Ben and his mother and Henry ate dinner in silence and after dinner they sat outside for awhile, until it was dark, not talking much, and then his mom went to her room to read — romance novels, the same ones, over and over — and Henry went to his to sleep, and Ben went to his to lie on his back, staring at the ceiling. The evening breeze brought snatches of string music and a faint hum of conversation and women’s laughter. He imagined them sitting at that long table, the trees rustling, the lanterns lightening the dark, the candles, the flowers, the assistants gliding about, removing this plate, filling this glass, the violins in the night air, and Ruth Chapman, at the end of the table, in a beautiful blue dress, watching everyone and guiding the conversation and smoking discreetly. Or are you allowed to smoke around a governor general?
He wanted to be there so badly. Even if he wasn’t playing the fiddle, even if Ruth Chapman didn’t introduce him to anyone, even if he was just one of the waiters and nobody knew his name, just to be there, to see these people, to watch them eat and drink and listen to their conversation, these people who were so much more aware of the world than anyone in Muskoka, who said daring things and laughed at what they said, and were clever and knew it, and enjoyed it. He wanted to be there so badly.
He got off the bed and went downstairs quietly, and outside, down to the dock. There was a moon — of course there would be; it was a perfect evening; Ruth Chapman had ordered one — glinting silvery off the lapping water. He could see the lights of the cottage filtering through the trees, and the lanterns. Dinner was over, the music was a bit livelier: “How’d You Like to Spoon with Me?” He knew it. Were they going to dance after all?
He had to. He didn’t know why. He just had to. He kicked off his shoes, slipped off his clothes and dove into the water.
Total dark. It was always disorienting to dive into water at night. Which way was up? But his head soon broke the surface. The water was calm and warm. He stroked steadily away from the Landing toward the island, through the dark water.
It took ten minutes, maybe less. His hand touched wood, and he pulled himself half out of the lake, blinking the water from his eyes.
The lanterns lit the staircase up to the cottage, and the cottage itself was vivid with light. There were people in the clearing in front of the cottage, in the cottage, silhouettes, voices, snatches of conversation.
“But really, I couldn’t have, could I?”
“We knew them from Cairo, actually.”
A woman stepped onto the veranda and walked to the end. It was her; he was sure of it. And then she lit a cigarette, and he was really sure. She was alone, surrounded by all these people, listening to the music drifting from inside, smoking her cigarette, thinking. Of what? What was she thinking all the time? And why wouldn’t she think of him? Why hadn’t she asked him to help? He would have done it for free. He wanted to be up there so badly.
A man came out and walked toward her. Her age, perhaps — it was hard to tell. He handed her a drink and said something to her, and she laughed, and he touched her elbow, and she turned to go back inside, and then looked down toward the dock.
He was farther out of the water than he’d thought, and there was a lantern on the tree at the foot of the dock. Could she see him? He slipped back into the water, hid behind the dock, then peered cautiously around it.
She was looking down at the dock. Had she seen him? Oh God, what if she’d seen him? If she came down, if she realized. Oh God.
The man said something to her. For a moment she continued to look down at the dock, then turned away and went back inside.
The swim back was longer. The energy had gone out of him. What had he been thinking? Had she seen him? What would she think? Maybe she hadn’t seen him. Maybe it was too dark. Why in God’s name had he gone over there? How much farther was it? He was tired. What had he been thinking?
Finally, home. He heaved himself out of the water, shook himself, ran his hand through his hair to get the water out, grabbed for his pants, pulled them on, groped for his shoes. He looked up. A shadow against the darkness. Henry was there, watching him. Ben looked down, shivering in shame.
“You don’t belong over there,” Henry said.
Anger rushed through him. He jerked his head up, defiant, furious.
“WHY NOT?” He had never yelled at Henry before in his life.
“Because you’re better than they are.”
And Henry turned and walked away.
Fall
The heat broke, finally, the week after Labor Day. Now there was a nip in the air at night, and the sky was dry and royal blue, reflected in choppy water freshened by a finally clean breeze. It was always a fine time, the first hint of fall, the first night for a blanket, but it was also a warning. The hard months were approaching.
Many of the visitors to the lake left on Labor Day weekend, but Ruth Chapman wasn’t in a rush. He would see her sometimes, out on the dock, a sweater wrapped around her, reading a book. Nights were starting to come earlier, and the music from the Victrola drifted across the water earlier, and her lights went out earlier.
It was the middle of the month. Ben and Henry had been over to Browning Island to fix a leaky roof reported by a departing cottager. When they got back, Ben’s mom told them at dinner, breaking the routine silence.
“Mrs. Chapman was by. She’s leaving tomorrow. She wants Ben to go over first thing. Three dollars, same as before.”
Ben nodded, trying to pretend he was more interested in the meatloaf on his plate. He didn’t want to go over there. He was ashamed. What if she had seen him? And even if she hadn’t, he didn’t want to go over there. He was ashamed.
But three dollars a day was two dollars more than anyone else on the lake was paying for help with closing up a cottage. He was there early, only to find there wasn’t much to do. She had packed her things, including the booze, what little was left of it. The china was in crates, and the silver, and the bed sheets, and the towels and, well, pretty much everything. He’d thought she’d be leaving more behind. No one was going to disturb the cottage over the winter.
“Good morning.” She came into the living room carrying a hamper of food — flour and sugar and tea and things. “I’d be grateful if you’d take this back to the Landing. There’s no point shipping it all the way to New York.”
He sensed it in her, too: a certain awkwardness, almost embarrassment. It seemed strange; she’d always been so confident. It only made things worse.
“You want me to start putting sheets over things?” he asked. The sheets would keep the dust off, and the mice.
“No.” She shook her head. “Everything’s going. There should be a steamer along any minute. I’ve hired some men to help. But you can give me a hand with the shutters.”
She was leaving for good. One summer at Pine Island. That was it. She hadn’t liked the place, the lake, the island. She didn’t want to come back.They swung the shutters closed on each window and latched them, one by one. It was the strangest feeling. He had fixed the hinge on this shutter, sanded and painted it. It had meant a lot to him. It was as though he owned the place a bit, had put himself into it. But for her, what was it for her? One summer, and then she got bored. Of everything. Of him.
They were at the icehouse. He tossed the blocks outside to melt in the autumn sun while she swept the sawdust. While she was sweeping she began to talk, not looking at him.
“It was a wonderful summer. I needed to be away from everything, and I was. It was what I needed after … last spring. Just to be alone for awhile. But I’m not the sort of person who sits around. Next summer I want to travel. Europe, probably. I haven’t seen France in years. Maybe I’ll sell this place. I don’t know. I might come back. But not next summer.”
“Oh, okay.”
Okay is what you say when you don’t have anything to say.
A baritone whistle warned of the Segwu
n’s approach. Ben went down to the dock as the steamer sidled up. There was Cal, and there were half a dozen other men, and no one else, because there were few passengers on the ships this late in the season and Ruth Chapman had paid to ensure that her retreat from the lake was the Segwun’s main task for the day.
The piano they had struggled to haul up to the cottage they struggled to haul back down to the dock. And the leather sofas and the heavy beds and the dressers. Everything they had sweated over in June they sweated over again now, and even the September breeze didn’t keep Ben’s shirt from soaking through.
“So, how’s it going with Elsie?” Ben asked Cal as they staggered beneath the weight of a cedar chest filled with books.
“Ah, we broke up on Labor Day,” he huffed in response. Fall was fatal to romance. “You should come into town some time. We could catch up.”
“Yeah. Or you could come out here. We could go bass fishing.”
“Hey, that’s an idea. Maybe we could get my brother to sneak us a couple beers.”
“Nah, I’m never gonna drink again.”
“What happened?”
“Tell you about it later.”
“Not even one?”
“Well, maybe just one.”
It was mid-afternoon before they had everything squared away. Ruth Chapman was at the dock, poring over a list.
“So, if you could take the boat back to Greavette’s, they’ll put it in storage. And if you can keep an eye on the cottage, say, once a week, here’s a key. And here’s my address and phone number in New York. Call collect. And here are some post-dated checks. I’ll send you more. I may rent the place out next season, in which case we’ll need to make some arrangement …”
Ben nodded and said, “Sure” and “Okay.” Finally, she ran out of list. She paused.
“Well, that’s it then.”
“Okay.”
“Thank you for all your help this summer.” She smiled. “I enjoyed our conversations.”
He could feel the blush. “So did I.”
She was carrying a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with string.
“I have a present for you.” She handed it to him. “You can open it when you get back to the Landing.”
“Oh … you don’t need to —”
“I know someone who knows someone who plays the violin. These are pieces he says you should be studying. You should pay special attention to the Bach.”
Ben found it hard to speak at the best of times. The present left him far short of speech.
“And there’s a card in there,” she added. “It has the name of a man who teaches violin at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. Apparently he’s very good. I’ve sent him a note about you. If you ever get to Toronto, you should look him up.”
“Oh.” He couldn’t think of anything to say. He couldn’t even think of “thank you.”
She held out her hand. He shook it. She clasped her other hand around his.
“You know, I never had a son,” she said. “And I had no idea, before, how sorry I am about that.” She reached forward and kissed him quickly on the forehead, then let go of his hand.
“Good-bye, Ben.”
She walked smartly up the ramp and onto the boat. Ben helped Cal raise and secure the ramp. Cal was looking hard at Ben, eyes wide. Ben said nothing.
He said nothing as the boat steamed away, and nothing when he got back to the Landing, but went straight to his room and opened the package, took out his violin and started to play.
— — —
Cal showed up a week later, and they spent practically two whole days in the punt — up at dawn to fish for pickerel, then trolling along the shoreline for pike, or parked off a weed bed casting for bass. The cooling waters were good for pickerel especially, and Ben’s mother appreciated the sweet-tasting fillets, which she fried up for dinner the first night and lunch the second day.
Cal did most of the talking because that was Cal, and Ben enjoyed listening to him going on about the perils and pleasures of having a girlfriend, and his hopes of turning part-time work at the hardware store into something more permanent, and the prospects for bagging a deer or maybe even a moose this year. It was near the end of the second day, when they were sitting in the mouth of the Muskoka River letting their hooks rest on the bottom, hoping the minnows would attract one last school of pickerel on their way to dinner, as the sun lowered in the sky and a cool breeze ruffled the lake, before Ben finally brought up the only thing he could think about anymore.
“Cal, you ever wonder?”
“Wonder what?”
“I dunno. What we’re gonna do?”
“You mean like jobs?”
“Yeah.”
“I told you, I’m hoping Clipsham’s hires me full time.”
“And that’s it?”
“I dunno, what else is there?”
“I dunno.”
They sat silent for a bit, then Cal spoke.
“You figure you’re gonna stay at the Landing?”
Pause. “I guess so.”
“You don’t have to, you know.”
Ben looked up quickly. “What else is there?”
“I dunno. You could always move into town. Maybe we could get a place. I’m sure ready to stop living at home.”
Ben shook his head. “They need me at the Landing. Besides …”
“Besides what?”
“Don’t you ever … I don’t know.” Big breath. “Don’t you ever think of getting out of here?”
The question startled Cal. “You mean like move away?”
“Yeah.”
Cal reeled in his line to check his minnow, and to think. “I don’t think I’d wanna do that. I mean, I wish I was back on the lake, but the town’s not so bad.” He looked at Ben. “You thinking of leaving?”
Ben hunched his shoulders. “Probably not.”
“Where’d you go?”
“I dunno. Toronto, maybe.”
“And do what?”
“I dunno. Play the violin.” He would never have told that to another person in the world. He instantly wished he hadn’t told it to Cal.
Cal frowned. “But that’s not a job.” Then he looked at Ben. “Oh. Well, why not?”
“It’ll never happen.”
“Who knows? It might.”
“How?”
Cal had no answer. They went back to watching their lines, until Cal asked, quietly.
“You’re not very happy, are you?”
Ben shook his head. “How can you tell?”
“I’ve known you since first grade.”
“Yeah, well, I guess.” Ben straightened up. “I just … I just see everything that’s gonna happen. I’m going to stay at the Landing, or move into town, and that’s it. And, I dunno, I’d figured there’d be more.”
“Yeah, well, you always were different, playing the violin and everything.”
“Yeah, well, right now I wish I’d never started.”
“You’d have just done something else. You’re pretty strange, you know. I mean you read, even when you don’t have to.”
Ben laughed. He couldn’t help it. “Anyway, sun’s going down. We better head back.” They started to reel in their lines.
“Hey, Ben …”
“What?”
“I think you oughta just get out of here,” Cal said, his voice low. “You oughta just go.”
“I can’t.”
“I know. You oughta anyway.”
“Thanks.”
They secured their hooks, and Cal picked up the oars. Ben looked out for a moment across the lake. The sun was sliding behind the pines that lined the western shore, and the islands were turning to silhouettes in the approaching twilight as the water darkened to gray-blue and the waves lapped a
gainst the rocking boat.
“Though I don’t know why anyone would want to leave this lake,” Cal said.
“Yeah, I guess.”
Cal dipped the oars in the water and turned the boat for home.
The Waome
The October day was darker than gray, with a cold rain and a sullen chop to the water, as the Waome steamed out of the Indian River into the north end of the lake. Ben and Henry had gone up on her the day before, to Lake Rosseau, to look over McCulloch House, a large, white, wooden, ramshackle resort that sprawled across McCulloch Island, in the middle of the lake. In its day it had been one of the finest addresses in the district, a place where men in white flannels played tennis on its four courts and women of a certain age protected themselves against the sun by sitting under umbrellas as they gazed out at the lake, or at the men in white flannels. But the McCulloch family had sold the resort in the twenties, because fashion had moved on, to resorts where tennis gave way to speedboats and jacket and tie wasn’t required for dinner. The resort had closed down soon after the Depression started. But now John Hotchkiss had bought it, because John Hotchkiss made a living out of buying things and then selling them, or renting them out. He owned some shacks on the edge of Gravenhurst that Ben’s mom said she wouldn’t let a dog sleep in, but men slept in them in the winter when they worked on the lakes cutting blocks of ice for the railroad, or in the summer doing odd jobs, until there were no odd jobs left to do and they moved on. John Hotchkiss had grown fat and happy off what he bought and sold, and he had one of the biggest, brickest houses in town, and now he owned McCulloch House. Ben and Henry had spent the day touring the place with him.
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