The Weight of Water (2 page)

What does Adaline think when she observes Thomas? My husband is a poet of the first tier, already a kind of emeritus at the
university, even though he is only forty-seven. Adaline is not a poet, but seems to have great admiration for Thomas’s work.
I wonder if she knew Thomas’s verse before, or if she has learned it for the trip.

When there is time, I read about the islands. I carry pounds of paper in my camera bag — guidebooks, accounts of the murders,
a trial transcript — materials from Research, who seem to think that I am writing the piece. When the murders occurred, in
1873, the newspapers wrote of the crime, and later it was called in these same papers “the trial of the century.” This is
a familiar turn of phrase this summer as we witness a courtroom spectacle that has all but benumbed even the most avid observers.
My editor thinks there is a link between the two events: a double murder with a blade, a famous trial, circumstantial evidence
that hinges on tiny factual details. As for me, I think the similarities few, but a magazine will make of something what it
can. I am paid to take the pictures.

My expense account is lavish, but Rich, who publishes technical journals, will not hear of money. I am glad that Thomas has
thought of his younger brother and his boat: I would not like to be in such close quarters with a strange captain or a crew.

How long, I wonder, has Rich been seeing Adaline?

I read many accounts of the murders. I am struck most by the relativity of facts.

When I think about the murders, I try to picture what might have happened that night. I imagine there would have been a gale,
and that the wind from the water would have battered against the glass. Sometimes, I can hear that wind and can see the wooden
house under the high cirrus of a full moon. Maren and Anethe would have lain on their backs on either side of the double bed
— or could it have been that they were touching? — and in the next room, Karen would have called out suddenly with fright.

Or was it that the dog barked first?

Sometimes I imagine the murders to have been a thing of subtle grace and beauty, with slim arms raised in white nightgowns
against the fright, white nightgowns against the snow, the rocks sharp and the gale billowing the thin linen like sheets on
a line. I see an arm raised along a window, the moon etching smudges on the panes, and a woman calling to another and another,
while below them, at the waterline, the waves slap fast and hard against the dory.

I love to watch my daughter move about the boat in her bathing suit, the fabric stretched and limp, riding high over her butt,
her body plump and delicious, often salty if I lick her arm. At five, Billie is entranced by the sloop, a space with lots
of cubbyholes and clever places to store the few toys she has been allowed to bring along. She sleeps in the quarter berth
beside the companionway. Adaline and Rich are in the forward cabin, the owner’s prerogative. Thomas and I have less privacy,
stowed amidships as we are, in the open, on a bed that is put away each morning to become a breakfast table.

Occasionally I find Billie’s sandy footprints down below. Sand in the fridge. Does Rich mind? I think not. Billie’s hair has
lightened in the sun and curls continuously from the damp. More and more, I notice her enlarged pupils and the way they cause
her eyes to appear nearly black. She has extravagantly long lashes that exaggerate every blink. The loss of her two top front
teeth has widened her grin and produces a delicate lisp.

In the mornings, I can hear Adaline and Rich in the forward cabin: a rustle of cloth, a murmur, rhythmic movements. The sounds
from Adaline are surprising — guttural and sometimes frantic. I begin to anticipate the sounds and to move away from them.
I go above to the cockpit in my robe. I wonder if Billie would be afraid if she awoke — afraid that Adaline were being hurt.

I think that Evan, who was Anethe’s husband, would have moved urgently toward the door on the morning after the murders, reports
of the unthinkable pushing him forward in a kind of frenzy. The high cirrus would have blown out by then, and the sun would
have been on the rocks, beginning to melt the snow. Evan would have been the first man inside the door. He would have insisted.

In 1852, Nancy Underhill, a schoolteacher, was sitting on a ledge at Star when a wave washed her into the sea. Her body was
found, a week later, at Cape Neddick, in Maine.

This morning, after we have tied up, Adaline stands in the cockpit, her hands at her waist, her eyes searching the shoreline
of Smuttynose, as if something profound might reveal itself to her. When she speaks, she has a residue of an Irish accent,
and her voice lends her an aura of authority I do not necessarily feel in myself. Her words rise and fall and dip some more,
and then come back to where you can hear them — like soft church music, I often think, or like the melodious beat of water
on the hull.

Adaline moves like a dancer, swaying for balance. In the mornings, when she comes up the ladder and emerges from the companionway,
she seems to glide into the cockpit. She wears long skirts in thin cottons, with blouses that fall loosely around her hips.
She wears a gold cross at her throat, jewelry that is somewhat startling in a woman of her age and stature. The cross draws
the eye to the hollow above her clavicle, a hollow that is smooth and tanned. It is as though she once wore the cross as a
girl and simply forgot to take it off.

Adaline, Rich tells me, works for Bank of Boston, in an international division. She never talks about her job. I imagine her
in suits, standing at gates in airports. She has scars on her wrists, slightly crooked vertical threads in smooth flesh, as
though she once tried to trace her veins with a razor or a knife. She has an arresting mouth, with full curved lips of even
dimensions, and barely any bow at all.

Sometimes I imagine I can see Maren Hontvedt at the end of her life. In the room in which she is sitting, the wallpaper is
discolored but intact. She wears an eyelet cap to cover her hair. I note the languid drape of the shawl folding into her lap,
the quiescent posture of her body. The floor is bare, wooden, and on the dresser is a basin of water. The light from the window
falls upon her face and eyes. They are gray eyes, not yet faded, and they retain an expression that others who knew her might
recognize.

I think that she is dying and will be gone soon. There are thoughts and memories that she hoards and savors, holding them
as one might a yellowed photograph of a child. The skin hangs from her face in folds, her skin a crushed velvet the color
of dried hydrangeas. She was not beautiful as a young woman, but her face was handsome, and she was strong. The structure
of her face is still as it was, and one can see the bones as one might be able to discern the outline of a chair covered by
a loose cloth.

I wonder this: If you take a woman and push her to the edge, how will she behave?

After we moor the boat, Rich offers to take me over to Smuttynose in the Zodiac. Billie begs to go along. I shoot from the
dinghy in a crouch, leaning against the side of the boat for balance. I use the Hasselblad and a telephoto with a polarizing
lens. From time to time, I shout to Rich to cut the engine so that the vibrations will be lessened, or I gesture with my hand
in such a way that he knows to push the throttle forward.

There are two houses on the island. One is a small, wooden-frame house called the Haley house. It is not habitable, but is
of historic note and has a great aesthetic purity. The other is a shack with rudimentary supplies for shipwrecked sailors.

Rich beaches the Zodiac expertly inside the crumbled breakwater of Smuttynose. The beach is tiny, narrow, blackened by dark
stones and charred bits of wood. The air is sharp, and I understand why years ago sea air was prescribed as a tonic for the
body. Billie removes her life jacket and sits cross-legged on the sand in a lavender T-shirt that doesn’t quite cover her
belly. Rich is tanned already, an even red-gold on his legs and arms and face. There is a line at his throat. We have left
Thomas and Adaline on the Morgan.

In the winter months on the Isles of Shoals, the windows were never opened, nor were the children ever let outside, so that
by March the air inside the houses was stale and putrid and old with smoke, and the children could hardly breathe.

Rich takes Billie by the hand and guides her past the breakwater so that he can help her search for mussels among the rocks
and put them in her pail. I heft my camera bag onto my shoulder and head out toward the end of Smuttynose. My plan is to turn
around and frame a shot of the entire island. At my destination, the easternmost tip of the island, there is a rock shaped
like a horse’s fetlock. Inside the square-cut boulders is a sheltered space, a sea cave, that sloshes with water when the
tide is high. It is slippery on the rocks, but after I have left my camera bag on a dry ledge and anchored it in a crevice
so that the wind will not blow it away, I crawl like a crab to the sea cave and squat inside. On three sides of me are the
shoals and roiling water, and straight out to the east nothing but Atlantic Ocean. Unlike the harbor and the place where we
have landed, this side of the island is unprotected. There is lichen on the rock, and small flies lift in a frenzy whenever
a wave crashes and sprays.

At the rock, which is known as Maren’s Rock, I shut my eyes and try to imagine what it would be like to huddle in that cave
all night in winter, in the dark, in the snow and freezing temperatures, with only my nightgown and a small black dog for
warmth.

I crawl from the rock, scraping my shin in the process. I collect my camera bag, which has not moved from its notch. I take
a roll of color slide film, thirty-six shots of Maren’s rock. I walk the length of the island, the going slow in the thick,
scratchy brush.

On January 14, 1813, fourteen shipwrecked Spanish sailors, driven to Smuttynose by a winter gale, tried to reach the light
from a candle in an upstairs window of Captain Haley’s cottage.

They died in a blizzard not forty feet from their destination and are buried under boulders on the island. One man made it
to the stone wall, but could go no further. Captain Haley discovered him the following morning. Six more bodies were found
on January 17, five more on the twenty-first, and the final body was discovered “grappled up on Hog Island passage” on the
twenty-seventh. According to the
Boston Gazette
on January 18, the vessel, named
Conception
, weighed between three and four hundred tons and was laden with salt. No one in America ever knew the dead sailors’ names.

When I find Rich and Billie, they are sitting on the beach, their toes dug into the sand. I sit beside them, my knees raised,
my arms folded around my legs. Billie gets up and stares into her pail and begins to leap in stiff-legged jetés all around
us.

“My fingers are
bleeding
,” she announces proudly. “We pulled off a million of them. At least a million. Didn’t we, Uncle Rich?”

“Absolutely. At least a million.”

“When we get back to the boat, we’re going to cook them up for supper.” She bends over her pail again and studies it solemnly.
Then she begins to drag the pail down to the water’s edge.

“What is she doing?” Rich asks.

“I think she’s giving the mussels something to drink.”

He smiles. “I once read an account of a pilot who said the most beautiful sight he’d ever seen from the air was the Isles
of Shoals.” He runs his hand over his shaved head. His skull is perfectly shaped, without bumps or dents. I wonder if he worries
about sunburn.

“Adaline seems very nice,” I say.

“Yes, she is.”

“She admires Thomas’s work.”

Rich looks away and tosses a pebble. His face is not delicate, in the way that Thomas’s is. Rich has dark, thick eyebrows
that nearly meet in the center. Sometimes I think that he has Thomas’s mouth, but he doesn’t. Rich’s is firmer, more pronounced
in profile. “Childe Hassam painted here,” he says. “Did you know that?”

“I wouldn’t have thought that someone who worked for Citibank would know so much about poetry,” I say.

“Actually, it’s Bank of Boston.” He tilts his head and looks at me. “I think poetry is something that’s fairly univer $$$on’t
you? Enjoying it, I mean.”

“I suppose.”

“How is Thomas?”

“I don’t know. I think he’s convinced himself that each poet is given a finite number of words and that he’s used up his allotment.”

“I notice that he’s drinking more,” Rich says. Rich’s legs are brown and covered with dark hair. Looking at his legs, I contemplate
the trick of nature that has caused Thomas and Rich to receive what appear to be entirely separate sets of genes. I glance
out toward the sloop, which floats four hundred feet from us in the harbor. The mast teeters in the chop.

“Adaline was married once,” Rich says. “To a doctor. They had a child.”

I turn to him. He must see surprise on my face.

“I think the girl must be three or four now. The father has her. They live in California.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Adaline doesn’t see the girl. She’s chosen not to.”

I am silent. I try to absorb this information, to put it together with the gold cross and the lilting voice.

“Adaline came over from Ireland for him,” he says. “For the doctor.”

He leans over and brushes a dried smear of muck from my calf. He smooths my leg with his fingertips. I am thinking that the
calf is not a place that anyone touches much. I wonder if he shaves his head every day. What the top of his head would feel
like.

“She’s kind of detached,” he says, withdrawing his fingers. “She doesn’t stay with people long.”

“How long have you two been together?”

“About five months. Actually, I think my tenure is almost up.”

I think of saying to him that to judge by the sounds emanating from the forward cabin, I cannot agree.

In front of us, Billie lies down at the waterline. Mostly, I think, to get sand in her hair. I tense and begin to rise. Rich
puts a restraining hand on my wrist.