In the Midst of the Sea

by Sean McCarthy

  He put his feet quickly on the floor, started to apologize.

  “No, I’m sorry,” Diana said. “I startled you. I didn’t think anyone was up yet.”

  The man waved her off. “No, no. I’m too blame. I startled you.” He stood, surveyed the area around him. Stalled.

  The coffee was running down the side of the leather chair.

  “Let me give you a hand.” Diana hurried over to the highboy, grabbed a small stack of napkins, and then crouched down beside his chair, sopping up the coffee. “These are beautiful chairs,” she said. “I’d hate to see them ruined.”

  “Well if there is a man who could ruin them, that man would be me,” the man said. “I’m beginning to fear I’ll never have the grace of a dancer.”

  Diana balled the napkins up in her hand. “Well, it wasn’t much. I’m sure it will be fine.” She stood and took a quick step back, feeling suddenly self-conscious, remembering the bruise on the side of her face. She hadn’t realized how close she was to the man. He was right in front of her, still hadn’t moved much. He looked to be a little older than her. Early thirties? Late? It was hard to tell. He was dressed for the day—faded jeans, and a faded blue sweatshirt—“VINEYARD” in big white letters written across the front. He was handsome, she thought, not overly handsome, but enough so as to make you look twice. Slightly exotic. His hair dark, curly but short, and he had a square jaw and amused eyes, remarkably dark and fluid A Mediterranean complexion, she thought, and he looked familiar. She had seen him before—she must have—but she couldn’t picture where. He stared down at the floor. Her feet. Diana followed his gaze. There was a large hole in the sock on her right foot, the heel missing.

  “Well, that’s embarrassing,” she said. “I didn’t even notice that. I must look like I just walked out of the poorhouse. We didn’t plan on staying, so I didn’t bring much clothes.”

  The man sat down, and started to remove his shoe. “Listen, don’t be embarrassed.” He pulled the shoe off, and held up his foot. “You see? Two holes. I’ve got you beat.” He was looking at the side of her face now, had paused, noticed it. He hadn’t noticed right off—she would have known if he did. Maybe the shadows in the room, poor light, or maybe it was already starting to heal, the swelling receding.

  “You might want to put some more ice on that,” he said.

  “Ice?”

  “Your face.” Diana blushed, the shame rising again. “Oh, that? It’s nothing. You think you’ll never be a dancer? I can’t even walk through my house without bumping into a wall. I’m going to get some tea. Do you want more coffee? I can get you more coffee. I feel bad.”

  The man stood again. “No, no, that’s fine. I can get it. The owner finds out I have the other guests waiting on me, she’ll probably force me out the door.”

  Diana was quiet.

  “I’m’ joking,” he said. “I actually stay down here fairly regularly, so she gives me a good deal as long as she has an open room—it’s usually easier in the winter.” He held out his hand. “I’m Michael, by the way. Michael Chiaro.”

  Diana held her hand out. “Diana,” she said. “Barlow.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t look like a Barlow.”

  “Barlow is my married name,” she said.

  He nodded, this time a bit slower. “I see. Are you just down for the weekend?”

  Diana wondered if the owner had mentioned them to him, or how much the owner even knew. Diana knew that Cybil had talked to her about their situation, but wasn’t sure how much she had told her.

  “No,” Diana said. “I live here.”

  They sat at the dining room table, Diana sipping her tea and nibbling at a scone. Chocolate chip. He said he lived in Boston, that he came down here to paint.

  “You’re an artist?” she said.

  He laughed a little. “Well, that wholly depends on who’s doing the viewing. I do a number of things, actually. I spent some time studying history, a little philosophy. I teach, too, when I can, and when I can I sell my paintings. It makes me a little extra money. Enough to pay the landlord anyway. And it’s nice to be able to spend time down here.”

  “What do you paint?” Diana asked.

  “Spirits.”

  “Spirits?”

  “Ghosts,” he said. “You know. The dead.”

  Diana held her teacup halfway to her lips, wondering if he were just having her on.

  The man smiled. “I’m joking again,” he said. “My subject matter is mostly period work though. Nineteenth-century people, places. Mostly from around the island, so I have to rely on a lot of old photographs and things. I spend a lot of time at the historical museum. Exciting, huh?”

  “I like the museum.” Diana sipped her tea, thinking of the Wesley, the desk clerk, and the bell ringing in the distance. “Do you ever paint any of the old hotels?”

  “I love the hotels,” he said. “I can show you.”

  He brought down some of his canvases then—he said the owner let him keep them upstairs—and leaned them against the wall in the parlor. He had painted the Wesley Hotel, people in Victorian garb lining the veranda, but the entire facade looking quite different than it did today, the balconies on the successive stories all much smaller, and no fourth floor. A man stood on the dusty street below, bowler and suit coat pulled together with one button in the middle. He had his arms folded, and appeared to be leaning back on his heels. There were others, too. The Arcade Building on Circuit Avenue, The Willard Hotel, the steamboats, the Edgartown train, and the Highland House. Then he pulled out the last one from the bottom of the stack, and there it was. The Sea View.

  The hotel was beautiful, but it looked nothing like the scaffolding shell Diana had been reading about in the journal. Here it was complete. High and magnificent, and perched upon the edge of the sea as if calling her on. Daring her to try and bring it down. There were people in this painting too, but they were just small black shadows, milling about Ocean Park, and holding umbrellas to the sun on the beach below. Diana couldn’t make out any of their faces—the focus of the painting was the hotel, detailed and glorified, and the colors magnificent. The colors grabbed her first. All of the photos that she had seen of the actual building were all black-and-white, of course, and made it all seem like a black-and-white world. But to add color … It somehow made it all seem that much more real. The people real. Not just ghosts.

  He had portraits, too. Men and women. Mostly in Victorian dress. One was of a man with a white beard and rolled-up pant legs walking through the surf. It was a very Homer-like painting, Diana thought, and the paintings brought back memories from when she was young. Her art classes. Her mother’s one concession while she was growing up. She remembered the long narrow room with the track lighting, the students’ paintings on the wall, and her teacher. A disheveled old man with sapphire-blue eyes and curls of gray hair. A stained cashmere sweater, and pipe tobacco stale on his breath. He would approach from behind, lean over, his face an inch away from the canvas. “What’s happening here?” he would say. And more than once he had brought Diana’s work to the front of the class to show them how to do it right.

  “Our budding little Georgia O’Keefe,” he had said with a sparkle in his eye.

  Diana had liked him.

  “Do you get them all from photographs?” she now asked Michael, viewing the man on the beach. “Some,” said Michael. “You would not be able to get a photograph like the man in the surf, not from that era. People needed to pose, holding extremely still, or the photograph would fail. It wasn’t like a photographer could walk down the beach with his camera. He would need time to stop, set it up, shoot. Look for the right light. I wanted to try and capture the light in that one—so you could see it was dawn, the sun rising in the distance, without seeing the actual sun. And I wanted to capture how it was. The time, I mean.”

  “I can see it.” Diana held her hand up, fingers splayed before the canvas. “You have a lot of talent.”

  “Well, thank you. I
t’s kind of you to say so, but the subject matter certainly isn’t hard to find. There are ghosts all over the island. Houses, landscapes, the reflection in the eyes of the gulls on the beach. I sometimes think the fact that it is such a beautiful island is what keeps them here.” He smiled. “Even the ghosts never want to leave.”

  “Never?”

  Michael shook his head. “Never.” He looked back at the painting of the man in the surf. “Anyway, once I get enough of them completed, I hope to have a show.” He was quiet a moment. “Maybe in Edgartown. Or maybe over in Holmes Hole. There are a few galleries over there.”

  Diana looked at him from the corner of her eye. “Holmes Hole?”

  He laughed. “Vineyard Haven, I mean. It used to be called Holmes Hole, and some of the old-timers still call it that. An old friend of mine has a few connections there.”

  22

  August 25, 1871

  Hiram has bought several acres of land on the hill above Squash Meadow Pond. It didn’t come about quietly. The people of the campgrounds have asked him to leave. Summer is now nearly gone, as soon will be most of the camp dwellers, and we sleep in a canvas tent at the top of the highlands, looking down upon Trinity Circle, as we watch our new home rising before us. We have “crossed the Jordan” as the people from the circle like to say, moving further from the wayward ways of the ever-expanding Oak Bluffs, across Squash Meadow Pond, but unlike the others, we have not done so on our own volition; Hiram was not nearly ready to give up his ground, to give up the fight, to give in to the Land and Wharf Company, and I need to seriously wonder if he ever really would; I’m not sure the fire and the soldier, and indeed sometimes the madness, in him would ever allow it.

  The builder Frederic Carl is constructing our home in the manner of the cottages but on a larger scale. He had worked for Mr. Pratt for a time, but confided in Hiram that he could no longer abide by the intent of the man’s ways—building nondenominational churches to quiet the masses, and presenting himself to be a service-going Christian while paying his laborers quite unfairly and promoting his playland to undesirables of all walks of life. Indeed, Hiram agreed, the Devil excludes no one willing to walk with cloven shoes, and with that he signed the man on.

  Our prayers rise to the Lord that the house will be completed before the winter arrives, and if not, I shall have to implore upon Hiram to travel to the mainland, to spend the season with my family in Boston. It will not be easy. Hiram is making a stand. He won’t be driven from his home, his island, not by heathens, and not by the disciples of Lucifer, parading about the campgrounds, disguised as Christians. These are Hiram’s words, not mine. I hold no judgment against our former friends, nor the neighbors, both the seasonal and year-round residents, those who sat beside us each Sunday as we worshipped. Hiram is no longer able to live among them and keep any semblance of composure, and it is not their fault. Were he to find these words, penned by me, I fear what consequences might arise, but I hide my journal well, only scribble when he is sleeping, in town, or down on the bluffs beyond Lake Anthony.

  He will no longer walk through Trinity Park, and forbids me to do so also—not that I would after all that has transpired. I can still see him in the tabernacle, overturning a pew, screeching, but even then our neighbors, the good people that they are, may have been willing to forgive him, may have looked the other way, if Hiram had not unleashed his fury upon Dr. Mortimer’s daughter.

  Dr. Mortimer’s daughter was only visiting for the week. It is said she cannot abide too much sun and when her parents arrive to spend the summer she stays with an elderly aunt who lives in Lexington. Hiram has heard this, too, and he informed me that he knows for fact for this to be false. He says the Lord set upon him and showed him in a vision the way the young woman conducts herself while her parents are here on Martha’s Vineyard, showed him the activities she delights in to fill her day.

  I must admit that Hiram’s disdain for Dr. Mortimer’s daughter, Mary, took me by surprise at first as I remember their first meeting last summer, and none of it was apparent then. Indeed, Hiram, in an unusual showing for him, went out of his way to make the girl feel welcome. Taking off his hat, and bowing to her at their introduction, and then spending some time sitting and talking to her after the last meeting of the day on Sunday, each of them sipping a cool glass of lemonade, and the girl with an umbrella spread open above her, despite the sun already breaking in reds as it set upon the western side of the island.

  I remember him telling her then that he was not prone to take in a great deal of sun himself as it brought on headaches and made him tired. There was too much that needed to be done during the day to spend all his time idling in the sun, he said, and he laughed loudly as he did so. It was good to see Hiram laugh, and it was also rare, though not as rare at it would be now, but he was different then, still enveloped in the light of the Lord but not as closed to the thoughts of others.

  The Mortimer girl is a pretty girl with fair skin and wide green eyes—wide as if everything she hears is completely new and comes as surprise. Her bosom is ample, and she is narrow in the waist. She has a small voice that you must sometimes strain to hear, and it is because of this voice, I imagine, that she is prone to whisper, leaning close to her audience’s ear as she did with Hiram that day, all that time Hiram listening intently, nodding. She couldn’t be more than twenty-three or twenty-four, though some have already begun to whisper the word “spinster” when she retires to her parent’s cottage for the evening, so perhaps she is older. Hiram, last summer, took umbrage to this and said there was no shame in a girl waiting for the right man to find her, the man who would lead her down the path of the Lord, and I remember him returning to our cottage that evening and speaking of her happily but quietly, telling me that he had never met a young woman who shines so with Jesus before. “Radiant,” he said. “Simply radiant.” As far as I have seen though there were never many suitors about on any of the occasions where Mary Mortimer has come to visit, although Louisa Teal had told me this in fact was out of respect for Dr. Mortimer as he is stern on approach, carries himself with a quiet air of dignity, and many of the young men on the island have no wish to offend him. And offending him is precisely what Hiram did.

  I fear I will never know what exactly ignited his fury, but it was within the first hour of Sunday services, and after coming face to-face with Mary Mortimer, recently returned to the island. Hiram and I had taken a bench near the back, and Dr. Mortimer, as usual, sat in the front row, standing aside to let Mrs. Mortimer and Mary pass before him. Upon sight of Mary Mortimer, I felt the change in Hiram, sitting beside me—a tension rippling and a rising in temperature—even before I saw the change on his face. He began to murmur, and then he bowed his head, and the reverend began his service. He was deep in the Scripture—John 2:13-25—when Hiram stood and began to shout. He pointed at the Mortimer girl and called her Salome. “She would take us all down to burrow in her little nest full of sin if she had her way!” he shouted. “Invite us to burrow and then deliver us to the Devil!”

  Dr. Mortimer stood and turned, looked at him, facing him head-on, but Hiram kept going. “Wallowing with the Devil,” Hiram said, now a shade quieter. “Parading about and flaunting her breasts, like a proud little robin. Tempting weak men to succumb to the flesh. Tempting here, merely tempting, in the midst of our tabernacle.” He paused. “But forfeiting freely in her relative’s home far away in Lexington!”

  “Stop,” said Dr. Mortimer.

  “Forfeiting and indulging,” said Hiram.

  “Stop,” Dr. Mortimer said again.

  “While her mother and father come ashore to our island and worship among us. Who is this young woman worshipping? I ask you!”

  I reached for Hiram’s sleeve, hoping to pull him back down in his chair beside me, but he neither brushed me away nor succumbed to my wishes. He stood perfectly still. “I have it on fact from a dear friend who travels off island in August every year. Travels to Lexington. He has seen this woman, and
the company she keeps. Spending time on the town common, and even now and then, time in the public house. Alone, unchaperoned, and waiting.”

  Dr. Mortimer began to move toward the end of his aisle, intent on meeting Hiram face-to-face. The congregation was nearly silent, just a few whispers, and the reverend had a look on his face as if he were lost in the woods, mouth open and eyes frightened. The Mortimer girl had not turned, she had her head down, hiding, and my heart suddenly broke for her. Hiram was ill. I now knew he was ill, but she did not. All she could possibly see was the cruelty, and there I could not blame her. There was no friend who traveled to Lexington, not that I was aware of.

  “How many men have nestled their heads in her bosom?! Can you stand before us now and come forth?!” Hiram shouted. “I have spoken with the Lord and he has told me you are legion! Legion they are, and many more coming! For this woman comes to our retreat to lead as many as she can in, and lead as many as she can out! Merging with the sinful land springing up all about us. A spy from Satan, leaving a trail of bread crumbs to the hotels, the saloons.” He paused again. “And the brothels.”

  Dr. Mortimer was nearly upon him now as were several young men of the congregation, following suit. But Dr. Mortimer turned to them, raising a quieting hand. “Not before the altar of the Lord,” he said.