Testing the Current

by William McPherson

  Old Judge Aldrich, who had bought the islands from the government many, many years before and then arranged for his friends—most of them the parents of the present occupants—to build their summer houses on them, had written a book about the place. The book was mainly about the early Indians who camped there in the summer for the fishing. Each cottage had a copy of the leather-bound volume with engravings of tepees, of the Indians spearing fish in the shallow channels and drying them on sticks over their fires, of the signal fires burning at the Encampment, and photographs of some of the cottages under construction and of the first summer residents, and of the Logans’ and the Fishers’ yachts. The Logans were very rich and famous friends of Judge Aldrich, and the Fishers were friends of the Logans. They came from Cleveland. In the old days they used to stop their boats at the Island on their way to their camp far up Lake Superior. They had to drop anchor in the South Channel, between the Island and the shore, where one year the Logans’ boat ran aground and they stayed for a week. That’s how long it took to free it. The whole town went down to the shore to see the yachts, which were very big and white, like passenger ships. On the wall of Tommy’s cottage there was a faded photograph of his father, Mr. Aldrich, and Mr. Steer as boys, swimming from the Logans’ yacht before it sank one year in Lake Superior. Tommy’s grandmother used to tell the story of how the Logans and the Fishers had sailed out from their camp on an excursion, and while they were ashore with their picnic, the boat went down. “You know the Logans,” she would say, although no one did know them anymore, “they do hate to lose a yacht.”

  They were all dead now. Judge Aldrich himself was buried on the Island, which also contained an ancient Indian cemetery with little wooden shelters built over the graves, the houses of the dead. Indians still lived on the Island, too, in the summer, and sometimes they put bunches of wild flowers on the Indian graves and nailed the little shelters back together when they fell apart. The Indians lived in a couple of remote houses that had been set aside for them on the other side of the island the Steers and Mrs. Addington lived on. The children weren’t supposed to go there. The Indians didn’t spear fish anymore but dangled a hook and line from one of the bridges or docks. Sometimes, at night, they would go out in a rowboat with a flashlight, but that was called “shining,” and it made Tommy’s father and the other men very angry when they caught them. It was not sportsmanlike. The Indians spent most of their time keeping the houses in repair, the pumps working, the cottages cleaned, and the paths through the woods clear. One or two of them would work at the start of one of the parties on the Island, but they usually left early in the evening. Sometimes, though not always, they would show up the next day to put things back in order. That was the way the Indians were. Sometimes they showed up for work and sometimes they didn’t, and everyone complained about that but there wasn’t anything anyone could do about it, not even Mrs. Sedgwick, who would go over and rap on Ruth’s door, insisting that she come to work. But Ruth wasn’t there, the Indians said. Mrs. Sedgwick never believed them, and she would accuse Ruth, when she did show up, of hiding from her. “Are you afraid of me, Ruth?” They all laughed about that, about Mrs. Sedgwick’s boldness—even Mrs. Sedgwick—but Tommy didn’t think Ruth was afraid of Mrs. Sedgwick; she just had other things she wanted to do.

  To the islanders, the islands were all one—just the Island—and they were really one big family, though not always a happy one. Mrs. Sedgwick and Mr. Steer would have terrible political arguments when everyone gathered at half past five, even the children until they were sent to bed, often at the house where they were. Mrs. Sedgwick and Mr. Steer argued about Spain, about President Roosevelt, about the colored people although they agreed about the Indians, the only thing, it seemed, they did agree about. They even argued about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, whom Mrs. Sedgwick insisted on calling Mrs. Simpson. Mrs. Simpson was common, she said. Though Mrs. Sedgwick was an American, she believed the British monarchy was the best form of government, that it gave the people something enduring to respect, and that Edward had betrayed his duty to the Crown for a common tart. That’s what she said. Tommy supposed that if the United States had a king and queen, Mrs. Sedgwick would probably be a duchess, and he thought she supposed so, too. The Duchess of Sedgwick. It had a nice authentic ring. Mr. Steer, though, hated the Royal Family and said they should have thrown the rest of them out with the Duke and given the jewels to the people. Mrs. Sedgwick said he was a Bolshevik. “I’m a Bolshevik and you’re the Queen of Roumania,” Mr. Steer shouted, lurching on his cane and trying to plant it in the ground for support. Mrs. Sedgwick flushed and threw her arms up in exasperation, rings flashing, the long silken fringe of her shawl rippling around her.

  “Dick,” she said in her high, musical voice, trying to appear calm, “why must you be so contentious? It’s a lovely evening and all the ladies look so pretty.” Mrs. Sedgwick always looked like raspberry or lemon sherbet, Tommy thought, or like peaches and blueberries, in one of the flowing, flowered dresses made of batiste by a seamstress in the Bahamas, which she’d visited one winter. And Mrs. Sedgwick would float off like the Queen of Roumania, her laughter tinkling in the cool night air, leaving Mr. Steer sputtering and leaning on his cane. But Tommy knew she was really mad. Royalty was a sore point with her. Amy Steer was embarrassed.

  The repercussions from these arguments would sometimes last for days; they were always talked about the next morning, but in whispers so the children shouldn’t hear. Mr. Steer had had too much to drink, of course. “Dick’s not a radical,” Tommy’s father often said; “he’s just irascible.”

  It seemed to Tommy that Mrs. Sedgwick liked her drinks, too. When his father asked if he could freshen hers up, she would laugh in her silvery way and say, “Oh, maybe half a one, Mac,” but she had a lot of halves. In that way she was something like his mother, who always said she didn’t really like the taste of whisky but drank it to be sociable, though she refused to drink Mr. Sedgwick’s martinis anymore. He had a special technique for making them, swirling the vermouth with a great flourish from glass to glass, then filling each one with gin—he always brought his own and kept it on ice—and dropping in two olives at the end. The martinis made his mother sick, though that was supposed to be a secret, which was why she no longer drank them. Tommy knew they made her sick because once last summer when his father was away for a few days and everyone had gathered at Mr. Wolfe’s, his mother was drinking Mr. Sedgwick’s martinis and felt faint and left the room. Tommy found her sitting on Mr. Wolfe’s back steps with Mrs. Sedgwick fanning her and Mr. Wolfe holding a washcloth to her forehead. “It’s the vermouth,” his mother told Mr. Wolfe, sounding very weak. Then Mrs. Sedgwick shooed them both away and they went to look at the Indian arrows on Mr. Wolfe’s wall. They were very long, and Mr. Wolfe told him and Amy that the Indians up north in Canada shot bears with them. Later Mr. Sedgwick said that it couldn’t have been the vermouth. “Maybe Emma’s allergic to olives,” he said. At least it wasn’t kerosene, which was poison. Mr. Sedgwick mixed up the kerosene jug with the water jug once, and filled his mother’s drink with it. She had to run to the kitchen and spit it in the sink. She was very careful of Mr. Sedgwick’s drinks now.

  When it was Tommy’s parents’ turn to give a party—and of course they had to invite the Steers and the Sedgwicks and everyone else—his father and mother would figure out ways to keep Mrs. Sedgwick and Mr. Steer away from each other. They also had to keep him away from Mr. Aldrich, his brother-in-law. Mrs. Aldrich was his sister, but she wasn’t at all like Mr. Steer. Tommy’s parents’ strategies usually worked for a while but tended to fall apart later in the evening. Sometimes Mr. Steer, who said he didn’t like the parties anyway and rarely gave one himself, would stay home. That was a relief to everyone, though it seemed to Tommy the parties were more exciting when Mr. Steer was there. Mrs. Steer often stayed home. She said she’d rather read something interesting and also avoid a headache. Mrs. Sedgwick, she said, was impossible—“Oh! El
la Sedgwick,” she would exclaim—and for that matter so was Mr. Aldrich; Mr. Steer, too, whose behavior often irritated her but whose sober judgments she generally agreed with: they were, after all, hers first. “Moreover, Tommy,” she said, “your father’s not the easiest man in the world to get along with.” Tommy had to agree with that. Often, if Mrs. Steer didn’t mind company, Tommy would stay with her on those evenings she spent at home. They would have some of their more interesting talks then, as the distant sounds of the party drifted across the water and the lights from the bridge twinkled in the night on the river. After a time the disagreements would blow over and the islanders would start afresh.

  Once last summer Tommy’s father had had the dredge come down to deepen the shallow sandy channels between the islands. Just as Mr. Sedgwick had laid the cable under the river, so Tommy’s father arranged for the dredge because he knew the man who ran the dredging company. The company worked on the slip at the plant so the freighters could unload their coke and limestone for the furnaces. Tommy’s father could arrange a lot of things, even for the land that part of the golf course was on to be given to the country club. His company owned it but didn’t want to pay taxes on it. Tommy’s father was a powerful man, which made Tommy proud at the same time that it embarrassed him. Sometimes he wished that his father were like the other fathers, the fathers of the children he went to school with, instead of working for him, as many of them did. Once at school Tommy said that his father was somebody else. But the children of the other fathers didn’t have an island to go to, either, or a nice pleasant-smelling house with their own bedrooms. Bob Bonner, whom Tommy went to play with one day after school, lived three blocks away in an apartment that smelled of yesterday’s dinners, contained a big chair that reminded Tommy of sitting on a hairbrush, and had a linoleum rug in the living room. Although it was good for playing cars, Tommy hated the looks and feel of that cold linoleum rug that slid on the wooden floor under his feet, that curled up at the edges and was so brittle if you stepped on a corner of it you were liable to break off a piece, which would make Mrs. Bonner angry. She was large and fat, almost as fat as Mrs. Barlow. She was impatient with Bob and awkward around Tommy, and she wore a big housedress that looked too flimsy to contain her. She blamed Bob when Tommy broke off a piece of the linoleum, although she could see that Tommy had done it. Bob was nice about it, though. He said he was used to getting blamed for things his younger brother did. Bob slept in the same room with his younger brother, and his baby sister slept with his parents. Bob Bonner’s apartment faced Tommy’s father’s plant. It was on the second floor, and from the window you could see the men streaming out when the four-thirty whistle blew at the end of the day shift. That meant Tommy had to leave. Bob’s father would be home in a minute and it was their dinnertime. Although Tommy liked Bob and Bob seemed to like him, Tommy went to Bob Bonner’s only once. He didn’t go back, and he was ashamed to invite Bob to his house, where the grass was green and the rooms were large.

  When the dredge came to the Island, all the families stood on the shore and watched the tugboat shift it into the right position and the boatmen shout and wave their arms to one another signaling faster, slower, to the right, to the left, up, down. Tommy’s father, Mr. Sedgwick, and Mr. Aldrich ran up and down the shore shouting more directions—“Watch the dock!” “Not too close to the shore, you’ll hit the tree!”—as the big shovel scooped the mud from the bottom and dumped it in an ever-growing pile on the dredge itself. Before the dredge arrived, all the men with the help of Bill and Jim and a couple of other Indians had to dismantle three of the bridges, taking them off their pilings and laying out the boards on the land so they could be put back together as soon as the operation was over. They had to do that for the dredge. The dredging itself lasted only two days—just the channels between the Sedgwicks’ island and the one the Steers lived on, and the main island where Tommy’s family and most of the others lived were deepened—but for a week or so everyone had to use rowboats to go from one to another while the bridges were slowly replaced. The Indians didn’t always show up when they were supposed to, and the men were better at directing the work than actually doing it, which Tommy could tell the Indians thought was pretty funny. They never laughed, but he could tell. Mr. Wolfe said the Indians were like that, and he knew a lot about Indians, more than anybody except for Governor Wentworth and Judge Aldrich, who was dead.

  As the dredge clanked and steamed and churned the water in front of her house, Mrs. Steer stood on the shore with Tommy and Amy and Michael Aldrich, shaking her head. Deepening the channels was a serious mistake, she said. It disturbed the fish the Indians caught. It muddied the water for days. It made the currents flow faster and the swimming more dangerous for the young people and for herself as well. She was the only one of the older women who went swimming—the only one he had ever seen in a bathing suit, although he’d seen a picture of Mrs. Sedgwick in a bathing suit at La Jolla but everyone did it there, Mrs. Sedgwick explained. Daisy Meyer went swimming when she and Phil stayed at her mother’s, but she was younger. Of course, Madge McGhee and Emily Sedgwick went swimming sometimes but they liked to sunbathe better, and the Aldriches’ daughter did, too. All the boys went in—Phelps McGhee, Vint Steer, and Nick Farnsworth, Tommy’s brothers and the Aldriches’ grown sons—but except for Mr. Wolfe and Phil Meyer, hardly any of the men went in the water, either. But Mrs. Steer went swimming every morning, beginning early in the season and continuing until the water was very cold, stroking from her dock to the Boomer Island bridge and back against the current, four times altogether, in a steady Australian crawl. She was a good swimmer, better than his father, who hadn’t gone swimming in years, and certainly better than his mother, who didn’t even know how. It was interesting that Mrs. Steer did. She’d learned in Denmark and swum at the university. Tommy’s mother hadn’t gone to college, either. She went to work, instead, and helped pay for her sisters and her brother to go. Mrs. Steer and a man from the Coast Guard station on the next island upriver who used to come around sometimes—to sniff around Madge McGhee, Mrs. Steer said—taught Tommy and Amy and Michael Aldrich how to swim. Michael was Amy’s cousin who was two years older. The three of them were the only children on the Island except, occasionally, for the visiting grandchildren of some of the islanders, but they were babies.