Vineyard Deceit (4 page)

“To my family?”

“Yes.”

Zee had raked a bit before answering. “I don't know if you'll understand this, but my mother was on Paul's side. He's a charmer, and she figured that if he was leaving me I must have deserved it. I didn't need that. Aunt Amelia and Uncle Ray were on my side.”

I ran that through my computer while I dug two littlenecks out of my rake and dropped them in my basket. Littlenecks were selling at many pennies each in the
Edgartown fish markets, and I planned on making a couple of bucks that afternoon.

“My mother died when I was young,” I said, “so I don't know what she'd have done when my wife and I split up. I'd like to think she'd have been on my side.”

“You and your ex still get along,” said Zee. “Paul and I don't. Your mother wouldn't have had to choose; mine did. She chose the doctor. To understand that, you have to understand her. She came from the Azores, from a poor family in a poor town. Over there a doctor was almost like a saint. He was the most important person in town. He had education, money, and usually owned the biggest house in the area and had a car. He was the one people went to when they had problems. He gave advice, helped them write letters to America, helped them with government paperwork.”

“The Godfather.”

“Yes. My mother got to America only because she was sponsored by a cousin in New Bedford. She didn't speak English at all, but she learned it. She married my father, a man a lot like herself, and they raised us kids in Fall River. They worked hard. She cleaned houses, he was a handyman. Finally they saved enough money to open their little store. Muleto's Market, specializing in Portuguese foods. All us kids worked there from the time we were little. My parents did that with no education, but they made sure my brothers went to college and they were even proud when I decided that I would go too.

“When I met Paul in college and my mother learned that he was going to be a doctor, she was completely overjoyed. Her daughter and a doctor. A Portuguese boy, to boot. He was charming, she was in love with him, and I fell in love too.” She glanced at me as she dropped a littleneck into her basket. Her voice was clinical and detached. “Paul and I made plans. I stopped studying the liberal arts and switched to nursing because we knew that when Paul was in medical school I'd need a good job. We
were married the June after graduation, and my mother was in heaven. Of course we couldn't afford children. Six years later, in the middle of his internship, he found someone who didn't know about his less-attractive side. A wife always knows about that side of her man, but other women don't. His new love didn't. My mother didn't. She still doesn't. But she knows about mine. And after all, Paul is a doctor and I'm only a nurse. They still write and they visit when he's in Fall River. I think he's her favorite son.”

“She still doesn't see the warts, eh?”

“Only mine. Aunt Amelia sees mine too, but she knows that everybody's got them, so I came down here where I could be with her if I needed to. And I did need to.”

“As you no doubt are aware,” I said, “before my modesty obliged me to forbid public use of the name, I was known as J. Wartless Jackson.”

“Are you sure they weren't saying ‘Worthless'?” asked Zee, discovering a large conch in her rake. “Whoops,” she said and tossed the conch in a high arc so that it landed right in front of my nose and splashed me with a goodly splash.

It seemed a fair response. I spat out some salt water. “So your mother's still in love. Are you?”

“I was, but it seeped away. I was glad when it was gone.”

“Love is good for you,” I said.

“It can be pretty awful.”

I thought of my own divorce. “Yes, it can.” I had not thought of myself as a particularly loving person or as someone needing a lot of love, but when my wife left me I felt very bad for a long time. It had taken a while for me to find much joy in things. Probably, I thought, that's why, after being shot in Boston, I had taken my police disability money and moved to the Vineyard. Down here I knew I could do simple things that might heal me: fish, keep my garden, hunt ducks and geese and deer, be on
the beach at sunup or sunset or midnight. And I didn't have to talk to people about the turns my life had taken: the loss of my wife, the addition of a bullet near my spine, my private encounters with the void.

And the island magic had worked. Prospero had waved his wand and made me better. Not perfect, but better. The sea is a great redeemer, after all. And then I'd met Zee and had gotten better still.

But now Aunt Emily thought it was time for Zee to start mingling with “proper society.”

“What do you mean ‘proper society'?” I asked, trying to act as if I didn't know.

“Aunt Emily thinks it's time I started mixing with men and women again. That it's time to leave Paul behind and get on with my life. Aunt Amelia thinks so too. She's had to do the same thing since Uncle Ray died, and she says that divorces and deaths are a lot alike for the survivors. I think she's right.”

So did I, having experienced both kinds of loss. Joy was still possible, but you had to seek it and then open yourself up to it. You had to take a chance on suffering other losses, because that was better than living in old sorrows. I believed that the Buddha was right when he said that life is suffering, but I had never liked people who dwelt on their own. They had some kind of self-pity in them that was distasteful to me. I considered myself an expert on self-pity, having engaged in more than my share from time to time.

Zee said, “Of course Aunt Amelia and Aunt Emily don't agree at all about who I should be mixing with. Aunt Emily wants to introduce me to some very proper people who will be at the big event on Saturday. Aunt Amelia thinks that you're more the type for me.”

Good old Aunt Amelia! I brightened inside.

“You've helped me more than anybody,” said Zee, surprising me. “You and Aunt Amelia. You're both proliving, antideath people. A lot of women like me feel guilty
when things go wrong in our lives; we think we're to blame. My mother's that way, but Amelia doesn't think that and neither do you. Because of you two, I'm beginning not to think it either.” She turned her head and smiled at me. God, she was beautiful.

But I was uneasy with such talk. “Everybody gets knocked down sooner or later,” I said. “Some get up again and some don't. You did. Your Aunt Amelia's right. Now it's time for you to forget Dr. Jerk and move on.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Tell me about the emeralds.”

“Ah yes, the emeralds. Well, the fact is, I don't know much about them. Aunt Amelia never talked about them, really, maybe because Uncle Ray, being the good Azorian man that he was, didn't have much place in his life for a wife with an emerald necklace. He and Amelia were both more interested in gardening and each other than in her past or his. She does have an old scrapbook with newspaper clippings and photos of when she was a young deb in Boston. That was before she left the debutante society to marry a Vineyard farmer. I never saw the scrapbook until after Uncle Ray died. There are some pictures and articles in there about the emeralds. Would you like to see them? I'm sure Aunt Amelia wouldn't mind. She likes you.”

I liked Amelia too. She was one of the people to whom I took bluefish when I was catching them. I'd never thought of her as the owner of an emerald necklace.

“Yes,” I said, “I would like to see that book.”

“When we finish our tea, I'll phone her and find out when would be a good time.”

“Meanwhile, I'll just ogle you,” I said. “After Saturday night you'll be too sophisticated to mix with us hois and pollois.”

“I'll be kind,” said Zee. “Sometimes I'll think of you while I'm on my yacht. I'll have the prince bring the boat into Edgartown now and then.”

“Of course you'll be anchoring in the outer harbor because it'll be too big to bring inside.”

“Of course. But I'll send crewmen ashore with the launch and insist that they buy our fresh bluefish from only you. And now that you're a special policeman with a badge and everything, I'll insist on having you be part of the security that protects us from the common people.”

“The autograph hunters and all . . .”

“That's right. And if we meet by accident in one of the finer shops downtown, I'll be sure to speak to you.”

“You'll remember my name?”

“Of course. What was it again?”

4

Amelia Muleto owned a small truck farm off the West Tisbury road. When her husband had been alive the two of them had worked it and sold their vegetables at a farm stand, getting by in the good years, scrambling in the bad ones. My father had bought his vegetables there when I was a boy, and Amelia had delighted me with small, surprising gifts such as a seemingly normal apple that broke in two in my hands to reveal an apricot instead of a core, and within the apricot, where the pit had been, a strawberry. Her humor was the witty kind that had delighted both me and my father.

My father had liked the Muletos and had made a practice of taking fish by their house when he'd had luck with the blues or bass. Ray Muleto, like every Azorian I've ever known, and there are a lot of them and their children
on the Vineyard, loved fish. His farm kept him too busy to catch them himself, so he was particularly happy to get them when they came his way. In exchange, he would give my father wine that he'd made. It was strong, red stuff. “Vigorous,” my father had called it. The first alcohol I ever drank was Ray Muleto's vigorous wine. I sneaked it straight from the bottle and almost choked to death. After my father died, I took fish to Ray and Amelia and got red wine in return. Now that Ray was gone, I still took fish, but there was no more of that rich, dark wine.

Amelia now leased her farm to another truck gardener and worked at his stand part time. When not at the stand, she was at her small, neat, gray-shingled house, where she grew wonderful flowers and entertained her grandchildren whenever she could pry them away from their parents, Amelia's son and his wife, who had abandoned the island to live in America, across the Sound, way out west in Worcester, in fact, where, in the modern style, they both worked to support their family.

“The grandchildren have gone home,” said Zee, as we drove up. “Pre-school shopping and all that. Their mom must take them to the malls, and there are no malls on Martha's Vineyard.”

Amelia Muleto was a tall, slender, Yankee-looking woman whose silver hair was cut short and touched with blue. She was in her gardening clothes when we arrived: jeans, a loose shirt that had no doubt belonged to her late husband, and sandals. She came walking from her front rose bed as we pulled into her driveway. She and I had aged together. Long ago when, as a boy, I'd first come to her house with my father, when I'd been five, she'd been in her mid thirties and I'd thought of her as old. Now she was in her mid sixties and seemed pretty young to me.

She kissed Zee and gave me her hand and we went into the house. Amelia sat us down on her couch. On the coffee table in front of it there were scrapbooks and photo albums.

“There you have it,” said Amelia. “There's a Stonehouse family genealogy too, but I think Emily has it. That sort of thing means much more to her than to me, I'm afraid. Look those things over while I bring us some coffee. Or would you prefer beer?”

Coffee would do. She went into the kitchen, and I opened the first of the photo albums. It was filled with pictures from the late twenties and the thirties, many of two little girls growing up. The adults seemed to wear a great deal of white, and there were large houses and lawns and lakes in the shots. As Zee and I turned the pages, the girls and their parents grew older. Photos of early formal dances in large halls appeared. Nowhere was there any evidence of the Great Depression which had swept the world. The people in the pictures were happy and attractive. Uniformed servants could be seen in attendance. Young men were also on the scene, in sporting or formal clothing as the occasion demanded. There were pictures of healthy young people sailing, rowing, playing croquet.