, and started in.

  How she talks, that one, thought Kitty, half listening to her granddaughter, following the dip of a gull over her words. Lacuna in the documentary record—Kitty kept a straight face. Oh, indeed.

  “For instance, this moment,” Evie was saying. “What is this moment? Right now. Something is happening. It’s history in the making, but we can’t see it, do you see? We’re alive and dead all at the same time.”

  She was very pleased with herself, Kitty observed.

  “History?” Kitty broke in. “Never mind history; let that happen to others. These are the best years of your lives, you two. You don’t know it, but it’s true.”

  Someone had said that once. Who? Kitty shook her head.

  “God, Granny,” Min said, speaking up to the sky from her spot flat on the grass. “I hope not.”

  “They are, Minerva.” Their grandmother was firm. “Nothing has happened to you yet.”

  “I know,” groaned Min, flinging her arms wide. “It’s horrible.”

  “It’s the simple truth,” Kitty said swiftly, an unexpected heat rising against her granddaughters. “What’s done—once done—cannot be undone.”

  “But it can be revised, Granny,” Evie said squarely. “It can be revisited.”

  “Revised?” Kitty frowned. “What on earth does that mean?”

  “Freedom,” Evie offered, “to see it in a new way.”

  No one spoke for a minute.

  “Don’t be absurd, Evie,” Joan said quietly.

  Evie turned to her mother, startled.

  “You can’t revise what’s happened. Nor should you. A life can change in a single moment, and from there you simply move forward.”

  “But can’t you redo, Mum?” Evie asked her mother. “Can’t there be many moments? Can’t a life turn and re-turn and turn again?”

  Kitty and Evelyn and Joan all turned their heads and looked at her.

  Evie froze as if she had been caught stealing. She had spoken without thinking, but it was exactly what she had been thinking, what she was working on. It was the first time, she realized, looking back at them, that she felt different, was different from these three.

  “Nothing can be redone,” Evelyn observed at last, pulling the thread through. “Because no one ever forgets.”

  Joan turned around and stared at her sister.

  “Or forgives,” Evelyn continued, looking back at Joan.

  Evie sat very still.

  Kitty rapped on the bench with her knuckle. “Girls.”

  Min turned over and pushed herself up onto her elbows. This was interesting.

  Joan turned slowly away from her sister and stared back at the lilac.

  Evie caught Min’s eye.

  “Girls,” Kitty said, “go on down to the dock and get Henry and Shep and Harriet to help you. We need the mussels. The tide is right.”

  Reluctantly, Evie and Min picked themselves up and started slowly down the lawn, aware of their mothers and their grandmother watching them go.

  “I only—” Evelyn began.

  “Evelyn, leave it alone.”

  Evelyn wove the needle into the canvas and set it down on the grass. Joan put down the clippers.

  Halfway down the lawn, Evie looked back at them and Kitty drew in her breath sharply. There was Len Levy, again. There he was just then, glancing back to find Joan, making sure of her that day. Kitty shook her head. She could go years and forget until her granddaughter would come striding up the lawn, with that same air about her—the world, the world is all mine—a decisiveness that couldn’t be smoothed away, a surety that barreled into every room. And there he’d be again, right here, Len Levy. And that Mr. Pauling.

  And then, with him … Moss.

  Oh. She pushed up from the bench, walking blindly away from her daughters. Dear god, what does it matter? Everything gets through in the end, doesn’t it, nothing can protect us—close all the windows, shut all the doors, pull down the curtains, lock it all out—for here they came nonetheless.

  Moss. Moss at the piano, Moss on the trails. Moss at a dinner party. Moss in short pants. Moss, she thought, and closed her eyes, Moss’s little face looking at her, trusting her as he turned from that open window so many years ago. Where was Neddy? What happened to Neddy? A little moan escaped. She had saved him. She had pulled him back. And then, Moss in the doorway that last night, turning to look at her through the screen. Let me go, he had pleaded, walking down the hill and into the dark. And there he was, in the dark rowing—

  Toward what?

  She stopped in the middle of the lawn, her heart struck dumb with sorrow.

  “Granny?”

  Evie and Min had reached the bottom of the lawn and turned around. Their grandmother was standing halfway down the hill, motionless. Their mothers stood frozen in front of the house. The three women marked a triangle of quiet.

  What had happened?

  The old woman in the middle swayed unsteadily.

  “Granny K?” Evie called, the worry clear in her face.

  Kitty blinked, startled by her name.

  “Granny?” Evie started walking toward her.
<
br />   Kitty gazed at Evie thoughtfully.

  Revise?

  Here

  Forty-three

  EVIE.

  Joan stood at the foot of the bed, waiting. There was light in the room. There were birds. Evie, she said, her hand on the bedpost. Evie, she said looking down.

  Stop, Evie moaned, way down in her sleep.

  Evie.

  Stop, Mum. Stop. I am sleeping.

  Evie, she said, her voice pulling Evie out of the bed at last, pulling her out again, pulling her out of the room and down the stairs and through the door into the morning, out into the morning, out into the dew, their feet wet, their feet moving quickly, quick quick, up the hill, up we go—

  * * *

  EVIE SAT BOLT upright, her throat raw, as if she’d been crying, her mother’s face receding. The room around her was still.

  It was morning. She turned her head. It was morning on the Island. In the pink room. She was here. She slid her legs over the side of the bed and stood.

  When would it end, this dream? She splashed water on her face in the bathroom sink. When would she be free of it?

  In the kitchen, the coffee had been made and a mug put out. The English muffins sat beside the toaster with a knife and the butter. The windows shone. There was a new oilcloth on the battered table. Since the first day in the linen closet, the cousins had worked through the house, touching every surface, pulling out every drawer. The laying on of hands, Min joked. Every dish had been taken from the shelf and washed, every shelf wiped and repapered. Yesterday, they had painted the trim in the dining room and front room, and though there was nothing to be done about the wallpaper, they had glued some of the hanging strips. Jimmy had repaired the torn screens and replaced the warped jambs. There were sheets and towels to be gone through. Mattresses to assess. There were the sails for the catboat to be pulled down from the attic and aired on the lawn. The house was nearly ready for Charlie Levy, for the swims, the sails, and the naps.