The Ebony Swan

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  She spoke quickly, suppressing her annoyance. “To the islanders it is a beautiful place.”

  “Tell me about it,” Susan said.

  Eric, too long away from center stage, answered her. “Legend has it that Captain John Smith gave it that name. He’d spent some time in Tangier when he was in Morocco, and something about our Virginia island is supposed to have made a connection for him. Emily Gower is my aunt, so maybe I’ll take you there, Susan, if your grandmother doesn’t have time.”

  “Thank you, but we have other plans,” Alex said, sounding sharp.

  Susan nodded in agreement and smiled at her grandmother. Alex’s heart twisted. Her smile was Dolores’s smile, and it was as if old grief had never lessened.

  Eric shrugged. “Okay. I’ll be back. We’ll do something soon—you and Theresa and I. Thank Gracie for the pie, Alex. I’ve got to get going. I’m working for Dad now at The Mulberry Tree, and he doesn’t look lightly on employees who arrive late.”

  He was gone almost as suddenly as he’d arrived, and the air seemed to vibrate with energy in his wake. Eric really made her very tired, Alex thought. And she didn’t at all like what she saw in Theresa’s eyes when she looked at him. There was no stability in Eric, and even though Alex had never been able to love Theresa, she deserved better than Eric.

  Susan folded her napkin. “This has been a lovely dinner, but do you mind if I go up to bed now? I’m a little tired.”

  Alex was contrite at once. “Of course you are. We’ve kept you too long. Sleep as late as you like in the morning. Run along now.”

  When she had gone, Theresa and Alex sat at the table for a few minutes longer.

  “How do you feel about your granddaughter?” Theresa asked.

  It wasn’t how she felt that mattered most, Alex thought. Some unexpected longing to love Dolores’s daughter had risen in her. But she rejected this weakening in herself, because there was too much pain in loving and she was too old for disappointments.

  “I like her,” she said, and let it go at that.

  Theresa raised winged eyebrows. “I’m not sure she likes us. She’ll always be her father’s daughter first, and you sent her father away, didn’t you?”

  Alex pushed back her chair and rose to her still regal height. “I don’t know where you get your ideas. Anyway, all that is past history. It no longer matters, and I think Susan will make up her own mind about us.”

  “Perhaps the past is easier to retrieve than you imagine if Marilyn Macklin was trying to see Lawrence out in New Mexico before he died. What do you think about that?”

  “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know.”

  Theresa glanced at her watch. “Perhaps I can get hold of Peter and find out what’s happened. You never saw the whole manuscript, did you, Alex?”

  “I saw all except the notes for the last chapters that were to bring Juan Gabriel’s life up to date. Since the book will never be published now, this reappearance doesn’t matter.”

  It would be safer if she could make Theresa believe that it didn’t matter. Marilyn had wanted to use the details of that final terrible episode that had driven them from Peru—and which had reverberated in her husband’s writings to the end of his life. Alex had been adamant in her refusal to talk about this, but of course Marilyn could have written to Lima and obtained old newspaper clippings. Whether she had or not, Alex didn’t know, but she’d been aware that her own control over what Marilyn wanted to write had grown weaker toward the end. Marilyn had seemed excited about something, and her very eagerness had alarmed Alex.

  Theresa was watching her, clearly unconvinced. “Perhaps now is the time to find out what Marilyn meant to say.”

  “It’s none of your affair, Theresa. I will talk to Peter when the time is right.”

  “Yes, but I want to talk to him now,” Theresa said.

  It was hard to deflect Theresa from any project that stirred her curiosity. Alex let the conversation drop without further objection, unsure of what beehive Theresa was about to excite.

  When Theresa had gone, Alex slipped on a sweater against the cool breeze that could blow in from the bay, even on a summer evening, and picked up a flashlight and a cane to keep her steady on uneven ground. She went down the back steps to the lawn that sloped to the water.

  Little waves broke against the dock pilings with repeated sighs, while the August insects were busy with their own orchestra. The creek always seemed to breathe with the tide, so that stars reflected in its surface were never still. Due to the creek’s turnings, the bay was distant. Across the water a few scattered lights shone in windows, and the night seemed close and dark.

  Her mind began to replay what Gilbert Townsend had said at the church. What was it that he so feared from Susan? What had happened during his exchange with Juan Gabriel that she had never known about? He had seemed alarmed by Hallie’s sudden appearance, but what could he possibly fear from his dim-witted sister?

  She was weary of questions she couldn’t answer, and she turned her flashlight beam to pick out the shape of the old boathouse. There was no boat there now; she didn’t even keep a rowboat. The closed door at the land end of the building drew her—within was the room where Juan Gabriel had liked to work. Gracie and George still kept everything clean and in order, no matter how many years it had been since her husband had used it. Alex had promised to show Marilyn where Juan Gabriel had worked, but she had never gotten around to it.

  She walked slowly up the slope and placed her hand on the door. It swung open easily as she turned the knob. The smell of a closed-in space, faintly scented with the ghost of old pipe tobacco, assailed her as she stepped inside and reached for a light switch.

  She had furnished this big room for Juan Gabriel and he had never wanted anything changed. There were no dramatic touches here, no distracting colors. She knew what he liked. To be a good wife to her husband, and to help nurture his talent, had been her goal and her pleasure. He had rescued her from despair after Rudy Folkes had died, and he’d loved her deeply, with an old man’s love that had revived him and helped to keep his creativity alive.

  Looking about in the lamplight, she found everything clean, dustless, unchanged. There were overhead fans for summer heat, and electricity when it grew cold. She had come here only a half dozen times since his death, because it was too painful to be reminded of all that happened during those last months of his life. But now, because of Susan’s coming, the ghosts must be faced and dealt with.

  The room’s furnishings were simple—suited to a writer’s needs. Behind the great mahogany desk from the West Indies stood shelves that held books and notes. Against the opposite wall stretched more shelves that held the complete collection of Juan Gabriel Montoro’s works, in all their editions and translations. The small tea table and two chairs had been for the afternoon break he sometimes enjoyed taking with his wife. Though more often the tea table had been heaped with manuscript pages as they came from his hand.

  Several large closets had been built into the room, and one held his sturdy safe. Every writer dreaded the loss of a manuscript in the making, and the safe had protected Juan Gabriel’s work until it reached an editor’s hands.

  She had opened the safe for him just once during their first year in Virginia. She still felt chilled at the memory of what she had found on the top of the stacked manuscript pages—the loaded Spanish pistol he had brought from Peru. The gun had belonged to his father, and she could remember the gleam of the antique silver mountings. She’d known all too well how that gun had been used, and Juan Gabriel must have seen her shock, for he had come at once to hold her tenderly in his arms.

  Strangely, after his death, the pistol had not turned up in any of his possessions, so he had probably disposed of it long ago.

  She touched more switches so that lights came on and the room glowed with soft radiance. She looked around, in spite of herself, re
membering—too much.

  He had seldom used the covered typewriter that rested on a separate stand, for he loathed all machines. The pencil, with soft lead and a good eraser, was Juan Gabriel’s chosen medium, and he believed strongly in the connection between brain and fingers. Alex, who was able to read his handwriting as no one else could, had been his secretary, answering the mail and typing his manuscripts. Sometimes he would ask for her suggestions, respecting her opinion. Perhaps that was one reason why she had loved him—he allowed her to be a person in her own right, successful and intelligent. When she thought of him now, she still felt that warm sense of loving protection with which he had surrounded her always. He had been kind, and he had trusted her—a fact that still broke her heart. At least he had never known about Tangier Island.

  Alex moved to his worn, comfortable chair and sat before the tilted writing table where he had worked. A ceramic jug from the Andes stood on a table beside his chair, filled with pencils ready to his hand, all sharp points upward, so he need never hesitate when he discarded, point down, one that was dull. Alex had helped sharpen all those pencils for him year after year, and she’d sent to New York for the particular variety that he’d liked to use.

  She had come here once, while he was ill, and sharpened every dull pencil, as though by keeping them sharp she could assure his return to this room. She picked up a black pencil now and tested the point with one finger. Holding the shaft of wood was almost like feeling his touch again. How strong the affection had been between them. How deep and lasting. He had been her hero, teacher, idol. Her admiration for him had never faltered.

  But he had not been all she needed—Tangier Island awaited her, as inevitably as fate. It was an island possessed by a mystique that had both attracted and at times frightened her when she began to realize how deeply bred John Gower had been to that place. Even though he had grown up on the mainland, far away from Virginia, under circumstances that had seemed romantic to her in those young and foolish years, he had turned as a man to the old, rather fierce traditions that belonged to the island’s centuries of isolation and the need to survive against high odds.

  It was strange how happenstances had brought about her first meeting with John Gower. She had stopped at the local bookstore in Kilmarnock, where Emily Townsend worked in the days when she and Alex had been close friends.

  After she and Emily had said hello, she wandered the aisles looking for a book for the weekend. John was there browsing as well, and even before Emily introduced them, they had looked into each other’s eyes with unexpected intensity—a seemingly casual glance, but each had recognized something in the other that was startling and unasked for. Alex’s grandmother in Lima had believed in second sight and she might have said that Alex and John had known each other in some former life. In spite of that strange sense of recognition, nothing further had developed at the time.

  Later she learned a great deal more about John and the dramatic events of his childhood and teenage years. He had told her about his lovely, gentle, mainland mother, who, nevertheless, had found in herself the spirit to stand up to the Tangier Island man she had married and come to fear. She had died when John was only seventeen, but there had been money on his mother’s side to see him through college, and friends to help. In the twenties, when his mother had run away and taken her three-year-old son with her, they might have been followed and the boy taken back to the island, so it had been necessary to hide, and she had managed their escape.

  John had been told about his heritage, and when he was grown, the blood of generations of men who had fought the sea for survival spoke to him, drew him back. He had gone to the island out of curiosity and to meet his many relatives, but that speck of land, barely floating above water, held him and he had become a waterman—with, however, an ambivalence that set him a little apart because of the heritage from his mother.

  When Alex first knew him, she had never dreamed that the island aspect was stronger than the gentle-seeming side of the man she’d loved. By the time she recognized this, it was already too late. Fate had moved its pawns again.

  Juan Gabriel Montoro had read about Tangier and he wanted to use a scene from the island in a book he was writing that would touch on the early history of Virginia. When he learned of Alex’s chance meeting with a “native” of Tangier, he was delighted and couldn’t wait to take a trip out on the bay, so he could learn more firsthand. John, still unwary, had fallen in with his plans, proud to show off the place of his birth.

  The island, set out in the water between Virginia’s two shores, was only twenty nautical miles away, and John Gower took them across in his fishing boat. This was in the forties, before the present influx of tourists had opened the island to the outer world. Not a woman had been in sight for a stranger to glimpse, and Alex had sensed a guarded suspicion in the few men they passed on the long hike to the beach that Juan Gabriel wanted to visit. He’d always sought first for the feeling of a place, his own reactions to it, before he looked for factual details. By the time they reached that long, clean stretch of shell-strewn sand, Juan Gabriel was ready to rest.

  Alex could close her eyes now and see the beach again clearly. The sun had been about to set—John Gower had arranged for them to spend the night on the island—and colors of burnt orange and crimson stained the sky. She could remember Juan Gabriel urging them to go off together across the sand.

  “You two have young legs—so go! Walk along the water’s edge for me and I will sit here on the sand and go with you in my story-dreaming.”

  How young she had been! She’d worn a full skirt that blew against her slender body, her long black hair free about her shoulders, and John hadn’t changed from his waterman’s gear, his face as brown as his arms in their rolled-up plain sleeves. They had walked together on hard, wet sand, and hadn’t touched each other by so much as a finger. Yet they’d moved close in spirit, and they both knew very well what was happening.

  For Alex this had been nothing like her feelings for Rudy Folkes, or for Juan Gabriel. This was her first young love—totally abandoned, without caution or forethought. The acceptance, each of the other, had been complete as they walked together on the sand. Something utterly magical had taken hold of them that evening. Something dangerous.

  For her, there had been no choice. It had not been difficult to see one another. They had found delicious, secret places along the Tidewater shores for their lovemaking—never anything as mundane as a room or an ordinary bed. Sometimes it was a field where wildflowers bloomed, or perhaps the russet ground beneath pine trees. And how they had talked, opening their hearts to each other. The stoicism of island men had broken down in John. It seemed that each had understood the other as no one else ever could. That belief, of course, had been their greatest mistake.

  Curiously, she had felt no betrayal toward Juan Gabriel. Not then. She knew that nothing could change the special devotion she felt for her husband, but this new love, that she’d never before experienced, had risen in her so strongly that it swept all else away. There’d been no thought of the future, or of who might be hurt. How could this much happiness hurt anyone?

  Only one insurmountable problem existed between John and herself. John wanted to marry her and she already was married. Juan Gabriel was an old man—in John’s eyes—and he felt she deserved a young man’s love. Someone with whom she could build a life, with whom she could have children. Her marriage to Juan Gabriel had brought only one child—a boy who had died as a baby before they had come to this country. There had been no more pregnancies, though they’d tried. What she hadn’t understood was the deep island tradition of morality that governed John, even though the part of him that was like his mother could throw off such restrictions for a time.

  In some strange way, Alex’s relationship with John seemed to exist in another dimension that had nothing to do with her everyday life. In this way she avoided thought, avoided the truth of what was happen
ing, even the truth about herself. John was sure about his life. He wanted to go on with the old ways of the men of his family and be a waterman on Chesapeake Bay out of Tangier Island. He found the dangers and uncertainties of that life to his taste. So, he pleaded with Alex to divorce Juan Gabriel and come to live on the island as his wife. The fact that divorce would never be possible for Juan Gabriel meant nothing to John. He had the arrogance of a young man and the rock-hard immovability of all his island-bred ancestors. He could never understand Juan Gabriel’s principles, or that Alex Montoro had lived an entire lifetime as a ballerina before she even turned twenty-one. Even his mainland upbringing had not touched that fierce, hard core. He was a gentle man, whose hidden, inner fierceness came to frighten her. At first, time spent with John existed on a different plane. An unreal plane, perhaps. Something deep within Alex knew she could never leave Juan Gabriel, never go to live on that tiny, bleak island, burying herself forever. Perhaps she had buried herself in Virginia, but at least she had done so with someone who understood who she had once been, someone who valued her in ways John could never understand. So her refusal wasn’t entirely cowardice on her part. An unexpected strength had risen in her—a will strong enough to overcome the emotions she felt in John Gower’s arms. Perhaps it was a newly awakened sense of herself, of John, of Juan Gabriel. And she made her choice.

  In dark moments, when she was being honest with herself, she knew there had been another reason for her decision not to leave Juan Gabriel. His terrible burst of violence back in Lima was something she could never forget. It was always there at the back of her mind as a warning, and more frightening than the same element in John. Perhaps something in Alex herself had attracted passionate, loving, possessive men, with a depth of violence in their nature.

  Juan Gabriel had not been young—even then he was already in his fifties—so it was not the violence of youth that had betrayed him. A hot Spanish anger existed just beneath the surface, ready to explode. When she looked back now she could not be sure that her motive had been one of loyalty to her husband, or fear of what he might do. If she had followed John Gower, they both might be long dead by now. The gun she had seen in Juan Gabriel’s safe had been a warning.