The Fisher Boy (8 page)

She’d met Gaston in Senegal. She was working there after earning her MBA at Wharton. Suki began giggling. “So Gaston never met Ian. Remember Ian back at St. Harold’s? How full of the devil he was? But sweet. Remember Spring Dance when we all got so stoned that we broke into the chapel late at night and ate
all
the communion wafers?”

Not being part of Ian’s clique, I didn’t remember, but I nodded as if savoring the story.

“Are we almost done?” Gaston asked, seeming to grow peevish and less deferential once he returned with the sandwich. “We’ve paid our respects. Let’s get an early shuttle home.”

“Gaston
swore
he couldn’t function away from Mother Africa, but now that we’re living in New York, he just loves it,” Suki told me.

Gaston was not about to let this sweeping statement pass without modifying it in some way. There was a certain vitality to Manhattan, he admitted, but it was “imbued with the innate violence of American society.”

“Eventually we’ll go back to Senegal,” Suki explained. “The skyscrapers make Gaston claustrophobic.”

Gaston bombarded the carp with pieces of crabmeat roll. The fish were colliding with each other in their quest for the bread, slashing back and forth through the water as Gaston kept tossing them crumbs. “Americans are fundamentally unsure who they are. Unsure whether they even belong on this continent,” he said.

“We’ve had one sermon already today, darling,” Suki reminded him.

“Look,” Gaston said, tossing the last bit of bread at a giant carp that was silvery white like the dough rolls Chinese serve for dim sum. “No, not at the fish. Look at that man!”

Gaston indicated a tall, black male among the mourners across the garden. His sleek dark suit fit his body like skin, but his hair was worlds away from either Gloucester or St. Harold’s—a mane of dreadlocks, tumbling over his shoulders, bleached peroxide-blond.

“He’s utterly ridiculous,” Gaston snapped. “He’s not sure whether he’s Haile Selassie or Madonna…It’s this confusion you have, your mongrel culture.”

The man with the dreadlocks, in his early thirties, I guessed, was nursing a drink and wandering absentmindedly through the crowd.

“This Provincetown,” Gaston said. “I understand it’s…a very promiscuous environment. Many nightclubs, lots of, how do you say it,
low
life?”

“Yes,” Suki said, “it’s Fag Heaven. Now why did I think Ian summered in Katama?”

Everything gay about Ian was being obliterated. I felt like I was being obliterated too. A scalding force was threatening to erupt, like the night I’d poured beer onto Ian at Quahog. I said, “You know Ian had changed a lot since Spring Dance at St. Harold’s. He really wasn’t the Katama sort at all. He enjoyed Provincetown more, for the same reason I do…”

Gaston was acting bored and Suki was faking a smile.

I said, “The dick tastes better than on the Vineyard.”

Gaston began laughing, but Suki’s face was transformed into the mask of some Tibetan demon. “You liar!” Suki spat. “Ian always loathed you. He felt sorry for you, that’s why he tolerated your company…you twisted, pathetic little freak.”

“Great to see you,” I told her.

I navigated my way through the crowd until I located Arthur, browsing the long, linen-covered table laden with silver platters of food: mounds of shrimp, salmon mousse, fussy triangular sandwiches.

“I’m afraid I just disgraced myself,” I laughed. “I outed Ian to Suki Weatherbee, the St. Harold’s mattress. She spent every weekend in one of our dormitories. With either Ian or Kittredge Rawlings. She went to Braemere, you know, our sister school.”

“Our incestuous sister,” Arthur said.

Miriam joined us. She seemed a bit light-hearted for the day of a funeral, eating a jungle of a salad. “An adequate salad bar,” she whispered. “Will wonders never cease?”

We found a quiet corner of the garden where we could relax, speculate about the murder, and hear Arthur’s plan to dedicate his Swim for Scholars to Ian’s memory. While we were talking, Ian’s sister Sallie strolled by, arm-in-arm with a tall, dazzling stranger.

“Her fiancé,” Arthur whispered. “Or so I heard over the cucumber sandwiches. He’s a marine biologist. The ultimate small fish in a big pond.”

Chapter Ten

Arthur and Miriam returned to Cape Cod while I called on my mother in Gloucester. She lived a short distance from the Drummonds in a strange stone gatehouse, a mossy tower Rapunzel might have inhabited, so darkened by overhanging spruce trees that it seemed as though sun never penetrated its dampness. My mother had bought the house years ago from the Snows, distant relatives of Ian’s father.

At the time, the Snows were moving to England, something to do with North Sea oil, and the grounds of their estate, Bellevue, were going to be subdivided into a development called Bayberry Heights. Then Mr. Snow dropped dead of an embolism in the first-class cabin of their jet to London. His widow and children began a litigious dispute about Bellevue, and, eventually, the house was pulled down—some museum in New York bought the Grinling Gibbons carving from the library—and the family donated the land to the Nature Conservancy, for tax purposes. But before Mr. Snow booked his fatal flight, when it looked like Bayberry Heights would make the transition from the drawing board to the cement mixer and saw, my mother bought the gatehouse “for a song,” as she would say. And now that it abutted conservation land instead of an outbreak of plywood townhouses, its value had skyrocketed.

My mother was in back of the house when I arrived, painting at her easel, a canvas of Halibut Point, Rockport. She had hair like mine, the tarnished copper of hoarded pennies, my sharp features and the mouth someone once called “licentious.” She’d liked a drink since her nightclub days, while I was wary of liquor. She was wearing something she’d salvaged from a yard sale, a housecoat appliquéd with fat red strawberries. On her feet were ballet slippers, and, as always, she rattled when she moved; she wore a dozen silver bracelets and a necklace of pottery beads. Why she bothered with jewelry when she was content with such clothes, her “painting rags,” was a mystery.

“Hello, darling,” she said, although her back was toward me and my feet were muffled by the browning spruce boughs littering the lawn like rushes on the floor of a medieval palace. She had the hearing of a guard dog; I guess that came with her musical training.

“How can you paint such a sunny landscape in this gloom?” I asked. “A bomb shelter couldn’t be any darker.”

“I have the sun in my head.” She dipped a brush in turpentine and wiped it clean. “It’s in my memory. Besides, I was just touching up.”

“You weren’t at the funeral.”

“That’s right, I was painting.”

We hadn’t spoken since Ian was killed. My mother stepped back to appraise the canvas. She’d taken up painting late in life but was quite good. You could see the waves swelling; almost experience the odor of salt and kelp.

“What do you think? It’s already been sold to a homesick Bostonian in Minneapolis.” My mother’s art sold well. Between painting and giving piano lessons, she made a comfortable living.

“It’s the usual masterpiece. He’ll love it.”

Wiping her fingers on a rag she’d wet with turpentine, she said, “Mark, I’m not being callous, but mourning doesn’t undo what’s already been done. I believe in being nice to people when they’re alive. Not that Ian always did. Good Lord, I still remember him torturing poor Jonathan Robson. Of course, coming from that family, from that privilege, that arrogance.”

She recounted a story often told in Gloucester, of how Ian’s mother, Janet, had run over a mailman while returning from a tennis match she’d lost in Brookline. “Going sixty in a thirty-mile zone. That poor mailman was in a body cast for months. That family was
always
reckless.”

I smiled because “reckless” was an adjective sometimes flung in her direction.

“I suppose I’m saying that because it’s comforting, I know. It makes it seem less random if Ian put himself in the line of fire. If he came from a family that used poor judgment.” She was putting the brushes to soak in an old peanut butter jar. “I was hoping you’d drop by. I’ve marinated some chicken. I’m done painting today. I’m ready for a stiff vodka gimlet. How about you?”

I nodded. We sat in the back yard, beneath the blue-black spruces. My mother loved the sea, and turned out seascapes for corporate boardrooms, and tourists and transplanted New Englanders, yet she had one of the few pieces of property in this part of Gloucester lacking a view of the ocean. “Why don’t you trim these stupid trees?” I asked her, after the vodka made me a bit bolder. “If you trimmed these trees, you could see the water.”

“I’m an earth sign, darling,” my mother said.

That excuse was ridiculous because my mother thought astrology belonged in its place on the comics pages of newspapers. “Are you avoiding seeing the sea because it makes you think of my father?”

“Of course not, darling.” She was still in the ratty housecoat with a Jackson Pollack’s worth of paint dribbled down the front. “Would you like another gimlet?”

“My head is swimming. I’d better not.”

“Well, you drank that first one like it was lemonade. Just go easy. You’re not driving back to the Cape tonight surely?”

“No.” I surrendered my empty glass for a refill, to be sure I kept my word and slept over.

After dinner, after I’d consumed generous amounts of marinated chicken, potato salad, and corn on the cob, my mother mentioned one of the Snows. “I saw Geoffrey Snow at West Beach. Last week. He was visiting from Phoenix.”

I hardly knew Geoffrey. The Snows kept to themselves and kept their distance even from the Drummonds.

“Geoffrey has done well. He designs golf courses, imagine, and the Snows were all so uncoordinated, such poor athletes. Not like Duncan and his gang.” My mother served us home-made rhubarb pie: tart, slimy, and delicious. She said, “Geoffrey says Duncan Drummond isn’t well at all, he’s becoming confused.”

I remembered Ian’s father at the funeral, his bewildered expression during the service, his folding the program over and over. “He looked lost at the funeral,” I said, “but who wouldn’t?”

“Mark, I worry about you so. I mean, I’m sure you’re careful, but do you have to go back to Provincetown this summer? Couldn’t you commute like the rest of your troupe? I’ve seen that horrible Hollings Fair speaking on television, so smarmy and vitriolic. And those Christian Soldiers are everywhere, like gypsy moths.”

I said, “I can’t quit everything.” We both knew what that meant. I’d bailed from the ad world to concentrate on acting. Now, thanks to the fight, I’d blown that as well, but didn’t mention this.

Drinking the last of my gimlet, I remembered the vodka I’d shared with Ian and the bottle broken on the breakwater.

“Provincetown is dangerous this summer,” my mother said. “It’s not like when I sang there way back when.”

Feeling drunk and self-confident, I surprised even myself: “Maybe Ian was killed by someone he knew. Not by a basher.” I thought of myself: “Ian pissed off his friends more than anyone.”

“But these incidents,” my mother said, “the dog on your friend’s doorstep, the whole climate of the town—”

“So you saw me on TV?”

“Geoffrey Snow saw you. He mentioned it. I called you, I left three messages on your machine.”

It was true, I remembered the messages, but I’d postponed calling back because of dreading this conversation: the Dangers of Provincetown Conversation. Of course the issue was more than my summer on Cape Cod. Like many “bohemians,” my mother wanted conventional, placid children. She provided enough originality for the family.

“It wasn’t bashers, I’m sure of it. People would like to think so, because, as you say, it’s comforting.”

“Yet for some strange reason, wasn’t Ian popular? In with the in crowd, that sort of thing?” My mother gathered up the remains of the chicken, which, stripped of their meat, with their bones and structure revealed, looked more like carcasses than ever. “I called you about the exhibit too,” she said.

“Exhibit?”

“Centered around the first love of your life, remember?
The Fisher Boy?”

Of course. I’d meant to write it on my calendar before I left Boston. I’d figured I couldn’t help but remember it—such a big event right in Provincetown. Provincetown Municipal Museum was a planning a massive retrospective of his work, with paintings on loan from collections throughout the world.

That night, awake in my childhood bed, I kept thinking of Ian, newly in his grave, spending his first night in the Drummond plot, guarded by that atrocious, bare-breasted sphinx. Someone, somewhere, was very much alive—the person or persons who put Ian into that grave.

It must have been about midnight when I heard the sobbing, faint and stifled, like a child’s ghost. I followed the sound through the darkened gatehouse, down the cool stone stairs and into the kitchen. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, still in her painting clothes, with the Gloucester newspaper spread out in front of her, and the vodka bottle, just the bottle but no glass in her hand. Her face was streaked with tears.

I asked the stupid question we all ask when the answer is all too obvious: “Are you all right?” I thought she’d jump, be startled, or nonchalantly shoo me away, but she set the bottle on the table then began smoothing the newspaper, smoothing the obituary page with its bad news in fine print, its advertisements for funeral homes and tombstones.

“It’s an awful thing, just awful.” She smoothed the newspaper as though it were her sketchpad, ready to receive her impressions of an esteemed local view. She’d consumed a good deal of vodka; I remembered the level of the liquor in the bottle during our dinner.

Something priggish and self-protective made me speak. “If you were this upset, you should’ve come to the funeral.”

She laughed, running her fingers over the newsprint. “Good Lord, darling, they paid me. They paid me to stay away, they were rather generous.”

“What do you mean?” Everything suddenly seemed light, as if gravity had been abolished. As if everything in the room seemed made of helium.

“When I was at the Conservatory, I think I told you I sang in a little club called Lulu Wright’s, in the South End.”

I sat down in one of the hard oak chairs. I had the urge to confiscate the bottle of liquor, but I knew there were more, legions of them, there always had been, hidden creatively throughout the house, like Easter eggs.

“There were some pretty big names passing through there back then, and, hard as it is to believe, some people from the North Shore showed up. On occasion. We didn’t do anything special to encourage them, I mean, there was no Stuffed Shirt Night.” She laughed her drinker’s laugh—raucous and sad and embarrassing.

“One man…from the North Shore brought along some colleagues from his bank. I’d always thought of him as the consummate Philistine. A man with a tin ear, an intimidating member of the local gentry. I thought he was slumming.

“And then, Good Lord, he came back on his own, for five nights in a row. I was floored. Well, we talked after the show, and, lo and behold, he was a jazz buff, an aficionado, really. He’d waited for five hours in the rain outside a studio in Chicago just to get Ella Fitzgerald’s autograph. He knew songs by Charlie Parker that people at the Conservatory had never heard of.”

She’d heard tales of his wild youth, expelled from Harvard, totaling enough Jaguars to empty a dealership. Her mother had warned her that the whole family was reckless. She’d quoted that famous line about Lord Byron—the family was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

“I was young,” my mother said, “and a bit reckless myself…He was handsome, and almost courtly. It sounds so silly, but he made me believe in myself, in my singing. My mother was opposed to my pursuing the arts, she was practical to a T.”

He wrote poems to her, in lower-case letters like ee cummings. They met secretly in places his family would never frequent, over plates of tripe in the North End, in the Monet room of the Museum of Fine Arts. His grandmother’s portrait was hanging in that museum. Sargent had painted her, all firelight and pearls; he’d made that mercenary old woman who re-used mousetraps in her house on Beacon Hill seem as enticing as a mirage.

“He came back to my apartment one Friday in June. I was renting a studio so small you didn’t have room to change your mind. I said how much I hated it, but he said he lived in a much smaller space. In his marriage. His marriage felt like the character in that Edgar Allan Poe story, “The Premature Burial.” He was buried alive in his marriage. His wife was obsessed by her tennis game—imagine! His two young sons had each other. And his job at the bank was an utter bore; money was to be enjoyed, not managed.”

As I listened to her speak, a fantasy died as my father became something palpable, someone real—a man I’d known all my life, a man whose presence had consistently diminished my confidence. I could see him, years ago, with the faintest of smiles on his face and a gin and tonic in his hand, asking what I’d been “up to” and then listening to my answer with a detached amusement, as though I were the punchline to some joke he’d already heard.

I remembered his party tricks—with origami, of course—and his collection of birds’ eggs, some rare, mounted and labeled, under glass in his library in Gloucester. He sang “Summertime” once, at his daughter’s coming-out party. He had a beautiful voice, rich and low. My mother had trespassed into that reckless family, following her seduced young heart.

“Do his children know?” My voice and calm were faltering. “His other children, I mean.”

“No,” my mother said. “His wife was several months pregnant at the time.” She was holding Ian’s obituary in her hands, which trembled faintly like dying birds. “He provided for you, Mark. He established a trust for your education, for prep school and college. He bought me this gatehouse from the Snows. He made me sign an agreement I wouldn’t reveal his identity until after he was dead. But now, in his condition…”

He was as removed, of course, as if death had taken him. The dementia that was smothering his being was the neurological equivalent of Poe’s nightmare.

“You knew,” I said, meaning everything about my father. “You knew, yet you let me wonder for twenty-nine years. You let me comb through records at the Port Authority. Looking for some mythical destroyer.”