Authors: Stephen Anable
Although the theology books of Ian’s I’d gotten from Sallie Drummond contained nothing useful—Ian hadn’t scribbled any notes about his life or beliefs, just highlighted practically every paragraph in yellow—I had a 310-page clue I had yet to use:
The Purity of Light,
the tome I’d stolen from the Truro people. Though the book’s contents baffled me as thoroughly as any calculus text and no author, no Golden One, took credit for the dense prose, a publisher was listed on the title page: The Igneous Press in Rockport, Massachusetts. This was the town adjoining Gloucester, where I’d grown up.
The Igneous Press was located in a shabby part of Rockport, by an abandoned quarry full of water, junked cars, and, according to local legend, the tuxedo-clad ghost of Franklin Pearsall, the football star who’d drowned while swimming there, drunk, after his senior prom.
“No,” said the man at the plywood counter, catching sight of the book with the eye above the pyramid on its cover in my hand. “We’re not printing more until you pay for the last run.”
I put the book on the counter, next to a dish garden with snake-plants and china lambs. “I’m not one—”
“Take your business elsewhere. And take that book off my counter.”
“
I’m NOT one of them!” I finally shouted.
“Are you from the police?” His voice was quiet.
“A friend has become involved—”
“Go to the police,” the man suggested. In a back room, machinery was rattling. “What makes me ashamed is the whole thing started here.”
“What thing?”
“The baloney in that book, their leader’s ideas. Lucas Mikkonen’s damned ideas.” He must have enjoyed the surprise in my expression, because he continued talking. “Their guru—Lucas Mikkonen—grew up right here in Rockport. His mother, Patricia, runs a shop on Bearskin Neck. She sells dolls.”
Bearskin Neck is a small peninsula dense with gift shops, crowded as closely together as barnacles on the jaws of an old whale. The shops are in shacks where fishermen once mended their nets and sorted their catches of mackerel and cod. Now, the buildings have been sanded, painted gray or russet or periwinkle-blue, and given gardens of begonias and petunias with beach-stone borders. They have carved wooden signs of old salts and pirates and lobsters and sell the same sorts of trinkets offered in Provincetown, but there’s less art here, fewer serious galleries. My mother remembers the Rockport of the Fifties, when first-rate antique stores flourished on the Neck, full of China-trade Buddhas with subtle bronze smiles and junks and minute armies carved out of elephants’ tusks. Now, there are cheaper foreign crafts around: abalone shell earrings, ebony elephants mass-produced somewhere in Kenya.
But Rockport lives up to its name. It has the granite headlands Cape Cod lacks, granite impregnated with mica, like the stone comprising the Provincetown breakwater.
You can look into Rockport Harbor from the Neck. It’s a small bowl of greenish water ringed at low tide by stone wharfs dark with limp wreaths of bladder wrack. The harbor is full of stubby fishing boats, presided over by the most famous fishing shack in New England. “Motif Number One,” the shack was nicknamed by the artists forced to paint and sketch it for generations. Barn-red, seemingly primeval, this building actually dates from the late Nineteen-Seventies, when its century-old predecessor washed apart in a winter storm. With its beaky roof and single window, it looks a little like an oversized outhouse, but it’s been reproduced literally thousands of times, the East Coast version of the famous lone cypress above the Pacific near Monterey.
Mrs. Mikkonen’s store had a view of this landmark, but it was down an alley on Bearskin Neck, back of a “lobster in the rough” restaurant, by a gravel townies-only parking lot. Not a prime location. The shop sold reproductions of antique dolls. Inside, there were dolls everywhere, still, glassy-eyed, making it look like a Victorian orphanage or an infirmary filled with children newly dead from some antique disease like diphtheria.
Mrs. Mikkonen was a sturdy woman, short, with blond hair surrendering to gray. Her cotton dress was decorated with teddy bears, and she wore terrycloth slippers, as if she should still be in her kitchen, frying the morning bacon. Unsure what sort of reaction her son’s book might inspire, I carried it in my pocket.
She looked me up and down, without letting a smile or any reaction alter her squinting pink face. I pretended to examine two dolls, as if undecided which to pick, a girl with braids or a boy in a velvet Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, like the young Thomas Royall’s.
“Every detail is authentic.” Her voice was deep as Garbo’s. “All done by hand,” she said, of the female doll’s lacy bloomers. “By hand, not by machine.” I found this hard to believe, since I had seen similar dolls advertised in women’s magazines I’d thumbed through in doctors’ offices.
“Who is the doll for?” Her voice was so stilted, so gruff, it was hard to tell whether she had an accent or not, whether she’d been born in this country or abroad. I balked at lying and saying it was for my wife, even though my whole visit was a lie; I wasn’t interested in her dolls, but in her son and his community. Was she one of his followers? I saw no Nordic clues that led me to believe this.
“It’s for a friend,” I said, not specifying the sex.
“How old?”
I was thinking the same question about her. Her face was as smooth as the heart of a cut potato, a wide peasant’s face, someone out of Brueghel. She could have been sixty-five, seventy, or older.
Then, in this shop of still children, I thought of Miriam and Chloe and her broken mermaid doll. “My friend is in her forties.”
She scuffed along in her terrycloth slippers. Her ankles were chafed and she exuded a smell of dough, of fresh bread or pastry. Standing on a stool, she reached to take down a strange doll from the top shelf. It was a child-soldier, a drummer boy. He had the stare, I realized, of those street kids in Provincetown, the same bright deadness in the eyes.
“How much do you want to spend?” She handed me the miniature drummer boy, and I realized I’d been sucked into this discussion too fast. Even if I bought this doll now, there was no guarantee she would discuss the community or her son, even supposing she knew anything useful. Cult members, even cult leaders, so often alienated their families.
“I’m not sure this is right. My friend is…very religious, anti-war.”
Frowning, she pulled the doll from my hands. She climbed back onto the stool, and, straining, placed the doll back on the top shelf. The doll teetered momentarily in its licorice-black boots, and I worried it might topple and smash, but she steadied it. Then she shuffled back toward the cash register, and, with a sweeping gesture of her blunt fingers, said, “Look around, take your time,” as if she wished I’d be on my way as soon as possible.
She thought I was another tourist, always dissatisfied with what was on sale. So, as I again began browsing through the dolls, I decided to establish that I was local, from Gloucester, the next town; this might give me credibility of sorts.
I picked up a doll dressed as a princess, in shimmery fabric and a tiara. “Has it been a good summer?”
“Hot.” She was writing something in a ledger.
“I’ve spent most of the summer on Cape Cod,” I said, volunteering more information than I’d planned, but desperate to resuscitate conversation.
She made no reply, just kept writing. A cat materialized, a Siamese with eyes as unreal as the dolls’, unnatural as star sapphires. The cat leapt from the counter near the cash register onto a shelf with a squadron of babies in wicker prams. Mrs. Mikkonen took no notice. Obviously, the cat was experienced, trained not to knock over the merchandise. The cat leapt back onto the counter, rubbing its face against Mrs. Mikkonen’s hip, against the shabby dress with all the teddy bears.
“It was hot even on Cape Cod.”
She licked one of her blunt fingers and turned a page of the ledger.
“I’m actually from here.”
“I know,” she said.
I felt as if life had suddenly entered all the dolls’ eyes, as if all of them suddenly were staring at me. But only the Siamese cat was actually paying me any attention. It hopped to the floor, weightless as down, silently landing at my feet, then rubbing its face against my legs, marking its territory. Mrs. Mikkonen was still enthralled with her ledger, or pretending to be.
“I’ve seen you before.” She closed the ledger.
I took a doll in my hands, like a hostage. “Where?”
“At the funeral,” she answered.
“Whose?”
“Are there that many funerals in your life? I feel sorry for you.” She looked me straight in the eye, but there was no more sorrow in her expression than in her cat’s. “At Ian Drummond’s funeral. Are you allergic to cats? She’s just marking her territory. Come here, Helga, over here.”
A Siamese cat named Helga. I almost took out the cult’s book, but I didn’t, and didn’t answer her question about my allergies, didn’t respond to her subtle intimidation. Instead, I stroked the cat’s back and gently tugged its tail. “Were you a friend of Ian’s?” It seemed like a ridiculous question.
“The Drummonds are a prominent family. Everyone knows them. I knew Duncan, the old man. He came into my shop. The son was killed on Cape Cod.”
“Yes, in Provincetown.”
“A horrible thing.” She sounded like a peasant speaking of the death of a reckless young noble. She was philosophical, remote, as though the death somehow was apt, God dispensing justice with democratic severity.
“I’m flattered that you remembered me.”
“You were a few rows in front of me in the church. Then I saw you at the house, afterward. I remembered you because you spoke to that woman who’d been crying. The woman who came with the black man.”
Suki Weatherbee and her African husband.
“Poor Mr. Drummond. Such a nice old gentleman.”
My father, I could have said. “Nice” was hardly his reputation during his prime: drinking away his liver, seducing other men’s wives. And my mother. “Was he a regular customer?”
“He stole things. He picked up things and forgot to pay. His mind was going.”
“The Alzheimer’s.”
“Whatever they call it.”
It was evident by this time that she had no accent. Just a stilted way of speaking, clipped, militaristic. Yes, there was something militaristic about her. Perhaps that’s why she’d shown me the drummer boy first. Did she keep this shop of artificial children because her flesh-and-blood-son had been such a disappointment?
“The family always paid. He’d come down with the chauffeur. In a big car the size of a boat. He was looking for dolls for his daughter. He’d forgotten she was all grown up.”
So there was a link, tenuous but ongoing, between the Mikkonen and Drummond families. Ian himself could have come here, to this room of staring glass eyes. And Edward could be right—Ian could have done some “legal bullshit” for the people in Truro.
“I was at school with Ian Drummond.” I pretended to examine a pale resin baby in a christening gown with enough lace to please a bride.
Mrs. Mikkonen was writing something with a pencil capped with the head of a miniature Cabbage Patch Doll instead of an eraser.
“I went to a place called St. Harold’s.”
Mrs. Mikkonen continued writing, muttering something about “fancy schools for fancy people.”
I was holding the resin baby, which I felt compelled to support with both arms, as though it were real. Dolls had become so much more lifelike since I was a child. The doll in the christening gown looked like a baby, but not, I realized like a
live
child; it looked like a dead baby “prepared” by an undertaker. The resin had the hardness of dead rouged flesh.
“My son went to public school, right here in Rockport. It was good enough for Lucas.” Then her expression became hard as the resin dolls in her shop. “That school—St. Harold’s—closed down,” she said, with triumph.
The remark stung, small but sharp like a shaving cut. She stunned me when she added, “My son bought that school.”
“
What?!”
She put down the pencil with the Cabbage Patch Doll like a head impaled on a spike. She must’ve known she’d said something significant, something she shouldn’t have revealed. “Are you interested in Baby Victoria? Because, if you’re not, I’m closing for lunch.”
Was Ian connected to Lucas Mikkonen through St. Harold’s? Was the “legal bullshit” Edward had spoken of helping the school sell its assets to these fraudulent Nordics? Since I was already here on the North Shore, there was someone in the area I could ask.
I hadn’t gotten the chance to express my condolences in person to Mrs. Drummond the day of Ian’s funeral. She was mobbed by mourners and busy attending to her bewildered husband. So I brought her a bouquet, a half-dozen roses with baby’s breath in a cone of the florist’s green cellophane. I also brought my questions, many questions.
The Drummonds’ estate seemed to grow out of the granite of Eastern Point, squatting among the yews and rhododendrons.
You’re entitled to some of this
, a grasping little voice inside of me insisted. You’re more of a Drummond than she is; she’s a Drummond by marriage. You share genetic material, you share DNA, don’t be awed by their house or their things.
A plump maid with a moustache greeted me. Mrs. Drummond was in the library, a dark paneled room full of books whose gilt bindings had never been cracked. Janet Drummond had been “a great beauty” in her youth, so people said. You could still see that beauty in her high cheekbones and thick wavy hair, now silver but still brushing her shoulders. She was sitting on a low leather couch, the kind I associate with analysts’ offices, sorting through a pile of notes and cards, sympathy mail concerning her youngest son’s death. From somewhere in the room came the soft thwack of a ball then ripples of applause. Of course, she was watching a tennis match. I saw the portable TV on a spindly chrome stand, the sole cheap piece of furniture in a room of rich surfaces.
“Hello,” I said, and she glanced up just in time to say, “Ssssh! Sazonov is serving!” On the screen was the dripping face of Yuri Sazonov, the Russian tennis star rumored to be Mafia property. He slammed the ball toward his stunned American opponent, Matt Milner. Milner swung but missed, and Mrs. Drummond resumed writing on her heavy, cream-colored stationery.
“I’m terribly sorry about Ian.”
“You can’t know how a mother feels,” she said, which was certainly true, and a remark which needed no reply. “You needn’t feel guilty,” she added.
“Guilty?” With a tingle of dread, I was thinking that somehow, with a mother’s intuition, she knew I’d found her son without reporting his murder.
“About that silly scrap at the nightclub.”
“Nightclub” was such a Fifties word. It called to mind El Morocco and Porfirio Rubirosa. But that had been Mrs. Drummond’s world, café society. She was a Midwesterner, from Gates Mills or Lake Forest, a tennis star who’d met Ian’s father out carousing in New York. Someone claimed the Duchess of Windsor introduced them.
I said, “We’d known each other so long, we were bound to have our moments…” I was still holding the flowers.
“Ian valued your friendship.”
Mrs. Drummond hadn’t invited me to sit, but I did, in a wing chair by a jade plant in a Chinese pot all courtesans and plum blossoms. The windows of the library were thrown open, so that I could see Gloucester Harbor beyond the granite ledges, see Ten Pound Island in the distance.
“Ian saved my life once.” I thought mentioning that might somehow make up for our fight.
“Really?” She put down her Mont Blanc pen. “How?”
I explained about our rowing to Ten Pound Island, then the storm blowing up, the sky boiling with black clouds, then the rain like bullwhips—and my freezing at the oars, unable to row home. “He took over and saved both our lives.”
Her face became streaked with tears. “You were at St. Harold’s together.” She wore a small pin, a gold tennis racket, fastened to her black and white blouse. Ian had once mentioned the story of that pin: how she’d bought it in London while competing at Wimbledon and wore it at tennis-connected events. She wore it even today, while answering this wrenching correspondence. That athlete’s spirit helped her survive times like this.
“You know I accepted Ian for whatever he was. Just as I accept you, Mark. I mean, any number of the girls I competed against…” She was talking about tennis, of course. “Any number were veritable Amazons…What’s the zip code for Prides Crossing?” I told her. “God,” she sighed, “I hope I never get like my husband.”
My father. I couldn’t say it. “I saw him in Provincetown.”
“Did he recognize you?”
“I certainly hope so. His…friendship means a lot to me.” My tone and the break in my voice had a desperation that should have surprised her.
“Of course it really doesn’t matter, does it? We should be thankful he gets pleasure from our company. I wish I had more patience, but he’s so frustrating to deal with, so recalcitrant. It’s awfully hard on Sallie. She was his little princess, his blue-ribbon equestrienne. Sallie was the best athlete in the family. The best amateur…Fulton and George have such busy lives, I’ve asked Sallie and Alexander to settle Ian’s affairs.”
This was an opening of sorts. “What was Ian doing out west?”
“Real estate. A development north of San Francisco. In Marin County, a gated community. The whole thing fell through, the financing went bad. It was just as well, I wouldn’t have wanted him settling out west. I think family is awfully important, don’t you?” She glanced at me with a trace of pity; the sadness in her face was not just for herself.
“Awfully important—”
“I had a lovely note from your mother,” she said.
Who’d avoided Ian’s funeral to paint in her back yard. Did she know about my mother and her husband? It was hardly a state secret that he was the Casanova of the country club circuit. It occurred to me then, for the first time, that he could’ve fathered other children outside his marriage. Either way, both she and my mother were wronged, used by a faithless charmer. He’d collected women the way he’d collected the eggs of rare birds, damaging the environment in each case.
“It was too bad your mother was away the day of the services. Duncan would have enjoyed seeing her. All of us would have.” She was pressing a stamp onto an envelope. Her tears had dried, and her voice was as crisp as her Shreve, Crump & Low stationary. “I always liked your mother. She always ‘did her own thing’ as they used to say.”
Was she was being sarcastic? I couldn’t tell. Her face remained mask-like and genteel. My mother seldom spoke about Janet Drummond, and I couldn’t recall Mrs. Drummond mentioning my mother at all.
“She persisted with her first love,” Mrs. Drummond said. Did she mean Duncan? I wondered for an instant, but she said, “She persisted with her art.”
“She began as a musician.” I was about to mention Lulu Wright’s and my mother’s phony story, which had survived all these years like an intricate but unexpectedly sturdy piece of origami.
“Your mother didn’t cave in to the bluenoses.” By having me, I assumed she meant, in addition to heeding her muse. She deleted a name from her list of people to thank. Was it ruthlessness that made her so mechanical today, made her write while watching a tennis tournament? No, that was unfair. She could be sedated, or numb.
I wanted to say, I’m not interested in your money, but I’d like the chance to get to know my father. But then she changed the subject, as if anticipating some unpleasantness. “Ian wasn’t out west very long.”
“I thought he was gone two years.”
“Well, he maintained an apartment in San Francisco, on Telegraph Hill. But the Marin County project fell through quite quickly.”
“How quickly?”
“I think he was through with things in six months,” said Mrs. Drummond. “So we discovered once he was…gone. Ian wasn’t the most open fellow around. We disagreed about an awful lot. We fought like cats and dogs about politics. I’m a Democrat to the end, you know.”
I didn’t. She was full of surprises.
“Ian had changed these last two years. He’d matured, become a seeker. He was reading Emerson and Thomas Merton, all those tortured, questioning souls.”
The books I’d seen Sallie jettisoning back in Provincetown, stuffing into a green plastic trash bag. Had Ian’s financial losses made him more spiritual? And caused him to apologize for his past bullying that day in the dunes? Something big had been preying on his mind.
“Did Ian know a Lucas Mikkonen?”
“Not that I recall.”
I would broach something mildly controversial before daring to bring up my parentage: “There wasn’t any mention of Ian being gay…at the funeral.”
Any youth in her being seemed to recede so that her tired expression matched her silver hair. “Is everything an occasion for some political statement? Are we always obliged to educate bigots, or cater to activists? Aren’t we ever allowed just to be sad?”
Before I could answer, someone said “Mother?”
In the library doorway stood Alexander Nash. He wore sea-blue Bermuda shorts, revealing his strong, tanned calves. He was extraordinarily handsome.
“Alexander is helping me hold down the fort while Sallie minds my husband on Cape Cod,” said Mrs. Drummond.
“When I saw your husband—”
“He’ll find a vase for those beautiful flowers.”
I was a fool, an idiot, a coward! I’d squandered my chance to discuss my mother’s claim. Why had I wanted to do this? To be sure she was telling the truth, I suppose, to discover if the family had been informed, if they knew, to learn Duncan Drummond’s version of the events, some fragments of the story the Alzheimer’s hadn’t yet stolen.
Shepherding me from the library, Alexander kept repeating that the North Shore was gorgeous, how lucky I was to have grown up here. Did folks around here really appreciate it? Everything was so historical. He rattled off a list of sights he’d visited: Beauport just down the road, Fort Sewall in Marblehead, the House of Seven Gables in Salem, the Saugus Iron Works…He’d bought postcards and a pot of candy, some Boston Baked Beans.
Infuriated at not tackling my own story with Mrs. Drummond, I asked him, “Where are you from?” just to be polite, to distract myself.
He’d grown up “mostly” in a small town east of Santa Barbara, a place that was half oil fields, half lemon groves, where the oldest piece of architecture was a plaster-domed Greco-Roman gas station dating from the Depression.
In the kitchen, he found a tankard-like vase, something pewter, for my sympathy bouquet. I realized now that baby’s breath was not the most sensitive flower to give the mother of a murdered son.
“So you’ve known the family all your life, Mark.” Alexander poked the flowers into the vase until they were positioned just so. His finding a vase for my flowers and escorting me to the door implied a vaguely servant-like status. As a future son-in-law he was on his best behavior, in the family yet not quite of it, a situation not unlike my own.
“That’s very nice. Did you take flower arranging classes?” I asked as a joke.
“Actually, I did. Ever the self-improver.” Alexander was one of those people who hold a stare until it makes you self-conscious. His eyes were the deep blue of the northern Pacific, where he tagged walruses and measured the spiky legs of gigantic crabs. For a moment, I thought he was cruising me, drinking me in with his stare. Instead he lobbed an unexpected question: “Did Ian have any significant others?”
“He wasn’t that domestic. He dated now and then, mostly Log Cabin Republicans, but there was no real lover that I can remember.”
“What about women?” He was staring with those Pacific-blue eyes. Not bedroom eyes. Was he studying me? At Mrs. Drummond’s request? He’d called her “Mother,” so they had to be close, or else he was putting on a show. Perhaps she admired his princely athletic ease, the way he occupied the physical world. And he wanted the status of a son as soon as possible.
“Ian was involved with Suki Weatherbee at St. Harold’s. But so was our whole class, so was anything male in the Berkshires.”
“It’s kind of sad. Ian dying without ever being loved. Romantically, I mean. Hate crimes are so senseless.”
“Ian didn’t believe in them.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Ian didn’t believe in hate crimes. He said, ‘How many crimes are committed out of love?’”
He acted a little baffled. The heat could have affected his alertness. The kitchen with its big restaurant-sized stove was stifling. Rather than explain my reference to the incident at Arthur’s, which had happened before he and Sallie had come east for Ian’s funeral, I paid him a compliment instead. “You seem to fit into the family pretty well.”
“It isn’t always easy. I mean, Sallie was already devastated, what with her father’s condition. Then Ian dying…But Mrs. Drummond is a trouper. An amazing lady. She can beat the beejesus out of me at tennis. Even with the copper bracelet I wear to improve my serve.”
Alexander—at least at that moment—didn’t strike me as particularly bright, Woods Hole association or not. But at least he admitted his discomfort, slight though it was. That inspired me to risk my next question. “Sallie didn’t mind my not taking the things Ian had brought from St. Harold’s, did she? I mean, I took some books that belonged to Ian, spiritual books.”
“Oh, Sallie really appreciated your stopping by. She considers you like family.”
That was perfect. Now I could speak. Being Sallie’s fiancé, he’d be able to tell me her frank opinions. He didn’t seem to have the guile or eloquence to disguise them. “Some people say…” I was unable to meet his stare, unable to meet his eyes, so I looked instead at some tall bottles of vinegar with herbs like rotting water weeds inside them. “Some people say Duncan Drummond and my mother had a fling…and that I’m the result.”
Alexander paused then said, “Holy Toledo. That’s got to be tough for you, Mark. That’s got to be awkward as hell.”
Then I just kept speaking: “I just found out the day of Ian’s funeral. My mother’s been alcoholic for years. They met at this jazz club. In Boston, in the South End. They were intimate, as you say, just once. Or so she says. The Drummonds’ lawyer worked out some sort of settlement. Now…Mr. Drummond has dementia, as you know. So I’ll never know the truth. Know him or his side of the story…” I began to choke up, I couldn’t help it. I felt like a fool. “…Has Sallie ever mentioned any of this?” I managed to ask.