Lucy: Daughters of the Sea #3 (4 page)

When Stephen had told her of the opportunity to adopt Lucy, Marjorie had one stipulation — no one must know that she was adopted. Not even Priscilla. She did not want any “entailments” interfering with her daughter’s chance for a brilliant marriage. And now there was this chance, the wonderful opportunity to be on an island with some of America’s richest families. It wouldn’t be like New York. The parish of St. Luke’s was respectable enough, but its standing was somewhat diluted because of its location so far downtown. Nevertheless, it was a springboard to the office of the bishop, just as Bar Harbor would serve as a springboard for Lucy’s marital prospects. And then there would be no more teetering on the terrifying edges. They would be in the thick of it, or “the thick,” as Marjorie Snow sometimes thought of it.

U
NTIL
B
RIDGEPORT
,
the glimpses of water had been brief, but now the views became more expansive, especially as they entered Rhode Island. Lucy kept her face pressed to the window. A sensation had begun to build in her. This was no mere train ride. When she looked out the window, it was not simply a coastline that unspooled before her but an edge, and she was being drawn close to that edge. It dared her in a sense — or was it beckoning her?

Lucy sat across from her mother and father in a private compartment on the New York–New Haven–Hartford railroad. The click of her mother’s knitting needles occasionally surfaced amidst the cacophony of the train’s wheezes, groans, and clanking wheels. Her father was browsing through old sermons, or so she supposed, until she heard him say, “Marjorie, the Althorps apparently have a cottage on Bar Harbor.”

“Really, dear? The downtown Althorps or the uptown ones?”

“The downtown ones. Edward and Felicity of our congregation.”

“Well, I never thought they had the means.”

“Nor did I, but here they are listed as members of the tennis club.”

“Oh, Lucy, I do hope you’ll take some tennis lessons.” Marjorie dropped her knitting in her lap. “Lucy, did you hear me?”

“Huh?” Her eyes were fastened on the expanse of gray-green water of a deep bay.

“Oh, Lucy, don’t say ‘huh.’ That is so coarse.”

“Sorry, Mother. What were you saying?”

“I said I hope you will take tennis lessons.”

“Oh, Mother, I don’t think I’d be very good. You know, my foot and all.” Lucy tried to imagine herself chasing a ball on a tennis court, stumbling about in much the same manner she did in conversations at parties with people like the Ogmonts and the Drexels. She could imagine Denise De Becque, Elsie Ogmont, and Lenora Drexel in their tennis whites snickering at her, and felt a twinge in her stomach.

“Nonsense!” her father boomed. Stephen Snow was speaking in a voice he seldom used in the pulpit but often used in his home when contradicting either his wife or Lucy. “Your foot is so much better. Vastly improved, and the only way to keep improving is to try new things. There are such opportunities in store for you, Lucy. You must not squander them.”

“Absolutely! Listen to your father, dear!” Marjorie Snow had resumed her knitting. “Like dancing. You’ve danced before. Such opportunities …”

Tennis, dancing — opportunities for marriage
, Lucy thought as she returned her gaze to the coastline. The train seemed to be devouring the track, and the coastline fled by, but then new vistas would open up, and the boundless sea stretched before her.

“I’m so glad, Stephen,” Marjorie Snow said as she picked up a dropped stitch, “that the church decided to pay for first-class compartments on the train and the steamer.”

“First class all the way. We have to arrive in style, for the good of St. Luke’s. We must reflect well on our church. They don’t invite just any Episcopal priest to go to the Little Chapel by the Sea.”

“Yes, of course. And you see, Lucy, that is why you must enter into all the young people’s activities. We must all reflect well.”

“We are emissaries of the church,” her father said, rather grandly.

“You mean like missionaries?” Lucy asked.

“Heavens, no!” her mother exclaimed. “We aren’t here to proselytize. Good gracious. It’s Bar Harbor, not Africa! Father was saying that we must reflect well on the church. We must shine. Be our best.”

Lucy was trying to process what her parents were saying. It sounded like a fashion show. She pictured an immense oval mirror holding the reflections of the three of them in their new summer wardrobes. Her father in his summer clerics. Herself in one of the lawn cotton tea dance dresses, and her mother in her walking suit. The images changed — new outfits. Her father in his formal dress clerics for an evening event, her mother in an evening gown of ice blue silk, and herself in a ball gown of sea-foam green silk and lace that Mrs. Simpson said set off the deep green of her eyes.

There was a sudden knocking on their compartment door.

The Reverend Snow stood up and opened the door. It was the conductor. “Next stop Boston, South Station. Porter will meet you on the platform with your trunks. You’ve booked a cab?”

“Yes, sir. My secretary made the arrangements for our transport to the steamer dock in the harbor.”

“Fine, fine, Reverend.” The conductor seemed to linger a moment. Lucy saw her father jerk to attention.

“Oh!” His hand reached in his pocket. She saw him pull out a half-dollar coin. He flushed slightly as the conductor took the coin.

As soon as the door closed, Marjorie Snow whispered, “A half-dollar, Stephen?”

“We can’t appear cheap, my dear,” he said brightly. “We are going to be consorting with Van Wycks, Astors, Bellamys — the whole lot!”

Lucy’s parents beamed at each other. They had never appeared more ecstatic.

And she, too, felt a thrill surge through her as she stepped off the train. She sniffed the air. The scent of the sea threaded through the coal fumes of the locomotive’s steamy belches. Salt air! One never caught such a scent in New York.

She inhaled deeply as they followed the porter with their four steamer trunks. She ran a bit ahead to catch up with the fellow.

“Pardon me, sir, but how close are we to the sea?”

“The habber?” he asked. She realized that he meant
harbor
, but with his thick Boston accent, the
r
had vanished.

“Yes, sir.”

“Not far, missy. Take the cab twenty minutes but that’s because of the traffic. Less than half a mile to Lincoln wharf, where you catch the steamuh.” He had a plain-as-pudding face, and his hair, which stuck out under his cap, was the color of pale carrots. She detected a slight Irish lilt, which she found lovely.

When they arrived at the wharf, she was nearly overwhelmed with the most marvelous sensations. She took off her bonnet, faced into the breeze, and flung back her head. A hairpin came undone and the carefully wound bun fell loose, cascading in ripples down her back. The wind caught it and whipped it in streams across her face.

“Lucy, for heaven’s sake, what are you doing, child? Your hat! Your bun!”

“Oh, Mother, doesn’t this air feel wonderful? And look, you can really see the ocean from Boston.” They were standing near the end of the wharf where the
Elizabeth M. Prouty
, the coastal steamer, lay against the pilings, bobbing gently. This was the ship that would take them across Massachusetts Bay, up the coast of New Hampshire, across Casco Bay, Muscongus, then Penobscot Bay, and finally into Frenchman’s Bay and Mount Desert Island.

“What’s this?” Her father took one look at her and gasped. He appeared mortified, as if she had stripped off all her clothes and was standing naked on the wharf. Surely the absence of her hat and the sight of her disheveled hair could not be that unnerving.

“What is wrong?” Lucy asked, worried by her parents’ transfixed expressions.

“You look so different,” her mother said, staring at her as if she were a stranger. Lucy’s hair, touched by the sun, was a flaming conflagration, and her eyes sparkled a fierce green.

“Ain’t she a looker!” A stevedore whistled low and then suddenly the air was crosshatched with such whistles.

“Come along, child, it’s time to board. And for God’s sake, put your hat on.” It was more a prayer than a curse that her father uttered as he grabbed her arm and steered her toward the gangplank.

The wind was on their nose, which was unusual for this time of year, and the captain informed them that, due to the contrary breezes, they would arrive at six the next morning. Lucy couldn’t have been happier. The longer she could be at sea, the better. She did not plan on sleeping a wink. Why spend any time in a stuffy cabin when one could be outdoors? Her parents might worry if they knew her plans, so it would be best if she did not tell them. She had firmly decided that she would try her best to be the model daughter, the perfect emissary. She would even agree to give tennis a try if it would really help her father’s designs to become bishop of the diocese of New York.

And she was the perfect daughter that night, going down to dinner in the ship’s dining salon in a gray cashmere dress with a fitted jacket. They were seated at the captain’s table and the captain, Andrew Burch, asked that the reverend give the blessing. Marjorie was pleased with the honor but slightly disappointed that there was no one of note at the table. It was too early, as Mrs. Simpson had said, for the summer people. There was a dentist and his wife who were disembarking in Portland, a businessman and his ten-year-old son, also from Portland, and a governess who had come in advance of another family — the Greens — whom Marjorie had never heard of but who apparently summered in Bar Harbor. The talk was mostly about weather, and though Marjorie attempted to ask the governess a few discreet questions about the Greens, she was able to extract precious little information. At the conclusion of the dinner, they bid their tablemates farewell and wished them all a good summer.

The Snows’ cabin was a double suite, thanks once again to the largess of St. Luke’s, and when they had returned, Marjorie sank down on a settee and sighed. “Now I hope I don’t get seasick.” The ship was rolling a bit as they had steamed beyond the deep bays of the Massachusetts coastline and were exposed to the open sea. “My goodness, Lucy, how do you stand there and keep your balance without holding on to anything?”

Lucy shrugged. She loved the rhythm of the waves; it was as if she had known this motion all her life. She felt almost cradled by it. But how could she explain any of her feelings to her parents, who both looked a bit queasy? She tried to change the subject. “Mother, you said good-bye to Miss Burnham, the governess, as if we’ll never see her again this summer. Surely our paths will cross.”

She saw her mother and father exchange glances. “Oh, I don’t think her employers are our kind, dear,” her father answered quickly.

“Mr. and Mrs. Green?”

“Yes.” Her mother coughed slightly. “It’s an … iffy name?”

“What? Whatever do you mean?”

“Well, you know …” She lifted her short, thin eyebrows, which arched steeply like tiny commas over her somewhat vague hazel eyes. Her lips clamped together as if she preferred silence to any sort of explanation.

“Your mother is trying to say … that these are not our kind of people. The … the name suggests a different race.”

“A different race?” Lucy asked.

“Jews — possibly.” This comment took Lucy aback. She had never heard her parents speak this way. It was something she could imagine someone like Denise De Becque saying, or Eldon Drexel. But her parents, particularly her father, were quite careful in how they spoke of other faiths.

A different race?
What exactly did that mean? Lucy wondered. It was a religion, she thought — but a race? She was confused. She had seen Jews in New York, met some. The cobbler, Mr. Hurwitz, was Jewish. So was the lady in the New York Public Library at the reference desk. Miss Gold was her name. She had been very helpful. They perhaps looked slightly different, but so did the Irish porter who had carried their trunks in the station, and so did Anna, the Swedish lady who cooked for them. But would you say they were different races? She thought about how her parents had stared at her on the wharf when she had removed her hat — their shocked countenances. It was as if she had not been stripped naked but become something else entirely — another race, another being, something not quite human — an alien apparition.

These disturbing thoughts lingered with Lucy as she crawled into her bunk. Although she had no intention of sleeping, the rocking motion of the steamer, the swells rolling in from the vast Atlantic, were seductive. Despite the dull thrumming of the engines, she could still hear the hypnotic rhythm of the crush of the sea against the hull.

I don’t want to play tennis. I want to swim.
No one had ever taught her, but she did not doubt that she could swim. She simply knew it.

As she drifted off to sleep, she thought about the Begats, the little doll family that inhabited the dollhouse Aunt Prissy had given her. Lucy had invented the Begats long before she ever discovered those papers in her father’s study, her adoption papers from St. Luke’s with the words “mother unknown.” So had she wondered even then who had begat her? Who was “mother unknown”?

She had always listened so carefully in church when her father read the verses from Matthew. She had loved the rhythm, the cadences, as the people, starting with Abraham, then Isaac, Jacob, and Judas, tumbled out of that cataract that was Jesus’ original family. And the names became odder as the people, all of whom seemed to be men, were born. There was Aminadab after Aram and then Nassoon and Salmon and Booz. Occasionally a girl or woman was mentioned. In Lucy’s Begat family, it was just the opposite — mostly girls and sometimes a boy.