The Fisher Boy

by Stephen Anable

  The organ music surged through the church like electricity, like an earth tremor, through the floor, through the pews, through our bones. It pulled me back to prep school, to evensong after soccer practice, when Ian would arrive just as the opening hymn was beginning, all arrogant ease, his blond hair still wet from the shower, the collar of his blazer upturned against the autumn chill. For once, today, he was on time for a service.

  Arthur, Miriam, and I rose with the congregation to sing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” I joined in, hoarse, with conflicting emotions. I was thinking of the Ian I knew, from childhood to prep school to Provincetown. I saw Ian in the Gloucester woods, forcing a crying Jonathan Robson to eat green blueberries; I saw him at St. Harold’s, steering Suki Weatherbee around the floor at Spring Dance; I saw him naked in the dunes, then muttering, “Vaya con Díos,” his last words addressed to me in this world. Then the hymn was over and the mourners shut their hymnals with a series of soft, papery thuds that generated the only breeze inside the church.

  “Ian Drummond was confirmed in this church,” said the robust old Episcopal priest officiating. “So, today, Ian has come home.” Then the priest spoke extensively about a person I barely recognized, describing “a seeker, a seeker of truth, a man impatient with the orthodox answers, someone who sought to forge his own spiritual path.”

  I kept wondering about other seekers, the police. Had they lifted my fingerprints from the crime scene, from the pieces of glass, parts of the vodka bottle I’d missed? Should I go to the police on my own, I wondered, as the priest quoted the Book of Wisdom. No, that was foolish, I decided, as Ian’s oldest brother, Fulton, ascended to the pulpit and spoke about the family’s famous tradition of athletics, citing Ian’s soccer successes on the North Shore, at St. Harold’s, and at Dartmouth. Fulton broke down reading “Envoi,” the Robert Louis Stevenson poem, on the line, “Home is the sailor, home from sea…”

  At that point, a female voice joined Fulton’s sobbing. Tracing the sound to a pew just across the aisle, I saw that it came from Suki Weatherbee, elegant and almost matronly in a peach silk blouse, pearls, and frosted blond hair. A black man was handing her a handkerchief in an intimate gesture. Arthur, Miriam, and a good many mourners stole glances at Suki with sympathy that eventually curdled into annoyance as her crying intensified, then mercifully stopped.

  The Drummond family plot was in a surprisingly old cemetery in Gloucester full of slate gravestones from the seventeenth century, carved with skulls and skeletons lugging oversized hourglasses full of time. “I didn’t think they buried anyone in places like this,” Miriam said. “I thought these cemeteries were all filled up…with people like Paul Revere.”

  Ian came from an old New England family, I reminded Miriam, and privately considered it somehow appropriate for a person with Ian’s politics to share ground with neighbors familiar with snuff and the ducking stool.

  “Good heavens!” Arthur whispered when confronted with the Drummond family plot, guarded by the cemetery’s most modern monument, a Victorian sphinx of indeterminate sex with a male face and bare female breasts protruding from a necklace of scarabs and ankhs. Though I’d never seen this monument before, I remembered the explanation for its existence: one of Ian’s ancestors, a prominent Egyptologist, had helped the Museum of Fine Arts acquire its Middle Kingdom sculptures before dying of typhus in Cairo at thirty-one. Two years Ian’s senior.

  The crowd assembled around the open grave. Just beyond the cemetery, past a boatyard and a bed and breakfast, was the big fish processing plant, so the odor of cod was carried on the wind, mixing with the fragrance of earth from the new grave. The grass in the cemetery was long and wet, and some of the mourners began worriedly checking their shoes.

  “Let us pray,” said the priest, and we bowed our heads. He read a prayer of interment and a lone piper—we couldn’t see him—played “Amazing Grace.” The Drummonds were certainly emphasizing their Scottish heritage. I felt that Ian, who’d spent a miserable college semester “studying abroad” in Edinburgh, would’ve found these touches over the top.

  In fact, the whole service, at the church and the cemetery, had little to do with the breezy, cynical man I knew. There wasn’t a word about Ian being gay, no mention, actually, of his having been murdered, for God’s sake. Were both topics dismissed as equally unsavory?

  Miriam must’ve been clairvoyant. “This isn’t about Ian,” she muttered to Arthur. “Listening to these people, he could’ve been a married man who died of a coronary!”

  This impression was further strengthened at Cold Cove, the Drummonds’ baronial mansion on a pinkish outcropping of granite above Gloucester Harbor. The place was teeming with Yankee Boston: Marblehead yachtsmen, State Street bankers, girls from the Junior League.

  A small contingent of old St. Harold’s boys was present, but no one from Ian’s Provincetown parties. Kittredge Rawlings, our senior prefect, pinned me in a corner of the garden between a Roman sarcophagus and the Drummonds’ fishpond, where the carp, bright as chain mail, shot through the peat-colored water. Then he delivered one of those long, boastful monologues people usually save for alumni magazines.

  “…So, after Harvard, what do I do but apply to both law school and medical school, then end up choosing neither…After I left the bank, I married Catherine and we moved to Geneva…We call Kittredge the Second our little Swiss surprise. They say chocolate is an aphrodisiac, have you read that?”

  At last Kittredge mentioned Ian, his face distorted with puzzlement and irritation. “But what was he doing in Provincetown?” Kittredge was watching the carp rather than me. “We’ve only been there once. We were in Chatham at Catherine’s mother’s place and it was raining cats and dogs, so we got desperate and went to Provincetown to hit the shops. But it was just T-shirts and ice cream and Third-World junk. Of all the places to be mugged, to be done in. Poor Ian!”

  Was he staring at the carp because he was ashamed to meet my eyes? Had he heard Ian’s story about my gesture in our chapel? Did he want me to out us both then and there? This screen of decorum was infuriating. Now, I had the chance to puncture that screen, but I balked. “Ian was on vacation,” I said.

  Kittredge acted as though the great tragedy wasn’t Ian being butchered but being caught dead—literally—in a tawdry summer destination. Kittredge had no more idea Ian was gay than did Suki Weatherbee, now approaching us with her black companion. Before they reached us, Kittredge excused himself to visit the bathroom.

  “Mark,” said Suki, who smelled of face powder and some woodsy fragrance as we kissed the air next to each other’s cheeks. “This is Gaston,” she said. He was her husband and African, not African-American. “Darling,” she asked him, “could you get us another crabmeat sandwich?” When we were alone, she confided that their marriage had taken even her by surprise. “Not to mention my family and half of Charleston!”

  She’d met Gaston in Senegal. She was working there after earning her MBA at Wharton. Suki began giggling. “So Gaston never met Ian. Remember Ian back at St. Harold’s? How full of the devil he was? But sweet. Remember Spring Dance when we all got so stoned that we broke into the chapel late at night and ate all the communion wafers?”

  Not being part of Ian’s clique, I didn’t remember, but I nodded as if savoring the story.

  “Are we almost done?” Gaston asked, seeming to grow peevish and less deferential once he returned with the sandwich. “We’ve paid our respects. Let’s get an early shuttle home.”

  “Gaston swore he couldn’t function away from Mother Africa, but now that we’re living in New York, he just loves it,” Suki told me.

  Gaston was not about to let this sweeping statement pass without modifying it in some way. There was a certain vitality to Manhattan, he admitted, but it was “imbued with the innate violence of American society.”

  “Eventually we’ll go back to Senegal,” Suki explained. “The skyscrapers make Gaston claustrophobic.”

  Gaston bombarded the carp
with pieces of crabmeat roll. The fish were colliding with each other in their quest for the bread, slashing back and forth through the water as Gaston kept tossing them crumbs. “Americans are fundamentally unsure who they are. Unsure whether they even belong on this continent,” he said.

  “We’ve had one sermon already today, darling,” Suki reminded him.

  “Look,” Gaston said, tossing the last bit of bread at a giant carp that was silvery white like the dough rolls Chinese serve for dim sum. “No, not at the fish. Look at that man!”

  Gaston indicated a tall, black male among the mourners across the garden. His sleek dark suit fit his body like skin, but his hair was worlds away from either Gloucester or St. Harold’s—a mane of dreadlocks, tumbling over his shoulders, bleached peroxide-blond.

  “He’s utterly ridiculous,” Gaston snapped. “He’s not sure whether he’s Haile Selassie or Madonna…It’s this confusion you have, your mongrel culture.”

  The man with the dreadlocks, in his early thirties, I guessed, was nursing a drink and wandering absentmindedly through the crowd.

  “This Provincetown,” Gaston said. “I understand it’s…a very promiscuous environment. Many nightclubs, lots of, how do you say it, low life?”

  “Yes,” Suki said, “it’s Fag Heaven. Now why did I think Ian summered in Katama?”

  Everything gay about Ian was being obliterated. I felt like I was being obliterated too. A scalding force was threatening to erupt, like the night I’d poured beer onto Ian at Quahog. I said, “You know Ian had changed a lot since Spring Dance at St. Harold’s. He really wasn’t the Katama sort at all. He enjoyed Provincetown more, for the same reason I do…”

  Gaston was acting bored and Suki was faking a smile.

  I said, “The dick tastes better than on the Vineyard.”

  Gaston began laughing, but Suki’s face was transformed into the mask of some Tibetan demon. “You liar!” Suki spat. “Ian always loathed you. He felt sorry for you, that’s why he tolerated your company…you twisted, pathetic little freak.”

  “Great to see you,” I told her.

  I navigated my way through the crowd until I located Arthur, browsing the long, linen-covered table laden with silver platters of food: mounds of shrimp, salmon mousse, fussy triangular sandwiches.

  “I’m afraid I just disgraced myself,” I laughed. “I outed Ian to Suki Weatherbee, the St. Harold’s mattress. She spent every weekend in one of our dormitories. With either Ian or Kittredge Rawlings. She went to Braemere, you know, our sister school.”

  “Our incestuous sister,” Arthur said.

  Miriam joined us. She seemed a bit light-hearted for the day of a funeral, eating a jungle of a salad. “An adequate salad bar,” she whispered. “Will wonders never cease?”

  We found a quiet corner of the garden where we could relax, speculate about the murder, and hear Arthur’s plan to dedicate his Swim for Scholars to Ian’s memory. While we were talking, Ian’s sister Sallie strolled by, arm-in-arm with a tall, dazzling stranger.

  “Her fiancé,” Arthur whispered. “Or so I heard over the cucumber sandwiches. He’s a marine biologist. The ultimate small fish in a big pond.”

  Chapter Ten

  Arthur and Miriam returned to Cape Cod while I called on my mother in Gloucester. She lived a short distance from the Drummonds in a strange stone gatehouse, a mossy tower Rapunzel might have inhabited, so darkened by overhanging spruce trees that it seemed as though sun never penetrated its dampness. My mother had bought the house years ago from the Snows, distant relatives of Ian’s father.

  At the time, the Snows were moving to England, something to do with North Sea oil, and the grounds of their estate, Bellevue, were going to be subdivided into a development called Bayberry Heights. Then Mr. Snow dropped dead of an embolism in the first-class cabin of their jet to London. His widow and children began a litigious dispute about Bellevue, and, eventually, the house was pulled down—some museum in New York bought the Grinling Gibbons carving from the library—and the family donated the land to the Nature Conservancy, for tax purposes. But before Mr. Snow booked his fatal flight, when it looked like Bayberry Heights would make the transition from the drawing board to the cement mixer and saw, my mother bought the gatehouse “for a song,” as she would say. And now that it abutted conservation land instead of an outbreak of plywood townhouses, its value had skyrocketed.

  My mother was in back of the house when I arrived, painting at her easel, a canvas of Halibut Point, Rockport. She had hair like mine, the tarnished copper of hoarded pennies, my sharp features and the mouth someone once called “licentious.” She’d liked a drink since her nightclub days, while I was wary of liquor. She was wearing something she’d salvaged from a yard sale, a housecoat appliquéd with fat red strawberries. On her feet were ballet slippers, and, as always, she rattled when she moved; she wore a dozen silver bracelets and a necklace of pottery beads. Why she bothered with jewelry when she was content with such clothes, her “painting rags,” was a mystery.

  “Hello, darling,” she said, although her back was toward me and my feet were muffled by the browning spruce boughs littering the lawn like rushes on the floor of a medieval palace. She had the hearing of a guard dog; I guess that came with her musical training.

  “How can you paint such a sunny landscape in this gloom?” I asked. “A bomb shelter couldn’t be any darker.”

  “I have the sun in my head.” She dipped a brush in turpentine and wiped it clean. “It’s in my memory. Besides, I was just touching up.”

  “You weren’t at the funeral.”

  “That’s right, I was painting.”

  We hadn’t spoken since Ian was killed. My mother stepped back to appraise the canvas. She’d taken up painting late in life but was quite good. You could see the waves swelling; almost experience the odor of salt and kelp.

  “What do you think? It’s already been sold to a homesick Bostonian in Minneapolis.” My mother’s art sold well. Between painting and giving piano lessons, she made a comfortable living.

  “It’s the usual masterpiece. He’ll love it.”

  Wiping her fingers on a rag she’d wet with turpentine, she said, “Mark, I’m not being callous, but mourning doesn’t undo what’s already been done. I believe in being nice to people when they’re alive. Not that Ian always did. Good Lord, I still remember him torturing poor Jonathan Robson. Of course, coming from that family, from that privilege, that arrogance.”

  She recounted a story often told in Gloucester, of how Ian’s mother, Janet, had run over a mailman while returning from a tennis match she’d lost in Brookline. “Going sixty in a thirty-mile zone. That poor mailman was in a body cast for months. That family was always reckless.”

  I smiled because “reckless” was an adjective sometimes flung in her direction.

  “I suppose I’m saying that because it’s comforting, I know. It makes it seem less random if Ian put himself in the line of fire. If he came from a family that used poor judgment.” She was putting the brushes to soak in an old peanut butter jar. “I was hoping you’d drop by. I’ve marinated some chicken. I’m done painting today. I’m ready for a stiff vodka gimlet. How about you?”

  I nodded. We sat in the back yard, beneath the blue-black spruces. My mother loved the sea, and turned out seascapes for corporate boardrooms, and tourists and transplanted New Englanders, yet she had one of the few pieces of property in this part of Gloucester lacking a view of the ocean. “Why don’t you trim these stupid trees?” I asked her, after the vodka made me a bit bolder. “If you trimmed these trees, you could see the water.”

  “I’m an earth sign, darling,” my mother said.

  That excuse was ridiculous because my mother thought astrology belonged in its place on the comics pages of newspapers. “Are you avoiding seeing the sea because it makes you think of my father?”

  “Of course not, darling.” She was still in the ratty housecoat with a Jackson Pollack’s worth of paint dribbled down the fro
nt. “Would you like another gimlet?”

  “My head is swimming. I’d better not.”

  “Well, you drank that first one like it was lemonade. Just go easy. You’re not driving back to the Cape tonight surely?”

  “No.” I surrendered my empty glass for a refill, to be sure I kept my word and slept over.

  After dinner, after I’d consumed generous amounts of marinated chicken, potato salad, and corn on the cob, my mother mentioned one of the Snows. “I saw Geoffrey Snow at West Beach. Last week. He was visiting from Phoenix.”

  I hardly knew Geoffrey. The Snows kept to themselves and kept their distance even from the Drummonds.

  “Geoffrey has done well. He designs golf courses, imagine, and the Snows were all so uncoordinated, such poor athletes. Not like Duncan and his gang.” My mother served us home-made rhubarb pie: tart, slimy, and delicious. She said, “Geoffrey says Duncan Drummond isn’t well at all, he’s becoming confused.”

  I remembered Ian’s father at the funeral, his bewildered expression during the service, his folding the program over and over. “He looked lost at the funeral,” I said, “but who wouldn’t?”

  “Mark, I worry about you so. I mean, I’m sure you’re careful, but do you have to go back to Provincetown this summer? Couldn’t you commute like the rest of your troupe? I’ve seen that horrible Hollings Fair speaking on television, so smarmy and vitriolic. And those Christian Soldiers are everywhere, like gypsy moths.”

  I said, “I can’t quit everything.” We both knew what that meant. I’d bailed from the ad world to concentrate on acting. Now, thanks to the fight, I’d blown that as well, but didn’t mention this.