The Weight of Water Read online

  This morning, after we have tied up, Adaline stands in the cockpit, her hands at her waist, her eyes searching the shoreline of Smuttynose, as if something profound might reveal itself to her. When she speaks, she has a residue of an Irish accent, and her voice lends her an aura of authority I do not necessarily feel in myself. Her words rise and fall and dip some more, and then come back to where you can hear them — like soft church music, I often think, or like the melodious beat of water on the hull.

  Adaline moves like a dancer, swaying for balance. In the mornings, when she comes up the ladder and emerges from the companionway, she seems to glide into the cockpit. She wears long skirts in thin cottons, with blouses that fall loosely around her hips. She wears a gold cross at her throat, jewelry that is somewhat startling in a woman of her age and stature. The cross draws the eye to the hollow above her clavicle, a hollow that is smooth and tanned. It is as though she once wore the cross as a girl and simply forgot to take it off.

  Adaline, Rich tells me, works for Bank of Boston, in an international division. She never talks about her job. I imagine her in suits, standing at gates in airports. She has scars on her wrists, slightly crooked vertical threads in smooth flesh, as though she once tried to trace her veins with a razor or a knife. She has an arresting mouth, with full curved lips of even dimensions, and barely any bow at all.

  Sometimes I imagine I can see Maren Hontvedt at the end of her life. In the room in which she is sitting, the wallpaper is discolored but intact. She wears an eyelet cap to cover her hair. I note the languid drape of the shawl folding into her lap, the quiescent posture of her body. The floor is bare, wooden, and on the dresser is a basin of water. The light from the window falls upon her face and eyes. They are gray eyes, not yet faded, and they retain an expression that others who knew her might recognize.

  I think that she is dying and will be gone soon. There are thoughts and memories that she hoards and savors, holding them as one might a yellowed photograph of a child. The skin hangs from her face in folds, her skin a crushed velvet the color of dried hydrangeas. She was not beautiful as a young woman, but her face was handsome, and she was strong. The structure of her face is still as it was, and one can see the bones as one might be able to discern the outline of a chair covered by a loose cloth.

  I wonder this: If you take a woman and push her to the edge, how will she behave?

  After we moor the boat, Rich offers to take me over to Smuttynose in the Zodiac. Billie begs to go along. I shoot from the dinghy in a crouch, leaning against the side of the boat for balance. I use the Hasselblad and a telephoto with a polarizing lens. From time to time, I shout to Rich to cut the engine so that the vibrations will be lessened, or I gesture with my hand in such a way that he knows to push the throttle forward.

  There are two houses on the island. One is a small, wooden-frame house called the Haley house. It is not habitable, but is of historic note and has a great aesthetic purity. The other is a shack with rudimentary supplies for shipwrecked sailors.

  Rich beaches the Zodiac expertly inside the crumbled breakwater of Smuttynose. The beach is tiny, narrow, blackened by dark stones and charred bits of wood. The air is sharp, and I understand why years ago sea air was prescribed as a tonic for the body. Billie removes her life jacket and sits cross-legged on the sand in a lavender T-shirt that doesn’t quite cover her belly. Rich is tanned already, an even red-gold on his legs and arms and face. There is a line at his throat. We have left Thomas and Adaline on the Morgan.

  In the winter months on the Isles of Shoals, the windows were never opened, nor were the children ever let outside, so that by March the air inside the houses was stale and putrid and old with smoke, and the children could hardly breathe.

  Rich takes Billie by the hand and guides her past the breakwater so that he can help her search for mussels among the rocks and put them in her pail. I heft my camera bag onto my shoulder and head out toward the end of Smuttynose. My plan is to turn around and frame a shot of the entire island. At my destination, the easternmost tip of the island, there is a rock shaped like a horse’s fetlock. Inside the square-cut boulders is a sheltered space, a sea cave, that sloshes with water when the tide is high. It is slippery on the rocks, but after I have left my camera bag on a dry ledge and anchored it in a crevice so that the wind will not blow it away, I crawl like a crab to the sea cave and squat inside. On three sides of me are the shoals and roiling water, and straight out to the east nothing but Atlantic Ocean. Unlike the harbor and the place where we have landed, this side of the island is unprotected. There is lichen on the rock, and small flies lift in a frenzy whenever a wave crashes and sprays.

  At the rock, which is known as Maren’s Rock, I shut my eyes and try to imagine what it would be like to huddle in that cave all night in winter, in the dark, in the snow and freezing temperatures, with only my nightgown and a small black dog for warmth.

  I crawl from the rock, scraping my shin in the process. I collect my camera bag, which has not moved from its notch. I take a roll of color slide film, thirty-six shots of Maren’s rock. I walk the length of the island, the going slow in the thick, scratchy brush.

  On January 14, 1813, fourteen shipwrecked Spanish sailors, driven to Smuttynose by a winter gale, tried to reach the light from a candle in an upstairs window of Captain Haley’s cottage.

  They died in a blizzard not forty feet from their destination and are buried under boulders on the island. One man made it to the stone wall, but could go no further. Captain Haley discovered him the following morning. Six more bodies were found on January 17, five more on the twenty-first, and the final body was discovered “grappled up on Hog Island passage” on the twenty-seventh. According to the Boston Gazette on January 18, the vessel, named Conception, weighed between three and four hundred tons and was laden with salt. No one in America ever knew the dead sailors’ names.

  When I find Rich and Billie, they are sitting on the beach, their toes dug into the sand. I sit beside them, my knees raised, my arms folded around my legs. Billie gets up and stares into her pail and begins to leap in stiff-legged jetés all around us.

  “My fingers are bleeding,” she announces proudly. “We pulled off a million of them. At least a million. Didn’t we, Uncle Rich?”

  “Absolutely. At least a million.”

  “When we get back to the boat, we’re going to cook them up for supper.” She bends over her pail again and studies it solemnly. Then she begins to drag the pail down to the water’s edge.

  “What is she doing?” Rich asks.

  “I think she’s giving the mussels something to drink.”

  He smiles. “I once read an account of a pilot who said the most beautiful sight he’d ever seen from the air was the Isles of Shoals.” He runs his hand over his shaved head. His skull is perfectly shaped, without bumps or dents. I wonder if he worries about sunburn.

  “Adaline seems very nice,” I say.

  “Yes, she is.”

  “She admires Thomas’s work.”

  Rich looks away and tosses a pebble. His face is not delicate, in the way that Thomas’s is. Rich has dark, thick eyebrows that nearly meet in the center. Sometimes I think that he has Thomas’s mouth, but he doesn’t. Rich’s is firmer, more pronounced in profile. “Childe Hassam painted here,” he says. “Did you know that?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought that someone who worked for Citibank would know so much about poetry,” I say.

  “Actually, it’s Bank of Boston.” He tilts his head and looks at me. “I think poetry is something that’s fairly univer $$$on’t you? Enjoying it, I mean.”

  “I suppose.”

  “How is Thomas?”

  “I don’t know. I think he’s convinced himself that each poet is given a finite number of words and that he’s used up his allotment.”

  “I notice that he’s drinking more,” Rich says. Rich’s legs are brown and covered with dark hair. Looking at his legs, I contemplate the trick of nature that has caused Thoma
s and Rich to receive what appear to be entirely separate sets of genes. I glance out toward the sloop, which floats four hundred feet from us in the harbor. The mast teeters in the chop.

  “Adaline was married once,” Rich says. “To a doctor. They had a child.”

  I turn to him. He must see surprise on my face.

  “I think the girl must be three or four now. The father has her. They live in California.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Adaline doesn’t see the girl. She’s chosen not to.”

  I am silent. I try to absorb this information, to put it together with the gold cross and the lilting voice.

  “Adaline came over from Ireland for him,” he says. “For the doctor.”

  He leans over and brushes a dried smear of muck from my calf. He smooths my leg with his fingertips. I am thinking that the calf is not a place that anyone touches much. I wonder if he shaves his head every day. What the top of his head would feel like.

  “She’s kind of detached,” he says, withdrawing his fingers. “She doesn’t stay with people long.”

  “How long have you two been together?”

  “About five months. Actually, I think my tenure is almost up.”

  I think of saying to him that to judge by the sounds emanating from the forward cabin, I cannot agree.

  In front of us, Billie lies down at the waterline. Mostly, I think, to get sand in her hair. I tense and begin to rise. Rich puts a restraining hand on my wrist.

  “She’s OK. I’ve got my eye on her.”

  I relax a bit and sit back down.

  “Did you want something more?” I ask. “From Adaline, I mean.”

  He shrugs.

  “She’s very beautiful,” I say.

  Rich nods. “I’ve always envied you,” he says. “You and Thomas.”

  He puts his hand to his face to shade his eyes, and he squints in the direction of the boat.

  “I don’t see anyone in the cockpit,” I say.

  A few minutes later, I take a photograph of Rich and Billie and her pail of mussels. Rich is lying on the small piece of rough beach, his knees raised, dark circles inside the wide openings of his khaki shorts. The eye is drawn to those dark circles. His arms are spread at his sides in a posture of submission. His head has fallen into a depression in the sand, so that his body seems to end at his neck. Billie is standing over him, perfectly bent at the waist, her arms stretched out behind her for balance, like two tiny wings. She is talking to Rich or asking him a question. Rich seems vulnerable under her scrutiny. Beside Billie is her green plastic pail of mussels, perhaps enough to make an appetizer for two. Up behind them both is the Haley house, small and old, the trim neatly painted in a dull brick red.

  When I look at the photographs, it is hard not to think: We had seventeen hours then, or twelve, or three.

  Immediately after the photograph is taken, Rich sits up. He remembers, he tells Billie, that a pirate named Blackbeard once buried his treasure on the island. He gets up and searches through the scrub, examining this branch and that, until he has made two forked sticks. He sets off with Billie while I wait on the beach. After a time — fifteen minutes, twenty? — I hear a cry from Billie. She is calling to me. I get up to look and then walk over to where she and Rich are standing together, about two hundred feet from the beach. Billie and Rich are bent over a hole they have dug in the sand. In the hole is a treasure: five quarters, two dollar bills, a gold-colored toothpick, a chain with a single key attached, a bracelet made of copper wire, and a silver-colored ring. Rich pretends to read the inscription under the band of the ring. “To E from E with undying love.”

  “What’s ‘E to E’ mean?” Billie asks.

  “Blackbeard’s real name was Edward, which begins with E. And his wife’s name was Esmerelda, which also begins with E.”

  Billie ponders this. Rich tells her that the silver ring belonged to Blackbeard’s fifteenth wife, whom Blackbeard himself murdered. Billie is nearly levitating with excitement and fright.

  The boundaries of the Hontvedt house — also known, before the murders, as simply “the red house” — have been marked with stakes. The boundaries delineate an area approximately twenty feet by thirty-six feet. In this small space were two apartments, separated by a doorless wall. The northwest side of the house had two front doors.

  After the brief ride back, I step up onto the Morgan from the Zodiac, Rich catching my hand. Thomas and Adaline are sitting opposite one another, on canvas cushions in the cockpit, seawater dripping from their bodies and making puddles on the floor. They have been swimming, Adaline says, and Thomas seems mildly out of breath.

  Adaline has her hands up behind her head, wringing out her hair. Her bathing suit is red, two vibrant wisps of fire-engine red on glistening skin. Her stomach, a lovely, flat surface the color of toast, seems that of a young girl. Her thighs are long and wet and have drops of seawater among the light brown hairs.

  She twists her hair and smiles at me. Her face is guileless when she smiles. I am trying to reconcile the image of her smile with the frantic, guttural sounds that emanate in the morning from the forward cabin.

  I remember these moments not solely for themselves, but for the knowledge that beyond these memories lies an instant in time that cannot be erased. Each image a stepping stone taken in innocence or, if not in innocence, then in a kind of thoughtless oblivion.

  Rich goes immediately to Adaline and puts a proprietary hand on the flat of her belly. He kisses her on the cheek. Billie, too, takes a step forward, drawn to beauty as any of us are. I see that Billie will find a reason to drape herself across those long legs. With effort, Thomas keeps his eyes on me and asks about our small trip. I am embarrassed for Thomas, for the extraordinary whiteness of his skin, for his chest, which seems soft. I want to cover him with his blue shirt, which is lying in a puddle.

  On March 5, 1873, approximately sixty people lived on all the islands composing the Shoals: the lighthouse keeper’s family on White; workmen building a hotel on Star; two families — the Laightons and the Ingerbretsons — on Appledore (formerly known as Hog); and one family, the Hontvedts, on Smuttynose.

  We run the Zodiac into Portsmouth. We are hungry and want lunch, and we don’t have much in the way of provisions. We sit in a restaurant that has a porch and an awning. It seems as close to the water as one can get in Portsmouth, though I think there is not much to look at beyond the tugs and the fishing boats. A sharp gust of wind catches the awning and lifts it for a second so that the poles that anchor it come off the ground as well. The awning tears loose at one corner and spills its wind. The canvas flaps in the breeze.

  “The heavens rent themselves,” Thomas says.

  Adaline looks up at him and smiles. “Uncovered orbs and souls.”

  Thomas seems surprised. “Mullioned waters,” he says.

  “Beveled whispers.”

  “Shuttered grace.”

  “Shackled sunlight.”

  I think of Ping-Pong balls hit hard across a table.

  Adaline pauses. “Up-rushed sea,” she says.

  “Yes,” Thomas answers quietly.

  At the restaurant, Billie eats a grilled cheese sandwich, as she almost always does. She is hard to contain in a restaurant, an effervescence that wants to bubble up and pop out of the top of the bottle. I drink a beer called Smuttynose, which seems to be a brand that capitalizes upon the murders. After all, why not name a beer Appledore or Londoner’s? The drink is oak colored and heavier than I am used to, and I think I become slightly drunk. I am not sure about this. The boat itself produces a kind of inebriation that stays with you for hours. Even when you step foot on land, you are still swaying, still feeling the thump of water against the hull.

  I read in the guidebooks that America was discovered at the Isles of Shoals, on Smuttynose, by vikings.

  On Star Island, there is a cemetery known as Beebe. In it are buried the three small daughters of George Beebe who died separately and within a few da
ys of each other in 1863 of diphtheria.

  At the restaurant I have a lobster roll. Thomas has fried clams. There is a lull in the conversation, as though the strain of the trip into the harbor in the Zodiac has drained everyone of words. Adaline eats a salad and drinks a glass of water. I notice that her back is straight while she eats. Rich, by contrast, is easily slouched, his legs stretched in front of him. He pushes his chair slightly closer to Adaline’s and begins idly to stroke her arm.

  Captain Samuel Haley settled on Smuttynose several years before the American Revolution. While he was building a seawall to connect Malaga and Smuttynose, he turned over a rock and discovered four bars of silver. With this money, he completed the breakwater and built the pier. The breakwater was destroyed in February 1978.

  Edward Teach, also known as the pirate Blackbeard, spent his honeymoon with his fifteenth and last wife on the Isles of Shoals in 1720. He is said to have buried his treasure on Smuttynose.

  “Don’t tear your napkin.”

  Thomas’s voice is ragged, like the bits of paper on the table.

  Adaline gently removes the wad from Billie’s fist and picks up the debris around her plate.

  “How did you get a name like Billie?” she asks.

  “It’s Willemina,” Billie answers, the name spooling off her lips in a pleased and practiced way.

  “I named her for my mother,” I say, glancing at Thomas. He drains his wineglass and puts it on the table.

  “My mom calls me Billie because Willemina is too old,” she adds.

  “Fashioned,” I say.

  “I think Willemina is a pretty name,” Adaline says. Her hair is rolled at the sides and caught at the back with a clip. Billie stands on her chair and tilts her head to examine the rolls and the way they seamlessly fold into the nape of Adaline’s neck.

  Smuttynose is twenty-eight hundred feet east and west, and a thousand feet north and south. It consists of 27. I acres, almost all of which is rock. The elevation of the island is thirty feet.

  Thomas is thin and stretched, and seems, physically, not to have enough leverage in life. I think that Thomas will probably be thin until he dies, stooped perhaps in the way some tall men become as they age. I know that it will be an elegant stoop. I am sure of that.