Worst of all, the dredging made the currents so swift they were eroding the islands. Erosion was always a problem. Every year the men would confer about it, and their elaborate solutions, which involved pilings and jetties and too much money, never worked very well. They always tried to do it as cheaply as possible, which Mrs. Steer said was also the problem. Regardless of their efforts, the big front lawn of the Sedgwicks was a little less big each year. Tommy could see that from pictures taken a long time ago, and also by the diminishing distance of Argo’s doghouse from the riverbank. Argo was Emily Sedgwick’s St. Bernard. And each year the ground around the weeping willow at the edge of Mrs. Sedgwick’s side garden, the garden that faced the Steers’ across the channel, was a little more soggy. Once you could walk around the tree without getting your feet wet. Now if you walked up to it the soil squished like a sponge, leaking water. It was dangerous to get too close to the willow, the children were warned, because the current swirled around the island at that point, into the channel, and it would carry them away if they fell in. Mrs. Steer said the Sedgwicks’ island was in bad shape. In the middle of it, in the woods behind the big house, there was a marshy spot where the water bubbled up. Mrs. Steer told Mr. Sedgwick that sometime he’d have not one but two islands, that it would simply be cut in half by the rushing river. “One of these days, Tom,” she said in her straightforward way, “you’ll roar over in your launch and find another channel to dredge, the one running through the middle of your island.”
“Nonsense, Varla,” he fumed, and Mrs. Sedgwick said, “Well that wouldn’t be anything to gloat about, would it?” The Sedgwicks didn’t like to be told that at all, and Tommy couldn’t imagine such a thing. It was a terrible thought. The men didn’t believe the dredging was a serious problem, though, and as the channels were undeniably filling in and they needed to be deep enough to accommodate Mr. Sedgwick’s motor launch, it had to be done.
Mr. Sedgwick and Tommy’s father took the launch on their shooting trip to Iroquois Island that fall. Governor Wentworth—he’d built the house in town where Mrs. Slade lived—had a summer camp there, several miles down the river. It was a big island and he owned all of it. He didn’t live with Mrs. Wentworth anymore. Mrs. Wentworth, who had read the Bible twice through when she and the governor crossed the Gobi Desert a long time ago—it took a whole year—lived in Edgewater, the house the Indians had decorated with burlap and rope and birch saplings. Mrs. Wentworth wanted Tommy and Michael and Amy to call her Gaki, which was what her grandchildren had called her when they were still young and even after they grew up. Daisy Meyer still called her Gaki, but Mrs. Wentworth was Daisy’s grandmother. Tommy found it hard to call her that. Once the governor had lived on the Island, too, until he adopted the college student who was at the university when Mrs. Steer was there. People said she was part Indian. Mrs. Steer said she advertised in the paper for a statesman to adopt her, which the governor did, but after his term was over, not while he was still governor. She was his daughter for many years, but last summer the governor had the adoption cancelled and he married her. Every single one of the islanders was speechless, aghast—it was so completely beyond the pale, they said, that they had no words to describe it—but they talked about it the rest of the summer, in tones of astonishment, amazement, and awe, and in front of the children, too, who tried to figure it out among themselves.
Michael Aldrich said the governor always liked Indians and had written a book about Indian history before the white men came up the river looking for beaver skins. “He wants the Indians to improve themselves, and says they shouldn’t be allowed to buy whisky,” Michael said. Maybe that was it—the governor was improving the Indians. He always wanted to improve things. In the days when people still visited him on Iroquois Island—the invitation was in the form of a command, Mrs. Steer said—the governor would run shouting through the camp at dawn, waving his arms and pulling people from their cots, and make them jump naked in the lake. They had to be naked. All those old people naked in the lake! Some of them with big stomachs, and their skinny white hairless legs and their bare bums—and bare everything else, too! It seemed both shocking and hilarious, and Tommy and Michael and Amy giggled about it. But the men and the women went to separate areas, Mrs. Steer said, and nobody had a choice. Governor Wentworth checked to make sure they all jumped in, and he did, too. The governor also insisted the men and women sleep in separate cabins, the women’s lodge and the men’s lodge. Mrs. Steer said he disapproved of cohabitation and thought that was the way the Indians did it, before the Frenchmen introduced them to whisky and disease. The cabins had no electricity—there was none on his island—no running water or indoor plumbing, just outhouses. It sounded terrible to Tommy. His parents had gone only once, when he was a baby, and command or no, his father refused to go back. “What does he think he is, a Finn? Jumping in the lake at five in the morning,” his father exclaimed, as if that were all there was to be said about it. When Tommy told him that Mrs. Steer said the governor thought it was very improving, Tommy’s father looked at him, grunted, and went back to his newspaper.
The governor, who had a column in the newspaper, wrote that his daughter now his wife was the New Beauty and he changed her name to Bellanova, which he explained meant New Beauty in Latin, and said that together they were going to work for a new world order and against the old oppressive religion—but not like the Bolsheviks; more like the Fabians. Tommy’s father said the governor should have called her Belladonna, because she must have given him a lot of it. The islanders clearly thought the governor’s new marriage wasn’t improving anything, and they didn’t know what to say to old Mrs. Wentworth, so they didn’t say anything. They just patted her on the arm and smiled in a sympathetic way, and remarked when she was out of hearing about how amazing she was, what a wonderful woman. They didn’t know what to say to Mrs. Addington, either. She was his daughter. It was a terrible situation, and everyone wondered what would happen to the governor’s money. He was very old, and nobody expected him to live very long—“especially after a few doses of Belladonna,” Tommy’s father said. Mrs. Addington moved into Edgewater with her mother right after the governor got married, and gave her own cottage to Daisy and Phil. Daisy said the governor was an old fool, it was as simple as that, even if he was her grandfather, and all the islanders agreed, though they didn’t say so to Daisy; they just laughed about it among themselves, after a while.
The governor’s wife—to everyone Mrs. Wentworth was still his wife even though he’d divorced her many years before—gave the stained-glass Resurrection Window to the church the same summer. Everyone, even the Steers, went to the dedication service, which happened the very Sunday after the governor’s sudden marriage. The bishop came and patted Mrs. Wentworth on the arm and said in his sermon that she was a generous woman, full of forbearance. Everyone liked and admired old Mrs. Wentworth. She was a very great lady, they said, noting that she sat straight as a ramrod in the front pew at the dedication, acknowledging nothing. She sat by herself, too; Mrs. Addington sat in the pew behind her, with Daisy and Phil. Mrs. Wentworth continued to go to the parties on the Island, smiling graciously as if nothing had happened, and she gave her own annual party in Edgewater at the end of the season. Tommy supposed that if they had a king and queen, Mrs. Wentworth would be a duchess too.
Despite the governor’s marriage, which meant that nobody would visit him anymore, in the duck season when the governor had already gone to Georgia for the winter with Bellanova, Tommy’s father and Mr. Sedgwick put their decoys in Mr. Sedgwick’s launch and took it to Iroquois Island while Mr. Hutchins followed by car with his dogs, which were well trained and good hunters. Mr. Hutchins didn’t like boats, and there wasn’t room in the launch for the dogs anyway. The men spent the weekend in one of the governor’s small cabins that was always left open and returned with a bunch of ducks, which the grown-ups all went to the Hutchins’ to eat. Tommy was glad he couldn’t go. He didn’t like to eat duck or goose or partr
idge or venison. He didn’t like to eat anything his father had shot. It wasn’t so much that his father had shot it—he would have felt the same if Mr. Hutchins or Mr. Sedgwick or Mr. Steer did—as that when it appeared on the platter, fresh from the oven, Tommy saw it hanging in its feathers or fur from a rafter in the garage, looking very dead but with its remembered life still intact, an animal greatness that maybe the creature could no longer know but Tommy could imagine. Besides, he didn’t like the taste, so something else would be fixed for him. “After all, he has to eat something,” his mother would say.
Tommy remembered last spring, when his parents were looking at the farm on the River Road, how they’d sometimes stopped at Mr. Matson’s. While his father discussed properties and farming with Mr. Matson, and his mother talked to Mrs. Matson in her wheelchair about how much she liked the bedroom curtains Mrs. Matson had made for her, Tommy played around the Matson farm, exploring the edge of the pond, looking warily at the cows in the pasture, and venturing into the dim barn to jump in the haymow, watching the glowing motes of dust in the slanting rays of yellow light, the birds dart in and out. On the barn floor he stopped to pet the horses in their stalls and to look from the other side of his pen at Bill the bull. Bill was a mild creature and too old to be of use to anybody, Mr. Matson said, but he kept him on, the way he’d keep a pet. Tommy liked to stand outside Bill’s pen and tease him a little. Bill would toss his head back and snort amiably, and Tommy wondered if he dared climb up the rails and try to pat his nose. He seemed a friendly animal, like Ferdinand in Tommy’s storybook, but Mr. Matson cautioned him to be wary. An old bull can get ornery, he said. One time Bill wasn’t there and Tommy asked Mr. Matson where he’d gone. They were just sitting down to the dinner Mr. Matson had cooked. The Matsons had their dinner at noon, and Mr. Matson insisted Tommy and his parents eat too. “Mr. Matson, what happened to Bill the bull?” Tommy asked. “He’s the meat loaf,” Mr. Matson replied. “You’re eating him.” Tommy was indeed eating him, chewing the meat at that very moment, but he stopped right then. If his father had shot the Thanksgiving turkey—and after all, he didn’t even know the animals his father shot—Tommy wouldn’t have eaten that either. But the turkey came from the store so it was all right.
Tommy thought about these happenings this Thanksgiving Day as his parents’ guests moved about the living room. He turned them over in his mind, like a movie playing in his head, he thought, and he wondered if Mr. Sedgwick and Mrs. Sedgwick and Mr. Hutchins and Mrs. Hutchins and Cousin Maud and Cousin Gertrude and his brothers and Emily Sedgwick and Nick Farnsworth and all the others, if they had movies playing in their heads, too, and if they were seeing the same movie or if they all had different movies playing simultaneously but separately. It was a funny thought, and Tommy tried to imagine the movie each of them might be playing, but he wasn’t very successful at it. They were all talking so much, he supposed they couldn’t have much of a movie running in their heads anyway.
While Tommy was pondering this question, sitting on the stool in the corner next to the radio and the bookshelves, his brother David poked him on the head and said, “What’s on your tiny little mind, tadpole?” David sometimes called him “tadpole,” or worse. “Come to the party. Mother wants you to pass the hors d’oeuvres.” So Tommy got the tray of celery stuffed with cheese from the kitchen and began passing it from one guest to another, moving through the clusters of people, dodging elbows, offering celery, now to Mr. Hutchins, who was telling his mother that Mrs. Appleton had heard that Mr. Wolfe, who’d been away all fall, would be coming for Christmas, which his mother said she’d also heard, and she told Tommy he should offer the celery first to Cousin Maud and Cousin Gertrude because they were the eldest. So Tommy carried the tray toward the cousins. They were sitting erect at either end of the stiff old sofa with the feet that looked like lions’ paws, but they didn’t care for any celery.
Tommy’s father was teasing them. He could get away with teasing his cousins because Tommy’s mother said they doted on him, just like his mother, and he could do no wrong in their eyes. When he was in a good mood, Tommy’s father liked to tease, and he liked to tell stories, too, and he wanted the guests in his house to enjoy themselves and he made sure they did.
“My great-aunt Mary Farwell, the mother of these girls”—his father gestured toward the two old ladies on the sofa—“had a fur muff. Maud, you old sweetheart, I’ll bet you’ve got it with you today—or is it your turn to carry it, Gertrude? When I was a boy,” his father said, “I thought the muff was the brother of these little creatures here,” and he shook one of the paws dangling from Cousin Maud’s fur piece. “Aunt Mary used to wear both of them. It was colder in those days, though. And that was good for you girls—you don’t have to take turns with them. Good Lord,” he said, in a tone of mock astonishment, “these animals must be going on a hundred!”
“Now James, don’t tell that foolish old story,” Cousin Maud said. “I’ve never believed it.” She knew what was coming, and so did Tommy, who giggled in anticipation.
“What? What’s that you’re saying?” Cousin Gertrude asked.
“When Aunt Mary was an old lady she didn’t see too well,” his father went on, but a little louder, “and she didn’t go out much. But one day she and my grandmother took the train to Sudbury. Probably they wanted to make sure the mine was still running. It was their nickel, after all, and a girl has to watch her nickels—right, Maud?” Tommy was an appreciative audience for his father’s funny stories, and he laughed out loud: not only was the mine a nickel mine, but the cousins were very close with their money. His mother said they bought day-old bread at half-price. Tommy had visited the mine once. It was just a ramshackle wooden shed at the entrance to a black tunnel descending gradually into the earth, a railroad track coming out of it. He and his father and Mr. Hutchins followed the track for a little ways, into the mouth of the mine, past a broken wooden car that still stood on the rails, but then it began to get dark and they turned around. It could be dangerous, his father said. The timbers were old and rotten and the roof might fall in. The mine hadn’t been worked in years, but his father remembered when it was full of men who wore little carbide lamps on their heads and carried picks and shovels, filling the cars with ore. The men lived in the tiny wooden houses that dotted the neighboring hillsides. Nobody lived in them now, and the whole place was silent and bleak.
His father continued telling the story. “So Aunt Mary wrapped her furs around her neck and pulled the muff from the closet and went to the station. But she didn’t put her hands in the muff until she got on the train. And when she did, out of the muff jumped a family of mice. They’d been nesting there between outings. Now as I said, Aunt Mary didn’t see too well. In fact, she hardly saw at all, so she didn’t notice the terrified mice running wild through the car. But everybody else did, and there was a terrible hue and cry—women screaming, trying to jump on their seats, men chasing mice—a great hullabaloo. Aunt Mary leaned over to her sister—my grandmother was ten or fifteen years younger—rapped her cane on the floor and said, ‘I say, Julia, I say. What’s this fuss about?’ ‘It’s about the mice that just jumped out of your muff, Mary,’ my grandmother said. And Mary replied, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Julia! Mice in my muff! Such foolishness!’ That settled that,” his father said, “but Aunt Mary must have thought about it for a minute, because then she leaned over to my grandmother and said, ‘Anyway, haven’t these people seen a little mouse before?’”
Everyone laughed at Tommy’s father’s story, even Cousin Maud and Cousin Gertrude, who knew it by heart so it didn’t matter if she really heard it or not. Only he could get them to laugh. He could get anybody to laugh when he wanted to, and laughter and easy conversation rippled through the room that afternoon. They talked about the hunting season just passing, the Christmas season approaching too soon, the trouble in Europe and how Colonel McCormick said that Chamberlain had made everything all right and that it was Europe’s business anyway and not A
merica’s, which Mrs. Steer thought was shortsighted and she quoted from an article in The New Republic. Tommy’s father thought the real problem was Japan, and Mr. Sedgwick thought it was the new minimum wage, and they both agreed on that and told Nick Farnsworth that it was the rare man nowadays who gave a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay. Nick Farnsworth said, “Yes, sir. I’m sure you’re right, sir.” But they didn’t talk very much about politics. It was, after all, Thanksgiving, and nobody seemed intent on an argument. Mrs. Sedgwick talked to the cousins about the new king and queen, and the three of them pitied the duke who used to be the king and deplored the duchess who had taken him in, but the duke was weak where he should have been strong—“not like your old-fashioneds, Mac,” Mrs. Sedgwick said. “They’re strong where they might have been weak. But I believe I would have another, thank you. I’m a little chilly and they are delicious.” Mrs. Sedgwick was often chilly. “Nobody makes an old-fashioned like yours, Mac.” Tommy’s brother David mumbled that it would be cheaper to turn up the furnace than to fuel Mrs. Sedgwick—he didn’t like her very much—and his father began refilling glasses.
Tommy’s father drank only Scotch whisky, himself, with plain water. Soda was for sissies, he said. But if anyone asked, and always on special occasions, he served his guests old-fashioneds. Tommy thought they looked delicious and he liked to watch his father make them, muddling the cube of sugar with a dash of bitters in the bottom of the heavy glasses with his monogram on the side, adding the whisky, the soda, and then the slices of orange and a red maraschino cherry with a little juice from the bottle for color. He made Tommy and Amy and his cousins old-fashioneds, too, with ginger ale and without the whisky, and gave them their own muddlers. The muddlers were clear glass with a thick round ball on the bottom and on top a tiny delicate bird with open wings. Each bird was different and a different color. Tommy’s was the color of turquoise. When Tommy’s father did things well, he did them very well, with a kind of happy, careless ease that was a pleasure for everyone to watch. It made Tommy proud to see him like this, and he helped his father serve the round of drinks.
Testing the Current Page 10