“Well, here we are. So show me.” I touched his upper arm, to let him know I didn’t hold my injury against him.
“Okay,” he said, remembering the point of our mission. “Stare at the light.”
I did, for five long seconds. When I looked away I saw squiggles of light in the blackness, and the blackness was complete. “Now shade your eyes and look into the tidal pool.”
Cupping our hands around our eyes, Sam and I squatted on rocks and peered into the black pool. Tiny waves rippled the surface; the tide was coming in. We looked below them, to the bottom where purplish spangles flashed like neon. “What is
that
?” I asked.
Sam reached into the water and pulled up a handful of kinky seaweed. It was reddish and made me think of Joe Finnegan’s hair. “No, what is that sparkly stuff?”
“It’s this—
Chondrus crispus
. Irish moss. It’s covered with bioluminescence. Tiny organisms that give off a phosphorescent glow.” His voice was awestruck.
It was glorious. I cupped my hands around my eyes and watched the purple weed glimmer and dance in the intertidal current. I pulled a bit of it out, but like Sam’s handful, it lost its magic when it left the water.
“Unaaa!” I heard Margo calling my name. Bracing myself on Sam’s shoulder, I stood and waved.
“We’re out here!” I called. Margo stood still until she could fix my position, and then she waved back and walked away. With my white pants and Sam’s white shirt, we must have looked like two bright rocks jutting into the sea.
Sam touched my calf. “That’s a nasty scrape you’ve got. But at least you got it in the salt water. It’ll heal fast.”
It was already starting to feel sore.
The next morning, I wakened to sunrise in the turret room. My calf throbbed with pain under the weight of the covers. I lay in bed watching the light turn from deep red to pink to sparkling blue.
“You awake?” I heard Margo whisper through the door after a while. She knows I’m an early riser.
“I’m awake,” I said, and she entered bearing a tray with two cups and a porcelain coffeepot.
“I wasn’t absolutely sure you’d be alone,” she said. “I know what a romantic night on the beach can do.”
I nodded, sipping coffee. I pulled off the gauze bandage to shock her with the sight of my scraped leg.
“What happened?” she asked, leaning closer, a horrified look in her blue eyes. Her mouth looked like a parody of someone staring into a bloody car crash.
“I slipped on the rocks. Like a goon. Made a big fool of myself.”
“That looks awful. It’ll probably get infected.”
“No, it happened in salt water.”
“Well…even so. Good thing you found the bandages—Matt and I went straight to bed. We were whooped. Did you see the Karsky sunrise? The colors get more magnificent as the weather gets cooler.”
“It was extremely Karsky,” I agreed, happy that Margo had remembered the old color school.
“You and Sam Chamberlain seemed to hit it off.”
“Mmmmm.” I felt uneasy, sensing that Margo wanted to propel me into a romance. Maybe with the idea of saying “And to think it all started at our inn” years later, after we fell in love and married. I drank my coffee. Outside my aerie, fair-weather clouds tumbled through the blue sky. I thought of my father and wondered when he would make his appearance.
“I have a lot of research to do this week,” Margo said. “It’s just as well that you’ve found someone to keep you occupied.”
“I don’t need to be occupied. I brought books to read, and I plan to swim a lot.”
“Also, Matt wants to begin to batten down the hatches for winter. Check the shutters. Throw some shingles on the roof, put insulation in the attic. So you’ll be alone a lot. I’m not trying to push you into anything, though. But I thought
if
you’re free, and
if
Sam’s free…” she smiled and pulled her yellow hair into a ponytail behind her head. “But meanwhile, I thought maybe we’d take a jaunt downtown later this morning.”
I laughed because she was flustered and because Watch Hill’s downtown consists of one street running the length of the harbor, lined with a block of pretty shingled stores with geranium-filled window boxes.
“I have to buy a bathing suit for next year,” Margo said.
“Aren’t you a little early?”
“Post–Labor Day sales are on. Plus, I have to buy someone a birthday present.” She tickled my knee. Margo loves birthdays, and my thirtieth birthday was the next week.
At ten o’clock, we left the inn to walk down the hill to town. Warmth radiated up from the tar, but even so, we were chilly in our summer things. I wore white sharkskin pants and a big blue shirt, and Margo wore a fluttery sundress with a skirt in pieces, like petals. We walked the inland route, which was more direct and took us down a street of smallish summer cottages instead of the one that bordered the sea and went past the carousel. Some of the stores had already closed for the season; the others had just opened for the day’s business. Margo thought we should try the Mayan Shop first.
While Margo tried on bathing suits, I sat in a wicker chair behind a rack of tawny fall things and thought about Sam.
Can you will attraction away? If so, why would you want to? The year that had just passed had been lonely and rather desperate for me. I thought of Alastair, of Joe, of the nights spent with them and the lonely nights in between. I had been starting to think that love would elude me forever. Weren’t there women who were better off alone? Who were happier by themselves than sharing life with a man? I thought of my mother; she cried whenever she heard my father’s name, but she seemed more peaceful, more fulfilled, living alone than she ever had surrounded by a family. Then I thought of my sisters, one married, one engaged, each secure in a niche for which I felt too bony, too angular, too jutting to ever fit into myself. Always a sister-in-law, never a bride.
Besides, I was about to get my big break as an actress. My first movie audition! All of the envy I had felt toward Susan would start to disappear after I became Emile Balfour’s new star. I had never met the man, but magazine photos made him look glamorous. He wore wraparound shades, smoked constantly, had a handsome, down-turned mouth and an endearing cowlick. His romances with leading ladies were famous; photos would show him with his arm draped proprietarily across the slim, lovely shoulders of his star actresses. In Cannes, Paris, Hollywood, New York, Tokyo. At premieres, openings, society bashes, nightclubs. I had been nurturing a fantasy in which he fell madly, irreparably, in love with me. He would be ruined as a playboy. We would marry, I would star in the rest of his movies, and I would be his artistic consultant. I had been thinking along those lines when I met Sam Chamberlain, and I had already closed my mind to the possibility of attraction to the odd oceanographer from New York.
How different would that sort of romance be from ones with an Australian sailor, a young actor, a sporting goods executive? It would invite another visit from Father Conscience, while I was hoping my father’s next visit would be a friendly one. But an affair with a French movie director would be different. It was exciting and pragmatic. It could take me where I wanted to go. (And was that approach so different from Lily’s? Whose romance with Henk had taken her to East End Avenue?)
Margo called my name. I walked into the dressing room where she stood wearing a tiny pink bikini.
“You knockout, you,” I said.
“That’s exactly what I thought. Do you think I have too many hips to wear it?”
Margo’s hips were delicately flared, like hips drawn in fashion magazines. “No, you look great.”
“Matt will die. He is a true sucker for things like this. You should see what he bought me to wear in bed.”
“What?”
“A little black confection with lace and rosebuds. For a woodsy-looking guy with a beard, Matt has very sex-crazed tastes.”
“So, you’re taking the bikini.”
“Yes,” she said, gathering up two other bathing suits, both sleek one-pieces. “Plus these. You can’t swim in a bikini. The parts feel like they’re about to slide off. So I need a couple tanks.”
“Then why bother with the bikini?”
“Tanning purposes. I like a tan back and stomach, but I don’t like lying out nude at the inn.”
I held my words of warning; for years I had preached shade and sunscreen to my sisters, but they refused to listen. They did not freckle, they said, and it was a well-known fact (they also said) that only frecklefaces got skin cancer from the sun. They called it “sun cancer.”
Margo paid for the suits. Outside, the sun beat down on the green awnings and made the sidewalk scalding hot. Like the middle of summer. We walked down the block, across the street from the tiny yacht club, to the Olympia Tearoom.
“Want an orangeade?” Margo asked.
“Sure,” I said, and we pushed open the wide screen door. Overhead ceiling fans turned, circulating cool air through the dark room. A row of huge windows faced the water, but the sun hadn’t come around enough to shine inside. Margo and I crossed the black-and-white marble floor and sat at a dark wood booth. A waitress brought menus.
“God, bluefish salad sandwiches,” Margo said, reading with a scowl on her face. “At this time of summer you’re so laden down with bluefish and zucchini, you’ll try anything.”
I laughed at the image of anyone laden down with bluefish and zucchini, but it made sense. At the seashore everyone had gardens and went surfcasting, and they liked to share the largesse with their neighbors, most of whom also had gardens and went surfcasting. The young waitress brought tall glasses of icy orangeade, and Margo and I sipped through straws. I saw the waitress notice that I was Delilah, then whisper to another waitress. I smiled at them.
“‘Oh, Delilah, won’t you please sign your napkin,’” Margo mimicked. She lit a cigarette and smoked it like a glamour girl.
“Fewer people will recognize me if I do a movie.”
“Oh, everyone will always know you as Delilah. No matter what else you do. People will be so disappointed if you quit the show.”
“I’m sure they’ll get over it. It’s not like we’re close personal friends or anything. It’s not like losing a
sister
.” Modesty, however false, made me play down my confidence. “Besides, I probably won’t even get the part. Balfour was probably just doing Chance Schutz a favor, offering me a screen test.”
“Chance Schutz!” Margo said, nearly choking on her smoke. “Remember when he cornered you after the Juilliard play? And he really pissed Dad off?”
We giggled at the memory. “Dad never felt very happy about my acting on
Beyond
.” I stated it as a fact, hoping Margo would contradict me.
“No, he always hoped you’d become Ethel Barrymore or some other stage great. He’d love to see you in movies, though.”
“I guess that’s one of my big regrets—that he never will.”
“But the rest of us will, and we’ll be really proud. You can be sure of that.
I
can’t believe he’ll never meet Matt.”
“No, but Mom knows Matt, and she has enough enthusiasm for two people.” I waited for a laugh.
Margo hunched over her glass and sipped thoughtfully. “You know, Mom was always the stable parent, but even though Dad had Black Ass, I thought he was nicer. ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ I think he loved us more.”
“I don’t know,” I said, but I did know what she meant.
“Let’s bust out of here,” Margo said, reading my mind.
Chapter 11
T
hat afternoon I waved to Sam Chamberlain. He was sitting in a lawn chair, reading a book. Probably some scientific tome, I thought, but when I got closer I could see it was Agatha Christie’s
They Came to Baghdad
. Things are not always as they seem, I told myself sagely.
“How’re things?” Sam asked as I passed.
“Great,” I said, continuing to walk by. I wore all my beach regalia and carried a big bag filled with a blanket, a towel, books, and several different strengths of sunscreen. “Great weather we’re having.”
“Fantastic.”
“Well, bye,” I said, heading down the beach path into the gorse.
That day I swam the length of the beach, back and forth, until I was too exhausted to move. Then I went up to the turret room for a nap.
That became my routine for the next two days: waken at sunrise, drink coffee brought to me in bed by Margo, spend the morning with her, spend the afternoon alone swimming, reading, and sleeping, then have dinner with Margo and Matt in the inn’s dining room. Once Sam walked in just as we were finishing, but the other time he didn’t show up at all. Matt said he usually ate early, as soon as the dining room opened. With everything in New York geared to a late-night crowd, I wondered how Sam got along. But I didn’t consider asking him, even though I spotted him around the grounds quite often.
On Friday I walked to the beach after breakfast and found Sam reading a new mystery in a low chair. He wore a long-visored cap and zinc oxide smeared on his lips. A bunch of dark hair stuck out of the gap above the hat’s adjustable strap. It glinted in the sun.
“Hey, how are you?” he asked, looking surprised and pleased to see me. His strange greenish eyes lifted when he smiled.
“Fine. How’s the book?”
“It’s good, it’s good,” he said, kicking a few large round stones away from the sand beside him. “Here, have a seat.”
I spread my towel. From behind, his black hair looked almost golden in the sun. I had a crazy urge to run my fingers through it. I thought of a pirate, dipping greedy hands into a treasure chest and letting jewels run through her fingers. The thought made me self-conscious, and I sat right down on my towel instead of smoothing its corners and anchoring it with rocks, the way I usually did. I caught Sam examining my scraped leg. It was covered by a huge blotch of Mercurochrome, which I hadn’t reapplied for several days and which the salt water had faded to sickly pink. “It’s healing pretty well,” I said.
“It looks much better.”
Our small talk felt comfortable after my fantasy of treasure hair. I stretched out on my towel and asked him how he liked New York. Then he asked me if I was the oldest sister. Then I asked him where he had gone to college. Then he said “Dartmouth” and asked me why I had dropped out of Juilliard. Then I was telling him the story of Chance Schutz and my father and how my father had died. I stopped short of telling him my ghost story, just as I realized that it wasn’t small talk any longer. “So, why marine biology and not geology?” I asked him, thinking about the plethora of geologists in the Chamberlain family.
“Didn’t want to compete with my parents. There are only so many grants in the field, and I didn’t want to be any kind of a siphon from their money. Plus, I’d rather study living things. Things that move and change faster than rocks. I mean, there’s lava and glacial debris…and sludge. My parents make an excellent case for the thrill of the ice age, but it just didn’t turn me on.”
“Do your parents work together?”
“Mostly. My father’s really annoyed about how seriously my mother’s taking archaeology. He likes it as a sideline, but he doesn’t want to give up geology for it. He’s afraid she’ll defect from the igneous to the anthropomorphic.”
“Tragic.”
He nodded, smiling. “They love to build mountains out of molehills. Their marriage is always going through some crisis—they’re always terrified of being rent asunder by something. Like her getting a grant to study in Colorado and him not. Of course it never happens.” He paused. “She had a mastectomy a few years ago, and he nearly went wild. His hair went white that year.”
Again, I tried to see whether this was hyperbole, but this time I could see it wasn’t. “Really,” he said. “He lost weight, went completely white, and broke his arm rolling over in bed. When she got out of the hospital, he looked worse than she did. The idea of losing each other is unthinkable for them.”
“Is she okay now?”
“We think so. The cancer didn’t metastasize, and if it doesn’t recur within five years, she’s supposedly cured. It’s been four years. Nearly five.”
“That’s great,” I said, thinking of how my father’s doctors had told him the same thing. They hadn’t counted on the complications of radiation.
“So, you Cavan girls are a close pair,” he said. “What about the one in New York?”
“Lily,” I said. “She’s wonderful, only she’s married to Rasputin.”
“Yeah? A beast?”
“Not a regular beast. You can never quite put your finger on what’s wrong about him. The main thing is that he keeps her imprisoned—on East End Avenue, no less. Which partly explains what I mean about his beastliness; I mean, how can you say someone is
imprisoned
on East End Avenue? When it’s such a spiffy place and most people would kill to live there?”
“She’s a prisoner of the heart,” Sam said.
“Exactly.”
“Made worse by the fact that she doesn’t try to escape. He’s exerting some kind of power over her.”
“She makes absolutely no effort to see me,” I said, drizzling a handful of sand onto my good leg. It caught in the tiny blond hairs on my thigh. “Maybe I should move to France or California and do movies. Let Lily and Henk alone in New York.”
“Seems to me you don’t have to go anywhere to do that. You’d better give her a little time to get sick of it. Then she’ll let him know what’s what.”
“Actually, I thought that would have happened before now.”
Sam was staring at the rocky promontory, now covered with water. “Hey, it’s going to be dead low tide around six tonight. Want to take a look at the tidal pools with me?”
“Great!” I said with as much sarcasm as I could muster, but I had the definite feeling he had said it to raise my spirits.
“You’re going to love it,” he said, patting my injured leg. “It’ll be broad daylight, and there’ll be no slipping whatsoever.”
Margo, Matt, and I had lunch on the inn’s porch, and then I retreated to the turret room. Although I felt like finishing
To the
Lighthouse
for the seventh time since I had first read it at fourteen, I fell asleep on top of the bedspread. I dreamed a wonderful dream. It was winter; the sky was pearly white, opalescent, like the inside of an oyster shell. I was walking on the beach in front of my parents’ house with a woman—Susan, Lily, or Margo. The water was flat calm and licked the shore in gentle rhythms. The air was icy cold, ready to snow. Walking along, I had the sudden urge to swim. I dropped my clothes on the sand and walked into the gray water, casting a glance back at my companion. Look at me! Doesn’t it amuse you to see me swimming in the middle of winter? I dove and swam underwater, bubbles coming out of my mouth. A glorious azure fish swam by. I followed it, gaining, and caught it in my arms. Then I walked naked from the sea, holding the blue fish like a baby to present to Susan-Lily-Margo.
When I wakened from that dream the sun had gone around the inn. It was late afternoon. I lay still for a long time, trying to analyze the dream’s meaning, feeling content, not wanting to lose the restful feeling. I closed my eyes to preserve the color of the fish in my mind. What a lovely fat blue fish! Its scales were radiant, edged with ice crystals that refracted light like rainbows. I had felt so proud to hand it over to my companion.
This blue fish is for you,
I had thought, and she had known what I meant. I wasn’t sure who my companion was, but I knew she was female. Females, beginning with my sisters, had been my most loyal, my most satisfactory companions.
Rising from the bed, I stretched, looking out at the beach. There was Sam, waiting for me. He wore his baggy khaki pants and a blue shirt with the sleeves pushed up. After my brilliant fish, Sam’s blue shirt looked bleached and faded. I dressed and walked slowly down to join him, and when I arrived, I could see that the shirt really
was
bleached and faded. It looked decades old. It was made of blue oxford cloth and had ragged places around the neck and elbows where white threads hung loose. It had a soft shapelessness to it; it hung loosely on Sam’s lean frame.
“Hi, Una,” he said.
“Hi, Sam.”
“You just wake up?” he asked, moving one finger close to my cheek as if to touch a crease, then stopping short.
“Yes,” I answered, and we just started walking. He seemed to understand that I needed to wake up slowly. The sand flats gleamed in the declining light. Cirrus clouds had started to gather over Montauk; in a couple of days there would be rain. We walked silently along the deserted beach to the rocky headland. Our passage across the rocks was easier than it had been the other night. We crouched beside the tidal pool where I had scraped my leg, and saw periwinkles gripping the rocks, feathery appendages wisping out of crusty barnacle shells, weird crabs scuttling away from our shadows, an abandoned moon shell, a colony of blue-black mussels anchored by silken threads to the pinkish rocks, springy brown seaweed.
“What new things can
you
see?” I asked Sam, playing the old game.
“Huh?”
“In the pool—find something you’ve never seen before.”
“I study this stuff. None of it is new.”
“Something is. Find it.” The pool was still; the ebb was total, a foot lower than it had been, and no waves stirred the surface. It was as still as the water in my dream.
“Oh, there’s some starfish larvae,” he said, pointing at a microscopic dot of gelatin. “Too bad I don’t have my hand lens.”
“It’s not in your pocket?”
“No, it’s back in my room.”
I felt disappointed, gazing at the cloudy mass. I would have loved to see the tiny stars. Magnified, they would be as perfect as snowflakes, and they wouldn’t melt. “Are you telling me starfish larvae are new to you?” I asked.
“No, but they’re new to
you
.”
“True.”
We sat on the rocks and felt the evening breeze grow cool. Our arms touched. The breeze made the hairs on the back of my neck tingle. I glanced at Sam’s weathered brown face, and thought how marine biologists had to spend lots of time in the sun. He had cat eyes and shaggy black hair. Without sunlight it lost its golden glints. He had a habit of brushing his hair out of his eyes with large, careless hands. He did it over and over, but it kept falling back.
Black plovers flew along the ocean’s edge, silhouetted against the gray gleam. As dusk approached, the scene took on a mysterious quality. I felt timeless. If I closed my eyes, I could be on the beach in front of my parents’ house. Or I could be eighty, spending my last autumn at the shore. The rocks beneath me were giving up their warmth. I started to shiver.
“Hey, look at the black zone,” Sam said.
I opened my eyes. The light was fading. “What’s the black zone?”
He pointed behind us, requiring me to swivel. Where the rocks met the hill covered with bayberry and beach plum, there were streaks of black. They inscribed the rock with rough, bold bands: a dark message. In the light of early evening, they looked magical and terrible. “The black zone of shore,” he said. “It’s where the land meets the sea—literally. That stain is made of microscopic plants. Millions of them. It looks dead, but it’s alive.”
I stared at the markings for a long time, as if they were hieroglyphics in command of a greater meaning. I waited for them to speak to me, the way my father’s ghost had. I did not believe in God, I did not trust my own convictions, my own conscience, my own wishes, my own spirit. I looked to the supernatural, to things like my father’s ghost,
Hester’s Sister
, Margo’s vibes, the Black Zone of Shore, to set me on the right track.
To tell me what to do
. I needed permission to follow my own instincts.
“You hungry?” Sam asked.
Food hadn’t occurred to me. I stared at him with what must have been a stupid expression on my face.
“I think you’ve had too much sun,” he said, gently taking hold of my hand and helping me across the rocks. Funny man, the sun hasn’t been seen for half an hour.
My feet firmly planted on the sand flats, I walked toward the inn. Sam moved his arm around my shoulders. His body felt warm and smelled like sweat and suntan lotion. When we climbed the porch steps and wiped our sandy feet on the sisal mat, Margo looked up from the chair where she had been reading. Her face betrayed no surprise at seeing us together.
“Oh, Una—I’m glad you’re back. A telegram came for you.” She hurried inside to find it, and I followed her.
I tore open the envelope and read:
CONGRATULATIONS/ YOU AND JASON MORDANT
AWARDED “SOAP COUPLE OF THE YEAR” BY SOAP OPERA
UPDATE/ PROMO TRIP TO EUROPE IN OCT????/ LOVE
CHANCE AND BILLY
That night Margo and I decided to run up the phone bill. We had to tell our mother and Lily about Margo and Matt’s betrothal and about my award and movie audition. While Matt boiled water for lobsters and Sam took a shower, Margo and I settled on the couch in her and Matt’s private quarters. Margo dialed our mother’s number.
“Mom, guess what?” (I heard her say, bubbling with excitement) “Matt and I are getting married!…Probably Christmas…Well, as a matter of fact, two nights ago…. Oh, thanks, I’ll tell him…” (Long pause.) “Una’s here. She wants to talk to you.”
With a sour look, she handed me the phone.
ME
Hi, Mom. Great news, or what?
MOM
Mmmm. She sounds very happy.
ME
Oh, she is! We’re ecstatic—don’t you adore Matt?
MOM
Well, I only met him that once. He seems very nice.