by Philip Craig
Nature is violent, but only man is vile.
When I walked into my house, the phone was ringing. It was John Skye calling from Woods Hole to say that the boats weren’t running, so he and his family were in a hotel waiting things out. He said it would probably take him longer to get from Woods Hole to the island than it did to get from Colorado to Woods Hole. I reminded him that he was not the first to say something like that and that some people thought it was part of the island’s charm.
“Charm, schmarm,” said John. “Well, at least the phones are still working. We’ll probably be over tomorrow. Terrible news about Marjorie. Ian will be around until Sunday. Maybe we can all get together before he leaves.”
“Ian said something about getting together with me.”
“Fine. I hope you saved me a few fish.”
“I think there are still a couple swimming around someplace.”
The rain slashed down all afternoon. At five I put on my Vineyard cocktail party clothes and my topsider and drove up island. Between Beetlebung Corner and Menemsha was a sign saying Barstone. I turned in. There were several cars in the yard of the house. A little gale does not inhibit the island’s cocktail set. There was a crowd inside the house drinking Helen Barstone’s booze. I joined them.
Helen Barstone was wearing a red dress that was cut high in the front and low in the back and set her fine figure off well indeed. She saw me come in and came right to me. She had a few drinks head start. In a far corner I saw Hooperman frown as he watched her.
“I’m so glad you could come. What should I call you? J. W.? John told me your initials, but not what they stood for.”
“J. W. is fine.”
“And I’m Helen.” She stood on her toes and gave me one of those cheek-against-cheek kisses where the lips never actually touch skin. With her mouth close to my ear, she said, “The rest of these people are just here for drinks, but you’re invited for supper afterward. I’d like to get to know you.”
“And I’d like to talk to you.”
“Oh, dear, nothing impersonal, I hope.”
“Not to me.”
She smiled and took my arm. “Excellent. Now, let me escort you to the bar and then introduce you to some people.”
She did that, and I watered the small smile on my face with glasses of vodka on ice as I listened to cocktail conversations in the up-island mode, and was introduced to ladies in pastels and men in red trousers and boat shoes who spoke of art galleries, New York financial doings, and the dangers of development on the Vineyard. There was less yachty talk than at Edgartown cocktail parties, but otherwise not too much difference. Girls in casual party clothes carried trays of excellent hors d’oeuvres from group to group, and the bar was generous in its portions. I exchanged brief pleasantries with Hooperman, who put a false smile on his face to match my own. Finally, everybody else left and Helen Barstone and I were alone.
“I thought your husband might be here,” I said.
“Warren? Oh, no. Warren only comes on weekends. The rest of the time I’m a bachelor girl. Bill Hooperman sometimes thinks I belong to him on weekdays, but as you see, you’re here and he isn’t. I tell him he should bring his wife down, but she won’t leave Cambridge. Poor Bill.”
The serving girls had cleared the clutter from the party and taken it all into the kitchen before leaving, but the table holding the bottles was still there. Helen Barstone went to it and poured herself a nice jolt, then took my arm and led me to a couch. “Sit down. Let’s relax before we eat. These parties are fun, but I’m always glad when they’ve ended. Do you feel that way, too?”
“At my parties the guests stay as long as they please. If I don’t enjoy them, I don’t invite them.”
“Well, you must invite me the next time.” She had a silvery laugh.
“It may be a while. I do a lot of my drinking alone.”
“Do you? Isn’t that dangerous? I’m sure that’s one indication of alcoholism.”
“An island ailment for sure.”
She adjusted her skirt, and when she was done she was closer. She smelled like gin and expensive perfume. Not a bad combination. My arm was across the back of the couch. My hand was near her shoulder. She took it in hers. “So scarred,” she said, “so rough. But it’s a strong hand.”
“All fishermen have scarred hands.”
“The men I know have soft hands.”
“Soft hands, hard hearts?”
She was amused. “Hard hands, soft heart? I see I must be wary of you, J. W.” She drank half her glass, then set it on the coffee table and slid closer. “Tell me about yourself,” she said.
“Tell me about Tristan Cooper,” I said. “You and Dr. Hooperman have been interviewing him. What sort of guy is he? And what’s this theory of his all about?”
“I’d rather talk about you.”
I put my arm around her shoulders. “I’d rather talk about Tristan Cooper. I’m going to see him and I’d like to know who I’m dealing with. I’d also like to know about Sanctuary. We can talk about me later.”
“Rats,” she said, “you aren’t as malleable as I’d hoped. All right, I’ll let myself be bullied. But why do you want to know about Tristan and Sanctuary?”
“Because Marjorie Summerharp had unkind words to say about them and because they’re in Chilmark and Chilmark is west of the spot where the dragger pulled in her body.”
“I don’t understand.”
I told her about the problem of Marjorie Summerharp’s body with respect to time and tides.
She pulled away and stared at me. “Good God, you surely don’t think Tristan had anything to do with her death?”
“I don’t know anything about him. But the facts are that he knew her, that they’d argued, and that he lives in a part of the island where her body might have entered the water. The same is true of the Van Dams.”
“Well, as I told you, the argument between her and Tristan was purely academic and was long past the time when either of them were passionate about it. As for the Van Dams, well . . .” She settled back into the circle of my arm and took my hand again. “Well, they’re hardly what I’d call the murdering sort. Religious phonies, probably. Money grubbers, absolutely. Panderers, I’d bet on it. But murderers? I doubt it.”
“Panderers?”
She reached for her drink and got it. “I couldn’t care less, but yes, I’d bet on it. Have you been up there?”
“No.”
“I was. Once. By mistake. We were on our way to visit Tristan the first time and we took the Sanctuary road because that’s where his mailbox is. As it turned out, the main houses and outbuildings on the Cooper farm are all Sanctuary places now, and Tristan is living in one of the cottages a half mile away that’s reached by another road. But by the time we got that all straightened out, I had a chance to look around.”
“And?”
“And the guests are all rich and the help is all young and beautiful. Beautiful boys and beautiful girls. I got the picture pretty fast. Later Tristan more or less confirmed it.”
“He told you that Sanctuary was offering sex to its clients along with its other therapies?”
“No.” She giggled. “A couple of weeks later, as I was driving up to see Tristan I saw one of the girls I’d seen at Sanctuary slip away from his house. She wasn’t quite dressed.”
“A dark-haired girl with a good tan?”
She stared up at me. “A redhead, actually. Why did you say that?”
“Just a bad guess. I was told that he liked that type.”
“Maybe he does, but Tristan’s tastes are apparently catholic. It’s heartening to know that being eighty-four doesn’t keep some men from liking women and knowing how to please them.”
“I’m told that Tristan has always had women in his life.”
“Yes. He doesn’t talk about them, but I’ve talked with old-timers at Weststock and they say he was a pistol while he was there. Two divorces, other women, a couple of fairly serious scandals . . .
” Her voice was getting thicker as the drinks relaxed her.
“What kind of scandals?”
“Scandals. Fights, I think. The people I talked to were a bit fuzzy about details. Tristan had a wild streak in him, at any rate.”
“But now he doesn’t.”
“He’s eighty-four years old, for God’s sake.” The glass slipped in her hand and spilled on her dress before falling me a kiss,” she said, tilting her head back against my arm and pursing her lips.
I bent my head and kissed those wet red lips. Her fingers squeezed mine. After a while she pulled away, gasping. She got unsteadily to her feet. “Dinner can wait,” she said in a slurred voice. “Give me just a minute then come in.” She waved an arm toward the back of the house and wandered off in the direction she had pointed. After I finished my drink, I picked up her fallen glass, took it and my own into the kitchen, then walked back and found her bedroom. She was on her back on the bed, snoring gently. I pulled off her shoes and covered her with a blanket I found in her closet and went home and cooked my own supper.
About ten o’clock the wind began to die and the rain started to slack off. The storm had moved on.
The next morning I drove down to Katama to do some quahogging. As I pulled onto the beach, I met George Martin coming off. He held out a hand and we stopped side by side.
“I hope you’re not planning to bluefish off of Wasque this morning,” he said.
“Littlenecking,” I said, pointing to the rake on my roof rack.
“A good thing,” said George. “The storm punched an opening through the beach down at the clam flats. Chappy’s an island again. If you want to fish Wasque, you’ll need a boat or you’ll have to take the Chappy ferry.”
12
Most of the time the island of Chappaquiddick isn’t an island at all, but a peninsula linked to the Vineyard by a spit of sand along South Beach called, on some maps, Norton’s Point.
It’s called Norton’s Point because from time to time a storm comes along and knocks a channel through the sand spit; Chappy becomes an island and the sand spit west of the opening becomes a point named after a local fisherman of yore. Between the two, the tides flow to and fro, into Katama Bay on the rising tide and back into the sea on the ebb. Boatmen, if they can find a channel deep enough for their vessels, take advantage of the opening to save themselves the long trip around Cape Pogue; when the tidal river isn’t too fast, young people ride inner tubes downstream through the opening.
When the tide is falling and the winds and surf are strong from the south, the opening is a dangerous place. The outflowing tide meets the wind-driven surf and there is a wild, swirling sea, with crashing waves, whirling currents, and a shifting of sands. Where once a channel was, there may now be shallow sandbars to seize your boat and break it under thundering surf. A sailor tossed from his boat may be knocked down again and again by the surf as he strives for shore until he cannot rise again.
Normally such openings are short lived. As the tides move along the southern shore, the sands build along the western edge of the opening and the opening moves slowly to the east until, finally, it fills and is no more. Norton’s Point is no longer a point and Chappaquiddick is again a peninsula. And the fishermen can once more drive their four-by-fours to Wasque to fish the rip.
But that was days or weeks away. Now, Wasque was hard to reach. I’d have to take the ferry or a boat I didn’t have. My dinghy was too small for the trip, particularly at night or if the sea was rough.
I drove down the beach until I fetched the opening. The water was flowing out at a considerable rate. Outside, the spray was flying as the flow met the last swells from the passed storm. The surf smashed the beach on either side of the opening and roiled into the air in mid-channel. There would be bluefish and maybe bass there, I thought. I’d have to give it a try later.
Inside Katama Bay the clam flats had taken a real beating. The nice flat next to Chappy had been torn away in part and would be eaten away even further before the opening was closed again. At least a season of clamming would be lost there. Maybe more. Bad luck for me, since I liked to work those flats. But Nature cares nothing for clammers such as me, and I thought that was as it ought to be. I prefer the indifferent universe. The idea of it allows me to understand good and evil better than if I were to believe in a God who bends over the earth with, ah, bright wings.
Other fishermen and sightseers soon gathered on the point and examined the opening. We’d not had one for several years, and it was a phenomenon of general curiosity. Islanders have a natural interest in the power of wind and water, and so the opening was soon lined with Jeeps and pickups. We all watched the water pour out of Katama Bay and smash into the dying swells of the storm.
After a while, I drove west, parked, and waded out to rake myself a basket of littlenecks. They were selling for many pennies apiece in the grocery stores and for even more on the half-shell in the restaurants and bars, so there was a day’s pay for me if I could capture them.
And I could. There is something nice about quahogging. It’s a lonely, quiet, and slow-moving sort of job. You and your rake and your basket are all by yourselves, and you cannot hurry the work. The big rake can only be tugged so fast and the quahogs are only so numerous. You have to be patient and steady, but while you are working you can think about other things without any loss in efficiency, so there’s a double pleasure in the business: making money in a pleasant way and having plenty of time to muse, observe the flat beauty of the pond and beach, and enjoy being alone.
Even though I was a good distance from the new opening, I could feel a difference in the tug of water against my legs. There was a definite movement toward the opening, one that had not been there before. Nothing big—just a small pull toward the east. South of the island not long ago a similar soft flow had washed Marjorie Summerharp’s body finally into the fish-filled nets of the Mary Pachico. Where had the strong subtle currents grasped her first? Where had they discovered her lifeless form before gently carrying it, floating and turning, into those nets and the realm of men?
If I died now, if my heart stopped beating and I pitched into this shallow water, the gentle tug of the opening would take me slowly east along the beach until the stronger pull of the rapid water took me—where? Out into the sea? Or would the tide have turned by then and would my body, now the property of the world’s oceans, be washed into Katama Bay and on into Edgartown Harbor to astonish some yachtsman as he leaned against the rail of his vessel, looked down, and saw me sliding by, trailing seaweed, circled by curious fishes.
I worked a long time for my bushel of littlenecks, but I didn’t mind. Tonight Zee and I had a date, and I reckoned I might need the money. Ian McGregor was out of the picture, John Skye and his wife and daughters would be home, and normalcy would have returned to Martha’s Vineyard. President Harding would have been pleased. When I wasn’t thinking about Zee, I thought about the things people had told me about Sanctuary and Tristan Cooper. When I finally got my bushel and had sold them, I went home, stripped, and lay in the yard sopping up sunshine and thinking some more. Then I got dressed and went to get Zee.
Zee lived up island, where Tristan Cooper lived, where the Van Dams lived, where Helen Barstone and Bill Hooperman lived. Up island consists of the Vineyard’s three westernmost towns, West Tisbury, Chilmark, and Gay Head. Down island, on the other hand, consists of Edgartown, Oak Bluffs, and Vineyard Haven, the latter town actually being disputed territory, considered by some to be up island and by others to be down island.
Zee’s little house was off the road between West Tisbury and Chilmark. I’d tried to talk her into living down island with me, but she had declined, saying she’d just gotten out of one man’s house (that of her physician ex-husband, Dr. Jerk), and wasn’t ready to move into another one’s yet. I didn’t blame her, but I felt sorry for me. She also declined to marry me for similar reasons. Again, I didn’t blame her, but . . .
I passed the general store and the fi
eld of dancing fiberglass statues across the road. Past the fairgrounds, I soon came to Zee’s driveway. I arrived at her front door at precisely six o’clock, feeling happy and wary. She came out of her door as I turned off the ignition.
She was wearing white. White sleeveless dress, white shoes, small white purse, a white ribbon in her long, jet black hair. Her dark eyes and sleek tanned skin, her red lips and golden earrings gave her the look of a gypsy princess, of a Nereid, a siren.
“You came,” she said. Her teeth flashed in a grin. “And you look quite spiffy, too. I’m flattered.”
“I always dress this way on a first date.” I was wearing my yacht club clothes: white shirt, blue blazer, light gray slacks, a blue tie with little baby sailboats on it, a belt with whales on it, and boat shoes without socks, to show that I was, after all, on the Vineyard and not, therefore, too formal.
I took her arm, led her around the Landcruiser, and helped her up into the passenger seat.
“Thank you,” she said.
“A pleasure,” I said.
“Where are we going?”
“The Navigator. We’ll sit by a window so we can look out at the harbor and decide which yacht we’ll buy when we win the lottery.”
“Excellent. And we can watch the dinghies come in from the yachts and tie up at the dock and unload the boat people so they can have a meal on shore for a change.”
“And we’ll have a couple of drinks and then order whatever we want.”
“Because we’re rich with bluefish money and can afford the very best.”
“And if we spend all of that money, we still don’t have to worry because I have an emergency supply of littleneck money that I’ve been saving for just this occasion.”
“And if we spend all of that money, then what?”
“We’ll wash dishes. The secret is to eat everything first and then worry about whether the money is enough. If you count it first, you may never get to eat.”