Dark Nantucket Noon (33 page)

40

“Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee.…”

Moby Dick

Letter from Joseph Green to Katharine Clark, written June 24, delivered September 3:

Kitty, you have just been at my door and I have turned you away. Oh, Kitty, there were a couple of boats out in the harbor. They were full of people with telescopes and field glasses. They were following your every move. They could do you more harm than the terns. The terns won't hurt you, Kitty. Oh, Kitty, Kitty, the only way I can love you is to hate you. I recite that lesson over and over to myself, so that I won't by force of desire snatch at you in the street or fall on my knees in front of you in a public place. I have trained myself to turn away from water when I am thirsty and from food when I am hungry so that I may get used to a world turned upside down. Every bone in my body wants to hurl itself into your defense, to throw itself in the way of the machine that is grinding and tearing at you, and yet the only way I can help you is to remove myself, to stay far away, to keep up the pretense that I want vengeance for the death of my wife. Otherwise—and this is what I must beat and beat and beat into my head—if I were to approach you, if I were to show any trace of tenderness toward you, it would only give credence to their conclusion that you had a reason for coming to that place to kill Helen. Therefore I am compelled to show myself the coward, over and over and over again, and draw back as if to protect myself from some vile association, as if to show that I had no part in any kind of plot between you and me. All I can do, and it is little enough, is to put someone else in my place to help you, and to try to depend on him. But sometimes he infuriates me, Kitty, he is so slow, so clumsy! But I suppose I don't know what else I would do if I were in his shoes.

Kitty, Kitty, when I saw you standing over Helen's body I understood in that instant in one shock of revelation as if a thunderbolt had halted every life process and charged it with one purpose and drenched it with one thought that from then on I would have to strangle every natural impulse to go to you, to hold you, to comfort you; that to truly love you I must make you hate me.

Oh, Kitty, the worst thing is to see your sober face.

Kitty looked up. “I never hated you. If I looked sober I was just struggling to keep my dignity. Loving you was just a big gloomy fact. It was a kind of stupid lodger I couldn't get rid of.”

They were walking along the shore of the harbor at Quaise. Joe gripped Kitty's hand painfully. He took another letter from a thick packet of them in his pocket and gave it to her. It was dated July 1.

Kitty, today when I saw you going into the Whaling Museum in that ridiculous long coat I ached for you so badly I followed you in, and I think I would have made a fool of myself in front of all those people and ruined everything if you had not run away. I no longer trust myself.

Perhaps it is idiotic to try to tell you about Helen. Probably you don't give a damn what happened between me and Helen. But I have to tell you just the same that it didn't take me long to come to my senses and see her in comparison with the true soul I had lost, to discover that the stupefying golden vision that had come floating to me across the moors was nothing more than that, only a vision. Being a golden vision was Helen's stock in trade, it was her profession. Oh, of course it is true that the island and her ancestral heritage were important to her, but only as a background for what had become more and more a public performance. At home when I refused to be an audience of one I discovered that there was nothing left of her but petulance. It was a wretched awakening. I told her we should never have been married, that I had made a mistake. But she kept saying that I was being ridiculous, that I should wait, that she knew I'd change my mind. We were blundering along somehow, going from bad to worse. And all the time I wanted to turn time backward, to go back to you. But I knew you were not someone to whom I could go with glib apologies and sad stories. So I wrote a book for you instead. It was your book, not Helen's. It was a kind of long crazy letter addressed to you.

“I never read your book,” murmured Kitty, looking up.

“Well, why should you? I should have guessed. I suppose I assumed out of vanity you would read anything I wrote.”

“I thought it was what everyone said—I thought it was about Helen. I was afraid it would make me unhappy.”

“Read on,” said Joe grimly.

And then when Bird gave me your poem “Joseph's Coat” I was beside myself.…

“Bird?” said Kitty, looking up in horror. “He didn't! When? When did he give it to you?”

“The day before the eclipse, in all that rain and wind. He popped out of a bush beside the door with his big black umbrella, and slipped me an envelope and said, ‘I think you might be interested in this,' or something of the sort. I almost threw it back in his face, but then I didn't. I could forgive him almost anything because he was a student of yours, and sometimes he told me things about you, and then I would try to jump over his perversions of them and see you clear.”

Kitty was mystified. “But where did he get it? If he had it the day before the eclipse, before I came to the island at all, then it wasn't the one the police found afterwards in my apartment. And there weren't any other copies of it. Unless—aha. Now I know. He took it out of my wastebasket. I had my students in for dinner.
That's
where he got it. I threw the first attempts away. They were even worse than the one the police found on my desk.”

“Worse? Oh, Kitty, you don't know what it meant to me. I thought it was your answer to the book I had written to you, don't you see? I was a fool.”

In one way your poem made me miserable because I could see so horribly clearly what I had done to you, but at the same time it overwhelmed me with joy to know that in spite of that you still seemed to love me. That night I couldn't sleep, I was so glad because of it. I walked around with it all night. And then at the lighthouse I was still so full of the thought of you that when I saw you running across the sand I felt I had evoked you. I didn't know what was going to happen, but I didn't care. And then afterwards, after we found you with Helen's body and I knew that to go near you was to condemn you, I remembered “Joseph's Coat.” Kitty, I had lost it! The night before, walking on the beach, I had lost it! And I knew that if they found it you would be in even more danger than before. And now, oh, Kitty, I know they have it, because they've asked me what I think you meant. What have I done to you? From the very beginning I've blundered cruelly in and out of your life.

“You
have blundered into
my
life? Oh, Joe.” Kitty threw her head back and laughed. “And you were wrong about that awful ballad. They had it already. They had taken it from my desk.”

Joe turned to her and kissed the scratches on her sunburned cheek. “Do you know what I missed most? It was the way you laugh. I kept remembering the time my sink backed up, and you fixed it, and you kept making jokes about it, remember? ‘Forward, turn forward, O slime in thy flight! Let Joe have a drain again, just for tonight!' I thought of you with that rubber plunger in your hand more than anything else.”

“Now there's a compliment for a sensitive and beautiful woman.”

“Oh, Kitty.” Joe kissed her with a thirst he seemed unable to slake, and Kitty closed her eyes. When she opened them again she saw Jupiter. There was no mistaking him. He was beating his way strongly against the longshore wind, his body tipped slightly to balance his left wing. Now he was changing the direction of his flight, banking so that the sunlight lay in downy patterns on his breast, heading inland, steadying his wings in a long descent until he was an arc of purest white against the dark jack pines.

Kitty and Joe pursued him. “He's coming down in the pond beyond the house,” said Kitty.

Sure enough. When they skirted the shore and peered through the cattails and marsh grass and pickerelweed, they could see him skimming on the glassy surface of the pond, rising to flap his wings heavily and descend again near the opposite shore. And then they saw the reason why he was there. A woman in a man's old jacket and a pair of rubber boots was wading out into the shallows, holding out her hand to him. It was Alice Dove.

41

… Thou hast been a Man … that the Lord has been near, and favoured with many Openings, and if thou hadst been faithful to the Gift of God thou mightest have been serviceable, but thou has been unfaithful, and a Cloud has come over thee, and thou art laid aside as useless.

JOHN RICHARDSON,
Quaker evangelist in Nantucket, 1701

A couple of days later Kitty went to Vestal Street and Homer read aloud to her the deposition Alice had written for Police Chief Pike.

I
swear that what I have written in my own hand is the truth.
Alice M. Dove.

Mr. Pike, tells me Homer guessed, about Alden and the
Andrea Doria.
It's true, Alden was one of the divers on that salvaging expedition that ended so badly. He had been a frogman in the Navy, and he was an expert spear fisherman too, there at Pearl Harbor where he was stationed. So afterwards he joined that expedition that was going after the money and jewels in the
Andrea Doria.
But the diving was too dangerous and they couldn't see anything, and they had to keep fighting off sharks. And then the accident happened. It was Alden's fault: On the very last dive he thought he had blasted his way into the ship's vault at last. He had a locked box in his hand, and he was convinced it had all the money in it, all the passengers' money, all the millions of dollars they had put in the safe. And then the other diver yanked at him, and jerked Alden's arm. All he meant was, that it was time to go back to the surface, but he made Alden drop the box, and it sank down and disappeared. Alden was so enraged he grabbed the other man and tore out his breathing apparatus, and the poor man drowned.

After that Alden never dived again. He only spent a year in prison because his crime was judged to be manslaughter, not murder. When he got out he changed his name (it wasn't Alden Dove before), and he came to Nantucket to live. For a while he worked on somebody else's scalloping boat, until he could make a down payment on his own, and then he met me in the bank when he was arranging the loan. Somehow we hit it off right away, and decided to get married, and then we bought our place at Polpis. It's meant everything to the two of us, that place of ours, heart and soul.

I've always felt lucky to be married to Alden, timid spinster that I was, and we've been pretty happy together on the whole. Before we were married he said he had to get something off his chest, and he told me about the
Andrea Doria
expedition and what happened then. He had always had a violent temper, he said, and it was a curse, and he was trying to get over it. After we were married I felt sorry at first that we didn't seem able to have any children, but when I saw what Alden was like on his bad days I decided it was just as well. He was afraid of his temper himself, and whenever he had one of these attacks he was always miserable about it afterwards. He only laid a hand on me once, when I crossed him about something, but I gave back as good as I got, and I swear he never touched me after that. But he took out his feelings on things, time and time again. You'd think one kick at something would be enough, but that just seemed to feed his anger. He wouldn't be content until he'd broken it. He was good as gold in between, and we both thought he was getting over it, he was doing so well. But then this matter of Helen Green's land came along.

As soon as she announced that plan of hers, to set up a conservation trust all around us, Alden began to worry. He wanted to be sure it was going to be just what she said it was. Well, the more he looked into it, the more suspicious he got, and he went to Boston to look at the deed, and then he called up that Swiss bank and found out that Helen was doing something wrong, but he wasn't sure what. So he told me to look in Helen's safe deposit box and see if I could learn anything. Of course that was pretty tricky. I had to steal her keys when we were at a meeting together and copy them—it was something like making casts of birdtracks—and I copied all of them. And then one day I snatched a chance to look in her box, although I almost got caught at it. What I learned was pretty bad, the arrangement she was making with Harmony Hotels.

Well, I went home and told Alden. I was crying, I was so mad. His face turned white, and he didn't say a word. He just went out and walked all over Helen's land for hours. When he came back he had made up his mind. And it was soon after that that her accidents began. Alden didn't tell me, but when that railing collapsed under Helen I remembered that he had gone off the night before with the wrecking bar in his hand, and I guessed he had pried the nails loose from the porch. I was horrified. But the very next day I saw what Helen did to Jupiter, and I made up my mind I wouldn't try to get in Alden's way, because she was doing such terrible things. Oh, of course when she ran over Jupiter's mate it was an accident, I could see that. She was driving too fast. But then she got out of the car and picked up an oar from a dory that was lying there beside the marsh, and then she started hitting the bird with it, because the poor thing wasn't dead yet. And then when Jupiter rushed at her she hit him with it too. She broke the oar, she hit him so hard. Joe knows. He came running down the hill from the house. But by that time Helen had the shotgun out of the car and she was spraying buckshot at Jupiter with it. She would have killed him if Joe and I hadn't stopped her. Joe gave the gun to Alden later on, because Helen was using it on the dogs that came around the house.

So Alden kept trying one thing after another. But nothing seemed to work. The time that was left before the paper was to be signed was getting short, and Helen was still alive. And then Alden found out to his dismay that he had only one chance left, because Joe told him Helen had gone to Martha's Vineyard, and she was coming back only just in time to see the eclipse at Great Point. So Alden knew he would have to kill her on that very day. And of course the first thing he thought of was those two minutes of darkness. So he worked it all out in his mind, how to go about it. And afterwards he told me what he had done. The first thing was to help himself to Spike Grap's scuba-diving equipment and spear gun when he was at Spike's house delivering eggs. Then he transferred the barrel of Helen's shotgun to the spear gun, and practiced with it over at Mr. Biddle's place, because the house was empty, and nobody was there. Then he fixed up some things to make his boat look different. He cut some big boards to the right measure and painted them with fast-drying paint—it was that barn red we used on the chicken shed—and then he made some false cardboard numbers to paste over the Coast Guard numbers on the bow. And then he saved up scallops. That was really clever of Alden. For several days he hid half his catch under water at a sheltered place in Haulover Pond, so the scallops just kept on accumulating.