Dark Nantucket Noon (12 page)

Kitty woke up suddenly with a clear head and a sharp sense that now she knew what to do. She knew how she would use her six months, how she would give the time that was left to her some kind of usefulness and meaning. She would learn to read some of those languages, like Alice Dove. That was how she would make time dense, like the bristling thickets of the island trees.

13

… to think's audacity. God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.

Moby Dick

Kitty got out of bed, encouraged, bounded down the stairs, ran out to her car and drove to town. First she would stop at the drugstore on Main Street for some aspirin and a toothbrush, and then it was on! on! to the supermarket.

Her mettle was tested immediately. Half of the people drifting down Main Street in the direction of Steamboat Wharf had come to Nantucket because of its recent notoriety in the news. The particular arrangement of a thousand dark and light dots that was the published version of Kitty's face was photoengraved inside their heads, so that when she parked her car on the cobblestoned hill of Main Street and got out, her presence was discovered quickly, and the discovery was passed along.
It's Kitty Clark, Kitty Clark.
The wave crested, smashing into new boulders, sending up her name in splinters of broken glass.
Clark-ark-ark-ark-ark.

Head down, Kitty dodged into the drugstore, dodged out again and hurried downhill, the wave retreating the other way in front of her, reminding her of the day she had met Joe Green. He had said that the ocean was saying her name.

No, no, don't think about that now
, said Kitty to herself, stumbling across the cobblestones. But once under way, the memory would not be quelled. Huddling behind the wheel of her car, the smashed shell in her pocket grinding into her thigh, she backed out too fast, jammed on her brakes, stalled and started up again. Then Kitty said, “Oh, the hell with it,” as the sunshine of that ancient day poured down upon her bare back, and the old waves curled in and out, and the problem she had been working on rose up again in her mind.

She had been lying on the sand at Crane's Beach on the north shore, juggling a complex collection of eight lumpish pieces on a kind of mental chessboard. She had been trying to combine the four humors of the soul, melancholy, sanguinity, choler and phlegm, with the four elements, fire, water, air and earth—it was an old problem, she was still working on it, she. had thought of it again there on the beach just last week—and then a shadow had fallen across her, and she had looked up to see someone kneeling beside her. “Aren't you Katharine Clark?” he had said. He was wearing a shirt and rolled-up trousers. His feet were bare. “My name is Joseph Green.” Kitty had flushed with pleasure and sat up, brushing the sand from her shoulders, which were still dead white with winter classrooms and dark libraries and the thin winter sunlight of her apartment. They had known about each other before they met, their heads were swimming already in clouds of common understanding, and then with one stride they went the rest of the way. Before long he was telling her the surf was saying her name. “Listen to it,” he said. “That's
Claaaaaaaaaaaaark.”

“No, no, the ocean doesn't make those
k
sounds. It's more like
Greeeeeeeeeen.
Hear that?
Greeeeeeeeeen.”

“Greenberg. It would have to be Greenberg. Except for a couple of Nantucket Quakers, my great-grandparents were all German Jews. The waves aren't saying Greenberg. The ocean isn't Jewish.”

“Yes, it is. Those waves have come straight across the ocean from the Mediterranean, from Tel Aviv and Jaffa, from—”

“The ocean is a woman. It's always been a woman.”

He had taken her hand, and then on the way home in the back of somebody else's car, sun and water and mouth and eyes and hair and sunburned arms and legs had become rapturously entangled, and at the door of her apartment building Kitty had tumbled out of the car, gasping, desiring not to be cheap, but the next morning Joe had come back, and they had walked together the whole day, except for an hour Kitty had been forced to spend in class.

Part of the time they had lived in his apartment, part of the time in hers. They had been planning a wedding with wine flowing like water. Each could not believe in the good fortune that the other existed.

It had lasted through Christmas. But with the new year it had suddenly come to an end. An old Nantucket relative of Joe's had died and he had gone to the funeral. It was the first time he had ever been to Nantucket, and he had never come back. She had not seen him again. He had sent a letter at last, explaining about his third cousin Helen Boatwright, and how it had all seemed destined to happen, the union of two branches of an old family. But of course the letter hadn't explained anything. The stroke of the headsman's ax does not explain.

14

And let me … admonish you, ye shipowners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fishenes any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness.…

Moby Dick

Homer stood leaning on the counter in the police station on Chestnut Street, where Kitty had been locked up. He was waiting for Chief Pike to come in. Sergeant Fern was at his desk, occupying himself with this and that, moving his rolling chair nervously from desk to typewriter table with the heels of his shiny black shoes. Every now and then he glanced at Homer as if he were on the verge of saying something, and Homer would look at him expectantly, but then Sergeant Fern would turn away, his ears and the back of his neck bright pink. Homer moved away from the counter and studied the drug paraphernalia on the wall, and looked at the signed photograph of John F. Kennedy, the certificate of appreciation from the Boy Scouts, and the Miranda warning with its drawing of a handcuffed policeman and its legend,
ATTENTION, ALL CRIMINALS!

By the time Chief Pike came in at last, Homer was desperate for reading matter, and he greeted the chief joyfully. “I'd like to see Bird's pictures, please, if you don't mind,” he said.

“You mean those color snapshots he took? Oh, no. Sergeant Fern here, he developed the roll of film and made some prints, but they were all sent over to Barnstable to the district attorney's office. Everything's in their hands now. When they want to know something we try to find out for them. But otherwise we're not involved anymore.”

“Well, goddamnit, I suppose they'll be stuffy in Barnstable about letting me see those pictures. Ah, well. Thanks, anyway. Oh, excuse me, Sergeant. I didn't know you were going out.”

The two men had been trying to crowd out the door at the same time. “Going off duty now,” mumbled Sergeant Fern.

Homer held the door open to let Sergeant Fern go out first, and then he followed him down the walk to the street, but Sergeant Fern seemed hesitant, and he kept dropping back as if he weren't going anyplace in particular. Homer's car was parked around the corner. He ambled along the sidewalk, climbed into the car and turned the key. Suddenly Sergeant Fern's boyish face was bending down beside him, looking in the window.

“Lieutenant Kelly?” whispered Sergeant Fern. “If you'd like to see those pictures, I printed up an extra set.”

“You did?” Homer was flabbergasted.

Sergeant Fern gazed at the front fender of Homer's car. “So if you'd like to see them, I could, like, bring them over.”

“Well, sure, that would be great.”

Sergeant Fern turned his head and looked at the rear fender of Homer's car. “Would tonight be okay?”

“Well, sure. Do you know where I'm staying?” Sergeant Fern nodded. “But you know, of course,” said Homer sternly, “that I can't pay you anything.”

“Oh, gee, I didn't mean that.” Sergeant Fern's pink face blushed redder, all the way up into the roots of his orange hair. His blue eyes looked at Homer in distress.

Homer smiled at him and patted his sleeve. “I'll see you tonight,” he said.

The kid must be sweet on Kitty. It was plain as the nose on his face. Well, he might be a big help. But he was going to get himself in trouble, giving information to the defense when he was supposed to be working for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in its righteous prosecution of dangerous homicidal criminals.

15

He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.

Moby Dick

Alden was shouting something at Homer from the door of the house as Homer parked his car in the muddy driveway. “Telephone,” bawled Alden. “I said, you're wanted on the phone.”

“Oh, thanks.” Homer jumped across the wallowing tire tracks and made his way inside, as Alden pulled his coat down from a hook beside the door and went out, whistling for his old dog Fly.

“Hello?” said Homer.

“Mr. Kelly? This is Joseph Green. Would you like to come on over now?”

“Sure.”

“You know where I live?”

“Yes, I do.”

“All right, then. Good.”

Joe Green lived at Quaise, not far back up the Polpis Road on the side toward Nantucket Harbor. The dirt drive dipped down and up through a field still rich with winter reds and browns, still dotted with last year's milkweed pods, which were perched on their old stalks in birdlike attitudes. It was a rough tumbling landscape, majestic with red cedars rising here and there. Homer parked his car near the big gray-shingled house, and sat for a moment looking past the house at the harbor. The water was a cold blue, ending in the sandy strip that was called Coatue. Between house and harbor there was a pond and a salt-water marsh of amber-colored grass. Water fowl floated in the intermittent streams. A beautiful place, by God. The property had been Helen's, of course. What would Joe do with it now?

Homer walked to the door slowly, trying to picture Joe Green, expecting a tweedy young fool, somebody he wouldn't like. When the door opened, the man inside was older than Homer had expected, his face broader, bluffer, more candid. And yet there was something odd and undecipherable in it. Melvillean phrases flickered through Homer's head. He dismissed them promptly and stepped inside.

“This way,” said Joe. Walking ahead, he led Homer through the living room, a large chamber full of sunlight, yellow with paint and cloth of a color that might have been chosen to match the picture over the mantel, obviously Helen, a child with yellow pigtails and a yellow dress. Joe opened a door at one side of the room and said, “In here.”

The second room was small and dark and blank. Roller shades were drawn down over the windows. There were a lot of books and papers piled on a card table. There was a cot badly made up, a standing lamp, two folding chairs. That was all.

“You did understand my letter?” said Homer. “I'm trying to help Katharine Clark.”

“I understand,” said Joe. He had settled down in one of the chairs and was leaning back, his arms folded, a muscle spasm ticking in one arm.

“Good,” said Homer. “Let's start at the beginning, with the morning of March seventh.”

“Well, I met my wife's plane at seven.”

“She'd been on Martha's Vineyard for several days, is that right?”

“Yes. She'd been visiting a friend she went to school with.”

“So you got up about six-thirty to go to the airport?”

“No. As a matter of fact I didn't. I hadn't been able to sleep the night before, so I'd spent a good part of the night walking around. There was a lot of wind. But it had stopped raining early in the evening.”

“Where did you walk?”

“Oh—all over.” Joe gestured with his head and waved his hand. “I cut across to the 'Sconset Road. Walked to 'Sconset. Walked along the footpath on the North Bluff there. Came back the same way.” Joe supplied these short sentences slowly, with pauses in between. “I got back just as the sun was coming up, about six o'clock. And then I drove to the airport to pick up my wife. We had breakfast here. And then later on Helen had some errands she wanted to do. She went off in the car about ten o'clock. No, that's wrong. She came back in the house again and asked for the keys to the jeep, because she said the other car had been stalling so much. She'd been complaining about that. It was a new car. She wasn't used to it.”

“And you stayed here while she was gone.”

“No. I had discovered that I had lost something while I was out walking, so I went back part of the way, looking for it. I took the car.”

“You had lost something?”

“A piece of paper.” Joe gestured deprecatingly with one hand. “I didn't find it and I turned around and drove back after a while. It must have blown away in the wind. I gave up. The Ropers came along shortly after I got home again, and we waited awhile for Helen to get back, maybe twenty minutes. She was late. We had intended to start for Great Point around eleven-thirty. She had been driving all over the island looking for a store that was open, but they were all closed because of the eclipse.”