Honored Guest

ACK

WE WERE VISITING friends of mine on Nantucket. Over the years they’ve become more solitary. They’re quite a bit older than we are, lean, intelligent and carelessly stylish. They drink too much. And I drink too much when I visit them. Sometimes we’d just eat cereal for supper; other times we’d be subjected to an entire stuffed fish and afterwards a tray of Grape-Nut pudding. Their house is old and uncomfortable, with a small yard, dark with hydrangeas in August. This was August. I told my wife not to expect dinner from my erratic friends, Betty and Bruce. We would have a few drinks, then return to the inn where we were staying and have a late supper. Only one other guest was expected this evening, a local woman who had ten daughters.

“What an awful lot,” my wife said.

“I’m sure we’ll hear about them,” I said.

“I suppose so,” Bruce said, struggling to open an institutional-size jar of mayonnaise that had been set on a weathered picnic table in the yard.

“She’s unlikely to talk about much else with that many,” my wife said. “Are any of them strange?”

“One’s dead, I believe,” our host said, still struggling with the jar. “‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might…’” he said, addressing his own exertions.

“Let me give that a try,” I said, but Bruce had finally broken the plastic seal.

“I meant strange as in intellectually or emotionally or physically challenged,” my wife said. She had already decided to dislike this poor mother.

Bruce dipped a slice of wilted carrot into the jar. “I really like mayonnaise; do you, Paula? I can’t remember.”

“Bruce, you know very well it’s Pauline,” Betty said.

“I’m addicted to mayonnaise, practically,” Bruce said.

My wife smiled and shook her head. If she had resolved to become relaxed in that moment it would be a great relief, for Bruce had been kind to me and there was no need for tension between them. Pauline prefers to be in control of our life and our friendships. She’s a handsome woman, canny and direct, never unreasonable. I suppose some might find her cold but I am in thrall to her because I had almost been crushed by life. I had some rough years before Pauline, years I only just managed to live through. I might as well have been stumbling about in one of those great whiteouts that occur in the far north where it is impossible to distinguish between a small object nearby and a large object a long way off. In whiteouts there is no certainty and every instinct is betrayed — even the birds fly into the ground, believing it to be air, and perish. I strained to see and could not, and torn by strange sorrows and shames, I twice attempted suicide. But then a calm overtook me, as though my mind had taken pity on me and called off the hopeless search I had undertaken. I was thirty-two then. I met Pauline the following year and she accepted me, broken and wearied as I was, with an assurance that further strengthened me. We have a lovely home outside Washington. She wants a child, which I am resisting.

We were all smiling at the mayonnaise jar as though it were one of the sweet night’s treasures when a bell jangled on a rusted chain wrapped around the garden gate. We had likewise engaged the same bell an hour before. A woman appeared, thinner than I expected, almost gaunt, and shabbily dressed. She seemed a typical wellborn island eccentric, and looked at us boldly and disinterestedly … It was difficult to determine her age and thus impossible to guess at the ages of her many daughters. My first impression was that none of them had accompanied her.

“Starky! Have a drink, my girl!” Bruce said in greeting.

She embraced him, resting her cheek for a moment in his hair, which was long and reached the collar of his checkered shirt. She breathed in the smell of his hair much as I had and found it, I could imagine, sour but strangely satisfying. She then turned to Betty and kissed, as I had, her soft warm cheek.

She had brought a gift of candles, which Betty found holders for. The candles were lit and Pauline admired the pleasant effect, for with night, the hydrangeas had cast an almost debilitating gloom over the little garden. It did not trouble me that we had brought nothing. We had considered a pie but the prices had offended us. It was foolish to spend so much money on a pie.

“Guinivere,” Bruce called. “We’re so glad you came!”

A figure moved awkwardly toward us and sat down heavily. It was a young woman with a flat round face. Everything about her seemed round. Her mouth at rest was small and round.

“Look at all that mayonnaise,” Starky said. “Bruce remembered it’s a favorite of yours.”

“I like maraschino cherries now,” the girl said.

“Yes, she’s gone on to cherries,” her mother said.

“I have jars of them awaiting fall’s Manhattans,” Bruce assured her. “Retrieve them from the pantry, dear. They’re in the cabinet by the waffle iron.”

“Guinivere is a pretty name,” my wife said.

“She was instrumental in saving the whales last week,” her mother said. “The first time, not when they beached themselves again. The photographer was there from the paper but he always excludes Guinivere, she doesn’t photograph well.”

Every year brings the summertime tragedy of schools of whales grounding on the shore. It’s their fidelity to one another that dooms them, as well as their memories of earlier safe passage. They return to a once navigable inlet and find it a deadly maze of unfamiliar shoal. The sound of their voices — the clicks and cries quite audible to their would-be rescuers — is heartbreaking, apparently.

Pauline pointed out that those sounds would seem that way only to sympathetic ears. It was simply a matter of our changing attitudes toward them, she argued. Nantucket’s wealth was built on the harpooning of the great whales. Had they not cried out then with the same anguished song?

Starky murmured liltingly, “Je t’aimerai toujours bien que je ne t’ai jamais aimé.”

It was impossible to tell if she possessed an engaging voice or not, the song, or rather this fragment, being so brief. It was quite irrelevant, in my opinion, to the topic of whales.

Pauline frowned. “‘I will always love you though I never loved you?’ Is that it? Certainly isn’t much, is it?”

“One of Starky’s daughters has a wonderful voice,” Betty said, looking about distractedly.

Pauline nudged me as if to say, Here it’s beginning and now we’ll have to hear about all of them, even the dead one. She then continued resolutely, “As a statement of devotion, I mean. But perhaps it was taken out of context?”

“Everything’s context,” Bruce said, “or is as I grow older.”

Guinivere returned with a bottle of cherries and munched them one by one, dipping her fingers with increasing difficulty into the narrow jar.

“Those aren’t good for you,” Pauline said.

The girl tipped the liquid from the jar onto the flagstones and retrieved the last of the cherries.

“They’re very bad for you,” Pauline counseled. “They’re not good for anyone.”

The girl ignored her.

“Guinivere has a job,” Betty said. “She works at the library. She puts all the books back in their proper places — don’t you, Guinivere?”

“Someone has to do the lovely things,” Bruce said.

“And someone does the ugly things too,” Guinivere said without humor. “In Amarillo, Texas, more cattle have been slaughtered than any other place in the world. They make nuclear bombs in Amarillo as well.”

“You must read the books then,” Pauline asked, “as you put them back on the shelves?” Her efforts at engagement with this unfortunate child were making me uncomfortable. She wanted a child, but of course a lovely one. She had no doubt it would be lovely. Would even a bird build its nest if it did not have the instinct for confidence in the world?

“I have a joke,” Guinivere said. “It’s for him.” She pointed at me. “They name roads for people like you.” She paused. “One Way,” she said, and she smiled a round smile. She was much older than I initially though.

“You’re such a chatterbox tonight,” her mother said. “You must let others speak.”

Guinivere immediately fell silent, and for a moment we all were silent.

“I’m going to get more ice,” Pauline announced.

“Thank you!” Bruce said. “And more ingredients for the rickeys all around, if you please.”

Starky rose to accompany her into the house, which I knew would vex Pauline as she wanted only to remove herself from this group for a while, a group I’m sure she found most unpromising.

“You look good, my boy,” Bruce said.

“Thank you, it’s Pauline,” I said. Betty’s look was skeptical. “I’ve found there’s a trick to knowing where you are,” I said. “It’s knowing where you were five minutes ago.”

“Why, you were here!” Betty said.

“I know where you were long before five minutes ago,” Bruce said.

“Yes, you do,” I agreed. “And if that man, that man you knew, came into the garden right now and sat down with us, I wouldn’t recognize him.”

“You wouldn’t know what to say to him?” Bruce asked.

“I could be of no help to him.”

“Those were dark times for you.”

I shrugged. I had once wanted to kill myself and now I did not. The thoughts I harbored then lack all reality for me.

Quiet voices from the street drifted toward us. The tourists were “laning,” a refined way of saying they were peering into the lamplit and formal rooms of other people’s houses and commenting on the furnishings, the paintings, the flower arrangements and so on.

My thoughts returned to the whales and their deaths. They were small pilot whales, not the massive sperm whales Pauline had made reference to, the taking of which had made this island renowned. The pilot whales hadn’t wished to kill themselves, of course. But one was in distress, the one first to realize the gravity of the situation, the dangerous imminence of an unendurable stranding, and the others were caught up in the same incomprehension. In the end they had no choice but to go where the dying one was going.

Or that’s one way of putting it. A marine biologist would know far better than me.

Pauline returned carrying a tray with an assortment of bottles and a plastic bowl of melting ice. “Starky is on the phone,” she announced.

“It’s probably her real estate agent,” Bruce said. “She told me he might be contacting her tonight. She’s selling her home, the one where she raised all her girls.”

“I’m sure she’ll get whatever he’s asking,” Pauline said. “People are mad for this place, aren’t they? They’ll pay any price to say they have a home here.”

The night was growing colder. Bruce had brought out several old sweaters, and I pulled one over my head. It fit well enough — a murrey cashmere riddled with moth holes.

Betty placed her tanned and deeply wrinkled hand on mine. The veins were so close to the surface I wondered that they didn’t alarm her whenever they caught her eye. She had to look at them sometimes.

“We are all of us unique, aren’t we? And misunderstood,” she said.

“No,” I replied, not unkindly, for I was devoted to Betty, though I was beginning to wonder if she wasn’t becoming a bit foolish with age. The world does not distinguish one grief from another. It is the temptation to believe otherwise that keeps us in chains. “We are not as dissimilar from one another as we prefer to think,” I said.

The rickeys were not as refreshing as they had been earlier, perhaps because of the ice.

Starky reappeared, as gaunt and unexceptional as before and giving no explanation for what had become a prolonged absence.

“Oh, do begin now,” Betty said.

“Begin what?” Pauline asked.

“Without further preamble?” Starky said.

“Or delay,” Bruce said.

“What must this place be like in the winter!” Pauline exclaimed.

We all laughed, none more forgivingly than Starky, who then began, as I had suspected, to describe her children.

“My first daughter is neither bold nor innovative but feels a tenderness toward all things. When she was young she was understandably avaricious out of puzzlement and boredom, but experience has made her meek and devoted. She is loyal to my needs and outwardly appears to be the most praiseworthy of my children. She ensures that my lucky dress is always freshly cleaned and pressed and waiting for me on its cloth-covered hanger. Despite such conscientiousness, I feel most distanced from this child and might neglect her utterly were she not the first.

“My second daughter is the traveler of the family even though she seldom rises from her bed. One need only show her the shell of a queen conch or a paperweight with its glass enclosing a Welsh thistle and she is swimming in the Bahamas or tramping the British Isles, though this only in her mind for she is far too excitable and shy to make the actual journey. She prepares for her adventures by anticipating the worst, and when this does not occur she delights in her good fortune. Some who know her find her pitiful but I believe she has saved herself by her ingenuity. The bruises she shows me on her thin arms and legs, even on her dear face, incurred in the course of these travels, evoke my every sympathy.”

“How preposterous,” Pauline whispered to me.

“My third daughter,” Starky continued, pausing to sip her drink, “is plain and compliant with great physical stamina. In fact it is by her strength that she attempts to atone for everything. She is sentimental and nostalgic, which is understandable for given her nature her future will be little different from her past. She is not lazy, on the contrary she labors hard and conscientiously, but her work is taken for granted. She is hopeful and trusts everyone, leaving herself open to betrayal. She pores over my trinkets, believing that they have special import for her. She often cries out for me in the night. She fears death more than I do, more, perhaps, than any of us here.”

“Bless her heart,” Betty said.

“Does she?” Pauline asked. “But there’s no way of judging that, is there? I mean, how can you even presume—”

“I wish you’d continue,” Betty said to Starky.

“Yes,” Bruce said. “Mustn’t get stalled on that one.”

“My fourth daughter is a singer, an exquisite mezzo-soprano. Her voice was a great gift, she hasn’t had a single lesson. Even when it became clear that she was extraordinary we decided against formal training, which would only have perverted her voice’s singularity and freshness. Sing, I urged her always. Sing! For your voice will desert you one day without warning.”

“Mommy,” Guinivere said, startling me for I had forgotten her completely.

“Do sing for us, Guinivere,” Betty said. “We so love it when you sing.”

“Yes, go ahead,” her mother said.

The girl’s round mouth grew rounder still and after a moment in which, I suppose, she composed herself, she sang in the most thrilling voice:

If there had anywhere appeared in space

Another place of refuge, where to flee

Our hearts had taken refuge in that place

And not with thee

And only when we found in earth and air,

In heaven or hell, that such might nowhere be

That we could not flee from thee anywhere,

We fled to thee.

“How sweet,” Pauline allowed.

“Is that Trench?” Bruce asked. “I’m not as keen as I used to be in identifying those old English hymnists.”

Guinivere rose and said something urgently to Betty.

“Go behind the bushes, dear,” Betty said. “It’s quite all right.”

“Behind the bushes!” Pauline appeared scandalized. “She’s a grown woman!”

“Guinivere doesn’t like our bathroom,” Betty said. “It frightens her.”

“Perhaps there are ghosts,” Pauline said. She giggled and whispered in my ear, “Don’t tell me the Vineyard wouldn’t be better than this.”

“I don’t know about ghosts,” Betty said, “but in any old house you can be sure things happened, cruel and desperate things.”

When Guinivere had disappeared behind the large lavender globes of the hydrangeas, her mother said quietly, “Her voice is in decline.”

“I find that difficult to believe,” I said, though of course I am no expert. “Her voice is splendid.”

Starky said calmly, “She is like a great tree in winter whose roots are cut, only mimicking what the other trees can promise — the life to come.”

Guinivere returned and took her place. She could not be persuaded to sing again. We were all sitting on old metal chairs, rusted from years of the island’s heavy, almost unremitting fog, but not so badly that they marked one’s clothes. I believe Bruce and Betty stored them in the cellar during the winter.

“My fifth daughter,” Starky resumed to my dismay, “is the one I personally taught about time. I did her no service for she is my most melancholy child. She is unable to give value to things and never surrenders herself to comforting distractions. Alternatives are meaningless to her. She is a hounded girl, desolate, a captive, seeking in silence some language that might serve her. Faith would allow her some relief but she resists the slavishness of spirit that faith would entail. No, for her faith is out of the question.”

Bruce gestured for me to make fresh drinks for all. I wanted further drink badly, indeed I had almost taken Pauline’s glass and drained it as my own. I made the drinks quickly, without the niceties of sugar or lime and with the last of the ice.

“My sixth daughter is dead,” Starky said. “She ran the brief race prescribed to her and now her race is done.”

“She has a lovely stone,” Betty said.

“She wanted a stone,” Starky said. “I had to assure her over and over that there would be a stone.”

“Well, it’s lovely,” Betty said.

“She found the peace which the world cannot give,” Starky said, quite unnecessarily, I thought.

Pauline stared at her, then turned to me and said, “What could she possibly mean? How could she know what the poor thing found?”

I wanted to calm her though I knew she was more angry than anxious. Only hours before this mad evening had begun we were sitting quite contentedly alone on the moors, or what on this island they refer to as moors. We had wasted the morning, we’d agreed then, but not the afternoon. We could not see the sea, though we were aware of it because of course it was all around us. Love’s bright mother from the ocean sprung, the Greeks believed.

“I can’t bear this another moment,” Pauline said, rising to her feet. “Why do you expect to be so indulged? Why did you have so many? Where is the father? Who is the father? The children are freakish the way you present them. Why do you put them on such cruel display? Why are their efforts so feeble and familiar? Why are you not more concerned? This is not the way friends spend a sociable evening. Why didn’t you tell a real story, not even once? How could you believe we would even be interested? No, I can’t endure this any longer.”

And with this she hurried out, unerringly I must say, through the dark garden, across the uneven flagstone. It took me several minutes to deliver my apologies and good-byes, but even so I left in such haste that it was not until I was well down the street that I realized I was still wearing Bruce’s old sweater. I would mail it to him in the morning before we boarded the ferry. I wondered if Betty and Bruce would store the old chairs when the days grew bitter and if, assuming they did, the effort would be made to bring them out again in the spring.

It must have been quite late for the streets were deserted. I hoped that a walk, at my own pace in the light chill fog, would clear my head. Starky had seemed amused by Pauline’s outburst and Betty and Bruce unperturbed, while Guinivere had not raised her head, either then or at my own departure. Indeed, she appeared to be practically in a stupor. Her mother might have been correct. The effort she was making could not be sustained much longer.

I walked slowly down the cobblestoned main street, turning left at the museum where earlier in the day Pauline and I had spent less than an hour for it was a dispiriting place, cheerfully staffed by volunteer docents but displaying the most grotesque weapons and tools of eighteenth-century whaling — knives and spades and chisels, harpoons and lances and fluke chains. Antique drawings and prints accompanied by descriptive commentary filled the walls. One phrase concerning the end of the flensing process, which took place alongside the ships, remains with me: Finally the body was cast off and allowed to float away. Most disturbingly put, I felt, the word allowed be ing particularly horrible.

Pauline had been quite right about the whales. Had they not cried out in the days of their destruction with exquisite and anguished song? Yet their pursuers, with a purpose unfathomable, wanted only to extinguish them. Indeed, man had reveled in the fine red mist that rose then fell, as though from heaven, from the great collapsing hearts to herald the harried and bewildered creatures’ deaths.

The inn where we had taken lodging was now in sight. I thought once again of the debt I owe Pauline. I owe her everything I am. I would even prefer that she would leave this life, in time, before me, though I do not feel strongly about this. Even so, it is proof of her success with me that I could entertain such a thought. One of us will be first, in any case, and until then, we have each other.