“I don’t want somebody else…”
“That’s not how it looked to me a few minutes ago.”
“Kimmer, I love you. Only you.”
My wife shakes her head and smiles sadly. “Well, then, you’re crazy or stupid…”
“That’s entirely uncalled for,” I say in the most wretched Garland tone.
“… or maybe just some kind of masochist who gets his kicks from having a woman treat him like…”
This nonsense might go on forever, except that Bentley rescues us. Having spent a good twenty minutes simply watching the water go past, he has at last worked out what is happening. Grabbing both his mother’s hand and my own, he swings around until his back is to the rail. When he is sure he has our full attention, he smiles up at us and proclaims with great glee, “I’m on boat.”
The fight goes out of both of us, and we are, for an instant, united in pure and strong parental love for our son.
Then the moment passes, and we are competitors once more. And Kimmer, as usual, beats me to the punch. “Yes, you are on a boat, honeybunch, yes, you are,” she murmurs, gathering a proud, wriggling Bentley to her breast. “Yes, you are, baby, you’re on a boat, that’s very good; now let’s go inside and get warm. Mommy will get you a Coke.”
“Hot chockut, Mommy, hot chockut!”
“Hot chocolate! Great idea, baby, great idea!”
Without a further word to her husband, my wife, the prospective judge, carries our son into the cabin. I watch her go, reading questionable messages in the sway of her hips and the set of her back. As so often happens at these moments of marital frustration, something primitive and ugly twists and furrows within me. A terrible red heat rises inside my head, a kind of indigestion of the brain; as always, a brisk but patient stroll helps me to wrestle my demons down. I make two complete circuits of the deck and one of the indoor seating down below before I feel sufficiently calm to join my family in the canteen; in all that walking, I see no sign of the roller woman. And this bothers me, not simply because I miss her already, but also because I am convinced that her presence on board is no accident. She is here for the same reason she was at the rollerdrome, because she was sent -and not by God either.
Ocean Park is a broad but irregular expanse of grass fronting on Seaview Avenue, the busy street one crosses to reach the rickety wooden stairways leading down to the slowly eroding beach known, unofficially, as the Inkwell, in whose gentle waters, for generations, the darker nation has frolicked. The house where I spent the summers of my youth is on the opposite side, where the neat Victorians are small and cramped together and too expensive. At one end of the park, to the right as one faces the water from our front porch, a line of fine old houses, all of them much larger than ours and topped with brightly colored turrets and fancy weather vanes, dominates the horizon. At the other end, to the left, just beyond the line of sight from our porch, stands the Steamship Authority dock, where some of the ferries unload in summer; during the off-months, all the ferries tie up a few miles up the coast in Vineyard Haven. A bit closer in are a lovely weather-beaten Episcopal church, its doors open in summer to the sea and so to every Sunday storm, and the city police station, which looks out on a tiny plaza featuring an aging bronze statue bearing a plaque that commemorates, for some arcane reason of Yankee logic, Confederate war dead. The statue guards the top of Lake Avenue, the narrow, crowded street leading down to the Flying Horses carousel, which is all that matters to Bentley.
Like many homes in Oak Bluffs, my family’s summer place has a name, emblazoned on a faded wooden sign hanging from one of the posts along the front porch. Ours, unfortunately, is called VINERD HOWSE, a phrase selected by my sister Abby when she was small, quite by accident-she wrote it on a picture of the house she drew in the kitchen with crayons from the Crayola 64 box one rainy Oak Bluffs afternoon-and it was my unemotive father who surprised us a week later with the plaque. After Abby died, the family never had the heart to change the name. When we climb out of the white BMW on this bright fall day, however, the first thing my darling Kimmer says is that the time has come to get rid of it. As she pulls a sleeping Bentley from his car seat, I ask her which she means: the plaque or the name. “Either,” my wife tells me, still showing me her back. “Or both.”
My father once proposed changing the name to The Three Fools, one of his many obscure chess puns, but my mother put her foot down; my father, in all the years I remember, never acted against her wishes. Addison insists that it was Claire Garland who made the decision that it was time to end the confirmation battle, when the Judge was prepared to fight to the bitter end. Mariah whispers that it was Claire who argued that he should resign from the bench after the humiliation of the hearings, so that he could speak out publicly and clear his name. And all of us know that it was after Claire’s death that my father’s speeches became as wild and nasty as most people surely remember. Small surprise, then, that even after my mother died, my father honored her memory-and Abby’s too-by retaining the sobriquet Vinerd Howse. But now that Vinerd Howse is mine, or, rather, ours, my wife has other ideas.
I stand for a long moment in the narrow front yard, the key dangling from limp fingers, remembering the glorious Martha’s Vineyard summers of my childhood, when friends and family swirled constantly in and out of the double front doors with their tiny panes of glass, some rose, some azure, some clear, held fast in frames of involute leading; remembering the many sad and lonely visits to this house through those endless months when my mother sat dying, often alone, in the front bedroom on the first floor; and remembering, too, how easy it became to avoid coming back here once the Judge began his tumble toward megalomania. As Kimmer fusses with Bentley and I stare at the summer home of my youth, I find that I have difficulty recalling precisely why I was so filled with joy when I learned that the Judge left me this cramped and unhappy shell. With my parents both dead, the house should by rights be dead as well, quiet and neutral; instead, it seems almost a live thing, fiendishly sentient, brooding malevolently on the family’s misfortunes as it awaits the new owners. Quite suddenly I am paralyzed with some emotion far more primal than terror, a clear and utterly persuasive knowledge, shivering through me from some unnatural source, that everything is about to go wretchedly wrong: I fear that my legs will not move me to the porch, or my hands will not work the key, or the key will break off in the lock. In that terrible moment, I want to reject this scary inheritance and all its ghosts, to grab my family and hurry back to the mainland.
As usual, it is worldly Kimmer who restores me to my senses.
“Can you hurry up and open the door?” she demands sweetly. “Sorry, but I have to piss in the worst way.”
“No need to be vulgar.”
“There is if nothing else will get you moving.”
She is correct, after a fashion, and I am being foolish. I smile at her and she almost smiles back before she catches herself. I heft the heavy suitcase in my left hand and bounce the key in my right. Then I stride boldly up the steps, heedless of the demons who caper in the shadows of memory. Drawing a breath, I dismiss them like a veteran exorcist and rattle the key into the lock. Only as the lock begins to turn do I notice that one of the tiny panes of colored glass is missing-not broken, just not there, so that through the space defined by the narrow gray leading I can see into the darkness of the house. I frown, pushing the door wide open, and, standing frozen on the threshold of the house I have loved for thirty years, I realize that the goblins have not all retreated. I try to swallow but cannot seem to gather any moisture in my throat. My limbs refuse to move me forward. Through a slowly descending curtain of the deepest angry red, I see my handsome wife brushing past me with a whispered, “Sorry, but I gotta go,” and I feel her transferring Bentley’s hand to mine.
Kimmer is three steps into the house before she, too, stops and stands perfectly still.
“Oh, no,” she whispers. “Oh Misha oh no.”
The house is a disaster. Furniture is upended, books are strewn over the floor, cabinet doors broken, rugs sliced to ribbons. My father’s papers are everywhere, the breeze from the open front door ruffling their edges. I peek into the kitchen. A few of the dishes are smashed on the floor, but the mess is not as bad, and most of the plates are simply stacked on the counter. While Kimmer waits in the front room with Bentley, I force myself to go upstairs. I discover that the four bedrooms are barely disturbed. As though there was no need to bother, I am thinking as I stand in the window of the master suite, telephone in hand, talking to the police dispatcher. As I explain what has happened, I look down at the BMW, parked illegally along the split-rail fence that guards the south side of Ocean Avenue, doors still open, baggage not yet unloaded. Something isn’t right. They did not wreck the
