The Fisher Boy

by Stephen Anable

  Drinking the last of my gimlet, I remembered the vodka I’d shared with Ian and the bottle broken on the breakwater.

  “Provincetown is dangerous this summer,” my mother said. “It’s not like when I sang there way back when.”

  Feeling drunk and self-confident, I surprised even myself: “Maybe Ian was killed by someone he knew. Not by a basher.” I thought of myself: “Ian pissed off his friends more than anyone.”

  “But these incidents,” my mother said, “the dog on your friend’s doorstep, the whole climate of the town—”

  “So you saw me on TV?”

  “Geoffrey Snow saw you. He mentioned it. I called you, I left three messages on your machine.”

  It was true, I remembered the messages, but I’d postponed calling back because of dreading this conversation: the Dangers of Provincetown Conversation. Of course the issue was more than my summer on Cape Cod. Like many “bohemians,” my mother wanted conventional, placid children. She provided enough originality for the family.

  “It wasn’t bashers, I’m sure of it. People would like to think so, because, as you say, it’s comforting.”

  “Yet for some strange reason, wasn’t Ian popular? In with the in crowd, that sort of thing?” My mother gathered up the remains of the chicken, which, stripped of their meat, with their bones and structure revealed, looked more like carcasses than ever. “I called you about the exhibit too,” she said.

  “Exhibit?”

  “Centered around the first love of your life, remember? The Fisher Boy?”

  Of course. I’d meant to write it on my calendar before I left Boston. I’d figured I couldn’t help but remember it—such a big event right in Provincetown. Provincetown Municipal Museum was a planning a massive retrospective of his work, with paintings on loan from collections throughout the world.

  That night, awake in my childhood bed, I kept thinking of Ian, newly in his grave, spending his first night in the Drummond plot, guarded by that atrocious, bare-breasted sphinx. Someone, somewhere, was very much alive—the person or persons who put Ian into that grave.

  It must have been about midnight when I heard the sobbing, faint and stifled, like a child’s ghost. I followed the sound through the darkened gatehouse, down the cool stone stairs and into the kitchen. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, still in her painting clothes, with the Gloucester newspaper spread out in front of her, and the vodka bottle, just the bottle but no glass in her hand. Her face was streaked with tears.

  I asked the stupid question we all ask when the answer is all too obvious: “Are you all right?” I thought she’d jump, be startled, or nonchalantly shoo me away, but she set the bottle on the table then began smoothing the newspaper, smoothing the obituary page with its bad news in fine print, its advertisements for funeral homes and tombstones.

  “It’s an awful thing, just awful.” She smoothed the newspaper as though it were her sketchpad, ready to receive her impressions of an esteemed local view. She’d consumed a good deal of vodka; I remembered the level of the liquor in the bottle during our dinner.

  Something priggish and self-protective made me speak. “If you were this upset, you should’ve come to the funeral.”

  She laughed, running her fingers over the newsprint. “Good Lord, darling, they paid me. They paid me to stay away, they were rather generous.”

  “What do you mean?” Everything suddenly seemed light, as if gravity had been abolished. As if everything in the room seemed made of helium.

  “When I was at the Conservatory, I think I told you I sang in a little club called Lulu Wright’s, in the South End.”

  I sat down in one of the hard oak chairs. I had the urge to confiscate the bottle of liquor, but I knew there were more, legions of them, there always had been, hidden creatively throughout the house, like Easter eggs.

  “There were some pretty big names passing through there back then, and, hard as it is to believe, some people from the North Shore showed up. On occasion. We didn’t do anything special to encourage them, I mean, there was no Stuffed Shirt Night.” She laughed her drinker’s laugh—raucous and sad and embarrassing.

  “One man…from the North Shore brought along some colleagues from his bank. I’d always thought of him as the consummate Philistine. A man with a tin ear, an intimidating member of the local gentry. I thought he was slumming.

  “And then, Good Lord, he came back on his own, for five nights in a row. I was floored. Well, we talked after the show, and, lo and behold, he was a jazz buff, an aficionado, really. He’d waited for five hours in the rain outside a studio in Chicago just to get Ella Fitzgerald’s autograph. He knew songs by Charlie Parker that people at the Conservatory had never heard of.”

  She’d heard tales of his wild youth, expelled from Harvard, totaling enough Jaguars to empty a dealership. Her mother had warned her that the whole family was reckless. She’d quoted that famous line about Lord Byron—the family was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

  “I was young,” my mother said, “and a bit reckless myself…He was handsome, and almost courtly. It sounds so silly, but he made me believe in myself, in my singing. My mother was opposed to my pursuing the arts, she was practical to a T.”

  He wrote poems to her, in lower-case letters like ee cummings. They met secretly in places his family would never frequent, over plates of tripe in the North End, in the Monet room of the Museum of Fine Arts. His grandmother’s portrait was hanging in that museum. Sargent had painted her, all firelight and pearls; he’d made that mercenary old woman who re-used mousetraps in her house on Beacon Hill seem as enticing as a mirage.

  “He came back to my apartment one Friday in June. I was renting a studio so small you didn’t have room to change your mind. I said how much I hated it, but he said he lived in a much smaller space. In his marriage. His marriage felt like the character in that Edgar Allan Poe story, “The Premature Burial.” He was buried alive in his marriage. His wife was obsessed by her tennis game—imagine! His two young sons had each other. And his job at the bank was an utter bore; money was to be enjoyed, not managed.”

  As I listened to her speak, a fantasy died as my father became something palpable, someone real—a man I’d known all my life, a man whose presence had consistently diminished my confidence. I could see him, years ago, with the faintest of smiles on his face and a gin and tonic in his hand, asking what I’d been “up to” and then listening to my answer with a detached amusement, as though I were the punchline to some joke he’d already heard.

  I remembered his party tricks—with origami, of course—and his collection of birds’ eggs, some rare, mounted and labeled, under glass in his library in Gloucester. He sang “Summertime” once, at his daughter’s coming-out party. He had a beautiful voice, rich and low. My mother had trespassed into that reckless family, following her seduced young heart.

  “Do his children know?” My voice and calm were faltering. “His other children, I mean.”

  “No,” my mother said. “His wife was several months pregnant at the time.” She was holding Ian’s obituary in her hands, which trembled faintly like dying birds. “He provided for you, Mark. He established a trust for your education, for prep school and college. He bought me this gatehouse from the Snows. He made me sign an agreement I wouldn’t reveal his identity until after he was dead. But now, in his condition…”

  He was as removed, of course, as if death had taken him. The dementia that was smothering his being was the neurological equivalent of Poe’s nightmare.

  “You knew,” I said, meaning everything about my father. “You knew, yet you let me wonder for twenty-nine years. You let me comb through records at the Port Authority. Looking for some mythical destroyer.”

  She took the bottle of liquor into her lap. She held it like it was a baby. “Be kind,” she said, in a strangled voice.

  Why had she confided in me, for her benefit or mine? Her secret had become a burden she could not longer hold, a burden she needed to put d
own, if only for a moment, for a conversation. Or the death of another of Duncan Drummond’s sons—and the vodka—had loosened her tongue. She was always horrified by violence. In the house, she couldn’t crush a moth or step on a beetle without a ripple of regret, so I supposed the violence of Ian’s death, the deliberateness, had unhinged her.

  But thanks to her, I’d had sex with my brother, the brother I’d found dead and been denied the privilege of knowing, of really knowing. And my father—Duncan Drummond—was he anything more redeemable than a rake? Could I ever find out? His dementia was a fortress more formidable than any trust or the walls of an Eastern Point estate.

  “Be kind,” my mother repeated.

  So I went south, to Cape Cod, back to the place where my brother Ian was so brutally slaughtered.

  Chapter Eleven

  The week of Ian’s murder, the Christian Soldiers opened a small office opposite Spiritus Pizza. Dotted Swiss curtains brightened its plate glass windows. No grisly crucifixions were on display, or sinners blistering in hell, just two cardboard posters depicting scenes of the Holy Land, Manger Square and the Sea of Galilee. From the street, it might have been a travel agency. You expected El Al airfares to be posted daily.

  Their people were in the street too, not Parris Island toughs in combat fatigues, but handsome men, young like Mormon elders, in brown ties and starched white shirts. They carried clipboards but no pens or petitions, and approached groups of straight tourists, saying, “Have you heard the good news?” At first, the tourists paused, expecting discount coupons for lobster or two margaritas for the price of one. The tourists kept smiling but edged away once the Biblical content of the good news became evident. “God bless you,” the young men said, making it sound like a rebuke.

  And there was a second group in town that blistering summer that could not have been more different from the Christian Solders in manner or hygiene. Commercial Street was also clotted with girls and boys, teenagers with vacant or piercing stares, with bare feet and a kind of nineteenth-century sense of fashion, a liking for gingham skirts and overalls that might have been found at grange meetings a hundred years ago. In fact, the rings on their toes and puncturing the cartilage of their ears were the only indications the new millennium was imminent. Some of the runaways banded together to play instruments made of strange things: hollowed-out African gourds and logs. They congregated under the chestnut tree outside the Provincetown Public Library, on the town hall steps, and on MacMillan Wharf when the ferry from Boston was docking. “We’re Scandinavians,” they said, as if this explained their presence. The Vasa, the Swedish tall ship, was long gone from Provincetown Harbor, probably sailing into Chesapeake Bay, nearing her final American port of call, Annapolis.

  Occasionally, the street kids sold things, including flowers. I bought a glorious bouquet of lilies for Roberto, tall and spindly and pink as flamingoes, like something from the hot soil of the Congo. These were a peace offering. And I bought a Hallmark card, just this side of clever, with a cartoon mouse and a message about forgiveness. “Can you come for dinner at my apartment at 4:30?” I asked in my accompanying note.

  Arthur had claimed Roberto was now a houseboy at the White Gull. Climbing the guest house steps, I expected to confront an enraged Roger Morton, berating me for fighting Ian that night at Quahog. But neither Roger nor Roberto was on the premises. Gary, the houseboy manning the desk, said that Roger was in Boston on some sort of business and Roberto was on break, swimming at Herring Cove. Gary promised to give Roberto my flowers and card.

  Roberto appeared at my apartment at four-thirty sharp. Wearing lime-green Speedo trunks and a sprinkling of sand like salt on his pretzel-brown legs, he’d come straight from Herring Cove via the front desk of the White Gull. I had never seen him shirtless and could have given him the compliment he made about my view of Provincetown Harbor: “Very nice.”

  “Thanks for the fabulous lilies,” he said.

  “If they wilt, put a penny in the water. The copper is supposed to revive them.”

  “My room at the White Gull is sweltering,” said Roberto. “It’s in the attic. Got an extra roll of pennies to revive me?”

  “No,” I said, but I had some new Chablis.

  “Does everybody hate me?” I asked Roberto as we lazed on my back deck. He wore a gold star of David on a chain as fine as powder. By “everybody,” of course, I meant the guys from the troupe, for setting my most memorable scene in the audience.

  “The troupe voted to take a little breather. To think about reconvening in the fall.” Roberto was diplomatic, considering every word like a contestant vying for the jackpot on a quiz show. He said Andy had a new job in human resources at John Hancock; Sammy had quit the troupe to take a course in HTML. “But the general consensus was that Ian deserved his free beer. And Roger Morton agrees…”

  He was my brother, I almost said, I just learned it from my mother. Half of my life isn’t missing anymore, I know who my father is, but it’s upended my world. Since I couldn’t share this—or the horror on the breakwater—I described Ian’s funeral and the sphinx at his grave and my fight with Suki Weatherbee about Provincetown.

  “Of all the people in the community to become a martyr,” Roberto said. “Ian Drummond!”

  A vigil had been held last night, while I was in Gloucester, Roberto explained. More than three-hundred people had marched from the Unitarian/Universalist meetinghouse up Commercial Street to the breakwater, many carrying candles or signs like “Ian Drummond: Killed By Hate” and “Disarm the Christian Soldiers.”

  “Do you think it was a random hate crime?” I asked Roberto.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” he asked. “The thing at Arthur’s, then Ian being murdered. Both after these lunatics show up? You do the math.”

  Then, through the buzz from the Chablis, I heard someone calling at the foot of my back stairs, the wooden stairs descending from my deck to the ground.

  “Hello? Mark Winslow? Sergeant David Almeida, Provincetown police.”

  Roberto actually stood, like a St. Harold’s boy greeting the headmaster’s wife.

  “I’m Mark Winslow.” I remained seated while extending my hand, which Almeida clasped to steady me and assess me with eyes that were dark yet cold.

  “I have a few questions I’d like to ask you about Ian Drummond,” he said.

  Then I noticed he wasn’t alone. A second man squeezed past him up the stairs so that the two of them were overpopulating my deck, already crammed with K-mart summer furniture, with aluminum chairs and a table.

  “This is Detective DeRenzi,” Almeida said of his colleague who could be typecast as a pathologist: pinched and ascetic, I could picture him around tweezers and refrigerated samples of dead flesh.

  “Do you mind if we tape you?” Almeida asked.

  What could I say but, “Oh, no, go right ahead.”

  Almeida spoke to the tape recorder, reciting the date, time, and place of our conversation, and noting the names of those present, including Roberto. He knew Roberto’s name without asking, and that bothered me. As he and DeRenzi each took a chair, he said, “What was your relationship with Ian Drummond?”

  “We were friends…” I felt foolish not offering them wine, with the bottle right there, but they were obviously on duty, and offering it even as a courtesy might seem like bribery. “…And Ian and I were at school together.” I shouldn’t say more, I should get an attorney, I thought. But mentioning that might seem to amplify my guilt, my guilt at never reporting finding Ian’s body.

  “St. Harold’s?”

  “Yes.” I could see the tape gleaming through the pane of darkish plastic as it turned on its slow, steady spool, like ropes turning on the wheels of a medieval rack.

  “St. Harold’s was located in Stark, Massachusetts?”

  “Yes,” I said. They had seen Ian’s body, these policemen. It wasn’t theory for them, they didn’t have to imagine it, the stones soaked with blood, the opened throat. Yet the accounts in the med
ia didn’t mention his throat wounds, only the wounds to Ian’s chest. Remembering the horror on the breakwater, I remembered the broken vodka bottle and shivered.

  “When did you last see Ian Drummond, Mr. Winslow?”

  My very name, Winslow, now felt like a lie. “I saw him June fifteenth, at Herring Cove.” That was the truth, but of course blood was throbbing through my temples, burning my ears scarlet.

  “You saw Ian Drummond June fifteenth at the beach at Herring Cove?”

  “Correct,” I said. It was the wrong word to use; it sounded hostile at worst, pompous at best.

  Then I remembered it, my beach towel on the breakwater by Ian; the wind had blown it along the stones, flipped it into a pool of Ian’s blood. And a corner of the towel, just a tiny corner, had stained. I’d thought it was blood, but it could’ve been tar, tar from the beach. I’d meant to throw it out, but it was “evidence,” so I didn’t. That towel was inside my apartment. Would they search it?

  “What time did you see Ian at the beach?”

  All of them were staring—Almeida, DeRenzi, and Roberto. The gleaming tape kept winding behind the darkish pane of plastic. It was all being recorded, not just my words but my tone, my hesitations. The hesitations would seem incriminating, I thought.

  I would have to lie now, lie again. I couldn’t link myself to Ian by admitting we’d talked late that day. That might make me the last person to see Ian alive. But if I did tell the truth—that we’d talked later, shared vodka, had sex—at least that would demonstrate we weren’t enemies at the end, that the rancor from the Quahog fight had faded.

  “What time did you see Ian at the beach?”

  “Mid-afternoon. He was with some friends. I knew one, Barton Daggett.” Again, I massaged the facts: “I’d gone to the beach alone.” Surely mentioning Edward would be asking for trouble—and he had walked away from me, walking down the beach; he’d walked as though we were separate, I’d have witnesses to that.