Dark Nantucket Noon (20 page)

“My book is doing very well.”

“Mmm. I suspect it is. For all the wrong reasons, I suppose.”

“They sent me a check. Biggest I ever got.” Kitty reached for an envelope on the windowsill. “Here it is. Take it. I don't want it around anymore.”

“Oh, go on. Look, girl, we've been through this before. I've been well enough paid already. The money is coming out of my ears, for chrissake.”

“It is? Really? Good!” Kitty was surprised to learn that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was so generously rewarding its charity lawyers. “You're keeping track, aren't you? We'll have a grand accounting and setting to rights when—after it's all over.”

“Oh, sure, sure. Now look. I have a job for you. How would you like to go to Mrs. Magee's Property Owners Rights Association meeting tonight?”

“Me? Oh, Homer, last week she wouldn't even show me a cottage. She won't stand for any criminals at her meeting.”

“Well, then, I suppose I'll have to go myself.” Homer picked up his sandwich, then put it down on his plate, a big smile on his face. “I know. I'll wear my cloak of invisibility. Did I ever tell you about my cloak of invisibility? I mean, we've all got our little mythological devices. You've got a basilisk eye, I've got a cloak of invisibility.”

“I hope it's an extremely large cloak. What are you anyway, Homer—seven feet tall?”

“No, no, nothing like that. Look, I'll show you how the thing works.” Homer got up and ducked out of the kitchen. Kitty could hear him breathing in the parlor. Then he shambled in again, smiling vaguely in no particular direction, put out his hand at Kitty feebly, withdrew it before she could grasp it, said something that sounded like
Gdeebmnnn
, bumbled behind the backless chair into the corner of the room and let himself down clumsily onto the floor, where he sat hunched behind his enormous knees with his eyes half closed and his mouth drooping open. “How-ziss?” he said drowsily.

“Perfect,” said Kitty. “I can hardly see you. You're sort of transparent.”

Homer's cloak of invisibility worked surprisingly well. When he loomed up in the doorway of Mrs. Wilkinson's big house on the North Bluff at Siasconset, his image registered clearly for only a moment or two on her sharply perceptive retina. Then his terrible posture and wretched articulation and the poverty of the air supply from his lungs and his general air of inconsequence and self-effacement had their effect, and Mrs. Wilkinson soon forgot him in the press of meeting other guests. Homer was able to shuffle into the living room and settle down on a four-legged stool behind a large chair in one corner and withdraw into anonymity, carefully avoiding the look of startled recognition on the face of Mrs. Magee, who was sitting beside the fireplace preparing to conduct the meeting. In a moment the last arrivals had come in, and the business of the evening got under way.

Mrs. Magee carried the ball. She began by reading a list of property owners who had already pledged their support to the cause of overturning the new bylaw. It was a long list. Homer amused himself by comparing Mrs. Magee with her hostess, Mrs. Wilkinson, who sat on the other side of the fireplace in a matching crewelwork chair—Mrs. Magee the businesswoman, the realtor, her spun-glass hair glinting against the dark wood of the paneled wall, her turquoise knitted outfit form-fitting, fabulous; Mrs. Wilkinson an old war-horse, her Fair Isle sweater dyed to match her heather-mixture skirt. They sat in the two handsome chairs like two queens of Nantucket. Evil queens, decided Homer, giving them their due. Representing no majesty but money, no ancient ancestral claim, no roots in the history of the island, no care or concern for its fragile grace. Here they were in the same place working for the same cause—but of course they were different women altogether. Mrs. Wilkinson could sit quietly in the arrogance of inherited and wedded wealth, gazing with insolent indifference at the motley lot in her living room, while Mrs. Magee had the quick nervous gestures of someone who had clawed her way up, who would never be at rest.

She had finished reading the list. She was introducing the man on her left. “With us this evening,” said Mrs. Magee, “is Mr. Hamilton Brine, an attorney who has tried many cases of this nature before the superior court. He will be representing Mr. Holworthy and me in the suit we have filed against the Town of Nantucket, declaring the recent act of the Town Meeting unconstitutional. But before we hear from Mr. Brine, why don't we all introduce ourselves one at a time and state the nature of our objections to the bylaw? Mrs. Wilkinson, would you begin?”

Mrs. Wilkinson stirred in her chair and leaned forward, narrowing her old eyes as she sucked on her cigarette and coughed. “Before he passed away, my husband, Donald, bought sixty acres here in the neighborhood of 'Sconset because they were about to be picked up by a cheap developer. Donald thought a lot of nasty little houses would destroy the picturesque character of the village and lower the property values. So he bought the land himself as an investment, thinking he might divide it up into a few substantial estates someday. Now of course that investment has become worthless.” Mrs. Wilkinson leaned forward and stubbed out her cigarette with grim emphasis.

Mr. Holworthy was next. He was a freckle-faced sandy-haired fellow of mild address, who had, it turned out, a true reverence for the principles upon which his country had been founded. “It just seems to me that the new bylaw isn't part of our democratic tradition here in the United States of America,” he said. “Like it says in the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal—well, we're not equal if some people can develop their property and some people can't. It's the principle of the thing that bothers me.” Homer, crouched obscurely in the corner, reminded himself that in addition to his anxiety about these noble abstractions, Mr. Holworthy might also be slightly concerned about the loss of his million dollars.

Harper J. Cresswell agreed with Mr. Holworthy. He too had lofty ideological differences of opinion with the Nantucket Protection Society. Again Homer had to supply for himself Mr. Cresswell's strong interest, both financial and sexual, in Mrs. Magee and her various enterprises. Likewise with Samuel Flake-ley, whose sense of patriotism had apparently been deeply and profoundly shocked by this betrayal of the grand designs of the founding fathers of the nation.

The next speaker was a bony little woman in thick glasses and an unbecoming dress. “My name is Doris Pomeroy,” she said. “I've only got a very small piece of land, just outside of town. I've been going out there on Sundays, planting cedars and pine trees. I've been saving up for years to build myself a little place there. And now I can't. I tell you I'm just heartbroken about it. I just hope there's something we can do.”

Homer sat up straighter on his four-legged stool. The testimony had taken on a different character.

“I am Erasmus Smith of Nantucket. I was born here, went to school here. I own half an acre next to my own house lot, that's all. But I was planning to send my kid to college on it someday.”

“Donald Hemenway, Shimmo. Likewise. I've scrimped and saved to buy that piece of land I own on the south shore. Used to go there as a boy and watch the waves roll in. Always dreamed of living there, building a house there. Had two jobs the last couple of years, trying to pay for it. My wife worked too, babysitting. So we could have a place of our own, not live with my folks anymore.
Jesus, what was that?”

They were all turning around, craning their necks over their shoulders looking at Homer, who was sprawled on the remains of his four-legged stool. His cloak of invisibility had evaporated like the emperor's new clothes.

25

… amid the tomadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm …

Moby Dick

It was springtime around Kitty's house. The sun knocked on the windows and had to be let in, with a block of wood or a window stick propping up the fragile sash. The balmy April air had begun to unfold the lilac buds beside the door, and the shad-blow along the driveway was blossoming in palest white. The deciduous trees had given up some of their gray dignity in a light-green froth, a veil of infant leaves. The weedy front yard was splashed with dandelions. Even the briers behind the privy were a bold harsh green. The privy itself began to be a problem, and after consulting Alden Dove, Kitty took care of it by dumping a twenty-five-pound bag of peat moss and ten pounds of lime down the hole.

She was learning the names of more living things. She borrowed books from Alice, from the Atheneum, from the Maria Mitchell Library; she bought some at the bookstore. She started with simple ones written for children, picture books meant to be taken to the beach to identify treasures picked up at the water's edge on hot summer days—the shells of periwinkles and moon snails, the egg cases of skates.

“Go to the Head of the Harbor,” said Alice. “The shore near the Coskata Woods is a good place to explore.” Kitty took her books with her and wandered up and down the pebbly beach, bringing home a foul smelly horseshoe crab and the shells of conchs and razor clams and scallops and the long parchment egg case of a whelk and sea clams in a bucket. She took a fancy to the commonplace scallop shells, which had a Renaissance look, as if they had come from sculptured niches under the sea for mermaid dignitaries or fishy Medici. She leaned them in a row along the back of the mantelpiece in the parlor, sorted by size and color, gray ones together, and browns and greens and translucent whites. In front of them she arranged the rest of her collection. But one shell was missing, the broken whelk she had been so romantic about. Kitty went to her denim jacket, fished in the pocket, and looked at the whelk in dismay. Nothing was left of it but broken fragments, and the twisted column running down the middle.

If I
were superstitious
, thought Kitty,
I
wouldn't like that.
She wasn't superstitious, exactly, but she was ceaselessly metaphoric, and she was unable to prevent herself from seeing the twisting bony fragment of shell in her hand as a cyclone, a tornado, a funneled storm. She thought of the spiral turnings of the staircase in the lighthouse. She thought of the narrow chamber at the center of convoluted things. If you went around and around often enough, and worked your way closer and closer in, you might find it, the narrow dark chamber, and then you might curl up like an unborn child and go to sleep. Even hurricanes, after all, had quiet places in the middle of them. Her own storm was coming in September.
Oh, shut up, shut up.
Kitty slapped the remnant of the shell on the mantelpiece, hoping it would crack in two. It didn't.

Then Alice gave her Rachel Carson's
Edge of the Sea
, and Kitty spent the next week with it, spellbound by the brutal complex life of the seashore, endless in its variety. She sat at her kitchen table with Alice Dove, reading the book aloud.