The Summer Wives_A Novel Read online

  As we got close, the marshals patrolling the shore approached. They addressed not the two of us, but their colleagues behind. The dog whimpered and jumped toward me.

  “Look,” I said, “can you keep that mutt under control, please?”

  “He smells something on you.”

  “Of course he does. I spent the evening with the fugitive, didn’t I? Trying to get him to turn himself in.”

  The dog leapt and snarled, and the marshal drew in his leash.

  “Just go get the boat, ma’am,” said one of the marshals from the house, and he turned and explained the situation to the man holding the dog on its leash.

  Isobel started forward to the boathouse, and I followed her. The dinghy, I knew, would be resting upside down on its horse at the back. There would be Hugh’s scull, and the oars on their hooks along the wall. The door stood open. There was no light inside, because the Fishers had never run the electricity this far out. Just the flashlight on the shelf, which Isobel picked up and switched on. She shone the beam toward the back, where the dinghy sat in place, and together, without a word, we started forward and lifted the boat from its horse and set it, right-side up, on the wooden floor.

  Then Isobel handed me the flashlight, climbed on the horse, and pulled down on a small, rusted hook stuck in the ceiling, practically invisible. A hatch swung out, and a man silently leapt downward to land on his bare feet before us, wearing nothing but a pair of trousers, still damp and reeking of the sea.

  18.

  The dinghy wasn’t large. Joseph had to curl in the middle, between the two bench seats, while we laid the oars over him. Nobody said anything. It was like we did this kind of thing every day, like we were accustomed to smuggling fugitives from hidden compartments on the premises. Like we spent a hundred years practicing how to carry a dinghy with a full-grown man hidden inside, in such a way that you couldn’t tell how damned heavy he really was.

  As we reached the edge of the dock, the dog wheeled on his leash and let out a series of desperate barks. I heard the handler swear and take him in. The other two marshals saw us, adjusted their vests, prepared to start down behind us. Now we hurried, Isobel and I, trying not to look as if we were hurrying. I thought my arms might fall from their sockets. Tiny starbursts popped before my eyes. We reached the end of the dock and grabbed the ropes and made to lower it down the three or four feet to the water, which was now rising again from its ebb.

  Two feet into this operation, Isobel swore loudly and let the rope slide right through her fingers, so the dinghy dropped into Long Island Sound with an almighty splash, and nobody knew, nobody saw the man who rolled neatly into the water and swam under the shelter of the dock.

  19.

  By morning, Hugh’s beautiful yacht was gone. The water search had been curtailed by then, the fugitive presumed drowned or ashore, and nobody noticed the boat’s departure except me, sitting in my window seat while Brigitte snored from her bed. I nestled there with my binoculars, the binoculars I bought for ten dollars from Mrs. Medeiro’s general store, and observed Isobel’s return from the lighthouse with the marshals and the body and the priest and the doctor—she had to make two trips—and all the attendant confusion, while the dawn grew silently on the eastern horizon and a breeze gathered up from the northwest.

  The sun appeared, new and brilliant, and in the middle of this blinding light, the mainsail went up, the rope slipped from the mooring, and the mighty spring tide carried the sailboat silently down the Fleet Rock channel and out into the open ocean.

  Afterword: 1931

  Hugh Fisher comes to visit her while Pascoal is out in his lobster boat, tying his own vessel brazenly to the landing where anybody can see it. In March, however, nobody will see it, except possibly Pascoal. And what can Pascoal do? He has no power over Hugh Fisher.

  Bianca saw him motoring across the channel toward her from the window at the top of the lighthouse, and she waits for him now in an atmosphere of great composure, just outside the door, though her heart beats in quick, mighty strokes. He springs up the stone steps with all his old athleticism, and she notices that he doesn’t wear a wedding ring. Most men don’t, of course, but she looks for it anyway.

  As for Hugh, he’s not looking at her left hand, which naturally bears the slim gold band that Pascoal placed there in October, but at her belly and breasts, curving like huge summer melons against the material of her dress. He stops a few yards away, one foot on the step above, his gloved hand resting on his thigh. His eyes meet hers painfully.

  “So it’s true,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “He’s mine. You know he’s mine.”

  She shifts her feet. “It might be a girl. You never know.”

  Hugh makes a noise of agony and turns away.

  “How could you?” he gulps. “How could you let him?”

  “Because I had to.”

  “You didn’t have to. I would’ve taken care of you. Don’t you think, if you’d told me, I would have—my God, I’ve have moved heaven and earth for you, I’d have given you everything.”

  “Would you? Everything?”

  She sounds terribly wise, even to her own ears, but then she’s aged about a thousand years since last August, has lived through a number of lifetimes, it seems, has been an enraptured teenager and a wronged lover and a cold, calculating seducer and a hasty bride. Now she is an outcast. Her family won’t own her, nor will the rest of the Island. Only Pascoal is loyal to her. When she went to him and told him tearfully that their love had borne fruit—this was three weeks after Francisca’s return, she couldn’t wait any longer than that—he looked horrified and then fearful and then determined. He was expecting some kind of retribution, after all. He had done a terrible, sinful thing, taking her virginity—Bianca, the pure young cousin of his own fiancée!—and now he must pay his debt manfully to God. In two more weeks they were married, and they moved into the lighthouse that very afternoon. Pascoal worships her, and the more he worships her the more she despises him, and so great is her revulsion that any day now, any minute she’s afraid she’s going to do the very worst thing possible—more awful than copulating with him while pregnant with another man’s child, more awful than betraying Francisca and her aunt and uncle, who had taken her in and raised her almost as their own—and tell him the truth.

  But now an even worse possibility stands before her, in the person of Hugh Fisher.

  He stands as straight and beautiful as ever, his hair as golden, even in the iron-gray light of a March afternoon in New England. He is so perfectly groomed, so fine and fair and crisp at the edges, smelling of masculine soap—a scent she tries to recall at night, but can’t quite capture anymore. Inside her womb, his child kicks and grows. She stares at his bare, pink neck and her heart pours from her body and flows across the dank air into his, the way it poured across that July swimming pool on the morning after his father died, the way her heart always pours between them as he stands before her, even when she hates him.

  There is no escape, she thinks. We are bound, just as he said, bound together always. We can’t help it. It is God’s will I shall bear his child. It is God’s will we shall live and die because of each other.

  She says sharply, “I hear your wife is expecting a baby.”

  “Yes. In June.”

  “Good. They can grow up together, then. My child and hers. They’re almost twins.”

  “Don’t, Bianca.”

  “Why not? It’s your doing. You made my baby, you made hers. You did this.”

  “How was I supposed to abandon her? There are things you don’t understand, things you can’t understand. I had no choice.” He turns, and his face is streaked with tears. “Anyway, you left me. I thought you were gone for good. And I was angry, and then I saw you were right and I should try to make the best of things, and then I heard—I learned—and I can count, Bianca, believe me, I can apparently count better than any of—well.”

  “If it makes you feel any bett
er, everybody hates me here. Except Pascoal.” She laughs bitterly at the sound of her husband’s name and she glances out to sea, as if expecting to see his boat, his gnomish figure dragging the wooden traps from the water, one by one.

  “No, it doesn’t make me feel any better. I’ve been out of my head with worry for you. I love you. Just to look at you now, carrying my child, my son, you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I want to—right now, God forgive me, I could—”

  He stops and looks down at the rocks. Bianca tries to think of Pascoal—her husband who worships her, who willingly faces down her shame before the world—tries in desperation to think of him lovingly, as a wife should, but all she can summon up is the fishy smell of him when he comes home in the afternoon, a smell that clings to the oil of his skin and fills her nose when he sits across from her and eats his dinner in juicy, purring mouthfuls, when he reads his newspaper in the chair by the lamp, when he climbs into bed and sticks his gnarled fingers under her nightgown. How she turns her face away when he tries to kiss her, because she’s afraid she’ll gag on the taste of his mouth, so they make love without kissing, without even looking at each other, a silent and graceless humping that’s no more than a parody of the sacred union between husband and wife. Afterward, guilt and remorse, because she cannot love him, cannot even like him, not while Hugh Fisher walks upon the earth like a god.

  “And you live two hundred yards away from Greyfriars,” he says. “For the rest of my life, years upon years, you’ll be just out of reach, you and my boy. Inside a tower. A tower, Bianca! It’s like a cruel joke. Lamp flashing always at my window. And I can’t just sell up and move away. I can’t do without you, that’s the goddamned pity of it. I can’t think of any woman but you.”

  The wind howls softly around the lighthouse walls and whips his hair. For an instant, Bianca imagines that Pascoal’s boat will be caught in a squall, hurled upon the rocks, a terrible tragedy. She crosses herself.

  “Do you love me, Hugh?” she asks.

  He looks up, and his beauty stops her breath.

  “Do you need to ask?” he says.

  “I think I do.”

  “Then yes, Bianca. I love you.”

  “Always, Hugh?”

  “I swear before God, Bianca, if I ever stop, if I ever love another woman before you, you can kill me with your bare hands.”

  Bianca balances delicately on the point of a rock, in the middle of the roiling sea.

  She turns and opens the door behind her. The warm air rushes past her cheeks, smelling of smoke and the soup she’s making for supper. Above their heads, the light swings in its mighty arc, pulsing in time with the universe, making her young blood rise at last and clamor in her veins. She places her hand of the curve of her gravid belly.

  “Come inside, then,” she says, “and we will keep your promise.”

  This she believes with all her heart.

  Afterword: 1970

  The week before Hugh’s graduation, the weather turns warm and fair. After dinner, when the dishes are washed and put away and the bridge table is set up in the living room, I open the back door and slip out to wander across the gravel, around the side of the house and down the long, grassy slope toward the sea.

  Behind me, Greyfriars is ablaze against the indigo twilight. Every bedroom is now occupied. Miss Patty and Miss Felicity stayed through the winter, and so did Brigitte. Otto and Leonard arrived at the end of April. A couple of new residents introduced themselves nervously in March, having heard of the new Greyfriars theater residency through some circuitous connection, and after a brief trial period they seem to be getting on well. Through the open French doors, the chatter and laughter float from familiar throats, and the sound of it chases me all the way down the lawn, fading and fading, until the lapping of the water against the sea wall absorbs them all.

  For some time, I stand and look out over the water, toward the empty lighthouse and the steady, anodyne electric glow from its tower. There was some talk of tearing it down entirely over the winter, but the Islanders objected on historic grounds, the lighthouse was duly declared some sort of monument, and while the old mechanism was cleared out, along with any sign of human habitation, the structure still stands while the Department of the Interior decides what to do with it. Lighthouses are an anachronism, you see, a relic of the past, built for an age before charts and radar and all those modern gadgets that keep ships out of trouble. Built before a powerful electric lamp could just sit there and glow for weeks and months, putting out steady, faithful candlepower without needing any human being to attend to it.

  Still, there’s something so beautiful about a lighthouse bathed in the light of a full moon. It breaks your heart, almost. This brave, lonely, silvery thing standing tall in the middle of a hurtling tide. I’ve come here often in the evening, when the weather could stand it, when I wasn’t on the mainland attending to business. Sometimes I perch on the end of the dock, sometimes I sit on the bench. These past couple of months, I have mostly sat on the bench. Always my gaze searches the horizon, searching for a particular sail, and sometimes I think I perceive it. But it turns out to be an ordinary sailboat, of course. One of hundreds, of thousands plying these populous waters. Isobel tells me I’m crazy to keep looking. Isobel, who now spends a great deal of her time in the guesthouse at the Monks’ place at the other end of the island. I’ll let you decide for yourself what that means.

  Since the beginning of April, there have been no more postcards. They never did arrive at regular intervals to begin with—sometimes twice a week, sometimes once a month, four in one day on Christmas Eve—and contained no message at all, just my name and address, Miranda Schuyler, Greyfriars, Winthrop Island, New York, in neat, black letters. And postmarks, of course. Bermuda. Cumberland Island. Belize. If the Winthrop Island postmaster had been inclined to cooperate with the United States Marshals office, I suppose some useful information might have made its way up and down the chain of command. But the Winthrop Island postmaster happens to be Mrs. Menzies, a close cousin of Mrs. Maria Medeiro, who runs the general store, and at her age, she isn’t inclined to cooperate with anybody, trust me.

  But the postcards have now ceased altogether, and their absence has been a blight on my soul. Just the sight of that handwriting warmed me for days during the chill, miserable pit of the Winthrop Island winter. Mama set them aside for me when the mail came, along with all the legal correspondence related to my divorce, the legal correspondence related to the case of Mr. Joseph Vargas, the legal correspondence related to the formation of the Greyfriars Players, Incorporated. All of which is sometimes more than I can stand, which is why I like to come down here in the evenings and stare at the lighthouse until everything becomes clear again. Sometimes I doze off, bundled in my wool coat and scarf, and Brigitte has to wake me up and scold me. To tell me that rascal will return in his own time or not at all, and it was no good catching my death of cold out here waiting for him.

  But tonight I’m not catching my death of cold. Tonight I’m wearing not a wool coat but a cardigan. Tonight the air is mild, the moon is out, the drunken scent of late May viburnum drifts past now and again, so faint it’s almost my imagination. The night birds stir in the nearby trees. Summer is so close, so real, so within reach, the whole world is alive with anticipation, and I could no more doze off than I could fly to the moon. The dear, familiar moon. I stare down at its reflection on the calm sea, and I say to myself, sort of a murmur:

  The moon shines bright. In such a night as this,

  When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees

  And they did make no noise, in such a night

  Troilus methinks mounted the Trojan walls

  And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents

  Where Cressid lay that night.

  * * *

  It turns out you can’t just walk into Washington and demand a presidential pardon. Clay Monk helped me. He put in hours and hours. He constructed a perfect case, calling in eviden
ce from me, from Father McManus, from the forensic report of the murder itself. Even then, it helped that Joseph was presumed drowned. It helped, as Clay put it, arguing eloquently before his president, that Joseph—an innocent man—had sacrificed his own life to save the life of the United States Marshal who was arresting him. Find the hero, as Carroll used to say. People need their heroes. And even then, it helped that Clay’s father had known the president personally, that Clay’s daughter—I don’t remember which one—had once bounced from the knees of Richard Nixon in the Oval Office itself. These things matter, after all. It seems the Monks and Fishers of the world are maybe not entirely irrelevant, yet.

  And in April we won our pardon at last. The newspapers were full of it. I made sure of that, believe me. I made sure that my name was connected to the case, my celebrated name that was always good for a headline. I made sure that anyone in the world—anyone who could overhear a conversation in a café, anyone who could read a newspaper, anyone who could listen to the announcer on a radio—would learn of this extraordinary tale of heroism and sacrifice and redemption. Anyone in the world, wherever he might be. In whatever harbor he might have found shelter.

  Shortly afterward, the postcards ceased.

  The water slaps against the wall and the dock. A breeze drifts off the water, smelling of the peculiar tang of Long Island Sound, fish and brine and green, living things. Beyond it, the open ocean, the unforgiving Atlantic, over which my father sailed away from me, and Joseph sailed away from me. Over which I myself sailed away, and then returned, to this arcane little island, this little world, this precious stone set in the silver sea, which serves it in the office of a wall—oh God, my father’s voice again—against the envy of less happier lands . . .