Up Island (44 page)

It’s not a burden so far; we’ll tell you if it gets to be. And we’ll give you bulletins along the way. Molly’s got a reasonable and decent agreement with Bella and Dennis. It’s working fine for now.”

After she had gone and we had paid our bill and left for home, I looked over at my father. His profile was calm in the thin silver light of the Wolf Moon, but he was chewing on his bottom lip, and I knew that that meant he was puzzling about something.

“They’re not what Bella said,” I said to him. “The up islanders. The old families. They’re not cold and distant at all.

They’d have taken all of them in; they’d have done that years ago. Do you think she knows that? How could she not?”

“Bella thinks what she needs to think,” he said. “Don’t take that away from her. It’s hard, and it’s wrong, but it’s what’s kept her going all these years. She’d have nothing if she lost that.”

“Oh, God, it’s just so stupid,” I said. “So wrong and so useless. They don’t think that way about the Portuguese; you can tell that. Only that awful old grandmother thought that.

But all these years…”

“They were her years, Molly. Dennis is wrong about the up islanders and about his mother, too, I think, but the hate is what’s driving his engine now.

380 / Anne Rivers Siddons

When he’s done with the chemo, though, I think I’m going to set them both straight. Oh, they won’t thank me. But neither one of them needs to die thinking what they think now.”

The cold, old sadness came back up into my throat, like bile.

“Maybe they won’t die,” I said. “That’s always a possibility.”

“Yes, it is,” he said, and reached over and put his hand over mine. Neither of us said any more until we reached home.

In the days that followed things got a little better. Dennis finished the chemo, and if he did not regain the weight and color, at least the terrible, enervating nausea stopped. He began to come out once in a while during the mornings when I was working on his library, and he sat on the sofa and talked while I sorted and shelved. Most of the talk was about the books themselves, and the manuscript that was growing infinitesimally slowly in his bedroom. But once in a while he would let something personal drop, as lightly and quietly as a leaf falling from a branch. And always, when that happened, I would offer him a little chip of myself, another leaf from my tree. When February came roaring in on the shoulders of yet another winter storm, we both had a small, neat pile of each other’s leaves.

Once he asked me, out of the blue, if I had ever slept with anybody besides Tee.

“Why do you ask?” I said, my face flaming.

“Because I wanted to know,” he said reasonably. “You don’t have to tell me, of course. I was just thinking what a waste it would be if you hadn’t. What a waste for you and for some guy.”

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My cheeks burned hotter.

“No, I haven’t,” I said. “We got married awfully young.

You just didn’t do that back then, not in my crowd. Now I wish I had. I may never know what I missed.”

I spoke lightly, but he said, “I wish I could have shown you. I really wish that. It would have been quite something, I think. From my standpoint, at least.”

“Dennis,” I said. “Are you making a pass at me?”

“No,” he said. “What, a one-legged man making a pass at a woman?”

“I wasn’t aware that it was the leg that was necessary,” I said, and then blushed so deeply that I could feel it on my chest and arms and forehead.

He laughed.

“You almost make me wish I didn’t have cancer,” he said, and we both laughed, and the moment passed. I did not know if I was sorry or not.

Things were not good with the old women, though. Luzia caught a cold on one of the nights when her fire went out, and I spent almost all day for a week at her bedside. She needed a great deal of nursing care, and when she got better, Bella caught the cold and it went straight to her laboring lungs. The coughing and gasping were so bad that I finally called an ambulance, but she flatly refused to go to the hospital, and the attendants could not move her huge bulk. So I set up my contagious ward in her bedroom and settled in for another spell of nursing.

My father took over the library for Dennis, and he came every night to read to the old ladies while I got their supper.

We both grew pale and worn and more tired than I can ever remember being for any length of time. I would fall asleep on the sofa after dinner; he

382 / Anne Rivers Siddons

would fall asleep sitting up in his chair at breakfast. He did that for the second day in a row one bitterly cold, ice-sheathed day in the middle of February, and I roused him and sent him up to bed.

“You sleep all day, and I mean it,” I said. “I’ll get you up when it’s time to go up to the farm tonight. You can take over then, and I’ll sleep.”

He was too tired to protest, and so it was I who took the truck and went up the hill to the farmhouse in the dusk, to read to the old ladies. The ice was so bad that day that I had to leave the truck halfway up the lane and walk the rest of the distance, slipping and sliding and muttering weary curses.

It was, I suppose, the reason that they did not hear me coming. The truck always made a lot of noise.

The door was unlocked, as it always was, so that whoever was expected could enter. But the house was dark. Almost always by this time Bella was downstairs, and had lit the lamps and the fire. I felt a prickle of unease on my forearms and scalp. For some reason, I felt that I should whisper, tiptoe. Do not stir up trouble, my grandmother Bell would have said, and maybe it will go away.

I saw them before I got even partway into the living room.

I stopped dead and tried to breathe, but could not; when breath finally came it was so shallow and high in my throat that I almost felt it whistle. My head felt light and my face stung as though I had been slapped, hard. Afterward I knew that it was shock, but I also knew that it was not the sort of shock that I might have expected to feel. There was nothing grotesque about them, nothing obscene. Rather, they simply seemed totally exotic, totally out of any context I had. The first thought that penetrated the still white dome UP ISLAND / 383

of the shock was that they looked Indian, something from a frieze on an ancient temple in a lost garden somewhere, one of the exquisite little erotic Indian miniatures that the Victorians so prized. They lay together on the bed at the far end of the room, intertwined so that it was hard to tell where Luz’s delicate, withered arms and legs left off and Bella’s colossus’s limbs began. They were naked, and the firelight played over them: ivory, white, black, gilt, gold. They were kissing. It was a kiss of great and complex tenderness and old love, and of simple hunger. I averted my eyes and tiptoed out of the room and shut the door softly. All the way back down the icy driveway I tried as best I could to tiptoe.

By the time I reached home I had begun to shake all over, a very fine, silvery trembling. Everything I did, I did with great, precise care: parked the truck, got out and made my way over the spoiled old snow to the porch, opened the door, laid down my bag of groceries and the book I was reading to them. It was still
The Once and Future King;
Luz had asked again for the scene where the Wart pulls the sword out of the stone. Poor Luz. So in need of empowerment. Or perhaps not. Perhaps that was one of the things she found in Bella Ponder’s great white arms. I found myself beginning to cry, silently.

I told my father, of course. I could not keep my tears from him, and I needed the ballast of his mind and voice. He listened while I poured it out, nodding. When I had finished he reached over and took my hand in both of his.

“Molly, baby. What is it that upsets you so about it? Is it because they’re women, or they’re old, or sick and maybe dying? What?”

384 / Anne Rivers Siddons

“I guess it’s that…that…I just didn’t
think
about them that way. I mean, it must be like walking in on your parents when you’re little and seeing them…”

“…and you have to change the way you think about them forever after. Is that it?”

“I guess so. Oh, Daddy, I don’t care if they’re women, or old…I guess I care because of Dennis. Don’t you see? That’s what he saw. When he was just a little boy; that’s what he saw them doing, and right after that they…she sent him away.

I don’t think he would have been shocked, providing he un-derstood what they were doing, which I doubt. Small children don’t shock easily. It’s that she chose Luz instead of him.

That’s what he’s lived with all the time. His mother loved her cousin more than she did him, and she sent him away when he found out about it. After his father, it must have seemed the ultimate betrayal. I’m not angry at Bella for loving Luzia, for God’s sake; I’m happy she
has
someone to love.

It’s obviously a very real and very old love. I’m angry at her for sacrificing her son to it! That’s monstrous!”

Somewhere during my outburst the shock had turned to rage; I had felt it happening. Even as the fire of it scorched at me, I wondered at it. What business was it of mine? Why should I care about these three people I had known such a short time and would not, could not, know for much longer?

Danger flared with the anger. Beneath all of it I was frightened.

My father sat back and stretched his legs out to the fire.

He sighed. He looked impossibly weary.

“I know that’s the way Dennis feels about it,” he said. “He thinks she was afraid that he would tell somebody, and it would get back to her mother-in-law and the other Ponders, and all the other old families,

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and they would simply drive Luzia off the island. That she—Bella—couldn’t protect her, and that they would hurt her beyond repair. I have an idea it had gone on a long time by the time she married Denny’s father and came over here with him; she must have been frantic to get away from that Portuguese Catholic enclave they lived in. What kind of future could she and Luz have had there? Maybe she did use Ethan Ponder, but no worse than he used her. He must have found out when Denny was very small. It was his excuse to leave, even if it wasn’t his reason. And by that time they were stuck.

They couldn’t go back to the mainland. And Bella couldn’t take a chance on his telling…or that’s what Dennis thinks anyway. I don’t think that’s all there is to it, but he’s not ready to listen to any other ideas yet. He may never be.”

“If you don’t think that, what do you think?”

“I’m not sure. I do know that she loved that little boy, though. And I know that she loves him now, as much as any mother ever loved a son, even if it’s in her own grotesque way, and she’s torn up about him. Ah, Lord. What a mess of unhappiness. What a swamp of pain and lies.”

“Dennis told you, then.”

He nodded. I was not surprised at that, but I felt a flicker of resentment that he had told my father and not me. But then I remembered our agreement.

“Do Bella and Luz know you know?”

“No. And they must never know either of us do, unless they decide to tell us. You’re not to go telling Dennis what you saw, either.”

“Oh, Daddy…as if I would!”

“This is a hell of a conversation for a father to be
386 / Anne Rivers Siddons

having with his daughter,” he said, and I managed a watery smile.

He went to bed then, practically dragging himself up the stairs hand over hand, and I lay down on the sofa and watched the flames. Sadness and bitterness lay in my stomach like a sickness. A terrible pity underlay it all. It seemed to me then that the worst suffering in the world was inevitably born of love.

I am still not sure how I would have handled what I knew, or if I could have made some kind of peace with it, because before the week was out everything changed again, and in the face of the change the love of two sad old women in a farmhouse on a Chilmark hill simply did not seem out of the ordinary to me anymore.

We had an abrupt softening of winter the morning after I saw Luz and Bella together, and when I awoke, head aching dully, bones as sore and troubled as if I had been in an accident, the snow was turning to slush and the icicles that had hung from the trees and porch eaves were dripping, and a weak, repentant sun had come sidling out to bathe the glade in milky light. Even before I opened the front door I could sense the change, and when I did I felt the softness of the air on my face, and smelled, not spring, but a cold, fresh, sweet, faraway
promise
of spring. I stretched, feeling better. I would have a shower and wash my hair and maybe go into Vineyard Haven and buy something unnecessary for the cottage. Perhaps my father and I would have lunch there. Maybe I would go into the Bunch of Grapes and treat myself to a new book, or a pile of them. Later I might, finally, cut Dennis’s hair. I looked at my watch. It was very late. I went upstairs to wake my father. How on

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earth could both of us have slept so late? Except that we were both so very tired…

He was not there. His bed had been slept in, but he was not in the room and not in the cottage. Well, of course, the swans. He’d gone to feed the swans. How on earth it was that they had not waked us with their hissing, battering caco-phony I could not imagine; they never failed to go into their indignant act of swanly starvation when we were late with their breakfast.

I threw on a coat over my pajamas and went down the path toward the pond. Out over the Sound the sky was a clear, pale, washed blue, and the water was still and streaked in darker shades of blue. The white smoke of spume that the cold wind blew off the tops of the whitecaps on the hard, iron mornings was gone. The Irish had a word for this sort of weather: a soft day.

My father was sitting on the end of the dock. His head was bowed and he was very still; at first I thought he had drifted into one of the little neck-crippling naps that he sometimes took sitting up. But then I saw that he was looking into the water, watching a swan circling in the cleared patch. Circling, circling. And as I came nearer I heard the sound that the swan was making, and I never want to hear it again, awake or in my dreams. The swan’s head was thrown up to the sky, the long neck in a fierce, beautiful arch, and it made a great, rusty, desolate cry that sounded as if it were being torn out of the elegant throat. I never heard a mute swan make such a sound again.