“One of the few straight things around here,” Roberto said.
Subash laughed then shook hands with the rest of my companions, concluding with Chloe. “…And I’m pleased to meet you, young lady. What is the name of your pretty spider doll?”
Chloe giggled and squeezed the crab so that it squeaked.
I introduced my mother to my friends. Roberto I left for last: “And this is my partner, Roberto Schreiber.”
“Oh, I’m so happy to meet you!” my mother said. It had been Roberto’s idea to invite her to this barbecue specifically to jump-start our relationship. “You’ve both been through so much. Yet you look so placid and domestic.”
Arthur again became the host. “You used to sing here, a while back,” he said to my mother. Chloe was dipping her crab into the little fishpond.
“‘A while back,’ you’re being awfully kind,” she laughed. “I sang in a little dive called Jubilee’s. Dark, smoky, and terribly authentic.”
“Jazz,” Arthur said.
“She was very good.” I said that because it was true, and at that moment, I needed truth more than anything on the planet.
Roberto was staring at my mother, the way I must have stared at his father.
“I’d gone to the New England Conservatory,” my mother told Arthur. “But I was a little racy for them.”
“And you brought Mark to Provincetown when he was all of…ten?” Arthur asked.
“Eight,” my mother said. “And when we visited the museum, Mark was just entranced by The Fisher Boy.”
“They found Royall’s bones in Truro,” I said. “Buried on the grounds of that awful commune.”
“Good heavens,” my mother said. “Years ago, people used to joke that Truro considered Provincetown very scandalous. But now Truro is making up for lost time.” She turned toward me. “We should do the same. Do you mind,” she asked the others, “if I borrow my son for a few minutes?”
“We’re just friends for now, Subash and me,” my mother said, out on Commercial Street. “You know, it’s silly, but, years ago, I worried about getting married because I thought you might be jealous.”
“Never.”
“He’s a wonderful man. Erudite, brilliant, cheerful as all get out. His wife died of a heart attack five years ago. That’s when he began having a problem.” Then she said it: “Drinking. Like me. He has a summer place in Annisquam. I met him at AA in Gloucester.”
Which explained his “meetings” reference and the bumper sticker on her car. Saying congratulations didn’t seem to fit, but I hugged her, there on Commercial Street. I was able to do that.
“Joining AA was my prayer of thanks. For your making it through this nightmare of a summer. It’s the closest I’ll ever get to being holy.”
We walked toward the dunes, away from the crowds and restaurants and shops because my mother said she needed a little privacy. “That’s no reflection on your friends—especially on your wonderful young man. Another wonderful young man.”
Between the houses and trees, we could catch glimpses of the ocean, of the water that had almost received my corpse. I thought of Alexander Nash, whose body, partially devoured by bottom dwellers, had washed up on Nemaskett Beach, where it was found by clam diggers at low tide. I would think of Alexander—dead instead of me—for the rest of my life.
“I remember staying here at the Wharf,” I said. “That time you sang at the club.”
“You used to look out to sea. From that pier.” She was folding her big sun hat in her hands, squeezing it so roughly I thought she might damage the straw. “I shouldn’t have encouraged you to look out to sea. It was wrong, it was dishonest. Duncan Drummond offered to marry me. He offered to leave Janet and more or less elope. But by then I’d seen the kind of husband he was, the indifferent kind of father he’d become, and I didn’t want to be more indebted to him than I was. His children—Fulton and George—seemed pretty damaged, and poor Janet had just had Ian. A clean break…just seemed preferable. The irony is—one reason I refused to marry Duncan was his drinking. That and his compulsive philandering.”
I had to say it. Was that my Drummond recklessness? “But you let them buy your silence. And you told me those lies—”
“I guess I thought…a good lie was better than the bad truth. Sometimes people just make mistakes.”
We had come to the place where the street met the water.
“You’ve turned out fine, Mark,” my mother said. “God knows this summer was a test. Saving that little girl—”
“The Talmud says that if you save one man, you save the world. According to Roberto.”
“You saved me, too,” my mother said. “That talk in the kitchen was my wake-up call. To get it together, to get sober.”
Momentarily, we glanced at the breakwater, at the line of granite snaking toward the dunes of Herring Cove Beach. A cold wind, full of autumn and football and encroaching winter darkness, blew goose-bumps onto our skin. The wind seemed to scour the sky of sea birds, and the water assumed a cobalt-blue cast.
She said, “Let’s take a different route back,” and we turned away.
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The Fisher Boy Page 34