The Harbormaster's Daughter Read online

  Praise for the Work of

  HEIDI JON SCHMIDT

  The Harbormaster’s Daughter

  • • •

  “When you open a Heidi Jon Schmidt novel, prepare to dive deep below the surface of life into its heart. There, where laughter and tears converge, the characters of The Harbormaster’s Daughter walk the streets of Oyster Creek, fishing the waters—loving, hurting, weaving and unweaving the human webs we all spin. When you finish, you won’t want to leave town. I didn’t. I never do.”

  —Sarah Blake, New York Times bestselling author of The Postmistress and Grange House

  The House on Oyster Creek

  • • •

  “This novel shimmers with the light of a summer day in New England. Schmidt expertly explores the complexities of domestic life and the tug of forbidden love, and plays them out against the subtly drawn accuracies and realities of class in a small Cape Cod town.”

  —Elizabeth Strout, New York Times bestselling author of Olive Kitteridge

  “Here is that rare book: wise, hilarious, and heartbreaking. But then, also, most importantly, a book so full of its own life, of deep, live-life truths, that when I put it down I was lost in my own living room, under Schmidt’s spell for days afterward.”

  —Sarah Blake

  “Schmidt delivers a thoughtful, realistically complicated exploration on love, marriage, friendship, and community in The House on Oyster Creek while perfectly capturing the spare beauty of Cape Cod in her subtly nuanced, beautifully crafted prose.”

  —John Charles, Chicago Tribune

  Written by today’s freshest new talents and selected by New American Library, NAL Accent novels touch on subjects close to a woman’s heart, from friendship to family to finding our place in the world. The Conversation Guides included in each book are intended to enrich the individual reading experience, as well as encourage us to explore these topics together—because books, and life, are meant for sharing.

  Visit us online at www.penguin.com.

  “Schmidt conveys the unassailable bond of tradition in a tightly knit community along with the ins and outs of oyster culture. Her writing is nuanced and oh so clever as it relays her characters’ persistence in the face of life’s obstacles. Superior literary fiction.”

  —Library Journal

  “An absorbing novel.… [Schmidt’s] local knowledge helps the book move a step beyond typical ‘romance’ fare, and gives it a welcome note of authenticity.”

  —The Barnstable Patriot (MA)

  The Bride of Catastrophe

  • • •

  “Comically beautiful. In polished, nearly Austenian prose, Schmidt blurs the line between inanity and tragedy.”

  —Village Voice

  “There is line after line of hilarious and desperate truth here—what a joy to read.”

  —Elizabeth Strout

  “Energetic, garrulous, and funny, with characteristic affectionate yet biting wit. Our heroine may be a long way from mastering her life, but she has an enviable command of the book of love.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Will comfortably share the shelf with works such as John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire and Paul Theroux’s Mosquito Coast.”

  —Library Journal

  “Schmidt has a keen eye for detail and a sharp sense of humor.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Offers a number of pleasures, including… the exuberant attitude toward experimentation that was the hallmark of the 1970s.”

  —Booklist

  Darling?

  • • •

  “Brilliant, very, very funny.… It is impossible to disentangle the comic from the tragic in Schmidt’s writing.… [She] is incapable of cliché.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Generous, poignant, an unsparing eye, and a keen wit: Alice Munro throwing her arm around the shoulder of J. D. Salinger. One doesn’t often raise the banners that say profound and enormous fun over the same book, but here we can and do.”

  —Elinor Lipton

  “Sharp, yet lusciously written…full of shocks, beautiful images, and new ways of seeing things.”

  —The Guardian/Observer (London)

  “Here is that rare and welcome book about love that’s less concerned with how we find love than what we do with it, a book that deals not in moments of passion, but in moments of grace, a book about the frustrating, hilarious, embarrassing, transcendental business of living with love. Heidi Jon Schmidt’s stories are filled with delightful wit, spellbinding feeling, and an emotional intelligence that rises to the level of essential wisdom.”

  —Peter Ho Davies

  “This collection has so many shining moments of humor, of heartbreak, of grace that readers might find themselves asking: Why aren’t more stories this good?”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Schmidt creates a mood not unlike the tenor of modern life, lurching from giddy enthusiasm to embarrassment to frustration. Schmidt’s take on contemporary phenomena is bracing.”

  —Booklist

  The Rose Thieves

  • • •

  “A graceful journey into the individual life of a young woman and the collective life of a family—and a fine debut.”

  —The New York Times

  “Laugh-out-loud comic, and really tragic at the same time. Beautifully, evocatively written.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “The stories are standouts.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Captures the rueful humor in family ambiguities.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Delightful…precise and elegant.”

  —Library Journal

  OTHER BOOKS BY HEIDI JON SCHMIDT

  The Rose Thieves

  Darling?

  The Bride of Catastrophe

  The House on Oyster Creek

  The

  Harbormaster’s

  Daughter

  HEIDI JON SCHMIDT

  NAL Accent

  Published by New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by NAL Accent, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, August 2012

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Heidi Jon Schmidt, 2012

  Conversation Guide copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s r
ights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Schmidt, Heidi Jon.

  The harbormaster’s daughter/Heidi Jon Schmidt.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-60193-8

  1. Children of murder victims—Fiction. 2. Racially mixed people—Fiction.

  3. Cape Cod (Mass.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.C51554H37 2012

  813’.54—dc23 2012013108

  Set in Albertina

  Designed by Elke Sigal

  Printed in the United States of America

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  For Marisa

  “What see’st thou else, in the dark

  backward and abysm of time?”

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,The Tempest

  The Harbormaster’s Daughter

  Table of Contents

  Part One

  1. Pleasure Boats

  2. Caffe Corretto

  3. Hooked

  4. 3:17

  5. Tomorrow

  Part Two

  6. Learner’s Permit

  7. The Outer

  8. As Seen on Tv

  9. How She Walked Away

  10. Off Broadway

  11. Salvage

  12. A Lothario

  13. Sea View Auto Repair

  14. Famous Murder All Over Again

  Part Three

  15. Something in Common

  16. Kids

  17. Flapdragon

  18. Rainha do Mar

  19. Morning

  20. Another One Gone

  21. The True Truth

  Part Four

  22. Wide-Eyed

  23. Queen of the Sea

  24. The Washing of Ten Tides

  25. A Visit to 1612

  26. Magical Creatures

  27. His More Braver Daughter

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Conversation Guide

  The House on Oyster Creek,

  PART ONE

  1

  PLEASURE BOATS

  No matter how many years passed, Franco would find himself standing there with the bar rag, thinking back, trying to search out the flaw, the rusted bolt that held tight till it snapped, the knot that slipped, the exact place where the whole leaky contraption that was his life listed, took on water, and began to go down. If you rearranged the story by just one detail, Sabine could have lived, and worked herself into the fabric of the town one way or another, and now she’d own a little art gallery, or be the brisk, smiling hostess in the new bistro, married to a man who would of course have adopted Vita. The past would be past, and nearly forgotten.

  When he came to himself, he would give up and go back to wiping the bar. He should have been harbormaster. That was the natural order of things and everything would have been different if it had been followed. At Manny Soares’s retirement dinner, the men had clapped Franco on the back. It was his turn to oversee the harbor and they had faith in him. Franco had operated his dragger, the Rainha do Mar, from the same berth his father had used, and his grandfather before him. He knew every fisherman, every oysterman, in town, their families, their histories, their ways. It hadn’t occurred to him that anyone else would apply for the job, much less that the new town manager would advertise it, and not only in the Oyster Creek Oracle but in the Cape Cod Times, the Boston Globe, and on Monster.com.

  “Brian,” he’d said, looking across the desk to the earnest, sandy-haired young man with his degree in city management and his devotion to fairness, excellence, and the public good. And his seersucker suit, his bow tie. How did you talk to such a man? Franco squinted, and considered. “You need someone who’s comfortable on the pier.”

  Who else had such a full understanding of the delicate web of relations among the fishermen? It was in Franco’s blood, to know how to pay appropriate respect to men whose brothers had been lost at sea or how to keep an arrogant SOB like Bobby Matos satisfied so he didn’t start throwing his weight around. He had grown up among these guys, fished with them, fought the town’s fires beside them. When Vince Machado had seen an odd pattern in the chop and realized a tuna had ventured too close to shore, he’d called up and Franco had run down Sea Street with the rusted old harpoon his father had found while digging a foundation out on Try Point. Vince went out in his dory—it was the nearest boat to hand—and speared the fish right behind its eye. The majestic creature stopped still, its blood billowing into the water, and Franco swam toward it. That the tuna might thrash him to death… the last thing he thought of. He admired it; he wanted to know it, to feel it move while it was still alive. Bearing it in toward shore, he could hear his father’s voice telling him never to speak with disdain of his catch. The fish—especially tuna—were a valiant adversary. Standing beside it hoisted on the pier, he had understood this so well—he and this fish were a proud pair. And he and Vince Machado had had each other’s backs from that time on, until Vince went down on the Suzie Belle.

  Brian Sorel’s mouth had twitched, as if he found it amusing to think he might need anyone, never mind a guy like Franco, who had dropped out of high school, and not just any high school, but Oyster Creek High School, where students interested in going on to college had been considered traitors to the town that had raised them, that needed them to man the draggers and the restaurants and the cannery. Of course the cannery was a condo complex now, but… Franco had rubbed his eyes—he was allergic to every kind of pollen. When he was young he would start sneezing as they came into port, before they could even see land. They stood in Sorel’s oak-paneled office, beside the high window that looked out on a bay full of little sails—pleasure boats. Pleasure boats—what an idea!

  “It’s difficult to enforce fairly when you’ve been part of the community,” Sorel had explained, with an infuriating diplomacy. “I don’t want to put that burden on you. We need a fresh eye on the harbor, someone who’s not beholden to anyone.”

  So he’d hired Hank Capshaw, a guy from Newburyport who looked like a yachtsman, ruddy and weathered, and prone to clapping men heartily on the back. Franco would be assistant harbormaster. The washashores would trust Hank, so they’d make better use of the pier, bringing in more pleasure boats, more of the money that pleasure boaters had to spend. There were exactly nine draggers fishing out of Oyster Creek on a regular basis now, nine guys who would rather deal with Franco. Franco could name them, and their parents, and their wives, and their boats, and their stories.

  Franco had a picture of himself on board the Rainha, when his father was captain and he was ten or eleven years old. The hold was so full that the fish had spilled over onto the deck and to get anywhere you had to climb through them, slipping and sliding, feeling one leg go out from under you suddenly, then floundering up again and finding a dogfish down the leg of your waders. And there they all were, his father and his uncle Eddie and Joe Matos, culling fish, sorting fish, filleting fish, climbing over hills and slipping into valleys of fish. Franco stood in the middle of it all, a skinny kid holding a fat silver cod out in his arms, while behind him Joe hosed down the bit of deck that was showing amid all the fish heaped everywhere. It had not occurred to him, not to any of them, that they wouldn’t pull their nets in full and heavy like that every day for the rest of their lives.

  When there was only water, everywhere you looked in every direction, and maybe another boat or maybe two, and that was all—you could no more imagine the seas being
empty of fish than the ocean going dry. Like his father, and his grandfather, and the generations back to Portugal before they all followed the fish across the sea and landed here on Cape Cod, Franco was a fisherman. He knew there were other lives—both of his sons lived on the Pacific Coast now, working in offices, in cities, and though he’d visited, he still barely understood. You went up in the elevator, and then what? He was Franco Neves, captain of the Rainha do Mar. Or he had been, until the fish dwindled. Then the regulations began, the catch was limited, the number of fishing days was cut, the boat would just sit at the dock for a month until the engine clogged and mice built nests in the bilge pump. One winter he tied her to a mooring near the breakwater, meaning to give her a full overhaul in the spring… except that by spring it didn’t seem worth it. He tried to get out to check the engine every few months, but it weighed him down just to think of it. Two hundred fifty a year for the mooring, more for the registration, checks that hurt him to write, but to have her junked, sold for salvage… It would be like spitting on his father’s grave.

  Sometimes he’d admit he ought to sell the thing, but Danielle, his wife, would always shake her head, no matter how much they needed the money. “It’s you, Franco. It’s what you do. You’ll go back to fishing—I know you will. Look at the way the stripers have come back. Cod will, too.” The relief Franco felt when she said something like this!

  “You could be a professor at Wife College,” he answered, and she smiled at the idea.

  “A Neves has to go out to fish whether there’s fish or not,” she said, her voice deepening as it did when she was laughing at the poignant futility of everything, which was often. They both guessed he’d never go back to sea in the Rainha, but she recognized it as tragic, which gave him the comfort of seeing it as only a financial problem. He might have crumbled into dust if he’d really thought about all that old rust bucket meant to him, but bless her, Danielle did that for him.

  He had to admit that he could understand the town manager’s thinking. Arguments on the wharf tended to be settled by fisticuffs; in fact, Franco’s father had a pair of well-used brass knuckles from his time as harbormaster. And Franco was not a fighter. His heart was easily swayed and his mind padded obediently along behind, explaining the other point of view and finding the best reasons to give in to it. This was a wonderful quality in a bartender, less so in a harbormaster. The old fishermen had been here before the laws, and they were alive because they had outwitted nature. Dunk Carlos used to say, “Lookit the pretty rainbow” when he poured his motor oil over the side of the boat. Franco listened to Dunk and others like him, night after night at his second job, tending bar at the Walrus and Carpenter. They were sure that the only thing standing between them and success was the law. Let Hank Capshaw keep these guys in line.