Stern Men (21 page)

“Have a cup of coffee and a seat, Mary,” said Edith, still snipping the beans. Her voice was commanding. “She doesn’t know you’re back yet.”

“Yes, Mary, have a cup of coffee and a seat,” said Stan Thomas, and Edith the bean-snipper flashed him a sidelong look. It was a fast snatch of a look, but it took in a whole lot of information.

“And why don’t you have a seat, sir?” Edith said.

“Thank you, ma’am, I will.” He sat.

“Get your guest a cup of coffee, Mary.”

Mary winced. “I can’t,” she said. “I have to check on Miss Vera.”

“She won’t die if you sit here for five minutes and dry off,” Edith said.

“I can’t!” Mary said. She flashed past Stan Thomas and Edith, right out the kitchen door. They heard her quick footsteps fluttering up the stairs as she called out, “Sorry!” and she was gone.

“I guess I can get the coffee for myself,” Stan Thomas said.

“I’ll get it for you. This is my kitchen.”

Edith left the beans and poured Stan a cup of coffee. Without asking how he took it, she added a splash of cream and did not offer any sugar, which was fine with him. She made herself a cup of the same.

“Are you courting her?” she asked, after she sat down. She was looking at him with a suspicion she made no attempt to mask.

“I only just met her.”

“Are you interested in her?”

Stan Thomas did not answer, but he raised his eyebrows in ironic surprise.

“I don’t have any advice for you, you know,” Edith said.

“You don’t have to give me any advice.”

“Somebody should.”

“Somebody like who?”

“You know, she’s already married, Mr.—?”

“Thomas. Stan Thomas.”

“She’s already married, Mr. Thomas.”

“No. She doesn’t wear a ring. She didn’t say anything.”

“She’s married to that old bitch up there.” Edith thrust a thin yellow thumb at the ceiling. “See how she scampers away even before she’s called?”

“Can I ask you a question?” Stan said. “Who the hell is she?”

“I don’t like your mouth,” Edith said, although her tone did not suggest she minded it all that much. She sighed. “Mary is technically Miss Vera’s niece. But she’s really her slave. It’s a family tradition. It was the same thing with her mother, and that poor woman only got out of the slavery by drowning. Mary’s mother was the one who got swept off by the wave back in twenty-seven. They never found her body. You heard about that?”

“I heard about that.”

“Oh, God, I’ve told this story a million times. Dr. Ellis adopted Jane as a playmate for his little girl—who is now that screaming pain-in-my-hole upstairs. Jane was Mary’s mother. She got pregnant by some Italian quarry worker. It was a scandal.”

“I heard something about it.”

“Well, they tried to keep it quiet, but people do like a good scandal.”

“They sure like a good one around here.”

“So she drowned, you know, and Miss Vera took over the baby and raised that little girl to be her helper, to replace the mother. And that’s who Mary is. And I, for one, cannot believe that the people who watch out for children allowed it.”

“What people who watch out for children?”

“I don’t know. I just can’t believe it’s legal for a child to be born into slavery in this day and age.”

“You don’t mean slavery.”

“I know exactly what I mean, Mr. Thomas. We all sat here in this house watching it come to pass, and we asked ourselves why nobody put a stop to it.”

“Why didn’t you put a stop to it?”

“I’m a cook, Mr. Thomas. I’m not a police officer. And what do you do? No, I’m sure I know. You live here, so of course you’re a fisherman.”

“Yes.”

“You make good money?”

“Good enough.”

“Good enough for what?”

“Good enough for around here.”

“Is your job dangerous?”

“Not too bad.”

“Would you like a real drink?”

“I sure would.”

Edith the cook went to a cabinet, moved around some bottles, and came back with a silver flask. She poured amber liquid from it into two clean coffee cups. She gave one to Stan. “You’re not a drunk, are you?” she asked.

“Are you?”

“Very funny, with my workload. Very funny.” Edith stared at Stan Thomas narrowly. “And you never married anyone from around here?”

“I never married anyone from around anywhere,” Stan said, and he laughed.

“You seem good-natured. Everything’s a big joke. How long have you been courting Mary?”

“Nobody’s courting anybody, ma’am.”

“How long have you been interested in Mary?”

“I only met her this week. I guess this is a bigger deal than I thought. I think she’s a nice girl.”

“She is a nice girl. But don’t they have nice girls right here on your island?”

“Hey, now take it easy.”

“Well, I think it’s unusual that you’re not married. How old are you?”

“I’m in my twenties. My late twenties.” Stan Thomas was twenty-five.

“A good-looking, good-natured man like you with a good business? Who isn’t a drunk? And not married yet? My understanding is that people marry young around here, especially the fishermen.”

“Maybe nobody around here likes me.”

“Smart mouth. Maybe you have bigger ambitions.”

“Listen, all I did was drive Mary around to do some errands.”

“Do you want to see her again? Is that your idea?”

“I was thinking about it.”

“She’s almost thirty years old, you know.”

“I think she looks swell.”

“And she is an Ellis—legally an Ellis—but she doesn’t have any money, so don’t go getting any ideas about that. They’ll never give her a dime except to keep her dressed and fed.”

“I don’t know what kind of ideas you think I have.”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

“Well, I can see you’re trying to figure something out. I can see that pretty clear.”

“She doesn’t have a mother, Mr. Thomas. She is considered important around this house because Miss Vera needs her, but nobody in this house looks out for Mary. She’s a young woman without a mother to watch over her, and I’m trying to find out your intentions.”

“Well, you don’t talk like a mother. All respect to you, ma’am, but you talk like a father.”

This pleased Edith. “She doesn’t have one of those, either.”

“That’s a tough break.”

“How do you think you’ll go about seeing her, Mr. Thomas?”

“I think I’ll pick her up and take her for a drive sometimes.”

“Will you?”

“What do you make of that?”

“It’s none of my business.”

Stan Thomas laughed right out loud. “Oh, I’ll bet you can make just about anything your business, ma’am.”

“Very funny,” she said. She took another swig of hooch. “Everything’s a big joke with you. Mary’s leaving in a few weeks, you know. And she won’t be back until next June.”

“Then I’ll have to pick her up and take her for a drive every day, I guess.”

Stan Thomas treated Edith to his biggest smile, which was most winning.

Edith pronounced, “You’re in for a heap of trouble. Too bad, because I don’t dislike you, Mr. Thomas.”

“Thank you. I don’t dislike you, either.”

“Don’t you mess up that girl.”

“I don’t plan to mess up anybody,” he said.

Edith evidently thought their conversation was over, so she got back to the beans. Since she did not ask Stan Thomas to leave, he sat there in the kitchen of Ellis House for a while longer, hoping Mary would come back and sit with him. He waited and waited, but Mary did not return, so he finally went home. It was dark by then, and still raining. He figured he’d have to see her another day.

 

They were married the next August. It wasn’t a hasty wedding. It wasn’t an unexpected wedding, in that Stan told Mary back in June of 1956—the day after she returned to Fort Niles Island with the Ellis family—that they were going to get married by the end of that summer. He told her that she was going to stay on Fort Niles with him from now on and she could forget about being a slave to goddamn Miss Vera Ellis. So it had all been arranged well in advance. Still, the ceremony itself had the marks of haste.

Mary and Stan were married in Stan Thomas’s living room by Mort Beekman, who was then the traveling pastor for the Maine islands. Mort Beekman preceded Toby Wishnell. He was, at the time, the skipper of the
New Hope.
Unlike Wishnell, Pastor Mort Beekman was well liked. He had an air about him of not giving a shit, which was fine with everyone concerned. Beekman was no zealot, and that too put him in good standing with the fishermen in his far-flung parishes.

Stan Thomas and Mary Smith-Ellis had no witnesses at their ceremony, no rings, no attendants, but Pastor Mort Beekman, true to his nature, went right ahead with the ceremony. “What the hell do you need a witness for, anyhow?” he asked. Beekman happened to be on the island for a baptism, and what did he care about rings or attendants or witnesses? These two young people certainly looked like adults. Could they sign the certificate? Yes. Were they old enough to do this without anyone’s permission? Yes. Was it going to be a big hassle? No.

“Do you want all the praying and Scriptures and stuff?” Pastor Beekman asked the couple.

“No, thanks,” Stan said. “Just the wedding part.”

“Maybe a little praying . . .” Mary suggested hesitantly.

Pastor Mort Beekman sighed and scraped together a marriage ceremony with a little praying, for the sake of the lady. He couldn’t help noticing that she looked like hell, what with all the paleness and all the trembling. The whole ceremony was over in about four minutes. Stan Thomas slipped the pastor a ten-dollar bill on his way out the door.

“Much appreciated,” Stan said. “Thanks for coming by.”

“Sure enough,” said the pastor, and headed down to the boat so that he could get off the island before dark; there was never any decent lodging for him on Fort Niles, and he wasn’t about to stay overnight on that inhospitable rock.

It was the least ostentatious wedding in the history of the Ellis family. If, that is, Mary Smith-Ellis could be considered a member of the Ellis family, a matter now seriously in question.

“As your aunt,” Miss Vera had told Mary, “I must tell you that I think marriage would be a mistake for you. I think it a big mistake for you to handcuff yourself to this fisherman and to this island.”

“But you love this island,” Mary had said.

“Not in February, darling.”

“But I could visit you in February.”

“Darling, you’ll have a husband to look after, and there will be no time for visiting. I had a husband once myself, and I know. It was most
restrictive,
” she declared, although it had not in the least been restrictive.

To the surprise of many, Miss Vera did not put up further argument against Mary’s wedding plans. For those who had witnessed Vera’s violent outrage over Mary’s mother’s pregnancy thirty years earlier, and her tantrums at Mary’s mother’s death twenty-nine years earlier (not to mention her daily bouts of temper over sundry insignificant matters), this calm in the face of Mary’s news was a mystery. How could Vera stand for this? How could she lose another helpmate? How could she tolerate this disloyalty, this abandonment?

Perhaps nobody was more surprised by this reaction than Mary herself, who had lost ten pounds over the course of that summer from anxiety about Stan Thomas. What to do about Stan Thomas? He was not pressing her to see him, he was not taking her away from her responsibilities, but he persistently insisted that they would marry by the end of the summer. He’d been saying so since June. There did not seem to be room for negotiation.

“You think it’s a good idea, too,” he reminded her, and she did think so. She did like the idea of marrying. It wasn’t something she had thought about much before, but now it seemed exactly right. And he was so handsome. And he was so confident.

“We’re not getting any younger,” he reminded her, and indeed they were not.

Still, Mary vomited twice on the day she had to tell Miss Vera she was to marry Stan Thomas. She couldn’t put it off any longer and finally broke the news in the middle of July. But the conversation, surprisingly, was not difficult at all. Vera did not become enraged, although she had frequently become enraged over much smaller issues. Vera made her “this is a big mistake” statement as a concerned aunt, and then resigned herself to the idea entirely, leaving Mary to ask all the panicky questions.

“What will you do without me?” she asked.

“Mary, you sweet, sweet girl. Don’t let it cross your mind.” This was accompanied by a warm smile, a pat on the hand.

“But what will I do? I’ve never been away from you!”

“You are a lovely, capable young woman. You’ll be fine without me.”

“But you don’t think I should do this, do you?”

“Oh, Mary. What does it matter what I think?”

“You think he’ll be a bad husband.”

“I have never spoken a word against him.”

“But you don’t like him.”

“You’re the one who has to like him, Mary.”

“You think I’ll end up poor and alone.”

“Oh, you never will, Mary. You’ll always have a roof over your head. You’ll never end up selling matches in the city or something dreadful like that.”

“You think I won’t make friends here on the island. You think I’ll be lonely, and you think I’ll go crazy in the winter.”

“Who wouldn’t make friends with you?”

“You think I’m loose, running around with a fisherman. You think I’m turning out to be like my mother.”

“The things I think!” Miss Vera said, and laughed.

“I will be happy with Stan,” Mary said. “I
will.
”

“Then I couldn’t be happier for you. A happy bride is a radiant bride.”