Monstrous Beauty (2 page)

She stole a glance at Peter, a bullhorn hanging in his right hand, his left hand shielding the late spring sun from his eyes. She could see just the side of his face: a high cheekbone, black glasses, a thick eyebrow, weather-beaten blond hair like bristles of a brush, lips pursed in easy concentration. He was looking for whales. His eyes passed right over her as he turned, scanning the bay. In a moment he lifted the bullhorn to his mouth.

“Awright, folks, we’ve got a spray on the horizon off the port bow,” he announced cheerfully. “For you landlubbers that’s the left side as you face forward, near the front of the boat.” The tourists rushed to see, chattering and aiming their cameras. A father hoisted his son onto his shoulders.

“There it is again—eleven o’clock,” Peter said. “
Ah!
There may be two of them.”

The crowd oohed with delight and pointed eager fingers. Peter announced, “The captain is going to take us in that direction—toward the southwest corner of Stellwagen Bank. It’ll be a few minutes, but with any luck we’ll get a much closer look at those animals.”

He lowered the bullhorn and caught Hester’s eye, smiling. He yelled against the wind, “You’re slipping, hawkeye.”

“No fair, I was distracted by something,” she called back.

“Oh, yeah, by what?”

She opened her mouth but nothing came out. The truth was, she had been distracted by him. She had dropped her guard. How could she have let that happen? She felt her ears heat up.

A girl with a pixie haircut and a nose piercing rose from her seat and tapped Peter’s shoulder. He turned away from Hester to answer the girl’s question. Hester examined her; she was boyishly pretty with a heart-shaped face and cherry red lipstick. She wore tight black pants and a gray cashmere sweater with a red silk scarf. The girl’s eyes fairly sparkled as she spoke to him, and her broad smile revealed perfect teeth. Hester felt a little weight press on her chest, and then she felt irritated by the sensation.

Peter took off his Captain Dave’s windbreaker as he talked and Hester tilted her head with a new discovery: his shoulders were broader now. Had she already known that? She’d been friends with him for so long that half the time in her mind’s eye he was a bony six-year-old, hanging on to a swimming ring for dear life at the beach, craning his neck to keep the water from splashing his face, while she recklessly dove under him again and again, just to unnerve him. He was such a funny little chicken back then, she thought. She caught her eyes sweeping over his shoulders and his back again and she forced herself to look away.

She had no business admiring him, or spying on him when he was with other girls.

She pulled a necklace out of her collar—a rounded gold heart with softly brushed edges, on a delicate, short chain. She pushed the heart hard to her lip until the pressure against her tooth made her wince. She reminded herself of the history of the necklace: her dying mother had bequeathed it to her when she was only four days old, and her grandmother had given it to her mother under the same circumstance. According to a story passed down through the generations, the original owner was Hester’s great-great-great-grandmother, a woman named Marijn Ontstaan, who had died of “languishment” or something equally nebulous less than a week after her own child was born.

What a burden that little heart represented for her family, Hester thought, dropping it back under her collar: a legacy of premature death, passed on to innocent new life. It was also a warning, she had decided years ago, against love and its cozy associates: sex and marriage. Other people could dare to love—Peter and the pixie girl, for instance—people who wouldn’t lose everything if they did.

She looked back at the two of them. Peter was showing the girl a specimen of a baleen plate from a whale. From his gestures Hester knew he was describing the filter-feeding process of the whale and telling her that the baleen combs were made of keratin, like fingernails, rather than bone. She had heard him explain it to tourists a thousand times: wholly approachable, never impatient, always sharing a sense of discovery with them. But now his head was so close to the girl’s, they were almost touching. And then they lingered like that; a beat too long. He was neglecting the other passengers, wasn’t he? He wasn’t tracking the sprays of the whales for the captain, as he usually did. The girl brushed her hand over the baleen sample and then grinned as she ran her fingertips over his hair, comparing the two. He received her touch without flinching—maybe even playfully?

Hester needed to lift the weight from her chest. She moved to the back of the boat, to the other side of the captain’s cabin, away from them. She looked out across the water and allowed the feeling of longing to wash over her, spill into the crevices of her soul, and fill her completely.

Chapter 2

1872

E
ZRA LEFT THE STATIONER’S SHOP
with a lightness that felt suspiciously like joy, if he was remembering joy correctly. He pulled out his pocket watch to check the time. It was ten minutes before low tide. Perfect. He found himself smiling; the little muscles around his mouth had miraculously not forgotten how. In his other hand was a parcel—the object that promised to lift him just a little out of his misery.

He had taken a leave from his second year at Harvard nine months ago. It was temporary, he’d told the dean, perhaps a month at the most. His father couldn’t shake a bad cold, the housekeeper had written—it was nothing that hot toddies, warm blankets, and the doting of an only son would not cure. But Mrs. Banks’s optimism had already turned to shadowed eyes and a furrowed brow by the time Ezra’s coach arrived. He had watched his father suffer six and a half months of fever, spasms, and the shakes, until pain and despair whispered the unthinkable into truth: death would be more merciful than life. Ezra watched it arrive with anguished relief.

As a boy he had played in tide pools, devoured books, imagined undersea worlds, captured and sketched insects and sea life. As a young man, it occurred to him, he did much the same. His father had allowed him to attend college at sixteen, had never disputed his choice of studies (wholly unsuited to the family shipbuilding business)—had loved him that much. And so these last nine months had forced burdens on Ezra that he’d never borne before: managing business affairs; running a household; fielding too many well-wishers with their marriageable daughters in tow; hearing the shallow phrase “poor Mr. Doyle” again and again without walloping someone; dressing the bedsores of the ivory-and-blue wraith that had once been his beautiful father; planning the funeral of his last relation on this earth.

And now there was an undefined mourning period to endure: too short, and the town would mistake him for callous; too long, and he’d go mad. He needed to study. He could not live without wonder. Someday soon, he’d sneak away from Plymouth—put off the housekeeper and the lawyer and the foreman in the shipyard, promise to come back but not mean it—and hop on the Old Colony Railroad back to school to finish his studies. In the meantime, he would escape for a moment to the shore.

It had been drizzling when he went into the shop, with a sky so thick and heavy his evening plans seemed to have been thwarted. Now as he left, the clouds were punctured with luminous holes, spilling rays of sun like solid beams. He looked up at those beams as he stepped off the boardwalk—captivated by how extraordinarily
straight
light was, and how easy it must have been for scientists to mistake it for particles rather than waves—and collided with Olaf Ontstaan. His parcel fell in the mud on the dirt road of Leyden Street, and Olaf’s cotton sack crashed with the sound of breaking glass.

“Clumsy oaf!” Olaf barked, picking up the bag. Shards of a bottle slipped out and fell to the ground.

“I’m terribly sorry,” Ezra said. “My head was in the clouds.”

Olaf looked up then. “Mr. Doyle! Poor Mr. Doyle, how are you? Think nothing of this. A simple mishap. Eleanor reminds me time and again, there is no sense in weeping over shed milk.”

Ezra bent to help him pick up the sharp pieces. The smell of something stronger than milk wafted around them.

“I would appreciate your not mentioning my purchase to Eleanor,” Olaf murmured as they worked.

“Of course not.”

“She will not tolerate liquor, and I respect her wishes in the house. But I work hard, Mr. Doyle, I am a good provider—and at the end of the day if I may not stretch out my legs with a drink and relax in my own home, I deserve to take it elsewhere, do I not?”

Ezra rescued his own parcel from the mud as they stood up. He quickly removed the wet paper wrapping before it could damage what was inside.

“Ah, a book,” Olaf observed. “We have only the Bible at our house. I expect yours is for university?”

“It’s a journal.” Ezra flipped the empty pages for him to see.

“You are a writer, sir?”

“A researcher, a scientist in training: botany, zoology, marine life. But when I’m home I seem to be drawn to the history of legends and mythical beings. This will be a field journal in which I record observations and sketches of the ocean environment that might sustain such creatures.”

“Mythical creatures.” Olaf’s face sagged, suddenly doughy. “You are not by chance speaking of sea folk?”

“That’s right,” Ezra said. “Although I don’t tell many people. At best, it must seem to the outside observer a frivolous pursuit, and at worst, lunacy. I suppose now we must keep each other’s secrets, Mr. Ontstaan.” He smiled, but Olaf did not reciprocate.

“You ought stay away from that subject, Mr. Doyle.”

“It’s too late, I’m afraid. After all, I was weaned on such stories since before I could talk, from my father’s customers—in the shipyard, around the dinner table, at the fireside. The fascinating thing, scientifically speaking, is how consistent the legends are, and how persistent. Think on it, Mr. Ontstaan: even the Indians have oral traditions of such creatures. How could they generate the same descriptions independently of the foreign merchants, the sailors, and the local fishermen?”

“Mr. Doyle, would you consider coming home with me for supper this evening?”

“That is kind of you, but I cannot. I want to tally the number of mollusks and crustaceans that are at or below the high-water mark on the rocky outcropping. I have a theory that the abundance of food sources there could account for the high number of sightings in the bay.” He gave a helpless shrug. “I am a prisoner of the tides.”

“If you would allow me to say my piece, sir, I would dissuade you from this dangerous obsession.”

Ezra looked at Olaf more closely now—his leathery face and tired eyes. A man eroded by life, whose small-mindedness would extinguish Ezra’s last pleasure, if he let him.

Ezra bowed his head and said, “I thank you for your invitation. Please give my regards to Mrs. Ontstaan.” He turned and took quick, long strides toward the bay.

Chapter 3

H
ESTER WOUND HER WAY
through dozens of flickering Japanese lanterns on the lawn near the beach. In the waning evening light they were lovely, she conceded—like randomly clustered honey stars in a night sky. It was cool for mid-June, and as tiny raindrops speckled her arms she harbored a small hope—unfair to the others, she knew—that the weather might provide an easy way out. She was there only because Peter had asked her to come and he was graduating soon. She would do what she did at every school party: chat with him—shout with him—over the music, have a soda with a few other wallflowers, avoid stumbling on couples sharing saliva in dark corners, and steer clear of Joey Grimani, who prowled school events for anything with two X chromosomes.

The band finished setting up in the gazebo and began tuning their guitars and testing the amplifiers. They started a slow ballad as a warm-up. She looked at her watch: five minutes early. In her eagerness to get the party over with, she was paradoxically the first one there. The misty rain hadn’t extinguished the lanterns yet, but it had raised the hairs on her arms, so she made her way to a tree for shelter. How much moisture could speakers and amps tolerate? she wondered. How much rain would it take to decompose Japanese paper?

Her classmates began arriving by the carload—laughing and tumbling from vehicles whose booming, rumbling radios hammered over the relative calm of the band’s song. She leaned against the trunk of the tree, her hair falling in curtains on either side of her face.

When she looked up, Peter was walking toward her with Jenn and Claire. He pushed up his glasses and smiled as he approached. She tucked her hair behind her ears.

Looking at Peter was like looking out her bedroom window: she knew every tree, every nest in every tree, each tile of the neighbors’ roof, the lawn and the flowers, every splotch of color, in every season. She even knew the befores and afters: his teeth, before and after braces; his glasses, which she had joked were part Buddy Holly, part bio nerd when they were new, and which now had a scratch on the left lens from when he’d dropped them into the harbor and dove in to retrieve them. Whenever she saw him, he seemed glad to see her. Someday she’d figure out a way to tell him just how much comfort that had given her over the years.

“Hi, Jenn, hi, Claire,” Hester said.

“Hey, Hester,” Jenn said. “Aren’t the lanterns incredibly romantic?”

“Sooo romantic,” Claire agreed. “They make me wish the perfect guy were here to sweep me off my feet.”

“The lanterns are very pretty,” Hester managed to say.

“Don’t forget to dance this time, you guys,” Jenn said to Hester and Peter, tugging Claire away by her sweater sleeve.

“Yeah, have fun!” Claire wiggled her fingers goodbye.

Hester fixed on their bouncing ponytails as they merged effortlessly with the party. “Why do they always do that?”

“Do what?”

“Deposit you and run; try to make us a couple.”

“Aw, relax. They don’t understand the magic is gone once you’ve seen the guy projectile-vomit double-chocolate cake on his eighth birthday.”