The Harbormaster's Daughter Page 2

  That was how Franco met Sabine. Bobby Matos had been selling scrubbed lobsters at the fish market, and though he swore he had bought them without realizing it, Hank boarded his boat and found a wire brush still full of the eggs Bobby had scrubbed off. It was the spring run, when half of the female lobsters caught would be bearing eggs, meaning you had to throw them back. But the eggs were just there on the outside of the shell—you could rub them off with your thumb, and you’d have a lobster you could sell. Bobby was guilty of possession: possession of egg-bearing lobsters, possession of egg-bearing lobsters from which the eggs had been removed, failing to display fish in demand—there would be heavy fines at the very least.

  The Matoses did not like being called to account—years ago when the school principal said Bobby’s son would have to repeat second grade, the man’s car had burst into flames in his driveway in the middle of the night. Someone had tapped a nail into the gas tank and dropped a match. Bobby was coming in to the harbormaster’s shack at ten to have a talk with Hank. Franco had set off on his Rollerblades at a quarter till. It had been one of the first warm days of spring and Franco had headed out along Breakwater Road and lost track of time. His nickname was Wheelie, from the times in high school when he’d ride thirty miles on his bike just to work off some of his excess energy. When his sons were old enough to skateboard, he had learned along with them, and then came Rollerblades. He loved his kayak, too—anything that let him skim over the world’s surfaces. As soon as he was out of the shack—a small, tilting structure at the base of the pier, its cedar shingles curled with age—he felt young again, free as a butterfly.

  That day as he passed the Beach Rose Cottages, he saw Sabine standing in her doorway, in jeans and a thick sweater, watching him with admiration.

  “Hi, skater boy,” she said, as though she’d stepped right out of a movie. Franco loved the movies.

  2

  CAFFE CORRETTO

  Sabine was tiny, barely five feet tall, with thin, pale hair and dark circles under her eyes; he knew the type—the educated, poetry-reading type. They drifted into town clinging to some idea that never would have crossed a Portagee’s mind—the light here was so intense that it was necessary to their painting, or they never felt alive except when they faced the salt wind. Truly, they were here because life had damaged them and they needed a beautiful vision to hold to against some inner darkness, a well of despair that no self-respecting local had time for. Oyster Creek, with its narrow streets angling down toward the harbor, the breakers rolling against the eastern shore while the bay on the west side rippled like a bolt of silk, was their place of consolation. They might have “washed ashore” here like flotsam, but they clung like barnacles, taking any work, it seemed, or any man, whatever could help them stay and make their lives here.

  The local women—Danielle, for instance—belonged to an entirely different species. Romance was beyond their means, even in imagination. Their fathers were fishermen; their brothers and husbands had been raised on trawlers, hauling up load after load of cod, mastering a trade even as they were making it obsolete. They had learned to be tough, to survive. Danielle did love the smell of salt air, mostly because it meant warm water, safer for the men. She’d never liked the taste of fish; seeing a tourist eat steamed mussels, she remembered a story of someone who’d had to subsist on tree caterpillars during the war. A little beach cottage with rambler roses trained over the lintel and a window that looked out to the sea? She’d cleaned too much mildew, too many spiders out of places like that. She liked things brand-new, solid, clean. When the boys were young they’d lived in a raised ranch out in Cranberry Corners, a new development behind the highway with brickfront houses and pools in the backyards. And when the fish were gone, and the bank foreclosed on the house, she said, “Well, I’m glad I’ve vacuumed that place for the last time. It’s too big for us now anyway.” She stitched up curtains for the apartment over the bar, took a job behind the counter at the pharmacy, and never spoke a regretful word.

  Life without Danielle—he couldn’t imagine it. But the washashore women were like sunlight, wafting along the street in their flowery dresses, digging clams on a dim morning on the flats, their hair pulled back loosely so a few strands escaped, their laughter floating up through the fog along the beach, across the water. The unfulfilled dreams they sighed about seemed ridiculous to Danielle and her friends, but those yearnings gave women like Sabine a certain air; every move was full of art, of seduction.

  “You need some real strength to use those skates that way,” Sabine said. Her smoky voice had surprised him, coming from a woman so small. “Thighs.”

  He’d found himself shy. “My boys got me started skating. Builds the muscle…” Then he was sorry he’d mentioned the boys, making himself sound old, and irrevocably married. His wedding ring by itself had never seemed to daunt a woman; in fact, they seemed to take it as a challenge. But he’d sworn off women. He had.

  “I just made some coffee.…”

  “Oh, no, thanks. I gotta get back to work.”

  She smiled, blinking. “What is it you do?”

  “I’m…I work in the harbormaster’s office.” He was forty-seven years old; he was not going to speak of himself as someone’s assistant.

  “I see,” she said, looking down at the skates again, and up at him, with mischief. “Just take a little coffee break. Your skates won’t rust. Grappa?”

  “What?”

  “A shot of grappa in your coffee. Caffe corretto, the Italians call it. Corrected coffee.”

  “Grappa… like aguardiente?” he asked. “The liquor from the grape skins?” Flirtation was a little like Rollerblading. You might be unsteady for a minute at first, but once you hit your stride you were lighter than air.

  “Aguardiente?” she tried, syllable by slow syllable, so he’d watch her mouth. “Rolling the r?”

  “That’s the Portuguese word. Aguardiente.”

  She would love it; they all did. When he was young, families would put a particularly dark-skinned baby up for adoption, for the good of future generations—they were trying to bleach the Portagee out of themselves. Who would have guessed there would come a day when you could seduce a woman by telling her how to salt cod for bacalao? A woman like Sabine was looking for something real, something you could close your hand on and hold tight to—something like an ethnic heritage.

  “But, thanks, not while I’m… at work.” She wanted him; it felt wrong, unmanly, to refuse.

  “Some other time, then.”

  “Yeah…some other time.”

  He skated away, feeling he’d dodged a bullet. Georgie Bottles went by on his bicycle with a clam basket hanging from the handlebars and a rake over his shoulder.

  “Hey, Wheelie,” he called to Franco. Georgie would always use a nickname—it proved he belonged here, that he was part of the family. He was the town drunk, or one of them, and he’d have counted that a proud title if he’d been aware of it. His big jack-o’-lantern’s face was eternally arguing some enraging question and he would wag his finger if he had a free hand, though he rarely did, with the bicycle, the beer, and the clam rake. He pedaled along with his knees angled out, his long legs doubled, and the bike wobbling back and forth across the road.

  “Hey, George. You goin’ down to the flats?” The answer was obvious, but if Franco hadn’t asked the question, Georgie might have felt ignored, or taken lightly. And you couldn’t do that, not if you’d known him long enough. You could be miles out at sea on a dragger and Georgie would come along rowing a dory, fishing with a pole. He belonged here in a way even Franco didn’t anymore.

  Bobby Matos came out of the shack, hawking and spitting as if to rid himself of Hank Capshaw and any other authority, and swung himself up into his truck for the three-block ride back to the fish market. Bobby was a bastard, everyone agreed on that, but to some it counted as praise. Bobby owned his house, his boat, the fish market, the best oyster grant on the flats, and in the eighties he’d boug
ht a couple of “unbuildable” lots for twenty thousand, built duplex condos on each and sold them for six hundred thousand apiece ten years later. Try to stop him. Franco avoided him, and now he intended to avoid Sabine Gray, too. He put the skates under his desk and swore to keep his mind on his work: annual report to the Division of Marine Fisheries, annual report to the Department of Environmental Protection, compilation of statistics for the Office of Coastal Zone Management…. His head ached. If he were harbormaster, he, too, would have given these jobs to his assistant.

  But it was the month of May and inevitably the day arrived when the air was so fresh with salt that a surge of life came up in him. As soon as Hank took the boat out to check the recreational shellfishing areas, he laced up the skates and went straight down Breakwater Road. What were the chances he’d see Sabine, after all?

  “I thought you’d given up skating,” she said, in the voice of someone who knew exactly what a man was trying to give up. She was wearing soft old jeans and a man’s shirt, sitting in the doorway of her cottage—Sea Spray, it was called. Just the fact that she was there seemed to be a sign.

  The cottage was ten steps from the road, but she led him down the grass alley to a tiny patio surrounded by a privet hedge, shaggily overgrown. There were two plastic chairs and a rusted metal table barely big enough for the pot of impatiens she’d set there.

  He swallowed. Danielle always planted impatiens; that was all that would grow on their little deck. She had two window boxes shaped like dories—or, really, they were dories. He’d built them with the boys, one for each, a way to spend some time together and get them comfortable with tools; helped them understand the water, too—all those mysteries that had to be passed along through physical experience. Danielle scraped and repainted them every year, a bright red enamel. She would not have peeling paint, or the slightest blister of rust, as if decay might overtake her life entirely if she didn’t attend to it right away.

  But this had nothing to do with Danielle. It was about stepping into a dream for a minute, into another life entirely. These washashores, with their watercolor brushes soaking by the sink, their cellos resting in the corner, the frayed Persian rug some great-grandparent had left, the beach glass on the windowsill. LaRee and Drew Farnham had built their house entirely from salvage—beams, doors, windows—everything was a relic of something else, ill-fitting, unmatched. Everyone said it was charming, but to him it just looked unstable. People like the Farnhams and Sabine grew up in those big white houses on one or another Main Street and moved to Oyster Creek so they could live like shipwreck victims. It made no sense to him.

  Not that it wasn’t somehow magnetic.

  “So, may I correct your coffee?” Sabine asked, and he smiled.

  “It’s so harsh, it’s like medicine,” she said, pouring the grappa. “But I love it. It makes me feel like I’m back in Florence.”

  Franco tried to respond, but his tongue was slow. He was in her power, falling toward her; it was the best feeling he knew. He sipped.

  “Florence, Italy?” he managed to ask, realizing instantly that only a dumb Portagee who’d never been to college, who rarely went across the bridge to the mainland, never mind across the sea, would have asked such a question.

  “I lived there for years,” she said. “I was studying, and then… Anyway, I miss it sometimes. I’d have guessed you were Italian, in fact.”

  “No, Portuguese,” he said apologetically.

  “The great adventurers,” she said. “Navigators, conquistadores… I should have known.”

  Something pricked in the back of his mind, a memory of his father’s pride—his father who had not gone beyond high school but who read and studied Portuguese culture and history as if those books were making him strong. “A thalassocracy, that was Portugal—an empire of the sea!” he would say. He had a map, a copy of a map from the year 1500, that showed the continents, or their coastlines, emerging from a vast unknown. “Vasco da Gama, Cabral, Corte-Real… all sailing under the Portuguese flag, into…pfft! Who could even imagine what they would find?”

  The memory of his father’s expansive spirit, more than the grappa, more even than Sabine’s expert seduction, dizzied him.

  “I like you,” she said, a cool appraisal, paired with a glance so frank that something in him reared back—who was she, and who did she think she was? Then she laughed lightly. “Sorry,” she said. “That’s the kind of thing men say to women, you know. As if we were a bunch of goats lined up at a county fair. I don’t like it any better than you just did. But I’d always wanted to see what it felt like on the other side.”

  With that, the mask of sophistication dropped and she became sad and looked away.

  “I like you, too,” he said, filled with tenderness suddenly. Not so much for her, but for every lonely soul on earth, everyone who was yearning for some connection, reaching toward it, in whatever way.

  She looked up, quizzical. “No,” she said, pinching a spent bloom off the plant, “you don’t know me, that’s all.” Now her eyes were bottomless, and as he looked she leaned in and kissed his mouth, as sweetly as a child. Everything tender in him was awakened, but she had changed at the instant their lips touched—become hungry and harsh. So he took the part she gave him and played it in earnest, hands cupped to her ass, grinding against her.…

  “I’m so wet,” she said. Oh, she was not a local! He lifted her and carried her in to the bed. Soon she’d be saying, “Wait. We can’t,” in the same suffering tone, ending this little part of the drama. And he would give in to her scruple, swearing fidelity to his wife and making himself all the more irresistible. He thrust his hand up under her shirt.

  “You… you…” she said. But not “wait.”

  “You,” he said, unbuttoning the shirt, laying her breasts bare. Their eyes met. Where was “wait”? She lay there exposed and challenged him to resist her.

  “I…I don’t have any… protection,” he said, feeling utterly unmanly.

  “We don’t need it,” she said. “I don’t, I can’t… I’m barren, as the Bible would put it.… I mean, I probably don’t know you well enough to tell you that, but…”

  She laughed, sweetly, a tigress melted. Her skin was so pale beside his! The few lilies of the valley in the vase beside the bed gave off the sweetest fragrance.… She still seemed like she was in a movie, but now he had stepped in with her. And if this was more art than reality—well, he rose to the occasion; he knew every move. And then there they were, the dream had passed over them and a ray of sunlight was illuminating the flowers outside the window.

  “Is it noon already?” she asked, sitting up. “I have a hair appointment in half an hour.”

  He knew the arc of the situation. Having given in to impulse, he could expect a flood of guilt. What was he thinking of? He loved Danielle.

  “I can’t come back,” he said, just before he left, leaning against her as if he was deeply in her sway. Anything else would have been unspeakably rude.

  “I’m not that way,” she said lightly. “I don’t want promises.”

  “My wife…”

  “There’s nothing to fear.” She buttoned his shirt up, kissing his chest before she did the top few buttons. “See? Nothing’s changed.” She laughed lightly. “I’ve been in Europe so long, I’ve started looking at it the way they do. They have their dalliances; it doesn’t interfere.”

  By “Europe,” she certainly did not mean Gelfa, the town his grandfather had come from, where they had taken the boys to visit their cousins on their one trip across the Atlantic. Red-tiled roofs, a harbor crammed with boats, dogs sleeping in the alleys where they could shelter from a merciless sun. Men gathered in the square, their pants belted above their bellies, talking about the catch. Women in black from head to toe, gossiping in a tone he recognized easily though the words were foreign. The people from the next town could not be trusted; that was what they were saying, and they were speaking with pride. Of course, theirs was the best town, in the be
st country, in the world. On June 10, Portugal Day, they would celebrate the nation’s heroic explorers and the conquests they’d made. They were not more sophisticated than the Americans he knew.

  Though Americans did take a strange pride in their own shame, excoriating themselves for a history that had happened before most of their families had even arrived. Washashores were always eager to count off the ways that Europeans were better, kinder, braver, more honest, more sophisticated than Americans. Maybe they had only studied American history.

  “It’s like…swimming,” she said. “You slip into another element for an hour.”

  Franco blinked, squinted at her. In the course of his life as a rascal, he’d never heard a woman say such a thing. They always wanted love, or at least possession. That little tug, and his pull against it, would define the relationship. Without it, what was the point exactly? The sweetness of wanting, of errant submission to an overwhelming force—that was the pleasure! Guilt was an essential part of Franco’s life, even of his marriage. He had adored Danielle since he was fifteen—her body had been such a sweet revelation then, such a miracle. The years had strengthened the love, and coarsened it, until it was gnarled and twisted and maybe eternal, but his tender amazement was gone. The remorse that sprang up when he was with another woman could be counted on to rouse his feeling for his wife, sting him with love and longing for her again.