The Whore's Child (11 page)

“Oak Bluffs is nice too,” she added hastily. “That’s got a lagoon.”

Another flicker of doubt—had she insulted them?— and a weak smile, as if to concede she wasn’t the person to ask. She didn’t know what older people did, or where they did it, or why.

Her plight was so touching that Snow decided to help her off the hook. “Which is the beach with the cliffs?” he asked, suddenly recalling it from their previous trip.

“Gay Head, you mean?” the girl said, surprised. “That’s clothing optional.”

“Oh,” June said with a wry smile. “Well
that’s
out then.”

“Right,” the girl said sympathetically, though Snow couldn’t tell if she was reluctant to shed her clothing in public now or if she was looking ahead thirty years. Actually, if they stayed right around the area where the trail joined the beach, they’d be fine. It was only farther down the beach, beneath the bluff, where the nudists gathered. They liked to cover their bodies with moist clay from the cliffs—“it’s primo skin conditioner”—and then let it dry in the sun. “And don’t worry about the name. Some people think it’s a gay beach, but it’s not,” she concluded, as if she felt it her duty to allay their fears on this score at least. “They probably ought to call it something else.”

“Perhaps they could call it Primo Beach,” June said wryly when the girl stepped away.

While she was in the bathroom changing into the new bathing suit she’d bought on impulse the day before while they were waiting for the ferry, Snow called his old colleague, David Loudener, whom they’d planned to visit in Manhattan on their way back to Ithaca. David was one of very few people who knew the details of what had happened when June suffered her breakdown. In fact, he’d been with Snow when the police had called to say she’d been found at a nearby shopping mall, staring into the empty display window of a vacant store, and together they’d gathered her up and taken her home. Apparently, the only consequence of her brief disappearance was that she’d given her wedding ring to a stranger.

This was years ago, but “How’s June doing?” was David’s first question, and Snow imagined he heard concern, perhaps even fear, in his old friend’s voice. Snow again was reminded of his suspicion at the time that David blamed him, at least in part, for what had befallen his wife. “You’re going to have to be careful of her,” he’d told Snow after she was released from the hospital, and something in his friend’s voice suggested that he doubted that caring for June was a task he was suited for.

“We’re both fine,” Snow now said, aware that June was probably able to hear the conversation through the bathroom door. “Anxious to see you and Elaine.” And once again he took down the complicated directions he’d need to follow into Manhattan.

“This is way too young, isn’t it,” June said when she emerged from the bathroom, modeling the new white swimsuit.

Snow couldn’t tell whether this was true or if it was his wife’s posture that proclaimed, almost defiantly, her determination to act her age. June was still trim— athletic-looking, in fact—but clearly she was not about to cut herself any slack. In a sunny mood when she’d gone into the bathroom, she now appeared discouraged and uncertain. “You look wonderful,” he assured her. “Come here.”

She ignored this invitation. “It’s cut too high in the leg,” she said, tracing the line of the suit with her index fingers.

“It’s the way they’re wearing them,” Snow said, though now that she’d drawn his attention to it, he saw what she meant.

“It’s the way twenty-year-olds are wearing them,” she said. “Twenty-year-olds with primo bodies.”

“You look lovely, June,” he said.

“You’d let me go out in public looking like a fool, wouldn’t you,” she said.

“Dear God.”

“At least I had sense enough to buy this,” she said, slipping a mesh cover-up over the suit.

As they drove up-island, the devastation of the hurricane became even more pronounced. Obviously, cleanup had been prioritized, and the less populated side of the island was still awaiting attention. Along the winding road, branches and other windblown debris still littered the roadway, though larger downed limbs had been dragged onto the shoulder. The air was thick with yellow bees, which pinged angrily off their windshield.

But further on the landscape opened up, rewarding them every quarter mile or so with a glimpse of blue ocean, until finally the road climbed and narrowed and there was blue sky and ocean on both sides. June’s spirits seemed to lift as the car climbed the final stretch toward the lighthouse perched on a cliff. Halfway down the boardwalk path to the beach, they stopped so June could pull off the cotton cover-up, and she surrendered a grudging smile. “There,” she said. “Are you happy now?”

“I
was
happy,” he protested. “I
am
happy.”

“Feel that breeze,” she said.

By the time they got to the beach, Snow realized he was out of shape and allowed June to carry the beach chairs while he shouldered the bag that contained their towels and suntan lotion, his wallet, her purse. She didn’t even point out that she’d cautioned him against taking these particular chairs—bulky and old-fashioned, with heavy wooden frames—instead of the lighter aluminum ones. These had looked flimsy and chintzy to Snow, who’d thought they should recline in good sturdy beach chairs and sleep in an elegant inn.

At the end of the boardwalk, the beach was relatively crowded with bathers, but by trekking a bit farther they could have a stretch of sand more or less to themselves. “By all means,” June agreed. “In this suit I want to be as far away from people as I can get.”

It looked to be about three hundred yards to the rocky point, with the red clay cliffs rising gently along the way. They’d gone not quite a third of the way when June dropped their chairs in the sand and said, “This is as far as I go, buddy boy. Look up and you’ll see why.”

Snow, more tired than he cared to admit, had been slogging through the sand with his head down. “What?” he said.

Further up the beach, directly beneath the tallest cliffs, was another smaller cluster of bathers, which caused him to wonder if there’d been a different path that led more directly down to the beach.

“Those people are naked,” his wife said.

Snow squinted, salty perspiration stinging his eyes. “Are you certain?” While recognizably human, the figures down the beach were too far away to be, as his replacement might put it, “gender specific.”

“You need glasses,” June told him, setting up her chair.

He dropped their bag in the sand. “I need
binoculars.
”

Overheated, they went for a swim. The September water was still wonderfully warm, and Snow, who as a young man had loved to swim, dove into the surf and swam out beyond the breaking waves where he did a leisurely crawl before letting the surf bear him back in. June was not the sort of woman who plunged right into anything, much less the Atlantic, and he was not surprised to see that she was still feeling her way out. She had always been a graceful woman, and now, in her midfifties, still had a way of meeting the swells that seemed to him the very essence of womanhood. The waves never broke over her, never knocked her back. Rather, at the last moment, she rose with the water, right up to the crest, and then went gently down again. How long, he tried to recall, since they had made love?

Perhaps his wife was thinking the same thing, because as he swam toward her, her smile in greeting contained not a single reservation, though its cause may have been merely the joy of water, the thrill of buoyancy. “Oh, this is grand,” she said, water beading in her hair and lashes. When they embraced, she whispered urgently into his ear, “I’m sorry I’ve been such a pill.”

Such a pill. As Snow embraced his wife, it occurred to him that the last time she’d used this phrase, she’d been a young woman, and their love for each other had been so effortless that whatever had momentarily come between them could be effectively banished with this benign phrase. What it conveyed now was not just a sudden and powerful resurgence of affection and trust, but also promise that the difficulties of their marriage over the last decade might even now be swept aside by a mutual act of will. They could be their old, younger selves again. They would be in love.

Later, as they stood in the warm sand toweling themselves dry, June looked down at herself and said, “Thank heavens it’s just us.” The bathing suit that when dry had caused her so much anxiety proved, now that it was wet, somewhat less than opaque, and her nipples showed through clearly, as did the dark triangle of her pubic hair. And to Snow’s surprise, she seemed less upset than she’d been when she emerged from their bathroom at the Captain Clement, insisting that the suit was too young, that she looked foolish.

“Let’s move our chairs up under the bank,” she suggested with a mischievous glint in her eye, a thing he hadn’t witnessed in a long, long while.

“Why?”

But she was already carting a chair and the beach bag toward the bank. Tired, happy and suspicious, he folded up the remaining chair and followed. The tides had eroded the cliff irregularly, of course, and the spot where June set up her chair was semiprivate. Still, he was astonished when his wife peeled off her bathing suit and stood naked before him, this woman who for years had changed into her nightgown in the bathroom. “Well?” she said.

“Well what?”

“Let me know if we have company,” June said, settling into her chair and putting on sunglasses. “Unless you’re embarrassed, that is.”

“Why should I be embarrassed?” he said, staring down at her.

“Good,” she smiled, taking a book out of the bag.

Snow set up his chair next to hers, realizing that a challenge had been issued and there was nothing to do but answer it. When he dropped his bathing trunks, she looked at him critically over the rim of her sunglasses. “I
beg
your pardon,” she said.

The night before, having returned from dinner only to discover that he’d neglected to pack a book, Snow had slipped into a pair of Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt and padded downstairs in his bare feet to the library where tea had been served that afternoon. What he found was discouraging, if not surprising. Many of the volumes were Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and as he scanned the shelves for something vaguely worth reading, he realized that there could be only one plausible explanation for such a bizarre collection: that the books had been purchased in bulk to provide the Captain Clement’s “romantic ambience.” Some were water-damaged, their brown, brittle pages stuck together, and others were upside down.

Perhaps because it was one of the latter, Snow did not immediately recognize his book on Emily Dickinson. He had to remove it from the shelf to be sure, but there he was, twenty years younger, staring up seriously from the dust jacket. How strange, he considered, to discover himself in such a place. How had he come to be here, inverted, next to the far likelier Thomas Costain? He examined the book curiously, including the endorsement on the inside flap:
With steadfast scholarship, Paul Snow
penetrates the deepest secrets of one of literature’s most private lives.

This was precisely the sort of criticism, of course, that his young replacement had scoffed at. A twentieth-century male scholar “penetrating” the secrets of a nineteenth-century female poet? Such effrontery, according to the new thinking, would reveal only the prejudices and assumptions of the author’s own culture and gender. How ironically vindicated, Snow thought ruefully, this champion of culture and gender would feel to learn that Snow’s best work had been consigned to the “the gentler elegance of a bygone day,” at an inn on its last legs. Instead of replacing the book on the shelf, he laid it flat on a table where Mrs. Childress would notice it in a week or two, and perhaps recognize her guest from the dust jacket photo.

Returning to their room with a newsmagazine, Snow paused at the foot of the stairs, rooted there by the muffled, distant sound of a woman weeping. Although he had left June engrossed in a book, his first thought was that this grief, although sudden and unannounced, must be hers, and so he remained where he was, paralyzed in the dark, until he realized that the sound was coming not from above, but rather from behind the door marked PRIVATE. Indeed, June was safely asleep in their room, facing the window, its sheer curtains stirring in the warm autumn breeze. Still, though the grief he’d heard below was not his to share, it haunted him, and he awoke several times during the night to the sound of weeping carried upward along the ancient ducts and floor registers, and he lay in the dark for what seemed like hours, alert to the measured sound of June’s breathing and guarding against the possibility that some deep sympathy with another woman’s grief would reawaken her own. But she continued to sleep peacefully. Once she changed positions and murmured a word softly, and he noticed that she massaged her ring finger before rolling over again, but she did not wake and her sleep seemed untroubled. Since giving away her wedding ring, she’d refused to let him replace it, though he made up his mind to broach the subject again before they left the island.

Perhaps because he’d slept so fitfully, he now fell dead asleep on the beach, drawn downward by the rhythm of the waves. When he woke, it was to the realization that he’d been sleeping for quite some time. He vaguely remembered that just before he’d drifted off June had touched his arm gently and suggested he put on sunscreen, but there had been a cool breeze off the water, and he was enjoying the feeling of his skin tightening as it dried in the sun. His skin felt warm now, but he still felt no urgency about waking completely. How pleasant it was just to lie there with his eyes closed, thinking of June’s warm embrace—her acceptance of him—in the waves, listening to the surf and the voices and laughter carrying all over the beach.

He opened one eye. When he’d fallen sleep, he and June had been
alone.
But no longer. A few yards away a young woman had just released a Frisbee, and he followed its flight toward the water; a small dog leapt into the air, caught it in its mouth and trotted back. The girl was wearing a T-shirt and a tiny black bikini bottom, the smallest he’d ever seen. No, she was wearing
no
bikini bottom. At which point he remembered he’d fallen asleep naked himself, and sitting up straight, he saw that he still was. Also that June’s beach chair was empty.