The Loveliest Woman in America

by Bibi Gaston

  But the one name I never heard among the stories of the good old days was Rosamond.

  By the 1990s, my father had stopped clipping the obituaries, but it took just a single swig at cocktail hour for me to know he was still mad as hell about his brother. His brother was hard to forget because the stone fortress he’d built on Hurricane Island was visible from practically every point in the Gaston archipelago. One summer, when I was sprawled out like a dead bat in the sun on the lawn on Crotch Island with the Times in one hand and a Chivas in the other, my father interrupted to ask me the same damn question he’d always ask, whether his brother’s house on Hurricane Island was as offensive close-up as it was from a distance. So I admitted having gone over to Hurricane in the mid-1990s with a group of conservationists who found the house unfinished and the condition of the island deplorable. I thought my father would disown me for stepping foot on enemy territory, but instead he said, “Really, tell me more.” I didn’t need to lie to him; everyone knew about the situation on Hurricane Island. For nearly twenty years, parts of the island were an embarrassment to the family and a professional embarrassment to me.

  In the late 1800s, the island had been home to the Bodwell Granite Company, with a population of close to five hundred stonecutting families from Sweden and Italy, who carved granite columns, capitols, plinths, and pavers for buildings and streets in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. After the quarries closed, the island sat dormant for some time before Outward Bound made the island its base of operations. During that time, James Pinchot Gaston had created such a mess on its south flank with paint cans, generators, heaps of construction debris, and abandoned plastic and garbage that nothing could explain or excuse what had happened to Hurricane Island, not in my view at least.

  While Crotch Island had been resuscitated and Hurricane Island looked like the town dump, Crane Island settled into a modest retirement. From the looks of things, Crane was an uninhabited wild island, except for a strange graying structure enveloped in billowing masses of pink rugosa rose. Since the 1960s Shack had stood secure, fending off the tides, demure, but weary of her neighbors. She kept her double-holer windows wide open with one eye to the mainland and the other to the comings and goings on Crotch. My father penned a construction diary on the driftwood wall next to where he slept, recording each summer’s minor modifications and maintenance. He thought it was useless to lock his Shack when he went away; intruders would only break in. So he replaced a typical lock with a twig from the forest. Finding Shack open and delightful, admirers stopped in, leaving necklaces of mussel shells and love notes in bottles. Over the decades, old rusted chains and wreaths of seaweed festooned her walls. Twisted ropes and shards of tumbled glass drifted up to the beach and made their way onto the Gaston family’s umbilicus mundi, the bar, fashioned from a single split log in the shape of an ironing board. Each year, Shack allowed her little beauty to slip, trading beauty for fearlessness and glamour for character.

  My father’s last addition to Crane Island was what he called a self-flushing toilet and what the town office called illegal. A short walk through the forest and over a rise facing the sea, he’d wedged a little driftwood landing between two granite ledges. With that, he installed a driftwood toilet seat, a handy little box to keep the toilet paper good and dry, and a saloon door so one could attend to one’s business in private. Shack’s sanitary accomplice looked sleek and California modern, thanks in part to a triangular tarpaper roof on which my father chalked a name for his entry, “2000.” It wasn’t the year 2000 when he chalked it, but he said that people would eventually come to see his entry to the outhouse competition as futuristic in its simplicity. When I said I didn’t know there was an outhouse competition, he said there were no other entries; no one except he had realized it was a competition. “Oh, so it’s a competition with yourself?” He replied, “You could say that.”

  Older now and less inclined toward ambitious projects, he put his faith in the rhythms of rustication, keeping busy until the bell chimed for cocktail hour, which he usually chimed himself. His ongoing project was the maintenance of a two-foot-wide path around the island’s perimeter that he tended gingerly each summer, nipping a branch here and there to improve the view and keep things tidy. One of his rituals was to assemble the many vinyl buoys that floated up over the winter into a massive pyre on what he called “Styrofoam Beach.” There, he would set off an annual conflagration of acrid black smoke and chlorofluorocarbons that could be seen all the way to the mainland. Returning an hour later, he’d pry a lump of plastic from the sand no bigger than a brick. I questioned the whole operation but he said it was a noble effort. Crane Island would be pristine, he said, even if it killed him.

  In the early summer of 2000, a flock of tiny screech owls landed in the queen palms on the front lawn of the Florida house. After the flock flew off, a single, sickly little owl stayed behind and made a home on the hurricane shutters where I lived with the Irishman. With its ruffled, matted feathers, and haunting groans, I interpreted its sounds as a death rattle. In transition that summer, I decided to pursue my abandoned love, photography on the coast of Maine, where I had studied fifteen years before. All summer long, I kept hoping my father would row up out of the fog to the dock in Rockport, that we’d scramble into his wooden punt and summer would begin. But things didn’t turn out that way.

  When I took the call, I was on the second floor of the Odd Fellows Hall of the Maine Photographic Workshop, looking over the balcony toward what had once been a stage and was now hung with holographic maps of the heavens. Constellations of gods and goddesses danced across a black backdrop of infinite space. Something didn’t feel right; my father never called me, he always just showed up. Between images of the constellations, the world pivoted and spun on the smallest particle of silver. I remembered that the photographer spent the dark winter months in Maine battling depression and stayed despite doctor’s advice to go to a sunnier place. His winters were spent crossing days off a calendar of darkness, waiting for winter to turn to spring, waiting for spring to give way to summer, waiting for summer mornings of what the locals called thick-a-fog to break at midday, giving way to summer afternoons that offered him, as payment for all his waiting, a few precious hours of Maine’s incomparable light.

  I picked up the phone. “Bibi, this is your father,” he said. Of course it is, I thought, what are we doing on the phone? “It looks like I’m not going to be making it up this summer.” “Oh, why? You want to avoid a ‘certain someone’?” He couldn’t not show up, I thought. We can’t miss each other again. Ten minutes could turn into ten years. It was my first summer back in Maine in years and I was waiting for him. His words flooded my ear, rolled around the room, bounced off the ceiling, and landed in my solar plexus. “No, that’s not it. I have a brain tumor,” he said. “Not one of the good ones. I have five months, if I’m lucky.”

  He didn’t need to say anymore. He wasn’t lucky. I wanted him to stop. I felt sick. In that moment, I knew that the story of my father was over and my family’s game of hating him was up. But before I could say anything, he told me that he needed me to relate the news to the few people who should know: my mother; his half-brother, Tom; and his half-sister, Gigi; her mother, Teddy, in California; and my siblings. I told him I would make the calls and we’d figure this out. I started using the we word that day so he knew I was part of his fight.

  That fall, I sprung into action, as if the last five months of his life would make up for the thirty-odd years he’d been absent from mine. I called the Irishman to enlist his support and told him I needed to quickly learn everything I could about brain tumors. One weekend, still in Maine, I took the ferry to North Haven to visit Jennifer Cabot, my father’s cousin, at the rambling Gaston Cottage. I knew barely Jennifer when I blurted the news of my father’s condition. She said matter-of-factly, “Oh, I had a brain tumor—they put in a stent—and my sister Judy died of one, of course, you must know that, so apparently they run in the family.” I d
idn’t know that, I didn’t know anything about these Gastons.

  I spent much of the weekend on the sprawling deck at my great-great-grandfather’s massive shingle manse, where Big Bill’s sisters had once sat overlooking the Thoroughfare, commenting on the Crotch Island Crab. While the kitchen staff arranged triangular cucumber sandwiches on attractive porcelain plates, Jennifer shared bits and pieces of the Gaston family history. For the first time, I learned about Colonel Gaston and his wife, May Lockwood, about Big Bill’s siblings Hope, Ruth, and John, to whom he virtually never spoke. One wall of the house was hung with photos and memorabilia, including an article about Mrs. Gaston’s new hat shop in Boston, and a photograph taken in North Haven at a birthday party for Aunt Higgie in November 1931, a costume event, where Rosamond was in a long, full gown and Big Bill was dressed as a priest.

  Over the weekend, I wondered at the little I knew of my own family, its history of drinking, feuds, and now, apparently, brain disorders. I knew that one person in the Gaston family usually managed to wrangle the inheritance, leaving the others angry and barely speaking to each other except through high-priced attorneys. So I asked Jennifer what she thought of the feuds that distinguished the family, why it always seemed to come down to war. “Oh, I’d always heard that your grandfather was an embarrassment, I suppose you might say he was the black sheep of the family, but,” she said, “the final falling out was over furniture. It ended up in court.” “Furniture?” I said. “That’s interesting, why furniture?”

  I had to catch my breath before deciding whether to disclose my father’s bad behavior on my first state visit. Then I told myself, my father has a brain tumor for God’s sake, what could be worse than that? So I told her, “My father got so angry during his divorce from my mother that he moved all of the furniture out of the Old Mill. We were just children. My mother had to go to court to get the furniture back. Kind of a mean and odd thing to do, don’t you think?” “Probably not,” she said, sounding like such things came naturally. “If brain problems can run in the family, and anger and drinking, I suppose fighting over furniture can.”

  That night I called the Irishman back in Florida to describe the Gaston Cottage and how I’d learned about my family’s brain tumors and furniture wars. We decided that the best thing would be for me to spend the next four or five months with my father. It was the most important thing I could do, he said. He announced that he would be a rock of Gibraltar and we’d make it through the time apart.

  In late September of 2000, my sister staged her wedding on the lawn on Crotch Island. On a cold, blustery afternoon, my father arrived in Rockland with the Moroccan, who decided she’d skip the festivities. My father shuttled over from the mainland and arrived at Crotch Island knowing that, barring a miracle, it would be the last time he’d set foot there again. The wedding festivities took a backseat to the reunion of three people who hadn’t seen or spoken to one another in twenty-five years, my father, my mother, and James Gaston. As if it was the second-to-last act in a play, they were somehow summoned to convene without their attorneys on Big Bill’s bumpy lawn to celebrate something none of them had been particularly good at, marriage. Miraculously, they all showed up.

  That day, I indulged the fantasy that my mother and father would meet each other again on Crotch Island, and that their reunion would be like Odysseus finally returning to Penelope. I would maneuver over the rocks to get the best view, and the scene would unfold. My parents would be together in the same place, at the same time, and behave civilly toward each other. So there it was, in bas-relief like a Grecian frieze that no one saw but me.

  While everyone shivered and looked up at the sky, my father and I stood next to the spruce that he and I argued about each summer. I saw a boat approaching and I said to him, “There she is; that’s Mother on that boat full of people.” Without a moment’s hesitation, he turned like a warrior and headed straight for the dock. He was off to greet the only woman he had ever loved enough to call his wife, I told myself, in the place he said was the greatest setting on earth. As I watched him move down the path, I saw my mother spring from the launch, virtually pushing people aside to make her way toward the only man she’d ever loved enough to call her husband, although she’d also called him a rake and he’d scared her to death for most of her life. Nothing in my imagination prepared me for their running toward each other. No one else was watching, but then no one else knew what I knew, that all that fighting and warring wasn’t about ending the relationship, it was about keeping it alive the only way they knew how.

  They met each other for the last time beneath a little umbrella of spruce. My father would have walked right past my mother on the path had she not cleared her throat as if to say, stop, I know you. He stopped to look at a wisp of a woman he’d imagined for twenty-five years as all-powerful. She uttered his name in a little, gravelly voice he’d never heard before. “Mr. Gaston?” she asked. He responded, “Yes, and you are?” I intervened to stem my mother’s embarrassment and found myself introducing my mother to my father as if they were strangers. My mother laughed. “This is your ex-wife, Frances, my mother,” I told my father. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “Excuse me, you don’t, you’ve, uh, you look, uh, it’s been so long, you are shorter than I remember.” She laughed again, knowing she’d let her little beauty go. In the sound of her laughter, they both felt relief. “You don’t look…” she began, but she wouldn’t say it. The fight had been going on for so long, they had both forgotten what the enemy looked like.

  My father’s half-brother, Uncle Tom, was standing nearby and suggested we go up to the house, where there was a cocktail party, followed by the ceremony, followed by dinner and lobsters, as big as domesticated animals, the way Big Bill liked them, cooked under seaweed.

  That night, in a seedy motel room in Rockland, my father told the Moroccan what she’d missed. He dispensed with stories of the lobsters and the wedding, knowing that no marriage had ended particularly well in the Gaston family. Between big baleful wailing cries of grief, he told the Moroccan that for the first time in over twenty years, he’d seen his ex-wife Frances, the family he’d run from, and the brother who hadn’t been a brother. For the first and last time, people who had spent a lifetime hating one another and speaking through attorneys were in Big Bill’s Great Hall on Crotch. There’d been no rehearsal, but at the last minute, he found himself walking his daughter down the aisle. Later that afternoon, my friend Silvia and I joined my father’s brother Tom to sweep out the Shack on Crane. My father thought he’d live forever, but the end had found him and beat him to the finish line in a way he could never have imagined. He’d never see Crotch Island, the Aung, and Crane or the Shack again. What would become of Aung and Shack?

  The next day, I packed my bags, said good-bye to the islands and drove from Maine to New Jersey to help prepare my father for surgery. It was to be the first night I spent in the Old Mill since I was ten. That fall, yellow jackets staged an invasion of the living room. They followed tiny pilot holes cored by the heat-seeking tendrils of English ivy, nature’s own diamond drill bit. A glioblastoma multiforma grows in the brain the way ivy grows in the landscape, rapacious, suffocating, and undaunted. I had seen ivy blanket fields and forests and comfortably sit there for generations, but with a glioblastoma inhabiting a brain, one rarely survives for long because the brain is bounded by the skull, and very quickly there is nowhere for all that rapaciousness to go. Doctors stage a counterattack they know in 99 percent of cases is futile.

  Sometime that fall I started thinking of the brain as a rugged and beautiful landscape. It was probably when I watched the nurses paint little black dots on my father’s shaved head. In their dulcet tones, the nurses did their best to reassure me, but like my father, I wasn’t convinced. Just as I had learned to survey the land, they were building a three-dimensional topographic map of a brain, and the little black dots were used to calibrate the million-dollar imaging equipment with the tumor that sat in a ravine between the hills
and fissures of his left temporal lobe. His brain wasn’t just mapped to pinpoint the location of the enemy but to extract it from its position without disturbing the neighboring terrain. In the end, though, nothing slows a glioblastoma. Its tendrils make forays into adjacent territory. It masters the topography and gets away. My father had done his research and insisted on the truth. No one, he said, should waste a lot of time heeing and hawing over his “predicament.” There was no wheedling out of this by improvising an escape in the Jeep, not that he wouldn’t try.

  A week or so after we returned from Maine, my father and I went to see a small-town attorney who asked him whom he wanted to be his executor. He said, “Why Patricia here,” and pointed at me. “Who else would I ask?” We looked at each other, and I knew he had no one else. I said I didn’t exactly look forward to the assignment because my brother and sister, I knew, would be difficult. “How difficult could they be?” he growled. “I’m dividing everything in three,” he said. I looked at him, wincing, “The only reason I’m doing this is because you have asked me to.”