Dark Nantucket Noon (35 page)

“You?” said Homer. “What do you mean, you?”

“They want me to be the caretaker. Joe's going to set up a fund to pay the caretaker's salary and finance any little researches he might like to make, and the caretaker is supposed to live there in Helen's house and be a host to people who might want to do studies on populations of grasses or quail or anything like that. Joe and Kitty want it to be a real Nantucket-run kind of place, they said, and that's why they asked me, instead of somebody from the mainland with a long string of degrees, which is the kind of person they really ought to have. But you'll notice I didn't say no.”

“Oh, Bob,” said Mary, “that's wonderful.”

“Well, say, Bob,” said Homer, “that relieves my mind. I didn't know what the hell you were going to do with yourself. That's just great.”

They walked back to the cars. Mary crouched down and tried to fit herself into the front seat again between mounds of clothing and a box full of tennis shoes, half a loaf of bread, a jar of honey and a quart of milk. She looked soberly at the name
DOVE
on the mailbox beside the car, and leaned out the window. “What's going to happen to Alice now?” she said.

“Oh, don't worry about Alice,” said Homer. “I don't think the district attorney is going to bother his head with Alice Dove. Right, Bob?”

“That's what I've heard,” said Bob. “I hope it's true, because she'd be a big help with this new conservancy district. She knows more about the flora and fauna of Nantucket than anybody else on the island. She's still got her job at the Pacific National Bank, I know that. Dick Roper told me he didn't see any reason for firing her. Of course he knows now that she stole those papers from that safe deposit box of Helen's, right there in his own bank, but he's still so horrified by what Helen did that Alice's misbehavior doesn't hold a candle to it.” Bob laughed. “I forgot to tell you about the last meeting of the Helen Green Society. They were really in a sweat. The first thing they did was change their name back to the Nantucket Protection Society so fast the gavel in Mr. Tillinghast's hand fairly smoked.”

It was time to go. At Steamboat Wharf the boat was already swarming with passengers. Bob and Mary and Homer lugged Emmeline Pankhurst to the top deck; and then Mary sat down on the boxes while Homer drove the car on board. He rejoined his wife just as the boat whistle shrieked and the big crowded vessel began to slip away from its mooring. Together they stood at the railing waving at the diminishing figure of Bob Fern and looking up at the gray town rising beyond the wharf, rooftop above rooftop. The morning sun shone on the gold-domed cupola of the Old South tower and on the pointed steeple of the Congregational Church and cast an immense long shadow of the boat over the rows of houses behind the Brant Point light. One of the children at the railing shouted, “Look,” and they turned to see cormorants perched on the end of the jetty, where pale green lights blinked on and off, and on and off, growing paler as the sun rose higher in the sky.

“Why, Mr. Kelly,” said someone at Homer's elbow, “I don't believe you've introduced me to your wife.”

It was Mrs. Magee.

Homer pinched his wife's arm and jerked her forward, eager to make amends for the terrible things he had thought about Wilhelmina Magee in the recent past. “Mrs. Magee, my wife! Mary, dear, Mrs. Magee!”

“Why, Mrs. Magee, I'm so pleased to meet you,” said Mary, who was indeed delighted to get a good look at the notorious lady realtor.

“I think you know Arthur Bird,” said Mrs. Magee, turning around to tuck her arm in the arm of someone who had been standing behind her, drawing him forward.

“Of course I know Arthur Bird,” said Homer, glowering at him. “Destiny's right-hand man.”

Arthur blushed, and beamed at Mrs. Magee. Mrs. Magee beamed at Arthur. “Arthur and I have a little announcement to make,” she said.

“Surely, Mrs. Magee,” said Homer, flabbergasted, “you don't mean …?”

“A partnership.” Mrs. Magee giggled. “Arthur and I are going forth together on a thrilling new adventure.”

Christ, what a ghastly union! “You mean, you're going to … you two are going to …?”

“No, no, we
three.”
Mrs. Magee was beckoning to someone else, a tall stooped figure swathed in mufflers and sweaters and earmuffs and overcoats, an old man clinging to the railing looking out to sea. “Obed!” shrieked Mrs. Magee. “Obed Biddle! Oh, Mr. Biddle! Come here, Obed, I need you!”

Mary choked. Homer's mind reeled. Surely this was not the Obed Biddle who was Kitty's landlord. It couldn't possibly be the Obed Biddle who had stood up in Quaker Meeting and recited all those verses from Exodus. Surely it was utterly inconceivable that this was the Mr. Biddle who had stood like Moses upon the shore of the Red Sea and stretched out his hand over the enraptured congregation. But inconceivable or not, that was who it was. Mr. Biddle gaped toothlessly at Mrs. Magee, and at last he responded to her shouted introductions with a croaking gasp. “G'mawning.” Then Mrs. Magee pulled him close to her and nestled one arm into his elbow and the other arm into Arthur Bird's and cuddled them to her in a cozy little threesome, a bizarre trinity, a three-headed monstrous disparate amalgamation, and explained her new adventure. “Arthur is putting his money into it and Obed is putting his land at Quidnet into it and I'm putting my know-how into it, and here we are all together on our way to Boston right this very minute to sign the franchise for the first Howard Johnson's Restaurant and Motel complex on Nantucket Island.”

There was a stupefied silence. “You mean,
orange rooves?”
spluttered Homer. “On
Nantucket?.
But what about the bylaw? The new zoning bylaw?”

“Oh, of course not orange rooves. Nothing vulgar like orange rooves. And as for the bylaw, we fully expect it to be overturned any day now, don't we, boys? I mean, the case on behalf of the bylaw was hardly advanced by the actions of its late supporter, Mrs. Green, was it, Mr. Kelly? But actually of course it doesn't matter anyway,” said Mrs. Magee, patting Mr. Biddle's bony hand, “because Obed and I thought ahead, didn't we, Obed? We registered a plan for his property before the bylaw went into effect, didn't we, Obed? I said,
didn't we, Obed?”

Mr. Biddle grinned vacantly and wobbled his head up and down.

Homer's jaw went slack. He couldn't think of anything to say. Mary politely gabbled something that sounded like “How nice!” and nodded her head up and down too, and the trio melted away to the railing once again and stood in a tightly knit triumvirate with elbows interlocked.

Homer wanted to go lie down. He leaned against his wife and quoted Melville. “ ‘Doesn't the devil live forever? Who ever heard that the devil was dead?' My God, it's all going to hell. All this time somebody should have been bolstering up Mr. Biddle, encouraging him, befriending him. But nobody thought—I mean, everybody thought she would at least wait until he was dead before she started gobbling up his property. Everybody thought she was just some kind of a vulture, but now it turns out she goes after living prey. Oh, why wasn't somebody more vigilant? Eternal vigilance, that's what it takes. Eternal vigilance is the price of an island.”

Mary tried to comfort him. “Well, don't forget, Homer, at least you helped to save all that land of Helen Green's. Nothing can happen to that part of the island now, forever and ever.”

“But damn it all, this is terrible. Poor old Mr. Biddle.” Homer glanced at the old man again in anguished sympathy, and this time he was surprised to see that Mr. Biddle was beginning to look like Moses once again. His drooping sleeve was lifted up, he was stretching his arm out over the sea. Homer looked where his arm was pointing, half expecting to see the waters divided and the children of Israel walking across Nantucket Sound. What was he saying? He was croaking aloud, crying something in a hoarse fluting nasal shout. There was something in the water. He was shouting about something in the water. People were running over from the other side of the boat, crowding along the railing. “What did he say?” whimpered Homer. “I didn't hear what he said. What was that he said?”

“I think he said ‘Finbacks,'” said Mary. She pointed too. Everyone was pointing. “It's a kind of whale, I think. Look, see them spouting!”

There was a whole school of them, small whales, finbacks, rolling over and over in the water. They were racing toward the boat, to the delight of all the passengers, who were clustered around Mr. Biddle like the descendants of Jacob around Moses in the Promised Land. Now the black backs of the whales were rising and falling under the outstretched patriarchal arm of Mr. Biddle. They were rolling in the water like chariot wheels, a manifest sign of God's whole and wondrous original creation.

On the morning of the day when Joe and Kitty were to leave Nantucket Island for good, Kitty finished her poem about the watery substances and humors of the body. She had started struggling with it on the day they met, so now that it was finished she gave it to Joe. The new part of the poem was about the salt tides of the blood, the breath steaming from the mouth, the words bursting from the lips in warm droplets on the air, and it was about the ocean depths of which they were proprietors.

I behold you
from this shore that I inhabit
as another sea,
an ocean walking,
an undiscovered main
within whose chartless depths
move mammoth whales
and glistening silver schools of little fish,
while on the mile-deep sandy floor
crawl eyeless nameless undiscovered creatures.
A great shell settles,
abandoned by its occupant.
A sunken vessel rises and subsides.
Wide tablelands and unascended mountains
lie beneath the broad slow swells
that roll from your horizon—
but dolphins break your surface!
You smile.
The sun dazzles into ripples.

As servants of God, what land or estate we hold, we hold under him as his gift.… This gift is not absolute, but conditional, for us to occupy as dutiful children and not otherwise, for he alone is the true proprietor. “The world,” saith he, “is mine, and the fulness thereof.…”

JOHN WOOLMAN
, Quaker, 1770

Afterword

I wrote this book after witnessing the solar eclipse of March 7, 1970, from Nantucket Island, but neither the fictional eclipse nor the island in the book is in exact accord with its real counterpart. Weather conditions and tide levels and times have been changed. Houses have been picked up from one end of the island and set down at another. Patterns of land ownership are imaginary. Helen Green's zoning bylaw never existed, nor does her Boatwright Land Trust resemble any real land trust. There is no realtor like Wilhelmina Magee, and her Melville Estates and her marina at Monomoy are pure invention. So far as I know, Howard Johnson's does not plan to build a restaurant on Nantucket. There are no Ropers or Boatwrights among the old families of the island. Boozer Brown and his gas station are fictional. None of the articles attributed to the
Inquirer and Mirror
ever appeared in that paper.

I am especially eager to disentangle my often-befuddled Nantucket Protection Society from that worthier organization the Nantucket Conservation Foundation, which has been laboring so hard and so effectively under the leadership of its executive secretary, James Lentowski, to save the island from overuse and overdevelopment. Through the generosity of many people, this body has been able to accumulate land for conservation, until it is now the largest single landowner on Nantucket. In spite of its efforts, however, the great bulk of the island is still owned by private individuals and zoned for residential or limited commercial development. Thus, from the point of view of those who think Nantucket already overdeveloped, the larger part is still endangered—moor, field, wood, pond, salt marsh, dune and beach. The Nantucket Sound Islands Trust Bill, sponsored by Senators Kennedy and Brooke and Congressman Studds, may someday diminish the danger.

Several Nantucket people have helped with the writing of this book in ways large and small. Most of all I am thankful for the help and hospitality and friendship of Julie Perkins, which began with that first bowl of solar-eclipse split-pea soup. Especially valuable was the advice of naturalist Clinton Andrews of the University of Massachusetts Research Center at Quaise and his wife, ornithologist Edith Andrews, but I am anxious to say that they are not responsible for any blundering application of the information they gave me. I am also eager to thank Dr. Wesley Tiffney, Director of the University of Massachusetts Research Center; Chief Officer Wayne Tolbert of the U.S. Coast Guard and his crew, who took us to Great Point in the amphibious
Lark;
Chris Colberg and Gary Terrell, who demonstrated scalloping in Nantucket Harbor; Patrolmen Lionel Starr and Robert Kurcz of the Nantucket Police Department; Nantucket Fire Chief John Gas-pie, Jr.; Louise R. Hussey, Librarian, Nantucket Historical Association; James Bartsch of “The Sunken Ship”; Henry Kehlenbeck of the Pacific National Bank; attorney Robert Mooney; and Wesley Fordyce, Clerk of the Superior Court.