The Harbormaster's Daughter

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “‘I do not know one of my sex, no woman’s face remember, save, from my glass, mine own. Nor have I seen more that I may call men than you.…’” She worked it over and over, loud and soft, quick and light like a dizzy, confiding girl, then hesitant, like herself.

  LaRee poked the fire—to keep the damp from settling. The fog was blowing up from the bay through the woods, so thick she couldn’t even see down to the pond. There was a vine growing in around the window frame; she ought to pull it out. But she was fond of it; it felt right to let it in. The window had been the only one left intact from the Calliope after it burned down, and the owners had been glad to let Drew and LaRee carry it away. It was six feet high and nearly as wide, leaded, with two rows of stained-glass panes at the top, so when you looked out through it you seemed to see a huge painting, different every hour as the light and weather changed. Drew had built their walls out of timbers from the old stagecoach barn out on the King’s Highway. The wineglass LaRee sipped from had belonged to Ada Towne, and before her to the Stewart family whose initials were etched around the rim. Even the knobby geranium on the sill had been salvaged from the porch of a summer house after the tenants went home for the winter. LaRee had made a life out of what others had left behind.

  “‘…I would not wish any companion in the world but you,’” Vita was saying. “‘Nor can imagination form a shape besides yourself.’”

  The fire snapped; a drop fell on the roof, then another. LaRee heard Vita’s voice gather confidence as she started the little speech again, and then the bedroom door flew open and there she was, standing as proud as a statue.

  “I can do it,” she said. “It’s good. Do you want to hear?”

  “Of course!” LaRee was glad she hadn’t turned the light on yet, so Vita didn’t see her eyes fill as she listened to the story of a girl who came to the age of love on a distant island, with only the little she had learned in her shipwrecked life.

  12

  A LOTHARIO

  “It would have been different if I was harbormaster,” Franco said. “She’d be living with us now.”

  They were finishing breakfast—scrambled eggs and sausage, the same as his mother would make on a morning when his father was heading out on the Rainha, and coffee so strong it seemed oily.

  “Yeah, like when the boys were teenagers all they wanted to do was to be with their parents,” Danielle said with a little laugh.

  “Boys are something else completely,” he said.

  “I wasn’t exactly close to my father when I was Vita’s age,” she said. “But then, I was already married to you.”

  “She shook my hand and said she was pleased to meet me!” he said. “She was daring me to say I’m her father.”

  “And did you?”

  “No. I… wasn’t sure it was the right thing.”

  “So you were being a good father.”

  He smiled. “Still, if she lived here…”

  “Slay Case Lothario Wants Tyke Now.” That had been the headline in the Herald the day after Franco filed for custody. Then there was “DA: Neves Neither Exonerated Nor Charged,” and the one with a picture of LaRee emerging from the library with Vita on her hip, a cold wind blowing her hair across her face, and an expression of grim determination. “Kid Comes with a Fortune,” it read, as if that was all anyone cared about. The fortune was two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, all Sabine had had, and left to Vita in her will. She had named LaRee Vita’s guardian. Who else was there? Sabine’s father had evaporated, her mother was dead, and her sister operated a body-piercing salon on the West Coast. LaRee was the closest thing to family Sabine had.

  “It would be different,” Danielle said. “I admit.”

  “‘Harbormaster Seeks Custody of Orphaned Daughter,’” he said. “If that had been the headline, the whole state would have been on my side.” Those summer mornings when he was skateboarding down Breakwater Road to see Sabine, you could smell the asphalt in the sun and the bay sparkled like it was full of stars. That it could have come to this! He’d wanted no child, and now he couldn’t help loving her more painfully than he had ever loved anyone before.

  “They wanted sensational headlines. The DA wanted to keep from looking like an idiot, Franco, that’s all. You know how this stuff works. And plenty of people are on your side. The people who read those headlines wanted a story to take them out of their own lives for a minute. None of them gave a damn about you or Vita or me. None of it had anything to do with us.”

  “She ought to be here.” The ground went out from under his voice for a second; he felt foolish and small. Vita ought to be here, with him, with Danielle, whose all-forgiving love had already stretched itself to cover her husband’s illegitimate child.

  “If you were harbormaster,” Danielle said, “it wouldn’t seem like such a big-shot job. What does the guy do except chase people who are speeding in the no-wake zone and give out tickets for lobster scrubbing? To hear you talk, you’d think he was harbor emperor. You’re the one who’s famous.”

  But the fame was long over. Their misery had lost its savor and the cameras had swiveled toward the next catastrophe, and the next. Meanwhile his daughter was growing up with LaRee Farnham.

  “And Vita’s not here because you did the right thing,” Danielle said, as if she had read his mind. “She’d gotten used to living with LaRee and you weren’t going to break that up, not after she lost Sabine the way she did. You ought to be proud of it!”

  “Except…” Except Vita had come to belong to that world more than his world, and that was a world that looked down on him. He remembered how Sabine would seem to be listening for a distant music when she first sipped a glass of wine—she said she was waiting to experience the taste with all parts of her tongue. And he was a Portagee brute, not much use unless you needed him to lift something heavy, or scrabble down into a crawl space to fix a pipe.

  Vita might have read all of Shakespeare but she didn’t have the history of this town knit into her as she ought. LaRee couldn’t teach her what it had been like to return from three days’ fishing with a load of cod that made you feel like a king. LaRee had never waited for word, when a boat was missing, as he had when his uncle and his cousins, Paolo and Dan, went down on the Maria B. The family had crowded into the kitchen, the men drinking whiskey, the women coffee, knowing the truth long before the call came. The Maria had been so old it couldn’t stand up to the weather—his uncle had needed just a couple more solid catches before he could afford the repairs. That was when his father gave up, turned the Rainha over to Franco, and got a job at the lumberyard.

  Young and arrogant, Franco had weighed the price of cod against the price of cocaine and made the obvious choice. One trip a week to New Bedford, and his family was respectable suddenly, living in the house at Cranberry Corners with an in-ground pool. Franco coached the Little League team, Danielle supervised lobster roll suppers at church. For five years all went smoothly. Then one night two men were waiting for him on the dock. Soldierly, machine guns at their sides, they boarded the boat and came back to Wellfleet with him, rolling cigarettes, speaking to each other in Spanish. They had a businesslike, almost friendly manner, but when he started to use the radio he felt the gun in the small of his back and put it down. He usually unloaded down at Try Point, where the houses were boarded up for the winter, but this time he went straight to the wharf, thinking someone might come to his aid, though in the middle of a March night this was a slim hope. He stepped off the boat and started to tie it up, but the one raised his gun again, so he dropped the rope, and watched as they backed up and headed into the dark at no-wake speed.

  Three days later the Coast Guard found the Rainha drifting southward and towed her back to port. It was like seeing a corpse. She’d been stripped of every inch of brass, the mahogany ship’s wheel, the copper pipes, even the stove from the galley. Bobby Matos offered to buy her for two hundred dollars, said he’d sell her for scrap.

  “That boat was my father�
�s pride and joy,” Franco had said. “I’m not sinking it for an oyster reef.”

  Bobby had shrugged, a very slight, crisp motion. It didn’t matter to him.

  Danielle had said, “Of course, of course,” when he said he would never let the boat go. She hadn’t understood yet that Franco’s income had just disappeared, that they were going to lose the house. The town had been kind; of course it had been. Chris Taves had been happy to have Franco take over bartending at the Walrus—men would buy a drink just to be near him. The town always found a way to take care of its own.

  “I opened up the Fitzsimmons place yesterday,” Danielle said.

  “How were the mice?” The year before, Danielle had missed a mouse nest built inside the stove, and when Mrs. Fitzsimmons put on a kettle of water for tea, the nest caught fire and baby mice came streaming out of the back burner.

  “Irritated. But… this year the problem is a little more difficult to solve.”

  “What? Coyotes?”

  “Georgie. He’s been living in there.”

  “Huh?”

  “Well, the Seashore got after Jeb Stone—he had all those old cars in the woods and they were talking about environmental hazards and…”

  “Oh, right—God, I didn’t think about Georgie.”

  “He couldn’t live in the bus anymore. So he went to live at the Fitzsimmonses.”

  “I guess I heard that.”

  “Now he’s got to get out, and…”

  “Poor guy,” Franco said. “Where’s his sister?”

  “I don’t know—the mom’s sick, maybe there’s a new man or… Anyway, I said I’d ask you if he could stay on the Rainha.”

  “What? On the Rainha? How—”

  “It’s better than an abandoned school bus.”

  “An abandoned school bus is back in the woods. The Rainha’s tied up at the end of the pier!”

  “He’ll only come and go after dark. And it’s only for a few days. Fatima Machado said he could have her garage if he’d clean it out, so… maybe a week at the most.”

  “Eh, Georgie,” he said, but he had pretty much lost any rights to say no to Danielle. “You know they want me to move that boat. I can’t call any attention to her.”

  “I do know, and I’ll tell him again. I… oh, I just feel bad for him, you know. And he’s one of us, no matter…”

  “I don’t think Vita’s ever been in the church, except the few times we used to take her,” Franco said suddenly. “One of us” had jogged the image of the church full of townspeople, Christmas Eve when the boys were little.

  “You, of course, never skip a mass.” Danielle laughed. She stood against the light of the kitchen window, a haloed silhouette.

  “It’s different when you’re young. You’re there with everyone in town, and even though you’re just reading out of the prayer book you’re all admitting your faults together, swearing you’ll do better. You’re all on the same page. And singing the hymns, you feel like you’re part of something. My parents didn’t let me miss church until I was in high school.”

  Danielle had a deep laugh, the same laugh all women in town seemed to develop by forty, knowing and ironic, having given up hope that life would make any sense and begun to see it purely as entertainment. “Yes, and look how well you turned out,” she said, filling his cup again and swiping at the resultant spill with the dishrag that was always in her hand.

  “It’s not natural.… My parents were both baptized there, I was, you were, the boys were. LaRee doesn’t see the point,” Franco said. When Danielle raised an eyebrow, he said, “You know what I mean, about locals. LaRee didn’t go to school here, no, she grew up over the bridge. She doesn’t know a thing about Vita’s heritage—”

  “And she wasn’t a suspect in any murders,” Danielle said, quite tenderly. “A horny old goat in a borrowed suit, trying to pass for an upstanding man.”

  Franco smiled, abashed but not quite ashamed. Danielle was so clever a wife that she could make “horny old goat” sound like praise. Franco might not have managed to be faithful to her, but he was utterly loyal. There were women, and then there was Danielle, and they didn’t occupy the same realm in his mind. All the places they’d lived—the boat, the Cranberry Corners house, that dump in the hollow back of Old King’s Highway—what did it matter? Danielle was his home.

  “Paramour, lothario,” he said, enjoying the words more than he should have. If he couldn’t manage a respectable harbormaster’s life, at least he could be glamorous in the headlines. “Lothario, indeed. I was like one of those insects the queen bee uses for insemination.”

  “You know the difference between men and insects, Franco?” Danielle asked. “Men have zippers.”

  He put an arm around her waist and pulled her into his lap. “You’re putting thoughts in my head,” he said, kissing her neck, right beneath her ear.

  She laid her head against his. She had been the prettiest girl at Outer Cape High School thirty years ago, and she was a very pretty woman still. Her face had softened, but it had lost none of its kindness, its laughter. Her hair was dyed the same auburn she’d been born with. She still smelled like heaven. She still had that ache of love, toward him, toward everything—even his illegitimate child.

  “She’s your flesh and blood, your daughter,” Danielle said, safe with his arms around her. “It doesn’t matter if she’s with us or not, she always will be. Church isn’t going to make her a Portagee. Give her something that matters.”

  Franco’s tattoo itched. It was guilt; he was always guilty. Maybe that was just a man’s lot: Danielle seemed to have a sixth sense that told her what was right regardless of any rules, but he had never followed an instinct without finding himself in a hornet’s nest. To raise the boys—he’d just done what she told him to. Now he needed her help with the daughter he’d conceived in betrayal. He pressed his temple; vertigo was threatening.

  “I don’t have anything to give her. If she could say, ‘Well, my dad’s the harbormaster.…’”

  “It has nothing to do with you or how fancy your job is,” Danielle said into his ear. “Vita doesn’t need anything from the harbormaster; she needs something from her father. Now, I’ve got to go tell Georgie it’s okay before I go to work.”

  She kissed his cheek and went to the mirror with her lipstick. Franco, feeling foolish, headed down the back stairs, where his slicker and waders were hanging, and out into the green day. The Walrus wouldn’t be open till noon and the parking lot was empty. The new leaves still hung damp and wrinkled from their buds. His bike was propped against the corner of the building and he swung his leg over and coasted down Commercial Street toward the harbor, his heart lightening again as he went. It was a perfect, sparkling morning; he could see right across the bay. The bike wheel ticked, the little waves slapped the seawall. A woman was walking toward him, wearing one of those wrap dresses that fell open with the tug of a string.

  13

  SEA VIEW AUTO REPAIR

  “It needs the whole taillight assembly,” Sal Bemba said. “A hundred fifty, more or less, and maybe two hours’ labor, three if you need it right away. I’d have to go up to Hyannis and pick up the part. And the side piece here. It’s fiberglass so it won’t need to be painted if you don’t mind the way it looks. I can always paint it later, once the season gets going.”

  LaRee cleaned rental cottages on summer Saturdays, like everyone, and would have more money come June. She could do four a day for fifty bucks apiece, and she put most of that money away—an extra two thousand dollars a year toward retirement. Not that she intended to retire, but saving money was a kind of vice for her; she was afraid of the future and every time she saved a little she felt safer.

  “Thanks, Sal,” she said. “That would be great. I feel so stupid. I was just backing out of a space without thinking.”

  “I’ve done it myself,” he said. “Got too much on your mind is all. I can get the part by… Wednesday, I think. Can you leave it off Thursday morning? Just le
ave the key in the Camaro.”

  There was a purple Camaro on the lot with no front wheels but a paint job to die for, realistic lightning bolts racing along both sides to the back. Sal used the car mostly as a mailbox, though the hood also served as a bench from which to gaze over the bay. Sea View faced southwest on the hill that led down to the old sandpit. You could see across to Plymouth and all the way up to Provincetown from here. Some days the bay was so blue it hurt to look, though now there were dark clouds lowering and she could see rain falling to the south. But the real pleasure of Sea View Auto wasn’t just the panorama—it was the sight of a man fixing things. The broken-down trucks and bashed vans at Sea View would be put back together with some combination of old and new parts, silicone, tape, and wire, sanded and painted so their owners could squeeze out another ten or twenty thousand miles. The school bus Georgie had lived in was behind the Camaro, and Sal had taken out a couple of the seats and propped them against the building in the sun. Even Sal’s three-legged dog kept going, wagging his tail fervently whenever Sal came around the corner, watching the world eagerly.

  A truck was bumping down the sand road toward them—the park ranger’s truck. “Hello,” Matt said, rolling the window down.

  “What’s up?” Sal asked.

  Matt looked at LaRee and laughed. “Had a little fender bender in the fish market parking lot.”

  “I ran into him,” LaRee admitted.

  “Well, it was probably my fault.”

  “Let’s see,” Sal said, going around behind. “Taillight, eh?”

  “And the tailgate is… unhinged, I think,” Matt said. “LaRee, I thought you didn’t have any damage.”

  “I didn’t take a good look at it until I got home,” she said. Sal had gone in to check on the price of a new taillight for Matt.