The Fisher Boy (7 page)

Chapter Nine

I had some chloral hydrate at my apartment. I took two, washed down with some bad Chablis. Showering, I cried into the spray, then fell into bed.

When the sun rose and stung my eyes awake, I realized immediately that it had set on Ian forever

Until last night on the breakwater, I hadn’t realized the potency of my feelings for Ian—almost fraternal, we’d shared so much. Vignettes from our past kept playing in my head, of swimming, games of baseball, building forts in the sumac and cat briar of Eastern Point, and, of course, of his saving me in the storm in Gloucester Harbor. And our sex in the dunes kept screening in my consciousness, like a snuff film on endless loop.

My milk had soured, so I dribbled some tap water over my muesli before deciding this was unsatisfactory. So I drove partway up Bradford Street, but it was seven-thirty, so the supermarket of course was closed. Instinctively, I headed toward Arthur’s. I had to speak with Arthur, whether he was “up to it” or not.

His BMW, the gray of an old fedora, was parked in his driveway. The buttercup-yellow house looked serene, the peonies bending under the weight of their open, globe-like flowers. I heard someone singing—singing!—on this horrible morning. It was Arthur’s voice, damaging something from
The Pirates of Penzance.

“Hello?” I called, stepping toward the garden.

Instantly, the air filled with noise, like the sirens from every fire engine on Cape Cod.

Arthur came running in a terrycloth robe. “Don’t move!” he yelled to me, then vanished inside the house. After an interval that seemed endless, the racket ceased.

“Your new alarm,” I said, when he returned.

“It’s a bit hypersensitive, like its owner.”

A neighbor’s shar pei was barking from the yard across the street.

“They’re adjusting the alarm later today,” Arthur said, “before my neighbors evict me.” He began pouring birdseed into a Plexiglas cylinder wired to his silver maple. “You’re up early.” He was his buoyant old self, the Arthur of summers past.

I was casual. “The early bird gets the worm.”

“And then some.” Arthur closed the top of the feeder and then the bag of birdseed. “Well, you might as well be the first to know. My bird has left his gilded cage—along with two very valuable ormolu candlesticks. Can you beat that?” He plopped the bag of birdseed onto the flagstones on the terrace, then brought a plate of raisin bagels and two cups of coffee from the kitchen. “You look like you could use a hit of caffeine.”

He went on about the candlesticks. His great-aunt Harriet had given them to him when he was twenty-three, when he had published his first poem in the
Yale Review.
“They were French, Empire. Harriet claimed they came from the
salon
of Madame Récamier.” He was lathering cream cheese onto his bagel. “The little hustler,” he muttered, obviously not referring to Madame Récamier.

Only now it registered. “Edward is missing?!”

“Gone with the wind.”

He was savoring the theatricality of the moment. Certainly he was upset about both losses, but his new security system, his electronic safety net, apparently gave him confidence, restored some humor, and from his pocket he drew a plastic bottle of pills. “My new prescription,” he laughed, shaking the dull turquoise capsules. “My bluebirds of happiness. Mother’s little helpers. Did I ever tell you I had a mad crush on the Rolling Stones during the Sixties? Don’t tell a soul!”

Everywhere—in my coffee cup, in the waves winking from Provincetown Harbor—I saw the murder. As the sole witness to that scene, I carried all of its brutality alone. Arthur, obviously, had yet to hear the news. Ian’s body might still be on the breakwater, with no company but the gulls and terns. But I had to keep silent and use my acting skills, to pretend to be absorbed by some missing antiques, stolen by a kept boy who’d suddenly hit the road. Because everyone knew how I’d fought with Ian. Lots of people knew we’d both been at the beach. So I’d be a logical suspect.

“You know,” Arthur was saying, “that Edward was something of a prude. He didn’t even like to be touched.”

He was “that Edward” now. I thought of Edward’s story, of the man assaulting him in the woods. Who wouldn’t have qualms about intimacy after that? Supposing, of course, his story was true.

“We slept in separate rooms last night,” Arthur said. “The pollen was bothering him, or a summer cold. Or me.”

So Edward hadn’t mentioned his asthma. He’d kept his inhaler secret, like so much else.

“He knew the value of those candlesticks. He knew the David painting of Madame Récamier. ‘Oh, we had that in art history,’ he told me.”

“He slipped away without triggering your new alarm?”

“I’d switched it off before we went to bed. As you saw, it’s got opening-night jitters.”

Then the phone in the kitchen began ringing. To my tired ears, it sounded almost as loud as the alarm.

“Everyone is so early today!” laughed Arthur.

I stared into my cup of coffee; I felt as quavery as my reflection. Cupping the cellular phone to his ear, Arthur came striding back onto the terrace. Surely this was the call; surely this was the news about Ian. Bad news is an early riser, and it was all of eight-fifteen.

Arthur’s face assumed the frozen look of a mime’s. “Good God, I can’t believe it!” he was saying.

I starting cutting a bagel, then I put the knife down, reluctant about using it while Arthur was hearing about Ian.

“…Well, thank you,” Arthur said, in a strangled whisper. “I’ll break the news to Mark.”

He walked toward me. “That was Roger Morton. The manager of the motel near the breakwater just phoned him. A photographer found a body on the breakwater this morning, some photographer doing a calendar of sunrise shots. The body has been identified. It’s Ian. Oh God, it’s so horrible!”

***

Ian’s funeral was held in Gloucester, in a Gothic sandstone church the brown of cough drops, with some of the same Anglican touches as our chapel at St. Harold’s: the brass memorial plaques and Tiffany stained-glass windows glowing like sectioned mineral samples. These windows didn’t open, of course, so inside it was stifling, smelling of carpeting, old hymnals, and the lemon oil that emanated from the pews.

The church was mobbed, owing, frankly, as much to the Drummonds’ prominence as to their youngest son’s popularity. For years, Ian’s father Duncan and all his children—Fulton, George, Ian, and Sallie—had ridden to the hounds at the Essex Hunt Club. Ian’s mother Janet, a tennis star during her youth, had aborted her first child, rumor had it, to play in the semi-finals at Wimbledon.

Of course, Mrs. Drummond had been off the courts for years. She and her husband were elderly now, both Ian and Sallie having been “change of life” children. Today Mrs. Drummond was gaunt as one of the Fates, a black veil covering her features like an old-fashioned oxygen tent. Mr. Drummond seemed unsure exactly where he was, folding and refolding the funeral program as if making a piece of origami. Ian’s brothers—each years his senior—their eyes bright with grief, carried the mahogany casket while staring straight ahead, as if fixing their attention on anything but the gilt cross on the altar would endanger their brother’s soul.

The organ music surged through the church like electricity, like an earth tremor, through the floor, through the pews, through our bones. It pulled me back to prep school, to evensong after soccer practice, when Ian would arrive just as the opening hymn was beginning, all arrogant ease, his blond hair still wet from the shower, the collar of his blazer upturned against the autumn chill. For once, today, he was on time for a service.

Arthur, Miriam, and I rose with the congregation to sing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” I joined in, hoarse, with conflicting emotions. I was thinking of the Ian I knew, from childhood to prep school to Provincetown. I saw Ian in the Gloucester woods, forcing a crying Jonathan Robson to eat green blueberries; I saw him at St. Harold’s, steering Suki Weatherbee around the floor at Spring Dance; I saw him naked in the dunes, then muttering,
“Vaya con D
í
os,”
his last words addressed to me in this world. Then the hymn was over and the mourners shut their hymnals with a series of soft, papery thuds that generated the only breeze inside the church.

“Ian Drummond was confirmed in this church,” said the robust old Episcopal priest officiating. “So, today, Ian has come home.” Then the priest spoke extensively about a person I barely recognized, describing “a seeker, a seeker of truth, a man impatient with the orthodox answers, someone who sought to forge his own spiritual path.”

I kept wondering about other seekers, the police. Had they lifted my fingerprints from the crime scene, from the pieces of glass, parts of the vodka bottle I’d missed? Should I go to the police on my own, I wondered, as the priest quoted the Book of Wisdom. No, that was foolish, I decided, as Ian’s oldest brother, Fulton, ascended to the pulpit and spoke about the family’s famous tradition of athletics, citing Ian’s soccer successes on the North Shore, at St. Harold’s, and at Dartmouth. Fulton broke down reading “Envoi,” the Robert Louis Stevenson poem, on the line, “Home is the sailor, home from sea…”

At that point, a female voice joined Fulton’s sobbing. Tracing the sound to a pew just across the aisle, I saw that it came from Suki Weatherbee, elegant and almost matronly in a peach silk blouse, pearls, and frosted blond hair. A black man was handing her a handkerchief in an intimate gesture. Arthur, Miriam, and a good many mourners stole glances at Suki with sympathy that eventually curdled into annoyance as her crying intensified, then mercifully stopped.

The Drummond family plot was in a surprisingly old cemetery in Gloucester full of slate gravestones from the seventeenth century, carved with skulls and skeletons lugging oversized hourglasses full of time. “I didn’t think they buried anyone in places like this,” Miriam said. “I thought these cemeteries were all filled up…with people like Paul Revere.”

Ian came from an old New England family, I reminded Miriam, and privately considered it somehow appropriate for a person with Ian’s politics to share ground with neighbors familiar with snuff and the ducking stool.

“Good heavens!” Arthur whispered when confronted with the Drummond family plot, guarded by the cemetery’s most modern monument, a Victorian sphinx of indeterminate sex with a male face and bare female breasts protruding from a necklace of scarabs and ankhs. Though I’d never seen this monument before, I remembered the explanation for its existence: one of Ian’s ancestors, a prominent Egyptologist, had helped the Museum of Fine Arts acquire its Middle Kingdom sculptures before dying of typhus in Cairo at thirty-one. Two years Ian’s senior.

The crowd assembled around the open grave. Just beyond the cemetery, past a boatyard and a bed and breakfast, was the big fish processing plant, so the odor of cod was carried on the wind, mixing with the fragrance of earth from the new grave. The grass in the cemetery was long and wet, and some of the mourners began worriedly checking their shoes.

“Let us pray,” said the priest, and we bowed our heads. He read a prayer of interment and a lone piper—we couldn’t see him—played “Amazing Grace.” The Drummonds were certainly emphasizing their Scottish heritage. I felt that Ian, who’d spent a miserable college semester “studying abroad” in Edinburgh, would’ve found these touches over the top.

In fact, the whole service, at the church and the cemetery, had little to do with the breezy, cynical man I knew. There wasn’t a word about Ian being gay, no mention, actually, of his having been murdered, for God’s sake. Were both topics dismissed as equally unsavory?

Miriam must’ve been clairvoyant. “This isn’t about Ian,” she muttered to Arthur. “Listening to these people, he could’ve been a married man who died of a coronary!”

This impression was further strengthened at Cold Cove, the Drummonds’ baronial mansion on a pinkish outcropping of granite above Gloucester Harbor. The place was teeming with Yankee Boston: Marblehead yachtsmen, State Street bankers, girls from the Junior League.

A small contingent of old St. Harold’s boys was present, but no one from Ian’s Provincetown parties. Kittredge Rawlings, our senior prefect, pinned me in a corner of the garden between a Roman sarcophagus and the Drummonds’ fishpond, where the carp, bright as chain mail, shot through the peat-colored water. Then he delivered one of those long, boastful monologues people usually save for alumni magazines.

“…So, after Harvard, what do I do but apply to both law school and medical school, then end up choosing neither…After I left the bank, I married Catherine and we moved to Geneva…We call Kittredge the Second
our little Swiss surprise.
They say chocolate is an aphrodisiac, have you read that?”

At last Kittredge mentioned Ian, his face distorted with puzzlement and irritation. “But what was he doing in Provincetown?” Kittredge was watching the carp rather than me. “We’ve only been there once. We were in Chatham at Catherine’s mother’s place and it was raining cats and dogs, so we got desperate and went to Provincetown to hit the shops. But it was just T-shirts and ice cream and Third-World junk. Of all the places to be mugged, to be done in. Poor Ian!”

Was he staring at the carp because he was ashamed to meet my eyes? Had he heard Ian’s story about my gesture in our chapel? Did he want me to out us both then and there? This screen of decorum was infuriating. Now, I had the chance to puncture that screen, but I balked. “Ian was on vacation,” I said.

Kittredge acted as though the great tragedy wasn’t Ian being butchered but being caught dead—literally—in a tawdry summer destination. Kittredge had no more idea Ian was gay than did Suki Weatherbee, now approaching us with her black companion. Before they reached us, Kittredge excused himself to visit the bathroom.

“Mark,” said Suki, who smelled of face powder and some woodsy fragrance as we kissed the air next to each other’s cheeks. “This is Gaston,” she said. He was her husband and African, not African-American. “Darling,” she asked him, “could you get us another crabmeat sandwich?” When we were alone, she confided that their marriage had taken even her by surprise. “Not to mention my family and half of Charleston!”