The Fisher Boy (11 page)

Chapter Fourteen

She didn’t even say who she was, but I knew her voice. It was unmistakable—husky and aloof, with a kind of perpetual patrician laryngitis—Sallie Drummond. She was telephoning from Ian’s Provincetown house and had left three messages on my apartment’s answering machine. She was sorting through some of Ian’s things and wondered whether I wanted “some St. Harold’s memorabilia.”

Fulton and George, her older brothers, were Exeter alumni, not interested in articles from the second-string prep school Ian had enrolled in only after being booted out of Exeter. Ian was “the keeper of the St. Harold’s flame,” as Sallie put it, and, since I was “his oldest friend from St. Harold’s,” I got first crack at this stuff. I was relieved she said nothing about the fracas at Quahog or my fight with Suki Weatherbee at the funeral, so when I got her messages, I called and told her I’d be right over.

I couldn’t confront them at their house in Gloucester. That fortress, that Romanesque pile, always put the fear into me, not the fear of God, but the fear of property. But now I had to ask Sallie whether my mother’s story was true. Was she really my half-sister? Had my half-brother seduced me, knowing our blood tie?

It was my imagination, I’m sure, but it seemed, climbing the sandy hill, that Ian’s house had shifted still further toward the precipice, as if made suicidal by its owner’s death. And it seemed that the cliff of sand was somehow animate, disintegrating before my eyes, trickling down like the sand in an hourglass, like the sand in the Biblical aphorism about building your house upon a rock.

“When you say ‘right over,’ you’re not kidding.” Sallie came to the door wearing a bikini bottom and a diamond tennis bracelet—and nothing else. This shocked me into silence—Sallie and being in this hideous spaceship of a house, given the circumstances.

She was a muscular girl with the take-charge manner of a sister raised in a household of brothers. Many women in Provincetown could have taken her for a lesbian, which she was not. She’d briefly dated Jonathan Robson, of all people, before he’d moved to Denver to marry a cattle heiress. Then she’d been serious with one of the Saltonstalls, but they’d broken up over differences in politics. Sallie was even more conservative than Ian, so her nudity was even more startling.

“I’ve been living in Seattle, so sun,
any sun
, is most welcome,” she was saying, leading me through the nubbly beige carpeting of the living room and onto the redwood deck, now littered with boxes containing the unwanted innards of my prep school. “Oh, don’t look so shocked, Mark. It’s not like I need to worry around
you
. I mean Ian told me the whole bit.”

“The whole bit?” I’d assumed Ian had been killed before meeting anyone but his assailant, killed on the way back across the breakwater from the beach, so that his story of our sex, of our
incest
in the dunes, had died with him. No, “the whole bit” meant she knew my sexuality, so her being naked was somehow acceptable since I was no more male than the pine trees below the deck, than the ivy dying in terra cotta pots by the gas grill. She wouldn’t suspect our blood ties. There was nothing Drummond in my face or physique: my mother’s Winslow genes had vanquished theirs.

Sallie ripped open a carton marked “St. Harold’s #6” in Ian’s always legible script. Inside were tablets engraved with winning soccer scores and an ancient football swollen like some delicate kind of fungus. “When that silly school closed, Ian drove out there to cart off all this junk.” Without a trace of irony, she blew the dust from a lacrosse trophy, a silver jug, all dents and tarnish. “I wondered if you’d like it.”

Was this the way they’d bought off my mother? With a check that did minimum damage to their assets and a breezy kiss-off?

Letting the trophy bang to the deck, Sallie yanked open a carton of yearbooks with embossed covers. “What’s next?”

I was wondering that myself. “Are you selling this house?”

“Why? Interested?”

A sarcastic comment. She knew I couldn’t afford it.

Being male I felt an obligation to stare. Sallie’s breasts were full, with wide areolas. She’d probably been working all morning, hauling cartons, taking inventory, because her dark apricot skin was glittering with droplets of sweat. She must have spent hours with sun lamps to nurture a tan this serious in Washington.

She flicked her tawny mane of hair. “If you’re interested in this house, I’d like to sell you a bridge in Brooklyn.”

Suddenly I agreed with Suki Weatherbee’s African husband. “New York gives me claustrophobia.”

She put the yearbooks back into their carton. “Well, speaking of geography, Provincetown isn’t exactly my idea of a good time, Mark.” She shrugged and the sun caught on the diamonds of her tennis bracelet. She had broad hips for such a delicate bikini.

“Ian enjoyed himself here,” I said.

“Not in the end.” Sallie took a swig of some poison-green sports drink, the kind spiked with vitamins and caffeine.

“Have a look,” she said, all bonhomie, changing her tone like an actor in improv taking a strong suggestion from his audience. She shoved the cartons toward me with a brisk movement of her large-size foot. The variety of things in them was amazing: an iron Victorian microscope, a bolt of damask, hymnals drier than the Dead Sea Scrolls, a sign with an arrow to a fallout shelter, a terrarium containing a turtle shell and a china shipwreck, needlepoint pillows of the Lamb of God done by a headmaster’s wife…Ian must’ve needed an eighteen-wheeler to cart all this stuff away.

Of course Ian specialized in real estate law. He’d helped St. Harold’s liquidate some of its assets.

“They may pull this house down,” Sallie said. “It’s structurally unsound, so we’re told.” Below were pines in the cliffs of trickling sand.

Frowning at a black onyx pen set, Sallie asked, “Who do you think did it?” She was abrupt, almost accusatory.

“That’s what we’re all asking.”

“But you were here, you must have theories.” Sallie tucked the onyx pen set into a throw rug of Middle Eastern cotton.

“I have no idea who did it.” It wasn’t me, I’m your brother, I could have said. Except that I didn’t feel that; I tried to, but even now I felt no bond whatsoever with this woman.

“Ian saw your show.” Sallie was finishing her bottle of the energy beverage. I braced myself for a crack about our fight. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “He said you were very good. You were always very theatrical.”

She made “theatrical” sound like it carried a lot of baggage—like the view of the breakwater we were so busy ignoring.

One carton contained newer books, some Buddhist meditations and a biography of Thomas Merton. These were clean and had been carefully read, scored in places, whole pages, with yellow highlighter. “I never knew Ian was so…metaphysical,” I said. “I knew he read a lot of military history, I knew he was big on battles.”

“Big on battles” certainly described Ian. And he’d been reading a book on war, on occupied Greece, that day in the dunes before he’d died.

“Ian was conducting a study on early Christianity,” Sallie said.

He’d had the Boswell book in the bathroom, I remembered.

In an old Lowenbrau carton, I found an alabaster statue of St. Harold, missing his staff and part of his beard. I ran my thumb over these sugary, flaking parts of the stone and was about to mention that this statue occupied a place of honor in the Common Room when Sallie said, “Is that Santa Claus? Oh, no, I suppose it’s St. Harold. He’s all yours, if you want him.”

At last she opted to don a T-shirt, a very big one with Seattle Mariners in extroverted lettering. “Do you know Ian left a generous bequest to the Episcopal church in Gloucester? They’ll get the new slate roof they’ve been harping about. That’s why Reverend Tyler was so obsequious at the funeral. He was sickening.” Sallie frowned. “Do you want these New Age books or not?”

I didn’t really consider Thomas Merton or the Buddha in the same category as crystals and aromatherapy, but, to be polite, I took three of these paperbacks
.
After all, these were Ian’s things and not just memorabilia from our defunct school.

“There’s some gay policeman on the case,” Sallie said. She realized her tone had been insensitive, a small miracle, because she mitigated her sarcasm in the next sentence. “I suppose that’s good. He must know your community down here.”

Then I had to tell her, not about us, not about my mother’s story, but about something I’d felt from the very beginning. “I want you to know, Sallie, I’m, um, asking around…” She stopped what she was doing. “…I think Ian was killed by someone he knew.”

She seemed startled. “Why, thank you for your concern.” Then she leaned across the carton of leather-bound books to quickly kiss my cheek, and I’m afraid I cringed, which was doubly embarrassing because a tall, handsome stranger was just sliding the screen door aside to emerge from the darkness of the living room. “Honey, he’s agitated,” the stranger said. It was her fiancé.

“Mark,” Sallie said, “this is my significant other, Alexander Nash. Alexander, Mark Winslow. Mark was at St. Harold’s with Ian.”

He was dark, with the added attraction of very blue eyes, so blue you’d mistake them for contacts. He had the shy but virile manner of a handsome male unaware of his beauty.

“Alexander is working at Woods Hole,” Sallie said. “He’s in marine biology, studying the scallop population of Buzzards Bay. It’s mysteriously crashed.”

I was about to ask him about who was agitated when Alexander cut me off, saying, “This must be pretty precious material for you, Mark,” indicating some sepia photographs dark as tea in a pile of artifacts that seemed to have grown rather than diminished, despite Sallie’s efforts.

“Alexander thinks all this is history,” Sallie said.

“Coming from the west, where something from the Seventies gets a plaque stuck on it,” said Alexander.

“Alexander loves New England,” Sallie said, chucking a volume of one headmaster’s memoirs. “He’s tracing his family tree. He’s into genealogy. It’s a Mormon thing.”

There was something clean-cut and western about him, like a champion skier from an up-close-and-personal profile on the Olympics.

“My folks were Mormon,” Alexander said, “but I consider myself a staunch Episcopalian.”

“Oh, no!” Sallie suddenly moaned, waving at a figure at the screen door.

“I told you he was agitated,” Alexander said.

The old man picking at the screen was thin as a shoelace. His hands were desperate as moths, trying to beat their way through the restrictive mesh.

I felt sick, like the time I’d found the dog on Arthur’s stoop, but I leapt up. Bumping against a carton of St. Harold’s relics, I stumbled across the deck and drew the screen door aside. He looked years older than at Ian’s funeral, and he smelled old, like thick toenails and Ace bandages. I couldn’t call him “Father” or “Mr. Drummond” or anything else. I took his veined hands, his old wrinkled hands, in both of mine. Then made a fool of myself—and wept.

“Mark and Ian were very close,” I heard Sallie explaining to Alexander.

“It’s me,” I kept saying to the frightened eyes, which were vacant and intense at the same time, as comprehension came and went, flickered on then off, like current in a faulty socket.
“
It’s Mark,” I kept repeating, just this side of angry, as if he should know his son, even through that wall of dementia.

Sallie wiped her hands on a strip of grimy cheesecloth. Duncan Drummond’s shirt looked no cleaner. “Where is his carrot?” Sallie said, and then Alexander produced a stuffed cloth carrot that he gave to the old man to knead.

“It’s Mark,” I told him, but he was staring out to sea.

“We’re not sure he realizes,” Alexander said. “About the tragedy. It could be a blessing.”

“Isn’t it time for his medication?” Sallie asked Alexander. To me, she remarked, “Having him here gives Mother a little break.”

“Sir?” said Alexander, brushing the old man’s back, brushing the shirt where you could count the vertebrae, guiding him out of the sunlight, into the op art and darkness of his dead son’s living room.

“Is it…Alzheimer’s?” I asked, remembering my mother’s comments.

“He’s confused,” Sallie said, for once using a euphemism. “He’s been this way for three years. Don’t feel bad, Mark. Most days he doesn’t know
us
.”

I’m an “us,” I wanted to say.

Gently, persistently, Alexander was telling Mr. Drummond to “swallow the applesauce.” Sallie dropped my three paperbacks into a plastic bag, my hint to leave.

I had to speak: “Sallie, I’ve…known your family a long time, we go way back…”

She regarded me warily. The sun caught the diamonds of her tennis bracelet.

“My mother was…friendly with your dad.”

“They both liked jazz, they were Ella Fitzgerald fans.” Sallie laughed, but her square face was humorless.

She could know that from parties—the jazz link, I thought.

“I think they had a little…” I began. “…You’re my half, my half…” She looked terrified. “…My half-sister,” I said. Her face went blank. Then I became aware of a presence behind the screen—Alexander, holding a spoon and a jar of applesauce, and sighing. “I crushed the pill,” he said, “but he keeps spitting it out.”

“Daddy’s a little agitated,” Sallie said. “You’ll excuse us, Mark. Take St. Harold if you want to.” Then she did something that startled me again: she hugged me against her muscular body.

She hadn’t believed me. Or had she? She’d admitted they’d shared an intimacy, our father and my mother. “Our father”—it sounded like the beginning of a prayer. I’d always fantasized about my father, heroic in his Navy whites and bringing me strange shells from dangerous oceans. But now that I’d found him—elderly and sick, his mind wrecked—my fantasy withered. This father could never answer any of my questions or provide the “why” of his perspective. I’d never speak to him as my parent or let him know me as a son. He’d remain the aging rogue I’d met at North Shore parties, the man who’d playfully tugged my tie to confirm it wasn’t silk.

Of course there was the chance my mother was lying. But hadn’t I always shown a Drummond recklessness? On my job, for instance, smoking weed then resigning, giving two days’ notice? Dousing Ian with that pitcher of beer? But why should she lie now about this? She had nothing to gain. She risked my speaking to the Drummonds, violating their contract. And what a mess it would be if she somehow lost her house and ended up, desperate, on my doorstep.