Lovesick Gallagher redeemed
on Grindstone Island
in the St. Lawrence River floating
in reflected sky
“Anybody want to turn back? I don’t.”
They were driving to Grindstone Island. They were planning to spend Easter weekend at the Gallagher lodge. The three of them: Gallagher’s little family. For he loved them, out of desperation that the woman did not love him. The child he loved, who seemed at times to love him. But in the rearview mirror since they’d left Watertown, the child’s face was averted, Gallagher could not catch the child’s eye to smile and wink in complicity repeating his brash challenge, “Anybody want to turn back? I sure as hell don’t.”
What could the Joneses say. Captive in Gallagher’s car being driven at less than forty miles an hour on icy-slick Route 180.
Then Hazel murmured what sounded like No in her maddening way that managed to be both enthusiastic and vague, doubtful.
It was the way in which Hazel allowed Gallagher to make love to her. To the degree to which Hazel allowed Gallagher to make love to her.
In the backseat of Gallagher’s car the child Zack had disappeared from the rearview mirror entirely. He’d brought along his Royal Conservatory Pianoforte Studies and was lost in frowning concentration, oblivious of the snowy highway and occasional abandoned vehicles at the roadside.
Gallagher had assured him there was a piano at the lodge. He could practice at the lodge. Gallagher had banged on that piano plenty of times. He’d entertained his relatives. He’d played for himself. Summers on Grindstone Island, Gallagher’s happiest memories. Wanting to convey to the child as to the child’s mother how happiness is a possibility, maybe even a place you might get to.
Impulsively he’d bought the house in Watertown. But Hazel wasn’t ready for that yet.
Easter weekend on Grindstone Island. It had been a very good plan except on Thursday morning a freezing rain began and within a few hours the rain had become sleet and the sleet became a wet wind-driven snow howling across Lake Ontario. Nine to twelve inches by Friday morning, and drifting.
Still, the region was accustomed to freak storms. Snow in April, sometimes in May. Quick blizzards, and a quick thaw. Snowplows had been operating through the night. Roads into the Adirondacks would be impassable but Route 180 north to Malin Head Bay and the bridge to Grindstone Island was more or less open: traffic moved slowly, but was moving. By Friday afternoon the wind had blown itself out. Sky clear and brittle as glass.
God damn: Gallagher wasn’t going to change his plans.
The snow would melt by Sunday. Certainly it would melt. Gallagher was insisting. He’d been on the phone that morning with the caretaker who’d assured him that the driveway would be plowed by the time Gallagher and his guests arrived. The lodge would be open, ready for occupancy. The power would be on. (McAlster was sure there’d be power out at the camp, there was power elsewhere on the island.) In the lodge there was a kitchen, stocked with canned and bottled goods. Refrigerator and stove. All in working order. McAlster would have aired out the rooms. McAlster was a man you could rely upon. Gallagher had not wanted to change his plans and McAlster agreed, a little snow wouldn’t interfere with anyone. The island was so beautiful covered in snow. A shame such a beautiful place was deserted most of the year.
A shame it belongs to people like you.
McAlster, now in his sixties, had been entrusted with overseeing summer residents’ properties for decades. Since Gallagher had been a small child. Not once had McAlster spoken with the slightest air of reproach, in Gallagher’s hearing. It was Gallagher who felt shame, guilt. His family owned ninety acres of Grindstone Island of which less than five or six were actually used: the rest was woodland, pines and birches. There was a mile of river frontage, of surpassing beauty. Thaddeus Gallagher’s father had acquired the property and built the original hunting lodge in the early 1900s, long before the Thousand Islands region was developed for summer tourism. It had been a wilderness, at a remote northern edge of New York State. The small native population of Grindstone Island lived mostly in the area of Grindstone Harbor, in asphalt-sided houses, tar paper shanties, trailers. They owned bait-and-tackle shops, gas stations and roadside restaurants. They were trappers, guides, commercial fishermen and caretakers like McAlster, hiring themselves out to absentee residents like the Gallaghers.
Don’t you feel guilty, owning so much property you rarely see Gallagher had asked his father Thaddeus as a young man provoked to ideological quarrels and Thaddeus’s reply had been hotly uttered, unhesitating Those people depend upon us! We hire them. We pay property taxes to pay for their roads, schools, public services. There’s a hospital in Grindstone Harbor now, didn’t used to be! How’d that happen? Half the population in the Thousand Islands is on welfare in the off-season, who the hell d’you think pays for that?
Gallagher’s anger with his father so choked him, he had trouble breathing in the old man’s presence. It was like an asthma attack.
“My father…”
Beside him in the passenger’s seat of his car Hazel gave Gallagher a shrewd sidelong look. Unconsciously he’d been sucking in his breath. Drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.
“Yes?”
“…says he wants to meet you, Hazel. But that won’t happen.”
He’d told her very little about his father. Very little about his family. He supposed she’d heard, from others.
In fact, Thaddeus had telephoned Gallagher the previous week to inquire This new woman of yours, a cocktail waitress is she, a stripper, call girl with a bastard retarded son? Correct me if I’m wrong.
Gallagher had hung up the phone without speaking.
Prior to this call, Gallagher had not heard from his father since Christmas 1962 and then it had been Thaddeus’s private secretary calling, with the message that his father was on the line to speak with him and Gallagher had said politely But I’m not on this line. Sorry.
“Well. If you don’t want me to meet your father, I won’t.”
“You and Zack. Either of you.”
Hazel smiled uncertainly. Gallagher knew he made her uneasy, she couldn’t read his moods: playful, ironic, sincere. As she couldn’t interpret the tone of the more tortuous and meandering of his jazz piano pieces.
“You’re too good to meet the man, Hazel. In your soul.”
“Am I.”
“Hazel, it’s true! You’re too good, too beautiful and pure-minded to meet a man like Thaddeus Gallagher. You’d be despoiled by his eyes on you. By breathing the same air he breathes.”
Why Gallagher was so angry suddenly, he didn’t know. Possibly it had something to do with McAlster.
Hazel Jones, William McAlster. Individuals of the servant class. Thaddeus Gallagher would identify Hazel Jones at once.
Behind a slow-moving truck spreading salt on the highway, they were approaching Malin Head Bay. It was nearly 6 P.M. yet the sky was still light. There was an icy glaze over many trees, flashing sunlight like fire. Traffic moved sluggishly along Main Street where only a single wide lane had been plowed.
Gallagher didn’t want to think what Grindstone Island would be like.
McAlster had promised him, though. McAlster would never go back on his word.
McAlster would never disappoint Thaddeus Gallagher’s son.
Relenting, Gallagher said they could always stay at the Malin Head Inn, if the island didn’t work out.
“You aren’t worried, Hazel? Are you?”
Hazel laughed. “Worried? Not with you.”
She touched his arm to reassure him. A strand of her hair fell against Gallagher’s cheek. He felt a choking sensation in his chest.
She’d told him a man had hurt her. He supposed the man had been Zack’s father, who had left her, hadn’t married her. This would have been almost seven years ago. She’d kissed him and drew away from him telling him she had no wish to be hurt by a man again.