Beauty

by Frederick Dillen

  They slowed when they wound into the maze of Charlestown, across the harbor from Boston. When they reached the harbor, the judge had Ben stop short of the Wives and the TV trucks and what looked like a volunteer crowd that was growing by the minute.

  The last seconds waiting to get out of an agony squeeze inside a car are always the worst. And while Dave had assumed the judge would want to walk in through the crowd, now he figured out that she had to wait for somebody to find her if there was going to be the shot of her getting out of Ben’s car. Dave should have been worried about Carol, but as soon as he could punch the seat back in front of him and dive out, he punched and dove. He looked back, and Carol was already out. She hadn’t waited for him either.

  Now the judge waved Carol and Ben up to do the crowd walk with her. Dave stayed close enough behind to watch Carol. Maybe she’d need a hand, but mostly he was a fan at a good game, and Carol was a late-in-life rookie burning up the league. She was tall, confident, flannel shirt, red hair frizzed, leading the judge into the Wives of the Sea while letting it seem the judge was leading. Dave admired the hell out of Carol.

  Now Carol bent down like the right-hand political consultant, and the judge was listening, and now Carol was back up tall and waving and calling something into the Wives, and the Wives parted for some bumping progress through them. It was too low to see what it was, but it was moving through on a course for Carol. Carol’s free hand was on the judge’s shoulder. Dave could hardly believe how good Carol was.

  It was Anna Rose Taormina coming through. TV cameras closing in from everywhere. Anna Rose hugging Carol and then hugging the judge, and the judge, a slight woman but a politician and an old-school Yankee to boot, hugging back to beat the band.

  Carol started to step out of the picture, not easy in the corral of television equipment, but the judge turned back quick to get a hug from Carol, including a tiptoe kiss on the cheek. Dave froze the moment just long enough to tell himself he’d been smarter than Lazarus to sign on with Carol MacLean.

  Anna Rose led the judge on into the crowd of Wives and news groups and the more and more onlookers.

  Carol got Ben’s hand and led him off to the side. When Dave caught up, Carol raised Ben’s hand like for a champ, and Dave grabbed Ben’s other hand and raised that one. Ben grinned like a champ. The judge would go home with her regular driver in a limo or whatever, but Ben had already had a day.

  They worked toward the side of the crowd and in the general direction of the harbor. Carol pointed ahead at the three high white masts.

  “What’s that?”

  Ben and Dave said at the same time, “The Constitution,” like maybe Carol had been revealed as a Commie spy.

  With that, they had to push to keep up with her until they got to where they could see the ship itself, with its black hull and its white stripe windowed for cannons, and the masts soaring.

  Carol stopped and said, “That’s it.”

  No sobbing, but she was damp in her eyes, and in fact it was a weepingly beautiful ship, how it looked and what it meant.

  Then Carol said, “Oh, my god,” and grabbed Dave’s arm, and the three of them registered what was beyond the Constitution.

  Crowding the harbor were boats—fishing boats: big ones, bigger ones, small and smaller ones. The water out there beyond the eighteenth-century three-masted warship was all but solid with today’s boats that did work as ancient as war, and the guys on those boats must have learned that the judge had arrived, because a cacophony of horns lifted from the boats in a clanging howl that so shook the air that the towers of downtown Boston wavered like a mirage.

  Ben, kid from El Salvador, said, “This is America.” He was crying and Dave was not far from it.

  Carol said, “It is.”

  Ben said, “It is people standing up and trying, everybody, and everybody a chance. That’s why everybody ever came here and still comes.”

  There was the static barking of a public-address system, and they could look across a slip from the Constitution to where somebody, Anna Rose and her Wives, had set up a little stand and a microphone. The judge was ready to go.

  Dave said, “You don’t want to be over there?”

  “Let her have it. People will know about us when it’s time.”

  The judge, facing the cameras and the Wives and the crowd, said, pretty clear for a loudspeaker outdoors, “My office has just received a motion to suspend the injunction I recently issued, an injunction that all but shuts down the commercial New England fisheries. I didn’t issue that injunction lightly. Fishing is in New England’s bones; historically, it may in fact be New England’s bones. As a New Englander from head to toe, fishing is certainly in my bones.” The judge stopped and took a breath and looked over her audience. They were not, even with all the news people, a glamorous bunch. But everybody was paying serious attention, and when the judge took her breath, the attention got more ­serious.

  “I studied and weighed all the data and all the arguments, and as much as I agonized over the implications for people and harbors and history and even our New England soul, I finally didn’t feel I had any choice but to issue the injunction. We are the stewards of our ocean and the fish that live in it. Having issued the injunction, I am not inclined to suspend it immediately. That’s how the law works, and it’s also how I work. I am, in fact, inclined to be adversarial to any motion to suspend. The motion that came in today, however, calls into serious question the fundamental data on which I made my decision. That’s a problem for me and it’s a problem in the law. A motion to suspend, if it’s to have any chance of success, must present compelling reasons. The motion I received today presents compelling reasons, and it also suggests sound methods for acquiring more trustworthy data on our fish stocks. There is a reasonable possibility that our stocks are not as bad as suspected and that with far less draconian regulations than proposed in the injunction, fishing could continue off our shores. Even with this encouraging news, however, I worry that the expense of opening this matter up to further study would be prohibitive in these financially uncertain times. Happily, all but miraculously, money has come from the fishing community of Elizabeth Harbor to pay for the further study. It’s not enough money—there never is enough money—but it’s a meaningful start, and it has convinced me that I have another decision to announce. I’m here now to make that announcement, but first I want to tell the men and women behind me, the fishermen who have come in today hoping to mark another splendid chapter in the history of our great harbor.”

  The stations must have been broadcasting out so the boats could pick it up, because all the horns had gone quiet.

  The judge turned around to face the harbor and the boats. In the quiet, you would have thought the boats themselves were listening. The judge stood still, letting the moment be the moment. The boats waited. Dave waited. Carol and Ben waited. A politician, Dave thought, but sometimes you needed them.

  The judge raised both arms. Tiny woman, but both arms went up, and from Boston to Tokyo, you knew it was a touchdown, and the boats, the horns, erupted, lifting the harbor.

  Painter

  Carol searched for Easy’s boat. She searched by quadrants, going from right to left. She didn’t know what she’d do if she saw his boat, but she needed to know where it was. If it was here, and if that was close as she could get to him, she needed to know she was at least that close. She didn’t see it. The Beauty. She went back from left to right. The only boats she could distinguish were small ones coming in close, somebody in a rubber rowboat, kayaks, a Windsurfer.

  Dave and Ben were moving around to where everybody was, and Carol started to follow them and then worried it would be harder to pick out Easy’s boat if she were in the crowd. She walked out farther on the pier. She was alone. She started searching back right to left. She was short of breath and she had to squeeze her hands into fists, to stay focused in her search. She heard
a shout about beauty and paid no attention. She ignored all the sounds drifting from the crowd. Carol was looking. She gazed above the small boats and the oddities to search among the big boats farther out. She realized that she would not recognize Easy’s boat from so far away, if he’d even come. He had to be out fishing for his crew every minute before the regulations took effect.

  She heard it again, and she knew the voice, and it was nearby. “Beauty.”

  Right here below her, it was Easy in the rubber rowboat, grinning. Carol’s breath got shorter, and Easy said, in a pleased-with-himself voice, “I rowed.”

  Carol didn’t feel herself sinking down, but she was on her knees, just like she’d been when he first came to her, when she was an undertaker expecting her own company and had instead found herself buried with all the men and women she’d been burying for years and years.

  Easy laughed and said, “Take the painter,” and because of the instant in which she looked around for somebody with a paintbrush, she almost missed catching the rope he tossed up to her. She did catch it, and she laughed herself and held that rope for dear life.

  She held it until Easy boosted himself up onto the dock beside her. He tied the rope to something and took hold of her shoulders and stood her up.

  He said, “You did it,” and he was still grinning like he had everything just right. “I can fish out of Elizabeth Harbor and bring my fresh catch to you.” Then he let go of her shoulders, and she didn’t know whether to tell him that he shouldn’t let go, that he should hold her, so she reached around and hugged him herself. She smelled him, his sweat and the sea. He’d rowed in from the Beauty. She watched his face as he grinned again and then he had his arms around her, and he kissed her like he was supposed to do and she kissed him of course, and out over the harbor, the horns were going again. Which would have been more than enough for Carol, enough for anybody. Except then Easy leaned back, just a bit, and looked at her, and saw her.

  Acknowledgments

  Particular thanks to Joe Regal, Jon Karp, Emily Graff, Sallie Bingham, and Justin Colin.

  A legion of people read and contributed to one or more of the forest of drafts Beauty went through. If I do not name all of those people here, I thank them just the same, a lot, and I beg them to understand their own names among these few souls whose insistence I can’t shake: Ted Buswick, George Stalk, Ron MacLean, David Rosen, and Jack Parsons.

  About the Author

  PHOTOGRAPH BY LESLIE DILLEN

  Frederick Dillen was born in New York City’s Greenwich Village and raised in a New Hampshire boarding school. A graduate of Stanford University, Dillen worked odd jobs from Lahaina to Taos and New York to Los Angeles, managing a hotel and running a fake ranch, carrying plates and shilling for business. His short fiction has appeared in literary quarterlies and The O. Henry Prize Stories. His Hero was named Best First Novel of 1994 by the Dictionary of Literary Biography. His second novel, Fool, was a Nancy Pearl Book Lust Rediscovery in 2012. Dillen and his wife, the actress and playwright Leslie Dillen, are the parents of two grown daughters and live in New Mexico with a yellow dog named Lucy.

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  Also by Frederick Dillen

  Hero

  Fool

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Frederick Dillen

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  First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition March 2014

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  Designed by Aline C. Pace

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dillen, Frederick G., 1946-

  Beauty : a novel / Frederick G. Dillen.

  pages cm

  1. Businesswomen—Fiction. 2.

  Corporations—Massachusetts—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.I415B43 2014

  813'.54—dc23

  2013028658

  ISBN 978-1-4767-1692-3

  ISBN 978-1-4767-1694-7 (ebook)