15

He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.

Moby Dick

Alden was shouting something at Homer from the door of the house as Homer parked his car in the muddy driveway. “Telephone,” bawled Alden. “I said, you’re wanted on the phone.”

“Oh, thanks.” Homer jumped across the wallowing tire tracks and made his way inside, as Alden pulled his coat down from a hook beside the door and went out, whistling for his old dog Fly.

“Hello?” said Homer.

“Mr. Kelly? This is Joseph Green. Would you like to come on over now?”

“Sure.”

“You know where I live?”

“Yes, I do.”

“All right, then. Good.”

Joe Green lived at Quaise, not far back up the Polpis Road on the side toward Nantucket Harbor. The dirt drive dipped down and up through a field still rich with winter reds and browns, still dotted with last year’s milkweed pods, which were perched on their old stalks in birdlike attitudes. It was a rough tumbling landscape, majestic with red cedars rising here and there. Homer parked his car near the big gray-shingled house, and sat for a moment looking past the house at the harbor. The water was a cold blue, ending in the sandy strip that was called Coatue. Between house and harbor there was a pond and a salt-water marsh of amber-colored grass. Water fowl floated in the intermittent streams. A beautiful place, by God. The property had been Helen’s, of course. What would Joe do with it now?

Homer walked to the door slowly, trying to picture Joe Green, expecting a tweedy young fool, somebody he wouldn’t like. When the door opened, the man inside was older than Homer had expected, his face broader, bluffer, more candid. And yet there was something odd and undecipherable in it. Melvillean phrases flickered through Homer’s head. He dismissed them promptly and stepped inside.

“This way,” said Joe. Walking ahead, he led Homer through the living room, a large chamber full of sunlight, yellow with paint and cloth of a color that might have been chosen to match the picture over the mantel, obviously Helen, a child with yellow pigtails and a yellow dress. Joe opened a door at one side of the room and said, “In here.”

The second room was small and dark and blank. Roller shades were drawn down over the windows. There were a lot of books and papers piled on a card table. There was a cot badly made up, a standing lamp, two folding chairs. That was all.

“You did understand my letter?” said Homer. “I’m trying to help Katharine Clark.”

“I understand,” said Joe. He had settled down in one of the chairs and was leaning back, his arms folded, a muscle spasm ticking in one arm.

“Good,” said Homer. “Let’s start at the beginning, with the morning of March seventh.”

“Well, I met my wife’s plane at seven.”

“She’d been on Martha’s Vineyard for several days, is that right?”

“Yes. She’d been visiting a friend she went to school with.”

“So you got up about six-thirty to go to the airport?”

“No. As a matter of fact I didn’t. I hadn’t been able to sleep the night before, so I’d spent a good part of the night walking around. There was a lot of wind. But it had stopped raining early in the evening.”

“Where did you walk?”

“Oh—all over.” Joe gestured with his head and waved his hand. “I cut across to the ’Sconset Road. Walked to ’Sconset. Walked along the footpath on the North Bluff there. Came back the same way.” Joe supplied these short sentences slowly, with pauses in between. “I got back just as the sun was coming up, about six o’clock. And then I drove to the airport to pick up my wife. We had breakfast here. And then later on Helen had some errands she wanted to do. She went off in the car about ten o’clock. No, that’s wrong. She came back in the house again and asked for the keys to the jeep, because she said the other car had been stalling so much. She’d been complaining about that. It was a new car. She wasn’t used to it.”

“And you stayed here while she was gone.”

“No. I had discovered that I had lost something while I was out walking, so I went back part of the way, looking for it. I took the car.”

“You had lost something?”

“A piece of paper.” Joe gestured deprecatingly with one hand. “I didn’t find it and I turned around and drove back after a while. It must have blown away in the wind. I gave up. The Ropers came along shortly after I got home again, and we waited awhile for Helen to get back, maybe twenty minutes. She was late. We had intended to start for Great Point around eleven-thirty. She had been driving all over the island looking for a store that was open, but they were all closed because of the eclipse.”

“Closed? The stores were all closed? I know some people had to work that day.” Homer thought of Alice Dove in the Pacific National Bank and Alden out in his scalloping boat in the harbor. “So you set off with Richard and Letty Roper in your jeep around noon, is that right? I suppose they’re your closest friends on the island?”

There was a pause. (Ah, what is a friend, reflected Homer philosophically.) “Closest friends—well, yes, I guess so. They were both born here, like Helen. They had all known each other for a long time.”

“And when you got to Great Point you found Arthur Bird there waiting for you?”

Joe grimaced in mocking self-pity. “Yes, Bird was there.”

Homer abandoned his official grimness and smiled. “Ass of a fellow.”

Joe said nothing, but the muscles around his mouth twitched a little, as though he might smile himself.

“When did the four of you start up the stairs?”

“Just a little while before the total part of the eclipse began. There was some kind of effect Dick wanted to see from up there.”

“The shadow bands,” murmured Homer. “Some people at Altar Rock, where I was, put a sheet down on the ground. We saw them, flickering shadows across the sheet, just before totality. Did you see them from the lighthouse?”

“I don’t know whether the others did or not. I—I forgot to look for them.”

(Because you were watching Kitty.) “You saw Katharine Clark approaching across the sand. Did you recognize her?”

“I—I thought I did. Then when she took off her sunglasses I was sure.” Joe had turned his face away. He was studying the blank surface of the roller shade. “And then Bird spoke up. He said her name.”

“Did the name mean anything to your wife?”

Again there was a pause. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Did you have any pictures of Kitty in the house?”

Joe flushed. “No.”

Homer stared at the roller shade too, where a vision of Kitty running across the sand was as clear as if it had been projected on a screen. “At any rate,” he said, “your wife started downstairs. It was a dangerous staircase, wasn’t it?”

Joe turned wretchedly to Homer. “Don’t you think I know that? I should never have let her go.”

“You loved your wife?” Homer’s voice was flat.

A wave passed over Joe’s face, and he seemed about to burst out, but then with obvious difficulty he mastered himself and said almost inaudibly, “What do you think?”

But Homer was ruthless. “You had been in love with Kitty Clark before.”

Joe had recovered. Now he retreated behind a barrier of reserve. “Yes, until I met Helen.”

“You were surprised to see Kitty coming? Did you think what you would say to her?”

Joe’s voice was under careful control. “It would have been difficult. Embarrassing.”

Homer shifted in his chair, leaned forward, looked down at his shoes. “The medical examiner found a number of bruises on your wife’s body. Do you know how they came to be there?”

“She had fallen downstairs, here in the house.”

Homer looked up to find Joe looking intently back at him, as though he were eager for the next question, seeking it, directing it. “How did she happen to fall downstairs?” said Homer slowly.

“It was the stair carpet. The tacks had come loose. It slipped out from under her one day. About two weeks ago.”

“May I see where it happened?”

“Certainly.” Joe led the way back to the front hall and gestured at the carpeted stairs to the second floor. “The carpet on the two top steps was loose and slipped out as she was starting down.”

Homer walked up the steps and looked at the carpet. There were shiny new nails holding it fast at the top. “Had you noticed that it was loose?”

“No, neither of us had noticed anything like that.”

“Mmmm.” Homer stared at the bright heads of the small tacks and thought about it. A fall downstairs was seldom fatal, not for someone as young and strong as Helen Green had been. But it was odd, just the same. He shrugged his shoulders and descended the stairs. They went back to the small room with the lowered shades and sat down again in the folding chairs.

Homer changed the subject. “Were you as much involved in that new bylaw as Helen was? I understand she spent a great deal of time organizing support for it.”

“Yes, she did. No, I didn’t do anything. I had nothing to do with it.”

“A lot of Helen’s own land went to a conservation trust, I’m told?”

“Yes. The Boatwright Trust.”

“Did you help with that? Or was it just Helen?”

“It was Helen’s project. She took care of it.”

There was another silence. Joe looked back at the window shade.

Homer changed the subject. “Are you writing anything now?” he said.

“No. I haven’t … felt much like writing. I’m reading a good bit.” Joe’s eyes glanced involuntarily at the books piled on the card table. Homer looked at them too, wondering suddenly whether or not Kitty’s was among them. He ran his eyes up and down the stack of books, looking for a narrow one with a purple cover, trying to think of another inconsequential question. There was a thin book at the very bottom of the stack. He couldn’t see what color it was. “Do you—ah—use this room to write in?”

“This room? No, I don’t write here. I have to get out of the house.”

The rest of the books were all too big, too thick. The only one that could possibly be Kitty’s was the skinny one on the bottom. “You’ve got a room outside somewhere? In the garage maybe?”

“No. I’ve got a little shack on the beach. I bought it when it was advertised for sale. I go there when I’m working.”

Maybe if he were to lean on the table, here on this side where the legs looked rickety, the whole thing might fall down. “Where is this shack? Is that the place Chief Pike said was broken into a few weeks before your wife’s death?”

“Yes. It’s up at the Head of the Harbor. Nobody took anything. All they did was throw an old first draft of mine around. Vandals, I guess.”

Homer tipped his chair back dangerously until it leaned on the edge of the card table. “Did your wife use it too? I mean, did you work there together?”

Joe seemed startled at this idea. “Oh, no, she never went there at all. We had an agreement about that. That was my place.” Joe seemed to feel he had gone too far. “It’s a kind of quirk I have. I don’t like anybody to look at anything I’m working on until it’s all finished.”

“So Helen never went there? Bluebeard’s chamber, eh?” With a furtive movement of his backside, Homer slid the two supporting legs of his chair so far past his center of gravity that most of his weight came crushing down upon the weak-kneed side of the fragile overburdened card table, and at last he accomplished his object. Chair, table, books and hulking clumsy oversized Melville scholar and occasional espouser of lost impossible causes went over together in a shambling disastrous collapse. Homer hit his head on the edge of the table and cursed aloud. Joe Green jumped up with an exclamation of shock and sympathy and tried to lift him out of the wreck.

“Are you all right?” he said.

“Oh, Jesus, it’s just my head. Just let me get all these books off me.” With a massive sweep of his arm Homer tumbled the books on the floor, riffling them apart like a cardsharp examining a deck. Aha, there it was. Skinny book, purple cover, the name “Katharine Clark.” “Christ, I’m sorry,” said Homer. “I’m afraid there’s not much left of this chair. Or the table either. I’ll get you another set. A whole set.”

Joe Green was helping him up. “For God’s sake, never mind. They were falling apart anyway. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Positive.” Homer shook himself and passed his hand through his hair. “Thanks a lot for letting me talk to you.”

“You’re quite welcome.” They were back at arm’s length. Joe was stiffly polite again. “I’ll show you out.”

He opened the door of the small room and waited for Homer to go ahead of him. But in the front entry he reached past Homer, grasped the doorknob and then looked vaguely over Homer’s “shoulder at the view of the harbor and the distant shore of Coatue. “How is she?” he said.

“How is …? Who, you mean Kitty? Oh, she’s … all right. She’s fine.”

Joe pulled open the door then, his face expressionless, and Homer, with a final nod, took his leave. He knew now what those Melville phrases were that had run through his head on his first glimpse of Joe Green: “He looked like a man cut away from the stake.…” And: “… Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face.…”

Homer drove out of the driveway slowly, grumbling Melville to himself, pulling to one side into the undergrowth to let Letty Roper’s car go by. Letty waved at Homer and smiled. What was Dick Roper’s wife doing here? Well, it was obvious. She was bringing another good home-cooked meal to her bereaved friend and fellow author.

Alas for poor Kitty. As Homer turned out into the Polpis Road he found himself paying silent tribute to the power of Joseph Green. He could understand now what Kitty saw in him—the large slow reflection, the clear careful eye, the steady unself-conscious grace. Homer could see how they would hang on in a girl’s mind.