The Harbormaster's Daughter Read online

  That was what Amalia’s brother-in-law, who was chief of police, had said after Vinny Machado, in a rage at his wife, Maria, picked up the butcher knife and told her he had killed Sabine Gray and he could kill her, too. She called the police, regretted it an hour later and tried to recant, but it was too late. “I wouldn’t have thought Vinny had it in him,” the chief said, and then, “It’s a shame on all of us.”

  There had always been something wrong with Vinny. The family moved to New Bedford when he was a little boy, but it didn’t work out and in three years they were back—so Vinny was slow-witted and an outsider. Then his father went down on the Suzie Belle, and he and his mother became, essentially, wards of the town. Amalia had steered them through it, finding his mother a job behind the counter at Skipper’s, keeping an eye on Vinny so she could work, lending them money to cover the mortgage. Vinny was around on the street, and Franco would let him sit at the bar and serve him a Coke, because Vinny liked to feel he was one of the guys. Then a stroke of luck changed everything. Vinny got Maria Carriero pregnant. Of course they must be married, though Maria was just sixteen. She was a big girl with a cleft lip clumsily repaired. She had dreamed of a wedding, of course, but to find herself in a white lace dress with rose petals scattered in her path? Straight out of a fairy tale.

  Now Vinny was Maria’s problem. He got work at the transfer station sorting plastics and cardboard until the septic pumping job came up. He almost never spoke except to champion the Red Sox, but he had that grin, as if he had a depraved secret and was sure you had one, too. He would no more have fallen into a relationship with Sabine Gray than he would have written a letter to his congressman or signed up for yoga. But somehow, for some reason, he had killed her.

  “I guess…” LaRee was saying, turning back to the counter with its pans of slick fillets and tangles of squid, “just a pound of scrod. Please. It looks so fresh.”

  “Of course it’s fresh,” Amalia snapped. Blood is thicker than water was what she wanted to say. Vita should be living with her father, not with LaRee Farnham. It was easy to guess the real reason; they didn’t think Franco was good enough. So he, and the Portuguese community, had lost this child, and LaRee had inherited her, and the fortune that came with her, rumored to be millions. Vita would have been in communion class, except LaRee didn’t belong to Our Lady, or any other church. While the little girls in their stiff white dresses had filed silently up the steps for first communion, Vita had come skipping down the sidewalk, holding LaRee’s hand and talking a mile a minute. Vita would see Rome and Paris one day, but she would probably never visit Gelfa.

  Amalia didn’t go straight to the scrod, instead inserting her knife behind the gill of a haddock that had been laid out on a board and filleting it in three quick strokes, as if to highlight its freshness. She touched her tongs to a scrod fillet and LaRee said, “No, that one, at the back. The thinner one.” She said this as much to prove to herself that she wasn’t intimidated as anything else.

  Amalia gave her the one she wanted. She wasn’t a tourist anymore but a more or less regular customer.

  “Do you need a lemon?”

  “No, thanks.” The lobsters clicked against one another in the tank, brandishing their banded claws. LaRee slid the Visa card out of her wallet.

  “We don’t take charge cards for purchases under fifteen dollars,” Amalia was so pleased to say, pointing to a sign taped to the cash register.

  LaRee found a ten, and (going through her purse with great care, taking her time while Amalia stood reddening at the register) fished out two more dollars and thirteen cents for exact change.

  “Have a pleasant day,” Amalia said.

  “The same to you.” It was as good as a curse. Oh, Amalia, may you have a pleasant life, free of tenderness, longing, triumph, revelation. But very, very pleasant.

  The scrod made LaRee happy, though. She had felt pretty much like a lioness since that frozen night thirteen years ago—off all day tearing the heads off wildebeests and such, pursuing the best morsels for her child. Vita at sixteen still ate as she had at six: pasta with butter, chicken in pristine slices without so much as a membrane showing, and scrod baked on spinach. She needed more protein, more iron, more calcium, more confidence, more courage, more sense of connection, more hope, more…Well, the scrod was a step.

  For all the worries, LaRee was prouder of Vita than she probably ought to be. Vita was so full of thought and love and honor and kindness that when she appeared in a doorway it was the same as seeing the sun come up out of the bay. Yes, she was awkward, she dressed as if she was trying to hide, she didn’t know what “pull over” meant. But she had a natural equilibrium; it had been with her even the night she arrived. She would do one thing and another, and if things went awry she would keep at it steadily until they went right again, until she reached whatever goal she had in mind. If LaRee had said to her, “I hate Amalia Matos,” she would have laughed. “You hate Amalia Matos for an expression she had on her face ten years ago? You’re crazy!” And then LaRee would have to laugh too and admit that Amalia might be irritating but she was hardly a gorgon. The nights they had slept out in the backyard when Vita was younger, tangled in their blankets in the tent, watching out the front flap for shooting stars and opossums lumbering by… showing Vita all the simple magic in life, LaRee had known it herself.

  “LaRee’s the practical one,” Sabine used to say, meaning that she, Sabine, was the romantic, glamorous one. For some reason this had hurt LaRee then. Now it seemed like a lucky break. She wasn’t lost without Drew anymore; she was settled in her own life. Her beauty was more or less gone, but honestly, she didn’t need it. When she was young she’d looked in the mirror a hundred times a day, to reassure herself: Would someone love her? Maybe from this angle, or that? All those pangs—they were inconceivable now. Her vocation was the mothering of Vita Gray, her great challenge was to blaze the way for Vita. It was a thrilling profession, a life of great luxuries, such as baking a perfectly fresh fillet of cod on a cold spring evening, sending your daughter—your own daughter—out to pick the new chives. Still, this time was drawing to a close.

  She hopped into the car in the fish market parking lot and backed it around… and heard, before she felt, the crunch as she hit something. Ugh. She’d been lost in her thoughts. This parking lot was always empty in the off-season, and she, like everyone else, was in the habit of driving like a cowboy all winter, parking on the sidewalk, stopping to roll down the window for a ten-minute chat with a friend in the opposite lane. And zipping around backward without checking the mirror—because it was midweek in May and no one else was supposed to be there. Just a second ago everything was fine. The clock would lose only one second if she could go back and put on the brake. No one would notice!

  “What the—” A man’s angry voice.

  “Well, ‘what the’ yourself!” she said, turning to see the back of an old gray pickup, its tailgate fallen, bags of oysters jarred down the truck bed by the collision.

  “Did you even look?”

  “Matt, is that you?” It was. Matt Paradel, the one man she had made love to—to be honest, the one man she had even kissed—in the last ten years.

  “LaRee.” He said this as if he had known all his life that she was going to smash into the back of his truck.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, no, I’m sorry,” he said. “I was coming from the side. I just assumed…”

  “Let me—”

  “No!” he said, seeing her about to drive forward. “You’re holding the tailgate up. The oysters…”

  She got out. Well, here they were. She’d passed him on the highway, seen him at the gas pump at SixMart, said hello when she saw him in the beer tent at the Oyster Festival, but there had been no chance for conversation in years.

  “I’m so sorry, Matt.”

  “No,” he said. “I wasn’t paying attention—I always back out that way and I was in a hurry, I didn’t check.… There’s just too much
on my mind.” He raked his fingers through his hair. There was less of it than the last time she’d seen him, but he was still broad-shouldered and with his flannel shirt half untucked his presence seemed homey, welcoming. She wished she were wearing lipstick and her hand went straight to the loose skin of her neck. Still, his eyes, his whole face lit up, as if she was the best sight he’d seen in a while.

  “So,” he said, taking a deep breath, becoming earnest. “How are you?”

  “Oh, fine, fine.… How are you?”

  “No. I mean really.…”

  “Oh, God, how could I ever answer? It’s too complex; there are too many layers… and it’s been too long since we talked to give a proper answer.”

  He smiled fondly. “You can say a lot without giving ‘a proper answer.’ You always could.”

  “What am I saying?”

  He peered at her. “That we’re not the same people we were, last time we… saw each other.”

  “Do you drive around thinking of deep conversations to have with women who back into your truck?”

  “All I asked was how you are.”

  He had come into the clinic one evening when LaRee was on call, carrying his three-year-old son in his arms. The little boy’s name was Oak; his fever was a hundred and three. He’d started to convulse in his sleep and Matt had wrapped him in a blanket and run down the street, crossed the highway with the boy in his arms, not stopping even to put on shoes. He kept explaining that his wife was away, as if that had caused the illness, and watched LaRee take the boy’s vital signs as if he’d be able to read the diagnosis in her face.

  Of course a spark struck. At the follow-up visit he’d admitted that his wife wasn’t “away”; she had left him. Very slowly, they had moved toward each other. They had to be careful and discreet, for the kids’ sake—or that was how they put it. Really, neither one could bear to be hurt by love again. Matt was a ranger for the National Seashore, and dove for lobsters, kept an oyster claim, and had built a sailboat from plans he’d found when his father died. “She barely leaves a wake,” he said proudly. He took LaRee out on the bay one evening: It was like stepping through a looking glass to see the town from that perspective. All the lines and contours were unfamiliar, beautiful in a whole new way.

  The things she’d allowed herself to imagine! A whole, happy family, Vita with a fatherly presence, and she… well, it was embarrassing to remember the mirage of bliss she had seen ahead. One weekend—they’d had to plan carefully, with sleepovers for Oak and Vita—Matt had come for dinner, and to stay the night. He brought a bottle of champagne he’d found on the wrack line on the Outer Beach—Veuve Clicquot. He figured it had fallen off someone’s yacht. “You never have to worry in Oyster Creek,” he’d said. “Whatever you need, it just floats in.” She was shaking when he kissed her, she who had gotten rid of her virginity to the first boy who dared, back in high school. Now that she was older, she knew what was at stake. And that knowing, the sense that they were discovering a new world together… He’d slept, but she couldn’t, for fear of losing one minute of that night.

  At dawn she woke, pulled him down the path to the pond, and they swam while the morning mist hung in the air above them. A golden September day: September 10, 2001. When he left she went back down to sit at the end of the dock; as her feet touched the water she knew it was real, a real open love like an element she’d never moved in before.

  The next evening, Matt’s wife returned. She’d known it was a terrible mistake to leave, she said, but it wasn’t until she saw the towers fall that she knew she had to ask forgiveness. She loved him, she always had; she had barely felt alive without her family. She would go to counseling, do whatever he asked.

  And that had been that. Probably it was good to have ended things then, so it would always be perfect in memory, with no chance for the mess of ordinary life to dull its beauty. She would always have that image, of the dark water and the sun in the trees above, and a new life beginning right there. Better to be separated before the beautiful vision was disrupted. And now her heart was beating in a manner entirely out of proportion to the situation, which was after all a parking lot bump between two very well-used vehicles.

  “I am good,” she said. “I am. My life is very… whole. And you?”

  “Doing well, doing well,” he said, with a certain gravity, a respect for… call it the past. “Oak’s in eighth grade—he’s finally living up to his name.”

  “Wow—I still think of him as… an acorn! Does he like school?”

  “He seems to think it’s a football team that requires some irritating paperwork.”

  “And how’s work?”

  “Well, you know the National Seashore. The tide broke through the Outer Beach in the April storm. Not sure how we’re going to deal with that; the maps will have to be redrawn. Rebuilding the path over the tide marsh. Same old, same old, really. How about you? How’s Vita?”

  “Matt,” she said… and it all came back to her, the way he had let her talk on, brag on about Vita, the way his gaze had felt like sunlight. “She’s just so… oh, I wish you could see her.”

  “I’m not surprised,” he said. “And you? Do you…? Are you …?”

  “Oh, good, good. Old… you know, but…” She started to put the bags of oysters back in the truck bed. She wanted to be the one to say good-bye first this time.

  They pushed together to lift the tailgate and hook it shut again. He laughed. “This truck is so beat up, I don’t really have much to lose.”

  “I feel that way about my whole being.” She laughed. Honestly, she didn’t like to have him see her. Her skin had lost its glow, her waist was gone, her slenderness had begun to look like severity.

  “Yes,” he said, rubbing his forehead where his hair used to be. “I know just what you mean. Well, nice to run into you, ha-ha.”

  “Nice to run into you!”

  He opened the door to get back in the truck and stopped, turned back. “Tracey left again,” he said. “I mean, it’s fine, it’s the right thing. She went back to Raleigh. Her sister has a stable there and she always loved horses, so… Oak wanted to stay with the football team, so I have him until summer.”

  “Oh, I… I’m sorry.” Was that what she was supposed to say? Or to feel?

  “Don’t be. I just…I thought I should tell you. It doesn’t mean…”

  Years ago she’d have stepped on this sentence before he could snatch it back. What didn’t it mean? What did it?

  “No, of course,” she said quickly. “Nice to see you.” And she drove away. So there. It was maybe the first time in her life a man had left a door open and she hadn’t felt obliged to walk through it. She and Matt might have—well, but they hadn’t. And the time was past now; those feelings didn’t move in her anymore. LaRee wasn’t going to try to revive them just because his wife had finally carried out her intentions. It was a good feeling, as if her heart were weathertight.

  Across the street from the market, Sea Street turned off Front Street and led down to the wharf. Franco’s boat, the Rainha, was tied on the inland side, among the few other draggers that still worked from the pier. Every hull was painted: red and silver or brilliant blue… and just as brightly stained with rust. The Rainha was, or had been, a pale green rim above a deep purple hull—the most beautiful boat in town. From this distance it didn’t look more dilapidated than the others, but LaRee knew it wasn’t up to the voyage to the fishing grounds anymore, or any other voyage, except the yearly passage under the bishop’s sprinkle of holy water at the Blessing of the Fleet.

  A ray of sunlight escaped the passing clouds and blazed a silver path across the bay. Turning the corner by the old Wisteria Inn, she saw they’d set the rockers out on the porch. Another year—the pulse of the town quickening as young people arrived to look for summer jobs. Most would spend a few months and return to the city, where they would try and perhaps succeed at achieving something. But there would be some like LaRee, who would feel they belonged here and
would have to stay. Amalia would say they were hiding from real life, and she might be right. If LaRee had stayed on the mainland, she’d have gone to work in a hospital, become a nurse-practitioner, a nurse-anesthetist… or… something much more important than she was here. She’d have married a doctor, would have kids in private school, and maybe have an air of self-assurance, a quiet command of things. Instead, here she was, LaRee Farnham, the “girl who works at the clinic,” driving a car with two hundred thousand miles on it and yet another dent today, through a town whose era of greatness was a century gone.

  Then she came over the hill and started down toward Mackerel Bay Park, where Vita and the others were standing in the glow cast by the late sun. A flock of ducks was skimming the surface of the water behind them and settled together at the edge of the ebbing tide. And there was Vita, silhouetted against the bay, talking to Adam Capshaw. So she’d be full of excitement and happiness. What else could possibly matter?

  10

  OFF BROADWAY

  The theater, or what they had come to call the theater, was in the public park beside Mackerel Bay Beach, a wide lawn with picnic tables scattered across it, with the pier and the harbormaster’s shack on one side, a locust grove on the other. The trees were too tall and slender, like art nouveau beauties waving their handkerchiefs in the breeze, and if you ran between them in the dusk, with Mackerel Bay all liquid silver behind you, you could feel you were in a dream.

  Seeing them there, around the picnic table listening to Hugh’s plans for The Tempest set, Vita felt happier than she’d been in forever. These were her people—the Mackerel Sky Theatre Company on Mackerel Bay. Hugh Shiverick, the director, had been a professor before he retired. Orson Desroches, the company’s benefactor, was a short, round, whiskery man with a booming baritone who seemed to take as much pride in his weaknesses—for liquor, and theater, and red-cheeked young men—as in his strengths. Vita wanted to leap into their arms and lick their faces like a little lapdog, she was so glad to see them.