Dark Nantucket Noon (5 page)

But me they'll lash me in hammock, drop me deep.
Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep.

Oh, they won't hang her, naturally; they'll just drop her fathoms down, fathoms down, in Framingham Women's Reformatory.

I went off this morning to rent a four-wheel-drive vehicle, so that I could go out to the lighthouse where this disaster took place, because it's just a long sandy neck out there and our old Chrysler would never make it. Picture your lordly husband sitting high above the world wrestling masterfully with the wheel of a great lumbering object called an International Harvester Scout. I spent the rest of the morning in it, out there on the sandy wastes at the northeastern tip of this island. Didn't learn much. It's a wild lonely place, worthy of a Captain Ahab, that neck of sand, with a rip shoal running off the end of it highly suitable for violent deaths and spectacular shipwrecks, like the ghastly sinking of the
Pequod
at the end of
Moby Dick.

But I must say there's not much else that's reminiscent of
Moby Dick
here on this island anymore. Except for the Whaling Museum and a few other antiquarian places, there's nothing much left of the life of the old Nantucket, unless it's the scallopers dredging along the shore of the harbor, making miniature voyages in feeble imitation of the whaling men. And of course instead of a bunch of healthy young Quakers setting sail across the world, all we've got here is a lot of Unitarians and Methodists and neo-Buddhists selling crewelwork and perfumed candles to the tourists. It's rather sad.

Homer tipped back in his chair and stared up at the portrait over the mantelpiece, seeing the serene face of Mary Kelly instead of master mariner Timothy Folger. Then he bent forward over his letter again and finished it with a tender paragraph. He could have spent the whole afternoon writing to his wife, because as long as his pen was moving across the paper she seemed present in the room, an effusion given off by the ink on the page, a vapor in the air, but as soon as he put down the pen she withdrew, sucked back across the Atlantic to the dim island of England, where she was studying the women's suffrage movement, writing a book. Ah, well, it was high time he got back to work anyway.

Homer put his letter away, shuffled through his notes, shoved his chair back heavily, stood up, smiled at Mrs. Deerborn, and consulted the shipping file behind her desk. In his hand was his list of vessels, the Nantucket whalers encountered by Melville's ship on the Pacific Ocean in 1842—the
Henry Astor
, the
Columbus
, the
Congress
, the
Enterprise
, the
Ganges
, the
Richard Mitchell
, the
Ontario
, the
Phenix
, the
Potomac.
Were the logs of any of those ships in this library? If they were, then surely they would contain some mention of their meetings on the high seas with the
Acushnet.

Homer fumbled through the file, looking for the first ship on his list. There was a whole big folder of
A'
s. He took it out of the drawer and glanced through it at the table. To his surprise, most of the material in the folder had to do with another kind of ship altogether, the Italian luxury liner
Andrea Doria.
Good God, it had sunk, he remembered that now. It had been an immense seagoing hotel, and it had gone down off the coast of Nantucket some time back. What had happened to it? Inquisitive in spite of himself, Homer was soon lost in clippings from the
Inquirer and Mirror
, and
Life
magazine, and
The New York Times.
There were accounts of the collision with the Swedish-American liner
Stockholm
, stories of the various adventures of the passengers, details of the air-sea rescue, articles about a number of unsuccessful attempts at salvaging the thirty-million-dollar vessel.…

Jesus. Everybody and his brother had gone down there to take a look at the sunken hulk. Even Jacques Cousteau. Some of them were just curious, but most of them had been greedy for the riches that were supposed to be on board, the gold bullion and the jewels and the works of art and the two tons of provolone cheese and the millions of dollars that were reputed to be locked up in vaults and safes.

And dangerous! Christ, how many fools had gone down into those abysmal depths in that gruesome cold and darkness? And there had been sharks, good God. Well, he shouldn't be surprised at what people were willing to endure for the sake of some crazy dream of sunken treasure. Greed was a pretty powerful incentive for all sorts of violent and perilous adventure. Take murder, for example. Homer found himself staring at a fuzzy photograph of a poor wretch of a diver, his mask thrust up over his grease-blackened forehead, his features twisted, agonized, because he had just witnessed the accidental drowning of his diving partner. God, what a tortured face! Homer scrabbled at the clippings, shoveled them back into the file and wished he had never examined it. Pictures like that could stick in your mind and ruin your digestion the rest of your life. And anyway he was just wasting his time. He bent over to pick up a last clipping from the floor, glanced at it as he put it back in the folder, took a second look, and then decided he hadn't been wasting his time after all.

The clipping was from the
Inquirer and Mirror
, and it was a long account about the death of a Nantucket couple in the disaster, Chambers and Dorothy Boatwright. Jesus Christ, they were the parents of Helen Green. She had been Helen Boatwright. She was listed as their only child.

The poor kid. Unnatural death certainly seemed to run in her family. She must have been born under some malign astrological influence, some accursed conjunction of planets, some goddamned unlucky star.

6

I would up heart, were it not like lead.

Moby Dick

It happened just the way Homer had said it would. By eleven-thirty on Monday morning Kitty was free. She hobbled out of the Town and County Building on Broad Street with Homer's hand on her elbow, her legs and back stiff from the hard bed in the lockup, her skin trying to grow a rind of toughness, a horny carapace, to protect it from the looks on the faces that stared at her. A flash exploded in her eyes as she stepped outside, and Kitty put out one hand as if to ward off a blow. For the first time it dawned on her that she was public property. She dropped the hand into her pocket, which was lumpy with a talisman, the broken shell of the whelk.

In the front seat of Homer's Scout she fingered the sharp edges of the shell and watched him struggle with the truck's unfamiliar mechanism, cursing the obscenity gears and the obscenity fools on the sidewalk. Chief Augustus Pike was knocking on the window of the truck. Kitty rolled the window down, and he looked past her and spoke to Homer. “You understand about the dates, Mr. Kelly? The hearing is next Monday, the grand jury probably a week or so after that. And unless I miss my guess, you must be sure to have her back here on the island for trial on September second. Fifty thousand dollars bail is no joke.”

“I understand,” said Kitty. But Chief Pike ignored her and waited for Homer's reply. The chief was an honest man of action, and he was leery of Kitty. The strange whims and tumultuous passions of errant womankind alarmed and puzzled him. He preferred to deal with her attorney as man to man.

“Well, of course I know it's no joke,” said Homer angrily.

“I think you've got your emergency brake on,” said Chief Pike kindly.

“Well, of course I know I've got it on,” snarled Homer. He released the brake and the truck bucked forward, plunged down Broad Street and squealed around the corner.

“Where are we going, now?” shouted Kitty.

“Airport. I'm going to see you safely home to Cambridge. And I want to take a look at that apartment of yours and see what they've turned up.”

“Turned up? You mean they will have been there?”

“Oh, sure.”

Kitty thought about the top of her desk, the contents of her drawers, certain boxes of papers and letters and pictures. She looked at the broken shell in her hand.
I am like the shell
, she thought.
Smashed and broken into.
But then she ran her fingers over the microscopic honeycomb that coated the inner surface, and smiled with grim vanity. Yes, she was like the shell, broken and exposed, but she was still coded, still secret in some ways and unreadable.

Her car was parked at Logan Airport. Kitty picked out its friendly shape from far away. “Here,” said Homer. They gave me back your keys.” Inside the small car he loomed up gigantically. “Listen. Suppose I asked you what the prosecutor will ask you. ‘At the time of Mrs. Green's death, were you still in love with her husband?' What would you say?”

“What would I say?” The car descended into the dirty melancholy of the tunnel under Boston Harbor, and Kitty thought it over. It was easy enough to decide to speak the truth But the trouble was, it got lost in the telling. There it would be flowing forward from the mind, an urgent incoherent mass, carried swiftly into the mouth by the eager breath—but look what happened to it there, on the very brim of expression. It had to be chopped up into words and offered up bite-size, and somehow it was no longer altogether true, but dangerously misshapen, if not actually false. Kitty glanced cautiously at Homer. “I would lie,” she said.

“Well, all right. But do you think you left anything lying around in your apartment that might indicate you still had any feeling for Joe Green?”

“Oh—yes. Yes, I did. A sort of ballad. I've been worrying about it. It wasn't even any good.” Kitty laughed unhappily. “If they're going to convict me I'd rather the evidence against me scanned.”

Homer laughed too, and Kitty felt again that rude aboriginal power that had comforted her before, as if sheer physical strength could pull and jerk and haul and lift her out of this hole she had fallen into. “You mean you don't mind being convicted for being a murderer,” said Homer, “as long as nobody calls you a bad poet. Christ, how vain these scribblers are.”

Kitty's apartment house was a sunny building on Cambridge Street with small rocks set in among the bricks. Her basement room was a funny mixture of heavy old Morgan Memorial furniture and new wicker chairs, with a lot of fire-engine red scattered here and there. It amused her the way it always did, and she was surprised how happy she felt to be back in it again. She went straight to the long table against the wall. “It's gone,” she said. “That poem.” She opened a drawer. “Picture's gone too.”

“A picture of Joe Green?”

“Yes. I don't know what I kept it for. Damn-fool thing to do.”

“Did you have a picture of Helen Green?”

“No.” Kitty's face brightened. “So how could I have known who that woman was?”

“Oh, they can get around that. Her picture was probably in the
Boston Globe.
Maybe
The New York Times.
‘Bride of rising young novelist.'”

“It was. I saw it in the
Globe.”

“There, you see. What else did they get?”

Kitty ran her finger along a shelf. “I think they may have taken one of my books. I had six or seven copies left. I'm not sure exactly how many.”

Homer drew out one copy of Kitty's book of poetry and stroked the raised letters of the gold prize seal on the glossy purple cover. “Pretty good for a kid like you,” he said. “Joe got one of these prizes too, didn't he?”

“Yes, that's right. For his first novel. Oh—look. That's gone too. My copy. And there was something written on the flyleaf.”

“You mean your own personal copy of his first novel? Humpf. Did you read the second one? The one he wrote on the island?”

“No. The reviews said it was inspired by his wife. It was supposed to be a sort of epithalamium, a celebration of a wedding. I just didn't ever get around to—well, I didn't want to read it.”

“I didn't read it either, matter of fact. Say, you haven't got a drop of something around this place, have you?”

Kitty took a bottle of bourbon out of the cupboard under the sink and a couple of glasses from a shelf. She banged some ice out of a refrigerator tray. She handed Homer a glass and got some cheese out of the refrigerator. They sat down in her wicker chairs. Solemnly Kitty sliced through the red wax of the cheese with a paring knife, watching the serrated edge bury itself cleanly over and over again in the plump flesh. “Homer,” she said, her voice sepulchral, “are you sure I didn't do it? Sometimes I wonder if I did it and didn't know it.”

“Well, you know, Kitty Clark, when I walked into that police station and talked to Pike, I'll have to admit I wondered what in God's name had got into that clever young woman whose work Mary and I had been running into lately, here and there. But when I talked to you—well, I don't know what happened to Mrs. Green, but I've decided in my heart and brain that you didn't do it, if that's any comfort to you.”