LITMIR.BIZ

       1951 (MIRANDA SCHUYLER)

      1.

      ON THE MORNING of my mother’s wedding, I watched a pair of lobster boats crawl across the sea outside my bedroom window, setting their pots while the sun rose. They were some distance apart, one to the east of the Flood Rock lighthouse and one to the west, and I wouldn’t have known they were lobstermen—I knew nothing about fishing in those days—except that I had a pair of binoculars, and I saw them dropping the pots, one by one, from the sterns of their boats. Each pot was attached to a rope, and at the end of the rope was a colored buoy that bobbed cheerfully in the water as the vessel pulled away.

      Behind me, my mother stirred. “Is that you, Miranda?” she asked, in a slurred, sleepy voice.

      “Yes.”

      “What time is it?”

      “Only five thirty. Go back to sleep, Mama.”

      “What”—mumbling—“so early?”

      “Watching the lobster boats.”

      She sighed and grunted, the way you do when you’re still half-asleep, and you settle yourself gratefully back on a pillow and close your eyes. “Strange girl, Miranda,” she muttered.

      I wondered if she remembered she was getting married today. Sometimes when you sleep deeply enough, you forget everything you ever knew, even your own name, and Winthrop Island is possibly the quietest place in the world at night, except for the pulse of the ocean: so black and velvet that sleep comes as easy as that, as closing your eyes. You fall and fall, like an anchor that finds no bottom, and I don’t believe I have ever again slept as I slept throughout that summer of 1951, in my bedroom at my stepfather’s sprawling house on the Island.

      Except, on that morning at the beginning of June, the morning of Mama’s wedding, Hugh Fisher wasn’t quite my stepfather. The fateful summer still lay before me, a reel of film waiting to unspool, and how could I know that I was right now witnessing its first momentous scene? I mean, you never do suspect what inconsequential event will change the course of your life. This particular morning, I only thought about the wedding to come. That was the affair of the day, wasn’t it? The great occasion? Instead of sleeping deeply, I’d woken at dawn after a restless night, and now I knelt by the window, holding the binoculars to my eyes as the lobstermen labored on the water, and the sun climbed drowsily above the ocean.

      I watched the lighthouse change color, from violet to palest pink to gold, and the surrounding rocks emerge from shadow, and the little buoys multiply in long, bobbing lines behind the boats. I watched the lobstermen shift about. In the easternmost boat, there were two of them: one short and broad-shouldered, wearing a striped shirt and a knitted cap; the other taller and leaner and bareheaded, hauling the wooden cages into the water while his shipmate baited them.

      In the second boat, the one to the west, there was only one old man. He moved slowly, dropping maybe one trap for every three from the other boat, and as the light grew I saw the bulge of his tattooed arms, the silvery beard that grizzled around his face. He was nearly bald and chewed a pipe, and in my head I named him Popeye. I thought there was something awful and tragic about the way he baited each pot, attached line and buoy, and dragged it over the edge of the boat. Or maybe I only endowed him with those qualities in retrospect. Memory’s funny that way. At any rate, the eastern boat ran out of pots or something, because it turned around and started back for the harbor, disappearing behind the Flood Rock lighthouse for an instant or two and then reappearing, its white sides brilliant in the glare of the sun. At the same time the boat flashed back into view, Popeye was swinging another lobster pot over the side of his boat, and maybe a wave jogged him, or maybe he lost his footing, I don’t know. I’d returned my gaze to the other boat by then, and the lithe, bareheaded, carefree man who now stood at the wheel—a young man, arms and face richly tanned, curled hair whipping in the draft—so I never knew why Popeye went flying into the sea. I just saw the young man jolt, saw him turn his head and yell at his shipmate, saw him bend and yank off his rubber boots, and the next thing I knew he was diving into the water in a long, clean arc.

      Now, I’ve heard many times that most fishermen don’t know how to swim, as a matter of superstition or something. If that’s true, this particular fisherman wasn’t the superstitious kind. A hundred yards is a long way to swim, especially in the cold northern waters of early June, but he swam them just like he was stroking laps in the YMCA pool, regular and sure of arm, minding not the distance or the chill or the chop of waves. As I knelt there on the floorboards of my bedroom, frozen tight, following his progress through the glass of the binoculars, he made a final surge and dove under the surface, right where Popeye had just ceased to flail and resigned himself to sinking, and I thought, God save us, how is such a skinny fellow going to drag a stocky, solid artifact like Popeye back to fresh air?

      I held my own breath in solidarity with the two of them. My arms began to shake, so I leaned forward and steadied my elbows on the window frame, keeping that patch of water in view, counting the giant thuds of my heart. When I reached too many, I abandoned numbers and started to whimper.

       Please, please, please.

      That carefree boy. That poor old man.

       Please, Lord, please.

      I still remember the silent glitter of the sun on that water. The particular musty-salty-linen smell of that bedroom, newly aired after the winter hibernation, a smell that still recalls the terror of that moment to my mind. And sometimes I think, well, what if they’d never come up again? What if he’d never come up again? What if those two lobstermen had drowned together on the morning of my mother’s wedding, young and old, a terrible tragedy overclouding a day of promise, and I never knew either of them?

      I guess there’s no answer to that question. Because just as I started to panic, to lower the binoculars and rise from my knees and shout for help, they exploded together through the glittering waves like a single breaching whale. The younger man lunged for a rope hanging off near the stern of Popeye’s boat, hauled Popeye over the side, hauled himself. Thwacked Popeye a good one right on the back, so Popeye vomited up a few gallons of cold salt water.

      Then he grabbed the wheel of the boat with his left hand and the throttle with his right hand, and he made not for the harbor, a mile away on the sheltered side of the island, but for the nearest dock, Hugh Fisher’s dock, my almost-stepfather’s dock, the dock directly in line from my bedroom window.

      Boy, did I rise then. I jumped straight up and ran for the door, ran down the stairs, ran to the kitchen, shouted at the kitchen maid to call the doctor, call the doctor, boat coming in, a man near drowned. A lobsterman.

      Her pink face went round with amazement. “Who?” she cried.

      “Some old fellow, out by himself!”

      “Golly, that’ll be Mr. Silva!” She spun for the telephone hanging on the wall, and I threw open the kitchen door and ran down the soft green lawn, past the swimming pool, past the big white

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