Spartina (47 page)

The men on either side of Dick pulled away from him.

There was the scene Elsie shot of the boys and May at the boatyard. Schuyler—but maybe it was Elsie—had put in music. Dick was glad Elsie hadn’t recorded what they’d all said to each other. But the music was bad. It did just the wrong thing. It was happy-end-of-the-movie music. It stank, and Dick saw how some of the stink was going to stick to him.

Some of the guys still weren’t working. It didn’t surprise him when one of them said, “And here he is with us today. Luke Skywalker.”

At last someone else said, “Hell, there were a couple of lucky ones. Texeira’s boats were out. You got to choose lucky or good, choose lucky.”

“Hey, Dick. They pay you? For being in their movie?”

Dick said, “No. Nobody paid me.”

“I heard they loaned you money. The money for your boat.”

He left the bar. Stood by his pickup. Didn’t feel like driving home. Sooner or later May would hear about the movie. She’d smell a stink too. Different, but just as bad. For a moment he thought, What the hell have you done to me, Elsie? You thought
Spartina
was a work of art, put her in a movie, put me in a movie, made a fool of me.

“Wrong.” He said it out loud. He put his hand on the door handle. Might as well blame his truck. What kind of a sorry son of a bitch was he? He had his boat. That’s what he’d wished for.

The weather was colder. The stars were steady, the moon clear.

And what had Elsie got? She’d got a wish too, more of a bend in her life than she’d thought of.

T
he weather did clear. It was a little breezy, but Dick called up Tran and Tony.

They got
Spartina
out to the near edge of the banks, where they still had a few sets of pots. They’d moved most of the others in close enough to get out and back pretty quick, not as far out as this. When they were hauling one of the trawls, the line snapped. Dick heard the crack and the whistle. When he came out of the wheelhouse he saw the line had whipped forward over the wheelhouse and sheared off the VHF antenna and cracked the radar casing. Neither Tran nor Tony was hurt. They’d hit the deck when they’d heard the line hum just before it broke.

The damage was easy enough to fix, but he couldn’t tinker with anything delicate while
Spartina
was bouncing around in the chop. He took her into Woods Hole. As they came in at the end of the afternoon, he saw someone waving from the beach just north of the harbor mouth. The waving kept up. He put the glasses on it and saw the figure dragging a foot in the slope of hard sand. It made a big E.

After they docked, Dick let Tran and Tony go ashore for a meal. Elsie showed up, bundled up in foul-weather gear.

She’d come down from her mother’s to stay at a friend’s house … give her mother a break, they were getting along fine but … And she craved some sea air, so …

She was grinning down at him from the dockside while she said all this. He climbed up. Elsie held on to both his hands. She said, “I’m glad to see you! Come on, I’ll buy you a meal.”

Dick said sure, but he had to wait for either Tran or Tony to get back. He didn’t want some wharf rat pinching something off
Spartina.

He helped Elsie down on deck, she weighed a ton. He took her to the wheelhouse, which was warm.

Elsie said, “Turn around a second.”

She shed her foul-weather gear. When he turned back to face her, she stood sideways, pulling her wool jumper tight to show off the jut of her basketball stomach.

Dick was taken aback. He hadn’t thought of getting to see this part.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Elsie said. “The only part I don’t like is that I can’t go out much in case I run into someone I know. Even people I don’t know but who know me—it turns out my mother’s house is right down the street from Phoebe Fitzgerald’s ex-husband. I sneak out at night in a big overcoat and go to the movies, but that’s it.” Elsie climbed back into her foul-weather gear. “Anyway, I recognized
Spartina
from the beach.
You’re
someone I can run into.… Look, let’s go eat. Leave a note for your crew. We can ask the harbormaster to keep an eye on
Spartina
till they get back.”

Dick didn’t like to ask favors, but he didn’t want to say no to Elsie. He felt a terrible weight suddenly, not of trouble or sorrow, but of Elsie’s good cheer.

At the restaurant he started to tell Elsie about telling May, but she cut him off. “Later,” she said. “Let’s just eat. This is my first social life since Thanksgiving.”

She drove him to the cottage where she was staying. It was dark. “It’s a friend’s summer house,” she said. “She’s in Boston.”

She asked him to start a fire in the fireplace while she made
coffee. She brought a bottle of Irish whiskey out with the coffee. “I’m not drinking, but you go ahead.”

She was in a wonderful mood. She’d eaten a huge meal, right down to pie à la mode and a glass of milk. She talked about how cozy Woods Hole was in winter. “I like walking around the harbor at night; it’s like a little cup of tea with the mist coming up like steam. My sister’s coming up here tomorrow, just for the day.” She took his hand again. “And Mary Scanlon’s come to see me a couple of times. She’s going to come for the birth. In fact everybody’s going to be there then. My mother, my sister, and Mary.” Elsie laughed. “You want to come?”

Dick said, “Look. I got to say something. We haven’t really talked about this. I got to know about doctor’s bills and the like. I’d like to put some money aside for that. And for other things.”

“Dick, we did talk about that. I told you about that already. I’m doing fine. I mean, right this minute I’m getting paid a salary.”

Dick said, “I’ve got to do it. It’s not just because it’s May’s idea. I thought about it and she’s right. I see she’s right.”

“Ah.” Elsie folded her hands in her lap. After a minute she said, “Was it terrible telling her? Are things okay? That’s a dumb question. I guess I hope she blamed it on me. Did she? You know, call me a tramp and a slut? It’s funny, I’ve been feeling very close to her. I mean, this baby is related to her babies.”

“No,” Dick said. “She didn’t blame it all on you. She didn’t even get that mad. Not that way. It’s hard to explain. I’ve got to say I admire the way she feels about it—so far as I understand the way she feels.” Dick was suddenly glad to be seeing Elsie, to feel the relief of talking to someone who was in the same trouble.

“It’ll be a while before things settle down,” he said. “If I had to guess, I’d say things’ll be okay eventually. Not the same, but okay, if I make amends.”

“You buy her a dishwasher yet?”

Dick looked at Elsie.

“Oh, come on,” Elsie said. “No. I guess I shouldn’t tease you. I’m sorry, I can’t help it—part of this
is
funny. Me transporting myself across state lines. Elsie, the unindicted co-conspirator disguised in a man’s overcoat. I feel like an anarchist carrying a bomb.” She put her hands on her belly, said, “Boom!” and lifted her fingers.

“There is this side to it,” she said. “I’m not killing anybody with my crime. I mean, it’s not bad
that
way. I get to have my deep outlaw wish, and it’s a baby.”

Elsie sank down after that little spate of bright talk. She said, “So May didn’t blame me, she didn’t call me a cheap slut?”

“I said she didn’t blame it all on you. She might not even think you were bad to her personally. You just ignored her. If she was going to call you anything, I guess it’d be
spoiled.
But I’m not sure I get everything May’s thinking. I’ve never had to forgive anybody. At least not anybody in my family. For anything so definite …” Dick thought of how he finally forgave his father so many years after his father’s death. But it wasn’t for any one thing the old man had
done.
He shook his head and said, “I’m no one to go by about that.”

Elsie said, “Don’t go gloomy on me.” She started to get up, said, “Don’t just sit there, give me a hand.” He pulled her up. She shook the skirt of her jumper loose from where it clung to her tights. “I used to laugh at Sally when she was pregnant, struggling up out of chairs. Thank God, I won’t be pregnant in summer—I even feel too hot now.” She took her boots off by stepping on the heels. She held out a foot for him to pull her wool sock off, then the other foot. She went around to the back of the sofa and took her tights off, leaning on it with both hands as she trampled them off her ankles and feet.

“I’m not spoiled,” she said. “If anybody was spoiled, Sally was spoiled. When Sally was pregnant, Jack hovered around her like a
hummingbird. And he kept telling her how beautiful she was. I used to laugh at him. I don’t now. Everyone should get to be a little spoiled when she’s pregnant.”

Dick said, “I was just guessing when I said May might have thought you were spoiled. And anyway that was about the way you were last summer. I told you May wants me to put up my share of what it’ll cost.”

“What exactly does she mean by that?” Elsie said. “I think I see, but I’m not sure.”

“She doesn’t want me owing anything,” Dick said. “I understand that part. That’s one way of making things come out quits.”

Elsie said, “Well, as a practical matter, I’m on Blue Cross. And as for the kid’s clothes, Sally’s got trunks full of hand-me-downs.
Trunks.
Girl’s and boy’s, so we’re covered both ways. But if May wants you to do something—”

Dick said, “
I
want to do something.”

“Okay. I won’t argue about it. But I don’t want to feel I’m making things hard for Charlie and Tom. I mean, there’s still Charlie and Tom, even with Miss Perry’s books. God, it does get complicated. We’ll all be taking care of someone else’s kid before we’re through.”

“Miss Perry’s books?” Dick said.

“Oh,” Elsie said. “Oh dear. I thought … Of course it was a surprise to me too. Oh shit, you’re going to get mad at me again.”

Dick said, “What’re you talking about?”

“When I was talking to Miss Perry about the loan for your boat, I asked her about selling some of Charlie’s and Tom’s books. Not the readers’ copies they’ve got but the good ones in Miss Perry’s library. She said no, they were for Charlie’s and Tom’s college. I didn’t ask what she thought they were worth, but it sounded a little grandiose. I mean,
college.
I thought she might be a little addled. But I looked the books over one day—she’s got them all together in her library—and I made a list. I could tell that some of
them are first editions, but some I wasn’t sure of, so I took down the date and city, all that stuff. When I was in Providence one day, I went to a rare-book dealer and showed him the list. He said a lot depends on the condition of the book. They looked pretty good to me, and I told him that, and he gave me a rough estimate.… Look, I know I stuck my nose in again.…”

“What’d he say?”

“Tom’s are worth more than Charlie’s, though Charlie has one that—”

“What’s it all come to? All totaled … more than a thousand?”

“Twenty thousand.”

Dick laughed. “You must’ve got something wrong.”

Elsie said, “Nope. You know what amazed me?
The Wizard of Oz.
A nice edition is worth more than five thousand dollars. That’s what put Tom’s books up so high. That was on Tom’s Christmas shelf. Louisa May Alcott, Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier … I can’t remember them all. I’ve got them written down, but the list is back at my house. There’s one the dealer couldn’t price exactly—
The American Practical Navigator
by Nathaniel Bowditch. That one stuck in my mind. It’s a little beat up, but it belonged to Oliver Hazard Perry, it’s got his name on the fly leaf. If it’s his signature—and I’d guess it must be—it may put Charlie’s share up to Tom’s. Of course, Commodore Perry may have owned several. It’s sort of a manual, right? It came out in the early 1800’s, but it kept getting updated, so he may have kept getting new ones. The Navy probably issued them.… You could sell it back to the Navy!”

Elsie was cheery by now.

Dick felt a weight pressing at an odd angle. He said, “I didn’t know she was up to anything like that. I surely didn’t know.”

Elsie came round the sofa and knelt in front of him so she could see his face. “I was afraid you’d take it this way,” she said. “But it’s good news.”

Dick shook his head. “It’s too much money.”

Elsie said, “It’s a lot of money, but it’s not
that
much.”

Dick snorted. Elsie sat back on her heels. She said, “What I mean is that it won’t pay for four years of college, not with room and board. Even if they just go to URI.”

“Just,”
Dick said. “Everyone can’t go to Brown and Yale.”

Elsie moved a few steps on her knees and hoisted herself up, her hands on the arms of a chair. She said, “Don’t take it out on me. And don’t start that class-rage shit.”

Dick didn’t say anything.

Elsie said, “You know, it’s just as spoiled to be as touchy as you are about everything as it is to think you can get away with anything you feel like.”

“No,” Dick said. “You can’t say I’m just being touchy. There’s something strange about not knowing how much your own kids have. There’s something strange about all that money growing in the dark.”