The Love Season (14 page)

A few miles up Polpis Road, Marguerite passed the rose-covered cottage—featured on every third Nantucket postcard—in its second full
bloom of the summer. Then Almanack Pond Road, the horse barn, the turnoff for the Wauwinet Inn and Great Point. Marguerite slowed down. She lived so resolutely in town that she had forgotten all this was out here, all this
country
. Sesachacha Pond spread out silvery blue to her left, and directly across the street was the white shell driveway that led to the cottage that Porter had rented for so many years. She would love to turn down that driveway and take a peek. Why not? This day had taken on the quality of the moments before death: her whole life passing before her eyes. She wanted to see if the hammock still hung from the front porch, if the roses still dangled over the outdoor shower, if the daylilies she and Porter planted had survived. But there was no time to waste, plus she didn’t know who owned the property anymore. Mr. Dreyfus, who had rented it to Porter, had long been dead; one of his children owned it now, or someone new. The last thing Marguerite needed was to be caught trespassing. She drove on, but not too far. One mailbox, the stone wall, and then she turned right. A dirt path led deep into what guidebooks called the enchanted forest. Not so enchanted, however, because the skinny scrub pines were strangled with underbrush, pricker bushes, and poison ivy and the bumpy path leading through the woods held water, which meant mosquitoes. One could live on Nantucket one’s whole life without going to the Herb Farm or even knowing it was there, which had suited Marguerite just fine for the long time that she had avoided it.

Like so much else on this island, the Herb Farm had been Porter’s discovery. Every other restaurant provisioned at Bartlett’s Farm, a far larger and more sophisticated enterprise, closer to town, and with a farm truck that was a steady presence on Main Street each summer morning. Marguerite held nothing against Bartlett’s Farm except that she had never made it her own. She had, from the beginning, woken up in Porter’s cottage and walked with an honest-to-goodness wicker basket down the dirt
path. The Herb Farm reminded Marguerite of the farms in France; it was like a farm in a child’s picture book. There was a white wooden fence that penned in sheep and goats, a chicken coop where a dozen warm eggs cost a dollar, a red barn for the two bay horses, and a greenhouse. Half of the greenhouse did what greenhouses do, while the other half had been fashioned into very primitive retail space. The vegetables were sold from wooden crates, all of them grown organically, before such a process even had a name—corn, tomatoes, lettuces, seventeen kinds of herbs, squash, zucchini, carrots with the bushy tops left on, spring onions, radishes, cucumbers, peppers, strawberries for two short weeks in June, pumpkins after the fifteenth of September. There was chevre made on the premises from the milk of the goats; there was fresh butter. And when Marguerite showed up for the first time in the summer of 1975 there was a ten-year-old boy who had been given the undignified job of cutting zinnias, snapdragons, and bachelor buttons and gathering them into attractive-looking bunches. Ethan Arcain, with his grown-out Beatle hairdo and saucersized brown eyes. Marguerite adored the child from the moment she saw him because that was the way she was with people—everything right away, or nothing.

Ethan Arcain worked at the Herb Farm every summer that Les Parapluies was open, and so for a hundred days a year Ethan’s face was one of the first Marguerite saw each day. Their relationship wasn’t complicated like Marguerite’s relationship with Dusty. Ethan was a boy, Marguerite a woman. She thought of him as a little brother, although she was old enough to be his mother.
The son I never had
, she sometimes joked. Ethan’s family life was a shambles. Dolores Kimball, who owned the farm in those days, once described Ethan’s parents’ divorce to Marguerite as a grenade explosion:
Destroyed everyone in the vicinity
. Years later, Ethan’s mother remarried and Ethan fell in love with his stepsister and when they
were old enough they got married, which people on the island whispered about, because people on the island whispered about everything. Ethan’s father, Walter Arcain, worked for the electric company and was a well-known abuser of alcohol. The one time he had tried to come into the bar at Les Parapluies, Marguerite had asked Lance to see him out to the street.

It was Walter Arcain who had been driving the truck that killed Candace. Ten o’clock in the morning and he was three sheets to the wind, out joyriding the snowy roads of Madequecham for no good reason; there weren’t any power lines down that road.

At Candace’s funeral, Ethan had sat in one of the back pews—by that time a strong young man in his twenties—and cried bitter tears of guilt, atoning for the actions of his derelict father.

I feel responsible
, Ethan had said to Marguerite as he left the church.
Dirty and responsible
.

Marguerite couldn’t take anyone’s guilt seriously but her own, and therefore she didn’t grant him the absolution he was looking for. Now, from a greater distance and a clearer perspective, she felt sorry about that. Ethan eventually bought the Herb Farm from Dolores Kimball; once in a great while, Marguerite saw him in town, and he was always a gentleman, holding open doors for her, touching her arm or her shoulder. But the words unsaid polluted the air between them; she felt it and assumed he did, too.

There was a freckled boy working the register in the greenhouse, a boy about the same age Ethan had been when Marguerite met him. His son? Anything was possible. Marguerite just felt relieved that she didn’t have to deal with Ethan head-on; she needed time to get her bearings.

Things in the greenhouse had stayed more or less the same, though the prices had tripled, as had the choices. Marguerite had read in the
newspaper that the Herb Farm was supplying not only many Nantucket restaurants now but also several high-end places in Boston and New York. Marguerite was glad for this, she wanted Ethan to succeed, but she was pleased, too, that the trough filled with cool water and bunches of fragrant herbs was right where it had always been. Marguerite picked out bunches of basil and dill, mint and cilantro, and inhaled their scents. This was how Ethan found her, sniffing herbs as if they were her first dozen roses.

“Margo?” he said. The reaction she was getting was universal. Ethan’s brown eyes widened as Dusty’s had, like he couldn’t…quite
…believe
it. Ethan’s face was sunburned and his hair, longer than ever, was tied back in a ponytail.

“Hi,” she said, though her voice was so quiet, it was inaudible to her own ears. She took a few steps toward him and opened her arms. He hugged her, she kissed his warm, stubbly cheek, and they parted awkwardly. This was what she had dreaded; the angst of this very second was what had nearly kept her from coming. What to say? There was too much and nothing at all.

“I thought I recognized the Jeep in the parking lot,” he said. “But I wouldn’t let myself believe it. What are you doing here? I thought—”

“I know,” Marguerite said. She self-consciously drew her list out of her skirt pocket, checked it, and bent over to select a bunch of chives, which were crisp and topped with spiky purple flowers. Asparagus, she thought. Chevre, butter, eggs, red peppers, and flowers. If only she could get out of here without explaining. Although deep down she wanted to tell someone, didn’t she? She wanted to tell someone about the dinner who would understand. This man. And yet how painful it would be to acknowledge their tragic bond. It would be far more couth, more polite, to ignore it and move on.

“You’re cooking,” he said. It sounded like an accusation.

“Yes,” she said. “A chevre tart with roasted red peppers and an herb crust. You do still have the chevre?”

“Yes. God, of course.” He glanced around the greenhouse, eager to change roles, to be her provisioner. He would recognize some kind of special occasion, but unlike Dusty, he wouldn’t ask. He wouldn’t want to know.

Ethan rushed to a refrigerated case, right where the chevre and the butter had always been kept; she could have found it herself with ease. He was stopped at the cheese case by another customer, and Marguerite was grateful. She wandered among the wooden crates, picking up tomatoes, peeling back the husks on ears of corn, adding two red peppers to her shopping basket and a bunch of very thin asparagus, a bouquet of zinnias for the table, and seven imperial-looking white and purple gladiolas to put in the stone pitcher that she kept by the front door. She was loaded down with fresh things, beautiful, glorious provisions. Could she stop time and stay here, with her basket full, surrounded by organic produce? Could she just die here and call it a happy end?

Ethan appeared at her side with the chevre, just the right amount for her tart. He held the cheese out; his hands, if she weren’t mistaken, were trembling. Marguerite cast her eyes around. The woman he had been talking to at the cheese case was now at the counter. The freckled boy scanned her purchases, weighed her produce, and put everything in a used brown paper bag from the A&P. There was no one else in the greenhouse. Marguerite wondered if Ethan was still married to the stepsister. She wondered how marrying someone you were not at all related to could be considered by so many people as incest.

“Thank you,” Marguerite said. She, too, could proceed to the checkout and walk across the sunny parking lot to her Jeep, drive home without another word, but for some reason she felt that would be cheating.

And yet she didn’t want to knock him over with the force of an out-and-out testimonial. Conversation, she thought. She used to be, if not a master, then at least a journeyman. Able to hold her own with stranger or friend. And Ethan was a friend. What did friends say to one another?

“How
are
you?” she said. “Really, how are you?”

He smiled; his red face creased. He was sun-wrinkled like a farmer, but the hair and the soft eyes and the knowledge of his sensitive soul had always made Marguerite think
poet, philosopher
. “I’m good, Margo. Happy. I’m happy.”

“The place looks wonderful.”

“It keeps me busy. We’re doing all kinds of new things….” He sounded ready to launch into an explanation of heirloom varieties, hydroponics, cold pasteurization, which Marguerite, as a former chef, would appreciate, but he stopped himself. Backed up. “I’m happily married.”

“To….?”

“Emily, yes. And the boys are growing up too fast.”

“That’s one of them over there?” Marguerite asked.

“Yes.”

They both looked at the boy, who, now that the greenhouse was empty of customers save for the one his father was talking to, had started reading a book. Marguerite felt proud of him on his father’s behalf. Any other kid, it would have been one of those horrible handheld video games.

Ethan cleared his throat. “So you found everything you need? Everything for the tart?”

“Everything for the tart and then some,” Marguerite said. She closed her eyes for a second and listened. Was she about to make a colossal mistake? She heard the goats maahing and the refrigerator case humming. She met Ethan’s eyes and lowered her voice. “Renata is coming for dinner tonight.”

His expression remained unchanged and Marguerite faltered. Did he
not remember Renata? She had been just a little girl, of course. “Renata is Candace’s—”

“Yes,” he whispered. “I know who she is.”

“She’s nineteen.”

He whistled softly and shook his head.

“I’m sorry,” Marguerite said. “I shouldn’t have—”

He grabbed her protesting hand. “Don’t be sorry,” he said. “I figured as much. If you were cooking again, I figured it was the girl. Or Dan. Or Porter.”

“The girl,” Marguerite repeated. “Renata Knox.”

“If I could, I would prostrate myself at her feet,” Ethan said. “I would beg her forgiveness.”

“You don’t have to beg her forgiveness,” Marguerite said. “You did nothing wrong.”

“Yes, but Walter—”

“Walter, exactly.” Marguerite’s voice was so firm she startled herself. She glanced at the boy, Ethan’s son, but his gaze was glued to the page. “Walter isn’t you and you aren’t Walter. You never had to carry his load.”

“But I did. I do.”

“But you do,” Marguerite said.

“When I had kids, I promised myself…” Here he paused and Marguerite saw him swallow. “…that I wouldn’t
do
anything that would ever make them feel anything but proud of me.”

“Right,” Marguerite said. “And they are proud of you, I’m sure. This place is holy, your work is noble, you are a good, good person, and you always have been. Since you were that age.” She nodded to the son. “I didn’t tell you about Renata to awaken your old, useless guilt. I told you because I knew you would understand about tonight’s dinner. How important it is to me. How you will be a part of it.”

“I want to be a part of it,” he said. “Thank you for coming all the way out here. In my wildest dreams, I never expected to see you today.” Ethan took Marguerite by the arm and led her to the counter. “Margo, I’d like you to meet my son Brandon. Brandon, this is Marguerite Beale, an old friend of mine.”

Marguerite offered Brandon her hand. “Your father feels no shame in calling me old.”

“My apologies,” Ethan said. “I meant ‘longtime friend.’ We’ve been friends a long time.”

Brandon took Marguerite’s hand, uneasily glancing between her and his father. Marguerite nearly laughed. She felt unaccountably happy. Relieved. This was almost over; the hard part was through. It would end well. Brandon began to unload Marguerite’s purchases, but before he could weigh or scan anything, Ethan said, “It’s on the house. All of it.”

“Ethan,” Marguerite said. “No. I can’t let you do that.”

“Oh yes, you can,” Ethan said. “This is for the best chef on Nantucket and her esteemed guest.”

Brandon bagged everything with extreme care as Ethan and Marguerite watched him in silence. Marguerite was grinning; the boy looked so much like his father. When she picked up her bag, Ethan touched her head and Marguerite remembered a priest, long ago, bestowing a blessing. “Now go,” he said. “Cook. And enjoy your dinner.”