Up Island (38 page)

Indeed, she looked for all the world like a slyly serene Buddha, huge and richly adorned. Luz wore an ivory linen nightgown that buttoned up to her wattled throat, and another shawl, this one in shades of soft rose and green, wrapped her small shoulders. Bella had brushed the thistledown hair until it stood out around her tiny yellow face like a silver nimbus, and put a dab of pink lipstick on her little mouth.

She looked like a mummified child, dressed forever in her grandmother’s clothes.

“Well, you both look absolutely beautiful,” I said, smiling at them. “Is all this for my old pa?”

“Is there a law against a body putting on something
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decent for a change?” Bella said archly in her deep voice. Her face was flushed crimson, whether from rouge or illness I could not have said.

“Bella said a mysterious stranger was coming to see us,”

Luzia said and giggled. “Don’t I look pretty? I feel like a princess in this shawl. It was my great-grandmother’s. She really was a princess. Tell them, Bella…”

“Hush, Luz, you promised you wouldn’t babble,” Bella growled, but she smiled fondly at the tiny woman in the bed.

“I can well believe it of both of you,” my father said, smiling and bowing slightly to the old women. He had taken off the tweed hat he always wore outside, and held it in his hands.

Bella took it from him and laid it tenderly on the tea table.

“Nice to see a man’s hat in this hen’s roost,” she said. “I always did like the look of that.”

She cut her black eyes at him and smiled so archly that I had to stifle a giggle myself. Bella Ponder was flirting with my father! I wondered if he knew. If he did, he did not betray it by so much as the lift of an eyebrow. As I said, Daddy is nothing if not a gentleman.

“Bella, can I tell him about King Dinis?” Luz pleaded. “I’m sure he doesn’t know, and I don’t want him to think we’re just ordinary, normal people.”

“Later, maybe,” Bella said, glaring at her. “I don’t imagine he thinks we’re normal, by any stretch.”

Again the sly cut of the eyes, and the arch smile.

“Anyone would say extraordinary,” my father said and smiled, and went and sat down by Luz. “I’d like to hear all about it sometime when we have more time. I think I have to go shopping with my daughter in a little while. Could I come one day especially to hear about King Dinis?”

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“Oh, yes! When? Today? Bella, can he come today…”

“Let the poor man have a little time with his daughter before you start rattling in his ear,” Bella Ponder said. “Nobody much wants to hear those old tales these days, anyway.”

“I do,” my father said, and I knew that he did. Luz knew, too. She settled contentedly and watched and listened while my father worked his quiet magic on Bella Ponder. It was no more, really, than his extreme interest, and the mild but total focus of his eyes, but before long Bella was babbling like a teakettle herself. I went in to replenish the coffee and found a fresh loaf of bread on a tray, still warm from the oven. I sniffed; it smelled wonderfully of vanilla and something vaguely foreign. Sweet bread, then. I wondered what it had cost Bella to bake it. She had said she didn’t bake much anymore. There was a cake of firm white cream cheese on a saucer beside it, and a jar of homemade beach plum jelly. I put them all on a tray and brought them out.

“…But he doesn’t even speak to me anymore,” Bella was telling my father, and I sighed. The saga of Dennis’s defection again. “I’ve always wondered what they did to turn him against me, over there in America. I sent him so he could learn about his true heritage, but so far as I know he hates even the mention of the Portuguese. He wrote me right before he came that he wanted absolutely nothing Portuguese put in his house. I managed to sneak in a little touch here and there, though. It’s a proud heritage. He mustn’t forget it.”

“I don’t imagine he will,” I said, thinking of the
santos,
and the reredos in Dennis Ponder’s bedroom. So far he had not objected violently to them, at least not in my presence. Or maybe it was just that he knew he was stuck with them; he certainly could not move them out.

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“You must be wondering why we don’t speak,” Bella said to my father.

“It’s a hard thing when families break up,” he said mildly.

“Oh, it is! You don’t know the pain that I live with in my heart,” she said eagerly. “And I don’t mean this silly weakness of mine. My son has been a knife in my heart since the day he left me. I wish I knew why he hates me so, but my family has long since gone back to Portugal, what’s left of it, and I will never know unless he decides to tell me. But it had to be something they said or did…”

“Denny was the cutest little boy,” Luz piped from her bed.

I had thought she was sleeping; she had been nodding, her eyes closed.

“He was like my own; we played together all the time. He loved the old stories, and the games. When he gets better, he’s going to come and see me. Bella promised. We can’t go down there, you know.”

Bella Ponder rolled her eyes at us.

“You never know what she hears and what she doesn’t,”

she said. “I never told her that; it would be cruel. He doesn’t want to see either of us. Luz is…childish, you know. She was always like this. No wonder Denny liked to play with her; it was like playing with another child. She’s gotten worse since she fell, but not all that much.”

“Does Denny remember me?” Luz said wistfully to my father.

“He hasn’t said. I just met him, you know. But I’ll bet he does,” Daddy said. “He remembers about when he was a little boy here.”

Bella Ponder’s head whipped around to my father.

“What? What does he remember?” she said. “What did he tell you about that?”

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“As I said, very little. He said he remembers his grandmother, and his cousins. He used to go to school with them, and play with them at recess. Not much more than that.”

I looked at Bella Ponder. I thought she had said her son never knew his Ponder relations. She did not look at me, but her color deepened.

“What else does he remember about that time? Did he say?” she muttered. Her breath had begun to rasp in her chest.

My father smiled at her, a gentle smile, but I saw something in his face close, and knew that Bella had crossed a line with him.

“He didn’t say much else about anything,” he said. “We didn’t talk very long. He’s busy, and I didn’t want to tire him. It hasn’t been all that long since his operation, and it’s not an easy one to get over.”

“He’s very sick, isn’t he?” Bella said.

“I don’t know, Mrs. Ponder, but I suspect he is,” my father said quietly.

Bella stared into his face for a long time. The black eyes shone with tears abruptly, and she turned her head away.

But then she said, very softly, “Thank you. You could have lied to me. Most people would have.”

“I’m not going to do that,” my father said.

“Will you come again?”

“Of course, if you like.”

“Will you…tell me about my son? I promised your daughter I wouldn’t ask, but if he’s so sick, I want to know about him…”

“I don’t think I can promise you that,” my father said. “Not unless he agrees to it. But I’ll see if he will.”

She nodded. Presently we got up to leave. I collected
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the grocery list and walked out behind my father, with Bella.

“You bring your daddy back,” she said. “He’s a nice man.

A good man. You’re a lucky girl to have a father like that, to come all the way up here to be with you. Mine wouldn’t have done that, no more than Dennis’s would. You take care of that man.”

“I will,” I said, and surprised us both by kissing her on the cheek. My father had done it again; I knew more about Bella and Luz Ferreira from this brief meeting than I had learned in all my days with them before.

“Sad ladies,” my father said, getting into the truck. “Nice, but real sad. They both miss that boy something awful; it’s too bad. It doesn’t seem like any of them have a lot of time left…”

“You know, it just doesn’t ring right when Bella says she never got around to going over to the mainland to see him,”

I said. “All those years, and she never got around to it? If it were Teddy or Caroline over there and me over here, I’d have swum over there. There’s got to be something else…”

“Oh, yes. Something really tragic is buried in there somewhere, I suspect. But it’s her affair, hers and his. We mustn’t pick at it, or pry. I tell you one thing, though, whenever I next feel down in the dumps and sorry for myself, I’m going to remember those three people.”

“They seem to be doing all right, though, don’t you think?”

I said, anxious for him to agree with me. “I mean, considering everything.”

But he just shook his head.

“It’s hard enough, losing to death. It must be nearly unbearable, losing to life. Well, I guess you know about that, don’t you, baby?”

“I guess so,” I said. But it did not feel like the same UP ISLAND / 333

thing at all. Somewhere deep down in the middle of me, I knew that my loss of Tee was not on the same scale of pain.

Why that was true was a thing that would nag at me, I knew, for weeks to come. I had thought it was the worst pain I could know.

The three weeks before that Christmas were exquisite.

Whenever I think “winter,” it is not the Southern winters I have always known—landscapes of sepia and gray and fields the color of an old lion’s coat, and soft, sulky, wet days—but those short weeks before the turning of the light toward spring up island. Days were cold and dry and clear, and the sun hung low in the south, so that the light, instead of pouring down from overhead, seemed to flow over the fields and the sea like thin silver wine from an overturned cask. The sea glittered in its shallows and the pond was crumpled foil, but it was a dulled glitter, nothing like the glass shards that the sun struck off the sea in August. That up island winter light…it still glows in the best of my dreams.

“Another magic light day,” I would say to my father as we headed out in the truck with Lazarus to explore Menemsha or Lucy Vincent or Gay Head or one of my little secret up island trails.

“Seems like it,” he would say mildly, and smile at me. But I knew that he felt a deep, harrowing stab of pure pain whenever something particularly lovely or remarkable took his breath, because his first impulse was to show it to my mother. I still felt that, too, sometimes, the need to tell Tee about things, even though I almost never wished him with me anymore. Then one morning, after a brief, pristine little snow that was gone by afternoon but left the glade and the pond such perfect

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silver miniatures that I cried aloud with joy at the first sight of it, I saw the brief slash of pure, burning orange that was the swans’ beaks in all that photographic negative black-and-white, and I turned and ran back up the hill and pulled Dennis Ponder out on to the porch of his cottage to see. He did not laugh at me this time, but nodded and limped back into his house and brought his camera and took a few shots, and before he went back to work he said, “Thanks. I’m letting the leg make me miss too much.”

I was as proud of myself as if he had given me a good-conduct commendation and it was only much later that I realized that it had been him, and not Tee, that I’d first thought of when I’d seen the swans.

“What does that mean, then?” I asked myself, but there seemed to be no answer except “nothing at all.”

We were busy enough those first days so that I do not think my father felt the terrible, bone-sucking depression that he had at Kevin’s, though I know that the sadness was still heavy and constant on him. When we stopped, as we finally had to do in the late afternoons, he would fall silent and sit very still, his face blank and empty, looking bleakly at nothing. I knew, though, that for him those nothings were filled with my mother, and I often wondered what he saw. Her presence was as palpable in the little house as if she had just left the room; I felt her everywhere, perhaps brought near by the sheer power of his wanting, and she still came in my dreams, even if she did not enter the niche under the stairs anymore. I wondered if she came to him upstairs. I did not think so. I thought that he would have been happier if she had.

But on the whole he did well. He admired the places I took him with unfeigned interest, and he asked me a UP ISLAND / 335

thousand questions that I realized I probably should have known by now about up island, and he busied himself around the house with tools borrowed from Bella Ponder or Dennis, so that soon there was not a squeaking board or a drafty knothole or a thumping pipe or a faltering stove in evidence.

He made a small split-log parson’s table for the living room, found and rewired and hung a reading lamp for me so that I could read in my cave, installed a swinging dog door, and made a splendid insulated doghouse for Lazarus in the backyard so that he could indulge himself in swan-scanning or raccoon-barking far into the nights if he chose. Laz loved it, but he always came in before dawn. I never woke up in that place without his solid, odorous weight snugged softly into the curve of my hip or knee.

My father began gradually to take over some of my chores for Dennis Ponder, too. He let me do my morning’s cataloguing and shelving alone, content to stay behind and putter in the cabin or take the truck and go into Chilmark or West Tisbury. He loved the truck. But he was soon going in the afternoons to take Dennis’s groceries to him and do the afternoon check, and then the visits became daily affairs, purely because each man wanted it so. I was vaguely annoyed. I felt proprietary about my father to a degree I would not have thought possible, and did not want him co-opted by the cold, pale man across the glade. We had an agreement, after all.

There would be no intimate contact. And I resented that my father needed more than me.

“What do you talk about all the time?” I fumed one afternoon when he came home late, and the hot cheese rounds I had made to go with our Scotch had cooled into little rubbery circles.