The Summer Wives

by Beatriz Williams

  “It’s the funniest thing.” Johnny wiped away the sweat on his temples with his thumb. “Get this, Mrs. Goring. The boys in the U.S. Marshals office, my bosses and Frank’s bosses, they said—once we made our initial search, mind you, turning up exactly nothing—we couldn’t station more than two men on the Island until after October the first, not unless we had reasonable, specific proof that the fugitive had taken shelter in a particular location. Now, I don’t know where the bosses got their orders. I guess some pretty important people spend their summers here. Don’t want to have the place crawling with uniforms, spoiling the view, I get that. But for Chrissake, he’s a murderer! He murdered one of your own, that Hugh Fisher. I mean, wasn’t he your stepfather? The father of that blond broad over there?” He pointed to the meadow, where the Players trooped steadily across the grass toward the sea. “I mean, I don’t care if you were screwing the kid that night—”

  I lifted my arm and smacked him, huge and loud, the way Carroll had taught me to do before the camera. Except this time, I actually hit the fellow. I caught a glimpse of his red, shocked face before he reached out and snared my arm and hauled me up to his chest.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, lady? Who the fuck do you think you’re hitting? I am a United States fucking Marshal, do you know what that means?”

  I stared up at him furiously. “Sure I do. It means you can’t go around treating a woman like filth, when it’s her tax dollars paying your salary, her safety you’re supposed to be protecting—”

  The rattling of my teeth cut off the rest of that sentence, as Johnny yanked me into place and lifted his fist. Quick as a boxer, or maybe a boxer’s manager, Frank snatched Johnny by the shoulders and hauled him back. “Cool it, all right? Just cool it. What the hell are you doing? You want to get us kicked off the case? Stick both our careers in the goddamned crapper?” He let Johnny go, and Johnny wheeled away a few paces, running his hand through his hair. Frank looked at me. “I apologize for this fellow, ma’am. We’re both a little—you got to understand, it’s been the most—the craziest case, all summer long. Tempers get a little short, you know? All right, now, Johnny. Have yourself a smoke and cool off. Tell the lady you’re sorry.”

  Johnny shook his head and mumbled into the gravel. Reached into his jacket pocket for a pack of cigarettes or something. Frank put his hand on the back of his sweating neck and watched his partner for a second or two. Without looking at me, he said again, “Tempers get a little short, that’s all, ma’am. I apologize.”

  “That’s quite all right. I understand. You’ve got a job to do, of course. I don’t blame you for that.”

  “That’s kind of you.”

  “But I really must be on my way.” I tilted my head in the direction of the beach. “I’m directing a play, as I said. Things are a little hectic.”

  “Of course, of course. I’m a fan of yours, by the way, Mrs. Goring. Should I say Thomas? A devoted fan, ever since that—that one with the Frenchman, right?—the Frenchman who turned out to be a Nazi.”

  “At the Corner of Rue de la Paix,” I said.

  He snapped his fingers. “That’s it. That was some flick. Your husband directed that one, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “You know, I think I saw him on the ferry this morning. I might have been mistaken.”

  “No, that was him, all right.”

  “He’s not giving you any trouble, is he, Mrs. Goring?”

  “None at all.”

  “Because I thought I saw him leaving your place in a hurry, later this morning.”

  “That? He’d just remembered an urgent errand elsewhere.”

  “I see. I guess that happens, from time to time. Well, if he gives you any trouble, you let me know, Mrs. Goring.”

  “I certainly will, Mr . . . ?”

  He held out his hand. “Santorini. Frank Santorini.”

  “Mr. Santorini. Thank you. I’m so glad we had the chance to meet. Now if you’ll excuse me. Mr . . . er, Johnny?”

  The other man was staring in the direction of the unseen beach, smoking his cigarette in fierce, short drags. At the sound of his name, he eyeballed me over his shoulder.

  “Thank you for your time,” I said. “I assume you’ll be watching the party from one of your listening posts, or whatever you call them? Stakeouts?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Frank Santorini. “We’ll be right there on the ledge above, watching everybody get tanked. Right up there if you decide to change your mind. Something maybe jogs your memory.”

  “How convenient. I’ll be sure to let you know. In the meantime, I certainly hope you enjoy the play.”

  Johnny swore and strode off toward the white Corvair.

  “I’m sure we will, ma’am,” Frank said softly, watching his partner go. “I’m sure we will.”

  5.

  We opened our scene just as the sun touched the horizon, and everybody had a drink in one hand and a smoke in the other. It’s better that way, don’t you think? You’re prepared to like anything when you’re comfortably sauced. I think Tom was counting on me to star in the play myself, but I only took a bit part in the beginning, as the boatswain. I wanted to shape the production, not perform it; I wanted to see if I could teach somebody how to act, how to be. As I gave the signal to Miss Patty and Miss Felicity to light the torches around our sandy stage, as I motioned Hugh to begin beating the baking pans with a large metal spoon, as he set about his task of turning cookware into thunder, I observed the rapt eyes of the audience and the anxiety dropped away from my belly. Boatswain! called Doris the sculptor, in her heartiest voice, and I strode forward on my sea legs and said, Here, Master. What cheer?

  Just like that, we sailed a ship together, caught in a terrible storm, all those hundreds of us gathered on Horseshoe Beach that evening, the twenty-fourth of August, year-rounders and Families alike. A nice way to finish off the summer, if you ask me. A nice way to end with a bang.

  6.

  I spotted Carroll about halfway through the performance, as Prospero and Ariel were deep in conversation. He sat in the sand near the back of the crowd, still wearing his pale suit, though he had taken off the jacket and slung it over his shoulder. From his face, I couldn’t tell his opinion of the proceedings; it was too dark, the sun had nearly sunk, and anyway he always took the same intent, neutral expression when he watched a drama unfold.

  I turned to Brigitte to ready her for her entrance, but she already stood by, watching Miss Patty’s Prospero with her keen eyes. The magic was in full flow. I had forgotten what it was like, a live show. I had forgotten the euphoria of scenes that went on without interruption, a story told from its start to its finish without interruption. In film, you did takes. You created brief, delicate pieces of the puzzle, and the director and the editor put them together and smudged away the seams. I leaned against the rocks and whispered to Brigitte, The game’s afoot. She read my lips, and her face lit with understanding and with something else, possibly the same joy I felt, the rapture of creation. Then she turned, and with uncanny plasticity she transformed herself into a deformed and defiant beast. Called out, There’s wood enough within. Waited her cue and entered the light from the torches, and the gasps came forth even before she spat: As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed, with raven’s feather from unwholesome fen drop on you both! You could not drag your gaze away from her mesmerizing hatred, her bone-deep irony, until her last words, turning to address the audience, resigned, agonized, true: I must obey. His art is of such power, it would control my dam’s god, Setebos, and make a vassal of him. She lifted her right arm to the sky, fingers spread, and the sleeve fell back to expose the long, dark tattoo along the inside of her wrist. I don’t know if anybody saw it.

  Because I didn’t want to tax my actors or my audience, I clipped our show at the first act. Always leave them wanting more, Carroll used to tell me, and maybe it was a cliché but it was true. After Caliban’s ferocity, there came Ariel’s song, and t
hen the enchantment of Miranda, seeing Ferdinand for the first time. I held my breath, because that last rehearsal had been awful—Isobel so restless and cross, I thought she wasn’t going to turn up for the performance at all, and I would be forced to take over a role I had avoided my entire career.

  But you know, when all the lights and the eyes fall upon you, something particular transforms you, according to your character—either you freeze up like a Fudgsicle, or you come to life. And Isobel. I don’t know what came over her, whether she’d planned it all or whether she discovered this thing at the same time as the rest of us. She was competent enough in the early scenes, even forceful in her exchanges with Caliban, and then Hugh sauntered into the glow of the torches, the compleat Ferdinand, too princely for words, and it was right bang when she breathed out, I might call him a thing divine, for nothing natural I ever saw so noble—those precise words—when she came to life, utterly. I remember turning my head to search across the audience, to where Clay sat near the rocks with a dull-faced Livy, and how the longing there in his face—in the shape of his jaw and the reflection of the torches in his eyes—made my chest ache, nearly overcame me, so that I would in that moment have given the rest of my life to be able to live the past eighteen years over again, and especially that day in August, the eleventh, the best of those days and the worst of them.

  7.

  Anyway, like all scenes, this one reached its end. Hugh brought the tears brimming to their eyes when he gazed nobly into the phosphorescent surf and said, My spirits, as in a dream, are all bound up. My father’s loss, the weakness which I feel, the wreck of all my friends, nor this man’s threats, to whom I am subdued, are but light to me, might I but through my prison once a day behold this maid.

  The torches went out. For an instant, there was precious silence, and then a half-drunk roar of appreciation, echoing off the rocks, and in the enthusiasm, in the breaking up of audience and actors, in the violet twilight that now engulfed us, I slipped away to the rocks at the southern tip of the beach and found the little sailboat waiting for me, and the man made of shadow who stood next to it, knee-deep in the tide, holding a rope.

  8.

  We did not touch, we said not a word until we rounded the point on which Greyfriars stood and crossed the bottom of Fleet Rock channel to approach the lighthouse from its eastern side, the most forbidding, an almost vertical face of rocks.

  I called, “Watch out! You’ll hit the rocks!”

  And he didn’t reply, but simply brought her in neatly to a gap I hadn’t seen before, disguised by the rocks. Snagged the rope neatly on a hook, lit a small, old oil lantern, and said the first words I had heard from his throat in nearly two decades: “They carved this out in ’21, to land in the boats from Rum Row.”

  Of course his voice had grown deeper and rougher, a man’s voice. I supposed my voice had changed too. He drew down the sail and unshipped the rudder, and when he had finished all these things he lifted the lantern and held out his hand to me.

  “There’s a ledge to your left. D’you think you can climb it?”

  “Of course.”

  I took his hand and leapt from the boat to the ledge, a few feet above us. The tide was on the rise, and I imagined that when it peaked, the step would be nearer level. As Joseph prepared to join me, I looked around the tiny cave, just large enough for the boat and a few pieces of equipment. The damp, rough-hewn walls flickered in the light from the lantern, and I thought we might have slipped back into another age, crossed some barrier of time where we would be safe. But of course that was only an illusion. Joseph stepped to the ledge by my side and nudged me to the open doorway, up the long, steep stairs, until we reached the closed door at the top. He stretched an arm around me and unlocked it, and we came inside a basement of the ordinary, non-rumrunning kind, fitted with a masculine workbench and shelves of tools, an oil furnace, a boiler, the smell of mildew and kerosene.

  “It’s the bottom of the lighthouse,” Joseph said softly, almost a whisper, as if he didn’t want to wake somebody. “The actual lighthouse, I mean, not the living quarters.”

  “Can we go up?”

  “Sure we can.”

  He crossed the room and opened another door, and I perceived that the walls were built to a slight curve. I followed him down a cramped corridor until we reached a ladder that disappeared through the ceiling. Now I smelled iron and rust, the peculiar tang of salt meeting metal. I put my hands on the cool bars and climbed, rung by rung. I felt the groan of the ladder as Joseph started up beneath me. I seemed to be climbing entirely into darkness, climbing on faith alone. My head passed through the hole in the ceiling, my chest, my waist, and then the blinding path of the light crossed the air above me. I made a little gasp and climbed the last few steps to emerge in a round, tall room, perhaps fifteen feet in diameter, dominated in the center by the great electric light and the gears on which it rotated.

  Behind me, Joseph stuck his head through the opening in the floor and said, “Wait here for a moment, will you? I’ll be right back.”

  “But—”

  He’d already disappeared, and I spoke to blank air. The room was hot, having taken in a day’s relentless sunshine, having absorbed the glittering incandescence of the enormous Fresnal lamp. The light passed over my head, but the space was otherwise dark, and I thought of Mercury—the planet, not the god—existing in such proximity to a sun that the whole of your experience was nothing more than the swift, brilliant contrast of light into dark.

  Still, somebody lived here. There was a narrow camp bed on the other side of the light, neatly made; a shelf with books, an old kerosene lantern like the one Joseph lit in the cave below. At the bottom of the bed sat a small wooden trunk, and I resisted the urge to inspect the contents of either trunk or bookshelf. Instead I went to the windows that surrounded the room and stared into the black sea until I understood I was looking at the tip of Long Island, twinkling with tiny lights, each one signifying some house, some family, some lives, some little world I knew nothing about. Slowly I walked the circumference of the room, dragging my hand along the glass as I went. I saw the emptiness of the gap between Long Island and Rhode Island, where the ocean lay; I saw Winthrop Island return to view, and the faint light glowing from the vicinity of Horseshoe Beach, though I couldn’t see the beach itself from this angle. I continued walking until Greyfriars intruded, black and still except for a single lamp shining in my mother’s bedroom. Mama alone had not gone to the beach this evening. Everybody tried to convince her in turns, but she was resolute. She said she had seen the rehearsals, that was enough. As she folded up the picnic blanket that morning, she said, “I’ve enjoyed watching you at work, Miranda. I’m sure everything will go wonderfully tonight.” That was all.

  The room was not quiet. The metal gears ground as the lamp made its circuit around the night sky. Above it, I almost thought I could hear the movement of the light itself, the beam as it whooshed through the air, but of course that was an illusion, too.

  “In the olden days, it was an oil lamp.”

  I jumped and turned. Joseph’s head and chest were visible from the hatchway; his hands lay flat on the floor. As I watched, without speaking, he climbed to his feet and continued.

  “The lighthouse keeper had to stay up here all night, every night, to make sure it didn’t go out. Actually, there were several lamps set against reflectors, in order to create the necessary candlepower. And when there was a bad winter, a lot of storms, and the oil began to run out—well, it would get pretty desperate, because the keeper could go to prison, could even lose his life if the light went out and some ship wrecked on the rocks.”

  He ran out of words and stared at me. I stared back. In the space where our eyes met each other, there was no other thing, no molecule of even air, not ether or electricity.

  “Then I guess he would have done anything to keep it lit,” I said.

  “Yes. They were almost like lovers, the keeper and his light. They couldn’t exist wit
hout each other.”

  The light passed just over Joseph’s head, then mine, then around again in an eternal pulse. He looked the same, which surprised me. Oh, his skin was tougher, as you might expect, and his face was leaner, spare of flesh, the bones fixed in place. But his hair remained thick and dark, brushed the same way. He moved with the same lithe grace. Maybe his shoulders were stockier, I don’t know. Maybe he carried more muscle. But the shape, the frame was just as I remembered it, just exactly filled the hole in my memory. His eyes were the same soft, wise brown, only narrower, as if he’d spent most of his time squinting into some bright sun.

  “Where did you go?” I asked.

  “Just checking on Mama. She’s asleep.”

  I reached into the pocket of my dress and pulled out a small strip of white cloth. “Why did you send me this? Why now?”

  He glanced at the cloth and then away, out the window, toward Greyfriars. “Because I need your help,” he said.

  I don’t know what I was expecting him to say. I don’t even know what I hoped he would say. He was a fugitive, he was going to get caught sometime, that was inevitable. The first of October, Frank Santorini had said. Once the summer was over, once the Families left, there was nobody to protest if a hundred United States Marshals landed on the Island in an amphibious invasion. Well, nobody important, anyway. Joseph Vargas had a small, pitiful future, and that future was shorter still if he elected to remain near Winthrop like some kind of homing pigeon, some species of fish that must forever return to the waters in which he was spawned. So why should I think to figure in that nonexistent future of his? Of course I didn’t.

  Still, there was that hollow feeling in my stomach. That bitterness I swallowed back in my throat, which tasted of disappointment. “What kind of help?” I asked. “You know we can’t hide you at Greyfriars, they’ll certainly see you there.”