The Matchmaker (5 page)
Fine, Dabney said. Fine, whatever.
Agnes and CJ sat in the back, exuding the smugness of the newly engaged. Dabney wanted to scowl, but she couldn’t. All eyes were on her. She had to smile. She had to
beam.
She put a hand on top of her straw hat to keep it from blowing away.
Once they had parked in Sconset, under giant elms showing off their new spring leaves, Dabney poured herself and Agnes a glass of champagne. Dabney wasn’t one to seek solace in alcohol, but circumstances were piling up against her so rapidly that she saw no alternative. She took a nice, long sip of champagne, which sparkled against her tongue. Any second now, she would relax.
She set out the picnic on a card table covered with her yellow linen tablecloth, used only this one day a year.
She realized that she had forgotten to pick up the lemon tarts from the Nantucket Bake Shop.
“Oh my gosh!” she said. “I forgot the tarts!”
Box was uncorking the white Bordeaux. He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “No one ever eats them anyway.”
Dabney stared at her husband.
Forbearance,
she thought. But emotion overcame Dabney’s sturdy genes: her eyes filled with hot tears. She turned away from Box, and from Agnes and CJ, who now seemed like some hideous two-headed monster, and all the others who were starting to mill on the street. She couldn’t let anyone see her crying about the forgotten tarts. She felt like Clarissa Dalloway, who decided that she would get the flowers for the dinner party herself. This picnic, with the ham, and the asparagus, and the ribbon sandwiches that everyone felt comfortable
ridiculing,
was Dabney’s picnic. It was an expression of her very self, and yet here was John Boxmiller Beech, the brilliant and celebrated economist, telling her it didn’t matter. Which was the equivalent of saying that she, Dabney, didn’t matter.
She stumbled down the street, wishing she were alone, wishing she were anonymous, wishing—for the first time in her forty-eight years—that she were not stuck on this island where every last person thought he knew her, but where in reality no one knew her.
Oh, something was wrong.
Dabney’s vision was blurred by tears, and by drinking champagne on an empty stomach. She knew she should return to the car and eat a ribbon sandwich. There was a big crowd around the 1948 woodie wagon, which had won Best Car three times in the past decade; this year they had done a
Wizard of Oz
theme. The police chief, Ed Kapenash, was dressed as the Scarecrow.
Dabney didn’t stop, didn’t turn around, she just kept going. Clarissa Dalloway had survived, but someone at her dinner party had committed suicide. Was that right? And then of course Virginia Woolf had done herself in. She’d walked into the River Ouse with rocks in her pockets.
Dabney felt unsteady on her feet. Her hand was shaking so badly that champagne spilled onto the cuff of her yellow oxford.
She saw him waiting at the corner of Main and Chapel Streets. He was straddling a ten-speed bicycle, the same one he had ridden everywhere as a teenager because there had been no money to buy him a car. He used to ride that bike whenever he met Dabney to be alone. They used to meet in the Quaker Cemetery, they would meet at the old, abandoned NHA property called Greater Light, and they would meet at the high school football field. Their song growing up had been Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl,” not only because Dabney had brown eyes but because of the line about making love in the green grass behind the stadium. That line had been written for her and Clen.
She knew it was him even though he in no way resembled the twenty-two-year-old she had last seen at Steamship Wharf in 1987. He was bigger—seventy or eighty pounds heavier at least—and he had a mustache and a beard. He was a grown-up, a man.
He was wearing a red T-shirt, jeans, and a pair of black Chuck Taylors. Twenty-seven years later and he still wore Chuck Taylors? In high school they had been the only thing he would spend money on. He had owned five pairs.
Something else was different about him, something off balance. It took Dabney another second to realize that Clen had only one arm. She blinked, thinking it was a trick of the light, or the champagne. But what she saw was real: his left arm was a stump. There was the sleeve of his red T-shirt, and nothing below it.
I suffered a pretty serious loss about six months ago, and I’ve been slowly recovering from it.
He had lost his arm.
Dabney’s vision grew dark at the edges, but there was still color—the red of Clen’s T-shirt and the green glen and weak tea of his Scottish hazel eyes.
I could not stay, and you could not go.
She couldn’t speak. Nina Mobley would be looking for her, as it was time to judge the picnics.
It doesn’t matter, nobody ever eats them anyway.
Clen! She wanted, at least, to say his name, just his name, but even that was beyond her. She was in the power of some other force; something had her by the back of the neck and was pushing her down.
I hope that “never” has an expiration date.
She wanted to ride away on his handlebars. Any second now, she would relax. He was there. It was him.
She did not stop for him. She walked on. Even if she could have spoken, what would she have said? She was unprepared. She wasn’t feeling well. Around the corner, hidden by hedges, she tried to breathe, but found she could not breathe. She heard the sound of breaking glass and realized the champagne flute had dropped to the road and shattered. There was wind in her ears. Her knees gave way.
Blackness.
Silence.
Dr. Donegal:
I started seeing Dabney in 1978, my first year on Nantucket. Dabney was, in fact, my first patient. She was twelve years old; her mother had left the family four years earlier, and Dabney’s father, who was a policeman, was worried about Dabney’s emotional well-being as she entered adolescence. Dabney refused to leave the island; she was convinced that if she left Nantucket, she would die. Or something worse.
“Something worse?” I said.
Officer Kimball then explained to me that the last time Dabney had been off Nantucket was in December 1974, when her mother, Patty Benson, took Dabney to Boston to see
The Nutcracker
. They had orchestra seats for the evening performance of the ballet and a suite at the Park Plaza afterward. Patty, Officer Kimball said, had come from money and was used to doing things this way. She was also spoiled, selfish, and entitled, he said. A summer person, he said—as if this were the explanation for her unpleasant qualities. He then went on to tell me that Patty Benson had left the Park Plaza Hotel in the middle of the night and had never returned.
“Never returned?” I said.
“Never returned,” he said. He knew Patty hadn’t met with foul play because she had given the hotel’s concierge Officer Kimball’s phone number and a twenty-dollar tip to call and tell him to come to Boston to collect their daughter.
When Dabney awoke in the suite in the Park Plaza, Patty was gone. The concierge sent up one of the chambermaids to stay with Dabney until her father arrived.
Dabney never saw or heard from her mother again. Eventually, Officer Kimball hired a detective and discovered that Patty Benson was living in Texas, working as a flight attendant on the private jet of some oil millionaire.
I realized I had my work cut out for me with Dabney. The refusal to leave Nantucket was a natural response to having lost her mother, to being left behind in a hotel room like an empty shopping bag, or a half-eaten club sandwich.
Dabney was happy enough to talk about her mother. Her mother had grown up spending summers in a big old house on Hoicks Hollow Road. The Benson family had belonged to the Sankaty Beach Club; her mother used to say that tan skin was healthy skin. Her mother liked black-and-white movies with singing and dancing, liked lobster tails on Christmas Eve, and did not care for her husband’s Wharf Rat tattoo. Her mother read to Dabney every night before bed and some nights fell asleep in Dabney’s bed; she promised that Dabney could get her ears pierced on her twelfth birthday, but that the only acceptable earrings were pearls.
Dabney wouldn’t talk about
The Nutcracker
trip or waking up in the hotel alone or the fact that her mother had not contacted her in two, then three, then four years.
I had seen my share of obsessive-compulsive disorder and agoraphobia and paranoia, but I had never seen a combination of the three the way they presented in Dabney. I am, perhaps, making things sound worse for her than they were. She was an exceptional child, and as she grew into a teenager, she only became more exceptional. She was lovely to look at, intelligent, clear-eyed, perceptive, kind, poised, articulate, and funny. But when it came to leaving Nantucket, she had a blind spot. She wouldn’t leave the island unless her life depended on it, she said.
I met with her twice a month. We tried antianxiety medications, none of which proved very effective, but we finally made enough progress that when she was accepted to Harvard, she said she would go.
Even I was surprised by this.
She said, “I told you that I wouldn’t leave the island unless my life depended on it, and now my life depends on it. Am I supposed to stay here and wait tables? Work as a nanny? I have to go to college, Dr. Donegal. I’m smart.”
I agreed with her wholeheartedly: she was smart. I was sure that when she got to Harvard, she would realize there was nothing to fear. No one else would disappear.
This didn’t end up being quite true. Her boyfriend, Clendenin Hughes, went to Yale and became engrossed in his studies and his life there. Dabney traveled once to New Haven to see him, and it ended badly. Officer Kimball was working double shifts that weekend, and hence I was dispatched to go get her.
It was on the ride from New Haven back to the Cape, eight years after our therapy started, that I finally got Dabney to talk. She started with things I knew: she was fatally in love with Clendenin Hughes—“fatally” meaning she was pretty sure the love would kill her, or the fact that he didn’t love her the way she loved him would kill her. He wanted to go places and see things, and she couldn’t, and he didn’t understand, and she couldn’t explain. New Haven had changed Clen, she said. I told her that going new places did sometimes change a person, new experiences shaped us, and Dabney said that she liked who she was and was determined to stay that way. She had not been changed by Cambridge, and I suggested that was because she hadn’t truly let Cambridge into her heart. She didn’t respond to this, and the next time she spoke, she told me that the night her mother left, she told Dabney that she was woefully unhappy with her life. She was no longer in love with Dabney’s father; she had been blinded, she said, by the romantic notion of a war hero. She used to love Nantucket as a summer haven, but living there year-round had spoiled it for her. She hated it now with every cell of her body. She felt like a coyote in a trap, she said. She would chew off her own leg to escape.
Dabney said, “When I looked at my mother, she was sitting in a cloud of green smoke. I knew she was leaving, and the thing was, I also knew it was for the best. My father and I were Nantucketers to the core, and my mother hated us for it.”
I was just about to reassure Dabney that her mother did not hate her, but that she, Dabney, was in some sense the coyote’s leg. She was that which her mother had sacrificed in the name of freedom.
But before I could articulate this, Dabney asked me a surprising question.
She said, “Dr. Donegal, have you ever been in love?”
I stopped seeing Dabney as a patient after she graduated from college, although she never truly left my sights. I heard about Clendenin’s exodus to Southeast Asia and Dabney’s pregnancy, and a few years later I heard about her marriage to the Harvard economist, and when I bumped into Dabney and her daughter and said economist one morning having breakfast at the Jared Coffin House, I told her how happy I was for her. Then, a few months later, Dabney called me. At first I suspected marital trouble, or grief counseling because her father had just died of a heart attack, but what Dabney said was, “There’s someone I want you to meet. When can you come for dinner?”
The person she wanted me to meet was a man named Lance Farley, who had recently bought an antiques store in town and who had just joined the Chamber of Commerce. It was clear from the moment I shook hands with Lance Farley what Dabney was up to. I, of course, knew about Dabney’s reputation as a matchmaker, about her supposed “supernatural intuition” when it came to romance. I had heard about her many successes and how she saw either a rosy aura or a green fog. I remembered the story about her mother on the night that she left. But still, I put as much stock in Dabney’s matchmaking as I did in the answers on a Ouija board.
But as we drank gin and tonics in the Beeches’ secluded, grassy backyard and then dined on grilled swordfish and Bartlett Farm tomatoes and homemade peach pie, and as Lance and I discovered a shared love for Bach and the early novels of Philip Roth, and the northern coast of Morocco, I admitted to myself that maybe even after eight years of spelunking in the hidden recesses of someone’s brain, there were still things to be discovered. Maybe Dabney did have a supernatural intuition about romantic matters.
Who was I to say she didn’t?
D
abney fainted on Main Street in Sconset. Box hadn’t even noticed that she was missing; he had been too busy pouring a glass of Montrachet and fixing a ham sandwich. Nina Mobley had come looking for Dabney; the judging of the tailgate picnics was about to begin, and they couldn’t start without Dabney. Box had waved a casual hand at the mayhem around him. “I’m sure she’s here somewhere.” Dabney was the most popular woman on the island. She knew everyone and everyone knew her. She was probably off talking to Mr. So-and-So about the window boxes of his house on Fair Street, or she’d bumped into Peter Genevra from the water company and was feeding him marshmallow-and-Easter-egg sandwiches.
But fifteen minutes later, Dabney still hadn’t turned up. Nina was antsy. Should she start the judging without her?
“Judge without Dabney?” Box said. “Is that even an option?”
“Not really,” Nina admitted. “I need her.”
Box nodded. Dabney and Nina were best friends, but Dabney was the dominant one of the pair. She was Mary Tyler Moore to Nina’s Rhoda, the Lucy to her Ethel.
An instant later, the son of the fire chief—Box recognized the youth but couldn’t recall his name—approached to tell Box that Dabney had fainted in the street, and the paramedics were tending to her now.
It was as Box threaded his way through the crowd on Main Street that he saw the man on the bicycle.
Box took a stutter step; his right knee had been replaced the year before and still wasn’t 100 percent reliable. Box hated himself for looking again, but something about the man struck Box. Big guy, bearded like a lumberjack, one arm.
The man raised his good arm, not in greeting, Box thought, but as an acknowledgment.
I’m here.
Clendenin Hughes? Was that possible? Box was terrible with names but far better with faces. He had looked up Hughes several times on the Internet and had even read a few of his pieces, including the series on Myanmar, which had won him the Pulitzer. Furthermore, the man looked just like Agnes; it was uncanny. That was him, Box was almost certain.
Had Dabney seen Hughes, then? Was that why she’d fainted? Her old lover. Agnes’s father. It had been more than twenty-five years since Hughes had left Nantucket. He lived overseas, in Southeast Asia somewhere. As Box understood it, Clendenin Hughes was a man who needed political unrest and foreign women and espionage plots to keep his gears turning.
As Box understood it, Hughes no longer had any connection to the island.
And yet, there he was.
Clendenin turned the bike around—skillfully, considering he had only one arm—and pedaled away.
One arm?
Box hurried to the rotary. He was sixty-two years old, way past the point in his life where he should feel threatened or jealous. But something gnawed at him. He quickened his step, to tend to Dabney.
Box took Dabney home and put her to bed with three aspirin and a glass of water. Daffodil Weekend had gotten the best of her this year. She had allowed herself to stress out over a pagan celebration.
As her eyes fluttered closed, he thought to ask her about Clendenin Hughes. But he didn’t want to upset her—or himself—any further.
Box had met Dabney twenty-four years earlier at the Sankaty Head Golf Club during a Harvard alumni event. Box was attending at the request of the development office; they liked certain faculty members to show up at such events and glad-hand. Box had been to Nantucket once before, in the late seventies, when he and a few buddies from Harvard had hiked out the slender, sandy arm of Coatue and slept on the beach in tents. He had hardly been to the beach since then.
The event at Sankaty consisted mostly of captains of industry with golfing tans and their Nantucket Lightship basket–toting wives drinking scotch and eating pigs in a blanket, but suddenly Box found himself talking to a girl who had graduated from Radcliffe only four years earlier, a girl born and raised on Nantucket named Dabney Kimball. She had studied art history, but her roommate had taken Econ 10, so Dabney knew who Box was. Soon she was offering to take him on a tour of the island the following day.
“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” he said. She was wearing a madras headband in her brown hair and her face had a fresh-scrubbed look. Box would never have called himself an insightful person even back then, but he had been able to tell that underneath Dabney’s simple, pretty package lay hidden treasure.
She said, “Oh, please? It would be such an honor. I love showing the island off. I’m an ambassador of sorts.”
“But surely you have other plans?” he said. She was young enough to spend her Sundays playing boccie on the beach, or sailing around the harbor while lying across the front of her boyfriend’s sloop.
“I have a two-year-old daughter,” she said. “But my grandmother watches her on Sundays, so I’m free all day.”
A two-year-old?
Box thought. If she had graduated four years earlier, she would have been twenty-six. If she had a two-year-old, she would have gotten pregnant at twenty-three. Very few Radcliffe women had children right out of college. They all went to law school now, business school, medical school—or, in the case of art-history majors, they spent years doing graduate studies in Florence or Vienna. Box checked Dabney’s hand for a ring, but her fingers were bare. She wore no jewelry except for a strand of pearls and matching pearl earrings.
“Okay,” Box said. He was agreeing to the tour without even wanting one. “Thank you. I’d like that.”
Agnes stayed home with Dabney on Sunday morning while Box and CJ golfed at Miacomet. When Box got home, Agnes said, “I’m worried about her, Daddy. What if I called in to work this week and stayed here with her?”
“You know your mother won’t let you do that,” Box said. “She’s not going to stay home from work, and she wouldn’t want you to either. Think about the kids.”
Agnes was the executive director of the Boys & Girls Club in Morningside Heights, a job that paid next to nothing but that gave her enormous satisfaction. It was a job that, quite frankly, scared Box and Dabney. Their daughter sometimes stayed at the club until eight or nine at night with a handful of kids who had no one at home to feed them or put them to bed. Box wrote Agnes a sizable check each month to pay for her rent on the Upper West Side and a car service home whenever she left the club after dark. He suspected, however, that Agnes was too modest to use the car service regularly. He suspected that Agnes took the subway.
While they were golfing, CJ had admitted that Agnes’s job unnerved him as well, and said that after they were married he was going to encourage her to work for a different nonprofit, preferably one in midtown. Box had agreed that this was a good idea.
“The kids aren’t more important to me than my own mother,” Agnes said.
“Your mother will be fine,” Box said.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” Box said. “She has an appointment with Dr. Field in the morning. It’s probably just Lyme disease. Three weeks of antibiotics, she’ll be as good as new.”
“Okay,” Agnes said. “CJ has a client negotiation in the morning, so we’ll leave tonight.”
“I’ll take care of your mother,” Box said. “I promise.”
On their tour of the island nearly a quarter of century earlier, Dabney had driven Box to Quaise and Quidnet, to Madaket and Madequecham, to Shimmo and Shawkemo in her battered 1972 Chevy Nova. It wasn’t the car he’d expected a young lady like her to drive; she seemed like someone who would be more comfortable in a Saab convertible or a Volkswagen Jetta, but then she explained that she had been raised by her father—a Vietnam vet and a Nantucket policeman—and he had turned her into a motorhead. This term, coming out of Dabney’s wholesome mouth, made Box throw back his head and laugh. But Dabney was dead serious. She had purchased the Nova with her own money, and she wanted to trade it in for a Camaro. Her dream was to someday own a Corvette Stingray split-window with matching numbers in Bermuda blue. She was a devoted Chevy girl, she said.
She was sorry that the Nova didn’t have four-wheel drive only because that meant she couldn’t take him up the beach to her favorite spot, Great Point.
“That’s okay,” Box had said. He didn’t tell her that the tour had already run so far over his time limit that he’d missed the ferry he had booked back to the mainland.
She said, “I’ll take you to my second-favorite spot. And we can eat. I made lunch.”
Her second-favorite spot was Polpis Harbor, where she parked overlooking the sparkling water and the scattering of sails. Dabney pulled a wicker basket out of the Nova’s trunk. She had made fried chicken, macaroni salad, and strawberry pie. She handed Box an icy cold root beer, which was the most delicious thing he could remember tasting in his forty years.
Up until that point, Box had been a confirmed bachelor. He had dated dozens of women—most of them very smart, some of them very pretty, and one or two who were both. But Box had always imagined love as a musical note, and so far nobody had struck the right one. But the note resonated loud and clear that afternoon at Polpis Harbor with Dabney. It was a sweet, thrumming sound that nearly knocked him off his feet. He, who had never really given a thought to anyone’s feelings but his own, wanted to know her. She seemed ripe for the picking; he loved her pert, freckled nose. But he also knew he should proceed cautiously.
“Tell me about your daughter,” he said.
By Tuesday afternoon, Box had a phone call from Ted Field.
He said, “The tick panel was clean. It’s not Lyme, not babesiosis, not tularemia, thank God. Her symptoms are pretty wide-ranging and not inconsistent with a tick-borne disease, so I put her on a course of antibiotics anyway, just to be safe.”
“Okay,” Box said. “Thank you.”
“Her white blood cell count was high,” the doctor said. “She might want to go to Boston to get that checked out.”
“You know my wife,” Box said. “What are the chances she’ll go to Boston?”
“Slim to none. I know because I suggested it to her. I just don’t want to miss anything more serious.”
“Do you think it’s something more serious?” Box asked.
“Possibly?” Ted Field said. “Or it may be as simple as a wheat allergy. Gluten is the new bogeyman.”
Box hung up the phone and stared at it for a moment. Something more serious? Dabney never got sick. In his heart, Box believed that Dabney was suffering from stress. Anyone watching her work would have thought she was in charge of running a ten-billion-dollar multinational company: she took her job that seriously. And then there was the specter of the man on the bicycle. Clendenin Hughes—or maybe not. Maybe Box had been mistaken.
He picked up the phone to call Dabney at the Chamber. It had been so long since he’d called her at work that he had forgotten the number. Oh—3543, of course. There had been years and years when he had phoned Dabney at work every single day—to check in, to ask about the weather, to find out the score of Agnes’s field hockey game, to tell her he loved her. But possibly just as many years had passed since he’d grown too busy to call every day. He had classes, students, office hours, graduate assistants and department meetings to manage, his textbook to write and revise, articles to critique and publish, associate professors to advise, the crumbling markets in Europe to analyze and comment on (he appeared as a guest on CNBC two or three times a year). He’d also been receiving phone calls from the Department of the Treasury, which, although flattering, required intricate, time-consuming problem solving. He routinely complained that he needed four extra hours in each day. He started secretly to resent having to travel to Nantucket every weekend, and so he’d recently asked Dabney how she would feel if he spent one weekend a month immersed in work in Cambridge.
She had said, “Oh. That would be fine. I guess.”
She had said this with equanimity, but Box—although not gifted when it came to reading minds—figured out that it would
not
be fine. Or maybe it
would
be fine? Dabney was as self-sufficient and independent a woman as Box had ever known, and over the years, their union had settled into a comfortable arrangement. They were like a Venn diagram. She lived her life and he didn’t interfere—and vice versa. The space where they overlapped had grown more and more slender over the years. He assumed that this was normal, as was his waning sex drive. His nonexistent sex drive. He had considered going to a doctor and getting a pill, but that struck him as embarrassing, and beneath him. Dabney wasn’t complaining, anyway. Box figured that he and his wife had simply settled into the well-feathered nest of middle age.
Nina Mobley answered on the first ring. “Nantucket Chamber of Commerce.”
“Hello, Nina, it’s Box,” he said. “Is my wife there?”
“I’m sorry,” Nina said. “
Who
is this?”
“Box,” he said, feeling mildly annoyed. Though it
had
been aeons since he’d called. “John Boxmiller Beech. Dabney’s husband.”
“Box?”
she said. “Is everything all
right?
”
“Nina,” Box said. “Is my wife there, please?”
Dabney came on the phone. “Is everything okay?”
“Yes, yes,” Box said. “ I just had a call from Ted Field, who told me you passed the tick test but that he put you on antibiotics anyway.”
“He did. But I’m not taking them. I feel much better.”
“If he prescribed them,” Box said, “then you’d better take them.”
“I feel much better,” Dabney repeated. “Why did he call
you
anyway? I’m the patient. You’re not my father. He shouldn’t have called you.”
Box was tempted to agree with her, patient confidentiality and whatnot. But he and Ted Field had rowed together at Harvard a million years earlier; they were friends. Box wondered if Ted had called because there really might be something more serious going on.
“He said your white blood count was high, and that you should probably go to Boston to get it checked out.”
“Not going to happen,” Dabney said.