The Letters (4 page)

I found out the name of my ghost. She’s Annabelle Frost. Sutton told me that she was eighty-three, a member of the Boston Art Club and American Watercolor Society, and the Society of American Artists. She was the real deal. She divorced Sutton’s father, fell in love with a man who lived here on Monhegan, moved to the island to be near him. She died right in this house, last December.

Sutton was afraid to tell me—that I’d be spooked and want to leave. But I feel the opposite. It comforts me, makes me realize she’s nearby. I know her spirit is right here, Sam—just as I know Paul’s spirit is near Ukallatahal. So it soothes me, in a way I’m just beginning to let myself feel, to know that you will be near him.

Annabelle helps me realize this…

Don’t think I’m going round the bend. I swear I haven’t been this sane in years. Eighty days without a drink, for one thing. There’s a little church here on the island, and I’ve been going to AA. I know you think I’m not an alcoholic—in fact, I noticed how you wrote about the alcoholism of the Eskimos, wondered how you’d feel knowing your wife was one, too—but I am. I’m not sure when I crossed the invisible line; I imagine it was sometime during that year after…There was before, and there was after. I started drinking to black out after. But you know all that…

I like the group here. It’s small and vigorous. One old lobsterman’s been sober for thirty-nine years. And he said he was still drinking at his fortieth birthday…I do the math and feel daunted. I try to stick with “one day at a time.”

The slogans are so hokey; it embarrasses me to repeat them. Again, back to me the sentimentalist. You must think it’s ridiculous, that I can buy into a group that would measure out wisdom—not with Eliot’s coffee spoons—but in pithy sayings tacked up to church basement walls. I can just feel you cringing…

But it seems to be working for me. They tell you to remember the day you hit bottom. I don’t have to think very far. The accident, of course. But so many other things. The way I started to disappear. The way you’d turn to me—I’d see those piercing eyes I used to long to draw—and just want to close mine, so I couldn’t see you. My own version of the hole in the sweater, the stitches starting to pull. You remind me so of Paul…He had his own intensity, not for the written word, but for teaching/helping/saving…in those ways he was his father’s son.

Hitting bottom…

I remember, Sam. Sometimes I think I haven’t quite hit it yet—the true bottom might come along with the divorce papers. Do you ever think that? What it will be like to pick up a pen and end our life together? Oh, that might just be me being sentimental again—I guess I ended it the day of the accident. Or maybe you did, the day you moved out. I’ve lost track.

In any case, I have something to tell you. I’m buying the cottage. The price is crazy-low. I can paint here. I
want
you to have the house—or maybe you can’t bear to keep it either. Maybe we were too happy there for either of us to stay.

The island is beautiful. Back in October, when I first got here, the sun was out almost continuously. I spent the first two weeks painting
en plein air
. I’d set up my easel in the meadow, a field of flowers right in the center of town. Later I went to White Head, one of the high cliffs across the island. The other painters would gather, and it was quite a scene.

As I told you, most everyone leaves for the winter, but a few have stayed. One artist, John Morgan, I remember from RISD. We bump into each other at the grocery store, but he keeps to himself. People who stay the winter here aren’t looking for company.

The island is even more amazing now. It’s lonely and windswept and haunting. It’s inspiring. Even the names of the places—Cathedral Woods, Swim Beach, the Ice Pond, the Tercentenary Tablet. There are seals, which means you-know-what. There’s a lighthouse and a shipwreck. It’s a brutal, rocky coast: gray boulders, white foam, the endless sea, and whatever is swimming beneath…

Oh—and there’s a cat. A hungry, stray cat that sits on the stone wall behind my cottage. She stares as if she wants something from me. But when I approach, she runs away. What should I do? You were always magic when it came to animals…She’s a little gray tiger.

Be safe, Sam. When you get to the place, will you tell him I love him?

Watch out for icefalls and Martha Rich.

Hadley

November 18

Hadley—

Your letters arrived today in one big bundle. I admit I am annoyed and more than a little hurt, but glad to receive them nonetheless. I am feeling a dozen other emotions I can’t begin to sort out. Confused, mostly. How can you still cause this turmoil in me?

I need to think about what I want to say. And I’ll confess right now that I wasn’t entirely honest before. I am not sorry if this trip upsets you; or at least I can’t entertain that thought right now. I need to be here. I need to visit Paul. Call it his spirit, his ghost, whatever it might be. If he somehow exists in heaven or Valhalla or wherever he is, I want him to know that I came looking for him. That I stood next to his last earthly place and greeted his spirit. That his father came to find him.

Stopping now…

Deep breath.

I’ve decided not to edit this, or to rethink it, or to delete things if they make me uncomfortable. We’re past the need for editing, thank goodness. Say what you like. I’ll say my piece. If I step over a line, or say something hurtful, I’m sorry. No pulled punches.

And while I’m thinking of it, and because you mentioned it, no, I don’t think you are an alcoholic. What I think is, you are a lousy drunk when you get drunk. How’s that? I hated to see your second drink go down, because the Hadley I loved, the wonderful woman I married, faded backward through your skin and ended up caged in your ribs. Nasty image. But that’s what I felt. And then this other woman emerged, one I didn’t like nearly as much, and she took over. I remember that time we went to Tankers, that restaurant on the old tanker ship outside of Portland. You had two martinis and the bartender looked at me when you ordered a third, and you snapped at him not to consult your husband, damn it, and then you held forth on tax codes, of all things, and by the end of it the couple we were with—the Babcocks, I think, the lovely, dashing Babcocks, what a pair—had grown glassy-eyed and uncomfortable and you didn’t even see it. So that’s my opinion on your drinking once and for all. It turned you into a bore. Not a drunk, just a bore.

I was tempted to cut that last part about your drinking, but then I said, no. Let it stand. I’m sure you have things to say to me. Fair enough. But I also need to be clear: I hated the drinking because it erased the woman I loved. The martini-you would never care about stopping on the road and cutting wildflowers, or putting a bouquet of black-eyed Susans on a picnic table when we camped—you did that in Idaho, remember, near the Henry’s Fork. Do you know, if I could freeze one day, just one, from all our time together (not counting days with Paul), I would freeze the day beside the Henry’s Fork. You spent the day in jeans and a red flannel shirt, with some sort of bandana in your hair, and you didn’t care much about fishing, I know, but you loved the countryside, and you sketched an exquisite landscape all focused on a fence post and mountain perspective, and your cheeks were red and glowing, and that night we cooked rice and beans. And I had gone down to the river to fish and when I came back you were there at the campsite, and the sun was behind you, and you didn’t see me for a second and I watched how beautifully you moved, how you had such purpose and calm, and you had cut an enormous bouquet of black-eyed Susans and arranged them in an old coffee tin sitting on the table. You had collected the flowers for no other reason except that you appreciated beauty, just beauty, and returning to you that way, coming toward the camp, I felt out of breath at the sight of you. If you remember, I kissed you and then I pushed you down on the table and I kissed you some more, and we stayed like that a long time, the mountains around us, and the first chill of evening coming on, and you didn’t ask why, or what we were doing, and it didn’t push on to sex. We just kissed, and I thought, still think, that you knew we were happy, and I did, and that we had the real thing, that we could arrange days just as you had arranged those flowers.

So, there. That’s the other side. That’s the you I lost when you had too much to drink.

Okay, turn the page. Next subject.

Are you still reading? Maybe I don’t have the right to say such things to you. Tell me if I don’t. Maybe I have surrendered that right.

Anyway, some news. I haven’t left yet because the weather turned dirty and Martha—no worries there, I promise—came over to say we should postpone. She said we could slog it out, but we needed to wait until it “crisped up.” By that, I suspect, she meant it had to freeze hard everywhere. The big danger in dogsledding, especially if you are bushwhacking, is unfrozen water. If you go through the ice, you’re toast.

She came over and had dinner with me and Gus. A fun evening. Gus is an old crank, but he has a soft spot for Martha and he likes dogs. She brought over two house dogs—George and Sneak. Sneak is a sweet little female who, Martha claims, is the smartest dog she ever owned. And George is Sneak’s boyfriend, I guess, and is a magnificent animal with a thick coat and eyes that you can hardly bear to look into.