Up Island (29 page)

“I heard,” I said. “It’s okay. Little does she know that there’s colorless, odorless, death-dealing radon seeping from the basement as we speak. Asbestos, too. She’ll be toast in a month.”

“Really?” gasped Carrie.

“Why do you think I’m not coming home yet?” I said, knowing that she would take it literally, and that it would be all over Buckhead by this time tomorrow.

I thanked her again for sitting Lazarus and hung up. My good humor was restored enough so that the rising wind outside did not really bother me, and when I finally crept upstairs to sleep, I dreamed, not of my mother in her haunted subway, but of the quiet woods outside Menemsha.

The next morning Bella Ponder called to say that Dennis had accepted my terms, and the day after that I moved up island.

T
HE DAY I MOVED WAS THICK and gray; last night’s wind had blown in a canopy of low clouds that promised rain. The drive up island was dun-colored, but the beginning colors of autumn were oddly enhanced by the dullness. The stand of beetlebung trees at the crossroads in Chilmark was beginning to redden a leaf here and there.

Livvy had said that in the autumn they were one of the Vineyard’s glories. My first New England autumn: I felt as excited as a child going on a vacation in new territory. It was how I would live, I thought; how I would create a new life up here: I would taste as fully as I could each new experience, new sight, new sound. I would leave my baggage at home.

I did not want to waste any time on regret and pain. The great stew of unresolved emotion over my mother and my marriage would just have to simmer on the back burner until I got around to it.

Moreover, if I were going to make a fresh life in this place, I had better get on with it right away. For the first time I felt, on that drive, an urgent sense that my time of being was no longer limitless. The sense left a residue of sucking blackness, as if a curtain had parted briefly and let me look into an abyss. “Mortality,” my mother used

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to exclaim. “You can’t live until you confront your own mortality.” But somehow she had never confronted her own, probably not even when it happened. I dumped the mortal blackness into the stew pot with the rest of my ghosts and slammed the lid down.

The first thing I did when I drove into the glade was to stop by and look in on Dennis Ponder. Get it over with; set up a routine; lay a firm foundation of quick, impersonal, no-nonsense contact. I would, I thought, try checking on him first thing in the mornings and late in the afternoons. That way, if he needed anything, I could get it during the daytime and deliver it to him before dinnertime. Like feeding the swans, I intended that the care and feeding of Dennis Ponder be as efficient and nominal as I could make it. I did not imagine he wanted me hovering over him any more than Charles and Diana obviously did.

No smoke curled from the chimney of the larger camp this morning, though it was considerably cooler than the day before. I walked up the steps and across the porch, and lifted my hand to knock, then saw that the door was ajar. I was instantly uneasy.

“Mr. Ponder?” I called, halfway expecting to hear nothing, as I had before. But a voice called out, “Come in. Back in the bedroom.”

I walked through the big living space, seeing that a fire was laid but not lit, and that the stove in the kitchen was unlit, too. There was a wood box beside it like the one in my kitchen, this one filled with neatly hewn logs, and the stove’s black-iron door stood open, but no fire burned inside. There was no coffee or tea on the counter, no sign of breakfast.

Either he could manage easily after all, and had already eaten and cleaned up after himself, or he was unable to manage at all and

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I would have to do it. I prayed it was the former. I could not imagine feeding that cold, white man.

I went to the doorway of the big downstairs bedroom behind the living room and looked in. A floor lamp burned there, and he was sitting in an upright chair beside it, dressed and combed. His plaid shirt was buttoned up to the neck and the collar was far too big for his throat. It was the look of the old, or the sick. There were piles of books all over the room: on the unmade double bed; on the floor beside it; spilling off the desk and the one easy chair; still occupying moving boxes stacked against the wall. He had one open on his knee, and was making notes on a legal pad. At first he did not look up, and I stood there, waiting. I was determined not to speak first. Then he finished writing and did look at me.

He looked marginally better. His face was not so waxen yellow, though it was still pale, and the bones still made ridges through the translucent skin. He had not shaved, and there was a dark shadow of beard around his mouth and on his cheeks and chin. His eyes were dark and sunken under level black brows, and his mouth was long and mobile, the pale lips full in contrast to the rest of the desiccated face. If he had been well, it would have been a sensuous mouth. His black hair had damp comb tracks in it, and fell in a shock over his forehead. Forehead and cheeks were cut with deep lines of pain and weakness; I knew those lines from my hospital work. They furrowed what I could see of his brow, too, and bracketed his mouth. I was reminded of someone, and could not think who until I remembered seeing, late one evening the summer before, an old movie with Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones called
Duel in the Sun.
Dennis Ponder UP ISLAND / 251

reminded me of the indolent outlaw played by Gregory Peck in that movie, if Peck had been much older and wasted with cancer. Even with the stigmata of the disease on him, Dennis Ponder was a handsome man. Or, at least, had been. The resemblance to his mother was less today, but still apparent, though how that might be I could not have said; Bella was near to being grotesque. But still, in her son’s face, you could see what she once might have been…

“How are you this morning?” I said when he still did not speak. He stared at me a while longer, then smiled. It was not a warm smile. I thought that his mouth pulled tight in pain would look the same way.

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to stare,” he said, and his voice was as colorless as his face. “You really look remarkably like what I remember of my mother. I thought for a minute yesterday you were one of our endless kin; the Miara ones, of course. My mother is very good at importing relatives. But you’re not one of us, of course; she wrote me a remarkably thorough dossier on you: outlander through and through, you are, aren’t you? No ties at all to this sacred sod. Why you want any is one of God’s great mysteries, I suppose, but that’s your affair, as is everything else about you, and I assure you it will remain so. I’m sorry I snapped at you yesterday.

I’m told I’m not to do it again.”

It was not a pleasant little speech.

“That’s right,” I said. “You’re not. So. How are you today?

You look a good deal better than you did the last time I saw you.”

“How am I?” he said, and smiled, the skeletal teeth flashing white. “I expect you know how I am. My mother’s note also said that you work with cancer

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patients back home in…Atlanta, is it? She is quite excited about that; thinks it’s a sign that
Santa Maria
sent you to us.

As you can see, when it comes to
Santa Maria,
no stone has been left unturned.”

He gestured and for the first time I noticed that there was a carved black-and-gold crucifix, obviously old, over his bed, and two or three painted statuettes of the Virgin Mary, and a heavy old mahogany reredos against one wall, flowers and candles set out on it.

“I know something about malignancies,” I said evenly.

“Then perhaps you’ll know what I mean when I say that I have had a stage-four adult soft-tissue sarcoma that made shit out of my knee, found a home in some lymph glands, and headed uptown. By the time we found it there was no way to save the bottom leg and knee, and there’s no way now to know if any more of it will have to go. I’m among the elite; it’s very rare, especially in adults. It has been treated with radiation and chemotherapy, and I had the last treatment just before I came here. There is not any pain except in the part of the leg that is gone, which I understand is called phantom pain and is quite common. The itching is worse than the pain. The real pain comes next if the chemo doesn’t work, which I will not know for a while. Nor will I know where; this baby travels. Mainly I am weak and still nauseated, but I understand this should pass. I still sleep quite a lot. As you see, I have not lost the hair on my head or face, though for some reason I lost all my body hair. I’m as slick as a boiled frog all over; I hope the notion does not appall you, or even worse, turn you on. What I will need from you is for you simply to check on groceries and things like that, and to take me to my doctors’ appointments.

UP ISLAND / 253

Those should be minimal, and the first is not for almost a month. I need no help with meals or bathing or household duties.”

“Have you had your breakfast?” I said. “I didn’t see any dishes, and your stove isn’t lit.”

His face colored faintly.

“I left my crutches in the bathroom,” he said. “I just haven’t gotten them yet. I’m still learning my way around this place…”

His voice trailed off and he looked down at his legal pad.

I knew that he had not yet been able to retrieve the crutches, and was trying to put the best possible face on it for me. I knew, too, that he would rather fumble for the crutches, crawl on his knees, do without food and warmth than ask me to help him. For some reason, it made me angry.

I went into the bathroom, got the crutches, and stood them up against his chair. Then I went back into the living room, touched a match to the fire, lit the kitchen stove, and made coffee. I turned on the gas oven, put a couple of slices of bread on a baking sheet, and left it on the counter. I got butter and the ubiquitous beach plum jelly out of the refrigerator and set them beside the sheet. Then I went back into his bedroom.

“I got some things started for you,” I said. “For God’s sake, tell me when you need help. It takes about five seconds to do what needs doing, and it’s one of the agreed-on conditions.”

“Ah, yes, the conditions,” he said. “Well, thank you, Molly whatever your last name is. From now on I’ll remember the crutches, and I’ll stay in the bedroom while you minister; you’ll find a list of things I need on the table in the living room. That’s where it will always

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be. I won’t get in your way; I’ll be working in here most of the time.”

“Your mother says you’re working on a book,” I said, I hoped pleasantly.

“My mother is full of shit,” he said, “but yes, I am. Do you know anything about publishing, Molly By Golly?”

“I’ve had a little experience,” I said stiffly.

“Wait, don’t tell me…you edited the Junior League cookbook. Am I right?”

He was, or nearly. It had been the Grady Hospital Auxiliary cookbook. My face burned.

“I’ll leave you alone,” I said. “If you should need me, just call…or no, I guess my phone’s not in yet. Maybe you could—”

He gestured at the bedside table, and I saw then that an old-fashioned bronze dinner bell with a carved handle sat on it. Charlotte Redwine had one on her dining-room sideboard, only in silver.

“My mother has provided for all my needs, physical as well as spiritual,” Dennis Ponder said. There was color on both cheekbones now, like hectic flags against the pallor. Somehow it did not make him look healthier. “There’s even a crucifix in the kitchen, right over the portable toilet, in case I feel in need of a bit of blessing while taking a shit.”

“Poor baby,” I said meanly, and turned and left the room.

This man was odious, dying or no, and I felt neither sympathy for nor curiosity about him. I picked up the grocery list that sat on the split log table in front of the scarred leather sofa, and went out into the gray morning. Down on the pond I caught a whisk of white. The swans were no doubt waiting for their breakfast, too.

UP ISLAND / 255

“Tough patootie, you stupid turkeys,” I said to them. “You can just wait till I have some coffee. Go glom some underwater plants. Eat some algae. Live a little.”

It did not help my mood at all that the second man in one summer had compared me to a woman who loomed large in his life. I hated the first comparison and didn’t at all care for the second.

“Maybe I’ll get my head shaved and my nose pierced. What would you think of that?” I called to the swans as I got out of the Jeep. They had left the pond and were waddling up the bank toward me and, I supposed, their breakfast, lifting their great wings ominously. The larger, Charles I was sure now, began the snaky hissing.

“Terrific way to get your breakfast,” I said, moving quickly up on to the porch of my camp. “Really makes the cook feel appreciated. For that you’ll wait until I go out for groceries.”

I stopped on the porch and looked around. Bella Ponder had been as good as her word. Someone had done some serious work on the smaller camp. From the bronze chrysanthemums in iron pots beside the front door to the swept and scrubbed porch floor and the shining windows, the outside of the little house had been transformed. Two rickety but clean twig armchairs and an old hammock on a freshly painted white iron stand stood on the porch, and there was a sheaf of early autumn foliage in a tin bucket on a twig table.

I smiled. I could always spend my time on the porch if the interior was too grim. The real cold would not begin for a month yet.

But when I went inside I saw that there would be no need to do that. It might have been a different
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room. It, too, was swept and scrubbed; the fireplace was cleaned and laid with logs, ready to light; the two straight chairs had been joined by an old leather morris chair that looked as though someone had polished it; a round table laid with white crockery and a jar of wildflowers sat under the window at the end of the room. Old-fashioned white priscilla curtains, limp from years of wear but clean and ironed, framed the windows. A couple of thick plaid blankets smelling of camphor were draped over the sofa back. In the kitchen, which had been scrubbed, too, the wood box beside the iron stove was filled, and the stove itself looked newly blacked. Cooking stove and refrigerator had been scoured.