Coming back one moonless night, Melville stopped the boat to look at the sky. Stargazing had once been his hobby, especially in the long months at sea when he was in the merchant marine. He owned a telescope, and he often set it up on their deck at home, finding specific stars and planets, showing Zee and Finch. “I always wanted to learn to navigate by the stars,” he told them one night. “But I’m afraid it’s a lost art.”
The only place Melville refused to take her on their outings together was the house on Baker’s Island, which had been left to her by Maureen. Both he and Finch refused to go there, but Melville would sometimes drop her off on the island on his way out to fish and then pick her up again at the end of the day.
Finch didn’t understand why she would want to go. He wanted to sell the place, especially if it made Zee sad. He refused to pay the taxes on it. But Melville got it. It was Melville, finally, who kept the taxes paid and hired someone to maintain the old place, keeping it shuttered but in good shape in case she might want it someday when she grew up and had a family of her own. “New life chases away old ghosts,” he once told her.
SHE STAYED AT MELVILLE’S FOR an hour and a half. “I have to go,” she said at last. “I have to pick up some groceries. And some Depends.”
“Walgreens has the best prices,” Melville said.
“How long has he been incontinent?” she asked.
He shrugged. “For a while.”
“You sure you want to come back?” she said.
“Don’t even kid,” he said.
“Let’s maybe give it a couple of days,” she said. “Wait until the medicine completely clears out of his system.”
On her way out the door, Zee walked past Melville’s suitcase. Something akin to an electric shock ran down her spine. She stood stunned and staring. When she could move again, she bent over and picked up the book of Yeats poems. It was right there in the top of his suitcase, its spine jutting out from under a green cable-knit sweater. She was surprised she hadn’t seen it before. “Where did you get this?” She stared at him.
“It’s mine,” he said, gently but quickly sliding the book out of her hands.
“It belonged to my mother.” It was the book Zee had gone to get from the island the day Maureen killed herself. She would recognize it anywhere. The book was white, but it had a purple mark down the front cover where one of Zee’s crayons had melted. Zee pointed to the stain. “It’s the book that Finch gave her on her wedding day.”
Melville looked surprised.
“Where did you get this?”
“From Finch,” he said, his surprised look slowly morphing into a wounded one.
She stood looking at him for a long time, the impact of his statement sinking in. The anger that she had once felt for Finch, that she thought she was finished with a long time ago, surfaced in her once again.
“I don’t believe this,” she said.
12
MAUREEN AMPHITRITE DOHERTY FINCH was a writer of fairy tales, not simple happily-ever-after stories that lulled children to sleep but much darker tales with wildly implausible happy endings, usually involving rescue from incredible odds. Very seldom were those rescues performed by handsome princes. Maureen often declared that she was allergic to princes, by way of being Celtic and Irish and fresh off the boat. She wasn’t fresh off any boat that Zee knew of. She’d come to America just after she had turned sixteen, after her brother Liam was killed, and there were no boats involved in their crossing. They had all traveled to Boston by plane. But there was no arguing with Maureen when she was telling a story.
Being Finch’s daughter as well as her mother’s, and more governed by logic than her maternal heritage might suggest, Zee had always tried to point out that there were Celtic princes Maureen could have written about, like Efflam and Treveur, as well as great warrior kings to choose from, like Cormac or Cadwallon. Zee suggested the latter two because she knew that her mother had always had an affinity for great warriors. But Maureen would simply reply that the Irish valued poets more than kings and princes.
Zee listened to the stories. The fact was, in those days she had loved listening to her mother’s voice. And during Maureen’s manic phases, when the urge to talk became something that seemed to take her over, Zee had become smart enough to realize that letting Maureen’s monologues continue uninterrupted would sometimes prevent the more drastic acting-out that she became prone to at such times. Occasionally her mother would stop, upset by something she’d just revealed, and Zee, who’d heard the same stories over and over again for years, would pitch Maureen ahead into her monologues, avoiding the parts that upset her, like an old vinyl record with a scratch that launches it midway into the next song.
Even in those manic times, Maureen was a much better storyteller than she was a writer, and the stories Zee loved were not the fairy tales at all but the real stories about growing up and meeting Finch.
MAUREEN TOLD ZEE THAT SHE and Finch met at Nahant Beach, the long stretch that connected what were once islands to the mainland and more particularly to Lynn, where the family lived now, in a house owned by Maureen’s new stepfather.
Maureen had just turned nineteen and was celebrating with her friends, three girls from the shoe-box factory where she worked as an elevator operator. The other girls worked on the machine line, but Maureen, being more beautiful than most, had been plucked from the line and trained to run one of the two elevators that took the executives to their seventh-floor offices. She was good at her job, if not enamored of it. She didn’t like being inside, in a moving box inside a much larger box, she said. She was accustomed to much harder work than this-suited to it, actually. Still, she knew the privilege of being chosen, and if she would have preferred the line, she simply had to listen to her friends, who daily offered to trade places with her, to appreciate what a lucky girl she was.
Her shift ended at three. Every afternoon, winter or summer, she walked Lynn Beach, not on the esplanade as most walkers preferred but far below it, on the sand itself. She loved the ocean. Living so close to water made the move from Ireland bearable, though she would have preferred staying there, moving south from Derry to a town in the Republic, maybe, to Ballybunion, where they had traveled once as a family, while her father was still alive and before they lost Liam, and everything changed so terribly, and the Dohertys moved to America and another coastline that, while wildly different and strange, was at least in the end a part of the same ocean.
The day Maureen met Finch was exactly five years to the day that she had stood with her brothers on the cliffs at Ballybunion. It was the first day of summer, and though there were no cliffs in this new world, there was a beautiful beach. Although the water was cold, one could actually swim here, in the protected crescent of bay that stretched toward Nahant. The Irish beaches that Maureen knew, with their wild tides and rough waters, had always been too dangerous for swimming.
On the day she met Finch, Maureen had not been swimming, though two of her girlfriends had. The waters were still too cold. It would take until July for Maureen to go into the water.
She noticed him immediately. He was wearing linen pants and a light cotton shirt, dressed more for a garden party than the beach. He had photo equipment with him, an old eight-by-ten plate camera on a worn wooden tripod. It was very old-fashioned, as was he. “Elegant,” is what her girlfriends called Finch. He had a Gatsby-era quality more suitable to the twenties than the seventies, but lovely just the same, maybe all the more so for its strangeness.
He had noticed all of them. But it was Maureen he approached.
“May I take your photograph?” he asked.
Her girlfriends smiled.