The Harbormaster's Daughter

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  LaRee’s pancake-breakfast logic was apparently correct, because the parking lot was filling up, not just with the Volvos and BMWs of the summer people but with Chevy Impalas and Crown Victorias—the crowd from the Friday night fish fry at the Walrus and Carpenter was all here, too. And all of Bobby Matos’s relatives: the whole DPW, in their gleaming pickup trucks.

  “Imagine meeting you at a Shakespeare performance,” Cabbage said to Sal Bemba. “High tea tomorrow, if you please?”

  “Long as it’s at the Walrus,” Sal said.

  And another pickup, anything but gleaming: Matt Paradel’s truck. Who should get out of the passenger side but LaRee Farnham… or someone a lot like LaRee. At first Vita couldn’t believe it was her. Not that she wasn’t tall, with her hair twisted up quickly so that gray-blond wisps escaped all around; not that her glasses with their heavy black frames weren’t propped up on her head, and she still walked as if she were weaving through a dream. But she seemed both more confident and more shy than usual. She was wearing her jeans, a gauzy black blouse that Vita had seen in the closet but never known her to wear, and a long gold scarf looped twice around her neck. And lipstick, a shade of red that on almost anyone else might have looked crazy. LaRee looked defiant against the sorrow and confusion of life, determined to follow whatever ray of light she could see, and in that way, beautiful. And she walked along beside Matt, talking and laughing lightly as if he were an old friend.

  Adam came to stand with Vita behind the tent flap, watching the audience arrive. “Your mom… LaRee, I mean… looks pretty,” he said. “Is that the park ranger she’s here with? Is she… going out with him?”

  “Not that I know of.” But he must have asked her to come to the play with him, and clearly she’d said yes.

  “So, here’s your chance to kiss a man in tights,” Adam said. Vita laughed and kissed him, and again.

  “Oh, I love you,” he said.

  “I love you!” It was so easy, a pure statement of fact, as if Bumble the cat had been transfigured into a man. “I love you so!”

  Shyanne was back, looking as tense as if she might bite someone. After some strained conversation with Hugh she had gotten into her costume and was stalking ferociously back and forth behind the tent, repeating her lines. “What do you think?” Orson asked Vita. He was hunched over and dragging his left foot, dressed in burlap with a kind of mask of brown felt oak leaves pulled over his face.

  “Oh my God, I love it,” Vita said. “It matches with your hut, too. Do you like the driftwood I brought?”

  “I do,” he said, straightening his posture a little so he looked a little less like a woodland gnome and more like the person they knew, their benefactor. “Where did you get that wood?”

  “Out on the back shore. It was part of an old wreck buried in the sand out there.”

  “A really old wreck, apparently.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, look at this.…” He had in his palm a black… shell? Or…? It was smaller than a sand dollar, bigger than a quarter.

  “What is it?”

  “A coin, my dear. Here, take my reading glasses.” These were suspended from a chain around his neck, hidden under his costume. “I feel strange without them,” he admitted, bending forward so Vita could use them. She could make out the shape of a man astride a horse, and letters around the edge.

  “I found it under my couch pillow,” he said. “It must have been in your pocket, the night you slept there. It’s silver, tarnished obviously. British I think… and 16-something.”

  “Dollars?”

  “No, years. 1641? Maybe 1671? I can’t make out the third digit.”

  “I’d been carrying it around in my backpack.”

  “I’m not sure,” Orson said, “but I’m guessing this means you’ve found one of the oldest wrecks ever unearthed out there. And, in good old Cape Cod tradition, you plundered it.” He twinkled, not just his eyes—he was a person who twinkled.

  “Oh my God!”

  “My dear, you’ve been needing to flout a few laws,” Orson said. “It’s nearly time, isn’t it?”

  It was, yes, time. Thanks to Dorotea they had a full house—and Vita recognized almost everyone in it. “Probably the first Tempest for most of the audience,” Hugh said. “We’ve got to make it a great one.”

  They had a mirror set up in the corner with them, and Sam and Franco were jockeying for a last glimpse of themselves. Franco posed with shoulders back and a flinty, seaman’s gaze. He had been so often photographed, filmed, interviewed, it had become a habit to strike an attitude, to guess which one would end up in print. Every summer there was a woman who wanted a photo with him—“I’m sort of a murder aficionado,” one had said, without a flicker of embarrassment. “Do you watch Nancy Grace?” He hated Nancy Grace, who had not, apparently, realized that he was the authority on this murder, and had never even interviewed him but just huffed and puffed on about her own ideas.

  Sam was trying another range of expressions—some that Franco wouldn’t have dared, a liquid gentleness, a magnetic openness. A longing passed through Orson, a shudder of regret, but he let it dissolve, turning his gaze to Adam and Vita, who had each other and needed no mirror.

  The players were to enter from the back, up the center aisle, each striking a pose at center stage before taking his or her place. Shyanne went first, in her burlap dress, with her hair curled into perfect ringlets. She was the star; Vita was a member of the ensemble. A minor member of the ensemble. Which meant—she really, absolutely, belonged. She stood at the back, waiting her turn, her heart full and, somehow, calm. This was one of those times when she would have seen Sabine, when she was little; she’d have been quite sure that her mother was right there in the audience, in one certain seat. She had had to save herself, and that was how she’d done it. Now she looked out over the water, past Barrel Point where the harbor opened to the sea, and her heart was pierced by the long, empty distance. Maybe this was not so different from seeing Sabine—it was feeling her absence, standing face-to-face with the bleak understanding that was left behind.

  “And… go,” Sam whispered, behind her. She ran up the aisle in her ballet slippers, the scarves flying behind her, stopped for a moment on the stage, trying to obey Hugh’s direction to “embody a perfect simplicity,” and continued into the locust grove behind Caliban’s hut, where she would be hiding during most of the play. By now she thought of it as her house, hers and Adam’s.

  “That was wonderful,” Orson said, joining her.

  “What was?”

  “Your entrance.”

  “I’ve done it a million times.”

  “Never with that authority. You were always a little girl playing a flower fairy. Tonight, you were a goddess.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded. She couldn’t imagine what she had done differently, but she did feel different, as if there was a new weight in her, an anchor. Looking for answers, she had found harder questions; looking for comfort, she had found grief; looking for harmony, she had found a thousand squeaks and jangles. But her heart was full. Orson had seen that in the few seconds she was onstage? How?

  She started to ask, but he put a finger to his lips—the play was about to begin. Vita crept behind the hut to look around it and see what was happening. Franco had entered, with Adam and the other shipwreck victims, then Shyanne holding Leo’s—Prospero’s— hand. Behind them came Hugh, who was going to give a curtain speech, thanking the audience, reminding them they were here for a good cause, and that there was a synopsis in their programs to which they might refer.

  And behind him… heads turned. Who would come behind the director? The playwright? Well, why not, Vita thought, given the kinds of things she had discovered on the back shore?

  But it was not William Shakespeare. It was Georgie Bottles, who had seen the procession heading toward the park and guessed that there would be food and drink available. So he had followed them and was continuing to follow them,
right down the center aisle toward the stage. He had his beer in its paper bag and he looked around with huge eyes popping, a mad suspicion on his face, as if the entire town were somehow in collusion against him. Vita expected him to stride up to the stage and denounce them all. Then he saw the wreck of the Rainha and stopped still. “Orson,” Vita said. “He’s alive! It’s Georgie!”

  Orson peeped through the foliage arrayed over the hut. “This ought to surprise me,” he said. A suppressed mirth spread through the crowd, everyone looking down so as not to catch another eye and laugh out loud. For once in their lives, they were all on the same side, feeling the same thing. LaRee’s shoulders shook, while Danielle carefully studied her own hands.

  Amalia coughed to clear any amusement, then whispered something to Bobby, who got up and guided Georgie into a seat. He was one of their own, after all. They sat bolt upright, Amalia looking something like the queen of England, Maria and Dorotea Machado beside her, Georgie disoriented, craning his neck to try to understand where he was and why, and Bobby with that I’m a local and I have the right to kill you glint in his eye.

  Danielle sat with LaRee and Matt, in the seats Vita had saved, front row, far right, toward the locust grove. “It feels like church,” she said, “the whole town here together.”

  “Father forgive us, for we have sinned,” LaRee said, with half a smile. Hugh took the stage and began to speak in his wise professor’s voice. “So much has changed since Shakespeare wrote The Tempest,” he said. “Almost everything, except human nature. We suspect one another, based on the slightest of differences, even as we proclaim our intention to live together in peace.…”

  Was it LaRee’s imagination, or did Amalia’s neck muscles tense?

  “Don’t put them to sleep, Hugh,” Orson whispered to himself, crouching behind Caliban’s hut with Vita. “We can do that all by ourselves.”

  The wind was still; the low sun cast an iridescent sheen across the bay. Vita took a breath. It was almost time for the rainbow goddess to run through the locust grove, turning on all the lights in the trees.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank my editor, Ellen Edwards, for her natural insight and humanity, and her patience. And my agent, Jennifer Carlson, for years of calm, kind guidance.

  The Harbormaster’s Daughter is a work of fiction. No character or event here is intended to represent any actual person or story. The town of Oyster Creek, all the surrounding area, its citizens, shops, and organizations, its history and even some of its geology, are invented, an imaginary hamlet not far from Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

  Heidi Jon Schmidt is the author of The Rose Thieves, Darling?, The Bride of Catastrophe, and The House on Oyster Creek. Her stories and essays have been published in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Grand Street, Yankee, and featured on National Public Radio. She has won awards including the O’Henry, Ingram-Merrill, and James Michener awards. She teaches in the Workshops at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and lives on Cape Cod with her husband, Roger Skillings, and their daughter, Marisa Rose.

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  CONVERSATION GUIDE

  The Harbormaster’s Daughter

  HEIDI JON SCHMIDT

  This Conversation Guide is intended to enrich

  the individual reading experience, as well as encourage

  us to explore these topics together—because books,

  and life, are meant for sharing.

  CONVERSATION GUIDE

  A CONVERSATION WITH

  HEIDI JON SCHMIDT

  Q. This is your second novel set on Cape Cod. Why did you want to return there?

  A. So many of my favorite authors—Jane Austen, George Eliot, William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, William Trevor—wrote, or write, out of a deep knowledge of one place and the people in it. I’m saturated with the beauty and trouble of this place. One of the characters in The Harbormaster’s Daughter observes that every single life is a heroic journey, and you never see that as closely as you do among the neighbors in a small, isolated town.

  Q. This novel was originally sparked by a real-life murder. Can you explain?

  A. The Outer Cape is haunted by several murders, and they’ve all made me think, mostly about the way violence begets violence. Here both murderer and victim have been hurt, and toughened, by life—and each is willing to harm others because that’s a standard they recognize. LaRee wants to help Vita break that cycle. I have to reiterate that this book is absolutely fiction—it comes out of my own imagination and my own obsessions—it’s searching for a truth that goes way beyond the facts of any one event.

  Q. The novel is in many ways a coming-of-age story. It’s also a story about a mother and daughter. And a story about a father and daughter. How do you see it?

  A. All of the above, but maybe most of all a story of resilience. Every major character is keeping his or her balance despite serious loss. Vita is so young when her mother dies that she has no conscious memory to reckon with—just a cold dread that feels like truth to her. Yet there’s an artistic flame burning in her that defies despair and keeps her moving forward, reckoning with life. Vita’s own courage sets her course. That’s a kind of inborn talent in itself—LaRee nurtures Vita so her natural gifts can bloom, which helps Franco come to understand and support his daughter, too. It all happens through community.

  Q. I’m struck by your deep understanding of the secondary characters, who are so vividly drawn—Sabine, Danielle, Orson, Dorotea, and Amalia, to name just some of the standouts. Your compassion for their frailties and your respect for their strengths shine through. Was it tempting to let each of their stories take over your main tale?

  A. Thank you—that’s a high compliment. I’m so fond of these characters (yes, even Amalia). Each one makes a way through life with his own grit and grace. When disparate souls bump against each other, stories result. And, yes, I always want to follow all of those stories out.

  Q. I have to say, high school sounds just as daunting now as it was when I attended more years ago than I like to count. Where did you pick up your insider understanding of teenagers?

  A. My daughter just finished high school, and it has left me with a great respect for teenagers. They’re learning to be independent and they make mistakes, just the way they did when they were learning to eat spaghetti, except that these mistakes are bigger and harder to clean up. Adults can hardly bear it—we’re trying to forget we used to be that pimply and vulnerable. So sometimes we turn away just when we’re needed the most. If I had to take up a new profession I’d become a guidance counselor. I could definitely spend every day helping kids work toward their ambitions.

  Q. Your description of Vita and Adam’s romance beautifully captures the wonder and innocence of first love. I realized, to my surprise, that I haven’t read an uncynical, nonjudgmental depiction of love between teenagers in a very long time. Why is that, do you suppose?

  A. I honestly think cynicism is the result of disappointment. But I don’t believe there’s a soul on earth who doesn’t wish for an innocent, trusting love. Even the poet Charles Bukowski, who made a career out of tough-as-nails cynicism, has a poem (called Bluebird) about the hopeful tenderness he hides for fear of being hurt! Vita suspects that her mother may have courted death out of cynicism, so her romance with Adam is doubly meaningful for her.

  Q. Why did you make a production of The Tempest such an important part of the novel? You seem to suggest that such amateur theatrical productions offer a vital opportunity for self-expression and discovery in a small town.

  A. My daughter was drawn to theater at a very early age—she hated that dollhouse we got her, because she couldn’t fit inside it. She wanted to be the one dressed in costume, trying out other characters and other lives. So I started seeing a lot of theater locally and it struck me as a kind of sacred experience—everyone in the building living through something important together. And as
a writer I love the idea that all the people in a town would come together to bring a playwright’s vision to life.

  Q. Landscape is ever present in the novel—the sea, the light, the hills and marshes, the beautiful vistas, and the literal dumping grounds. Some characters are acutely knowledgeable of the natural world, others seek to exploit it or to find inspiration in it, and still others are indifferent. How has the Cape’s landscape affected you?

  A. Like so many people, I’m obsessed with it. It’s almost like another character—there’s a sense of well-being that comes from the light on the water here that beats Prozac all to hell. People who’ve lived here for generations know firsthand that the sea is also a destructive force. The town of Oyster Creek is still suffering from the loss of the dragger Suzie Belle.

  Q. The novel makes clear that the decline of fishing is having a devastating impact on the local Portuguese community. Can you explain how catch limits affect people’s ability to make a living, and how they are adapting? Over time, how do you see the loss of fishing altering the character of Cape Cod?

  A. Catch limits protect the future of the fishery—but meanwhile they’re putting fishermen out of business. The limit to the number of fishing days allowed has been brutal. It means that once you’ve left the pier you have to get as big a catch as you can because you won’t have many other chances. If someone gets hurt, or a storm blows up, your choice is between your livelihood and your safety.