That she appeared on the wharf surprised him. It was chilly, and her house was all the way at the far end of the island.
“I’ve made dinner,” she said. “If you’re hungry.”
His inclination was to say no. He had some food on board, nothing any good, but enough to get him through until morning. However, when he turned to answer, she was already back at the top of the dock, motioning for him to follow. He called after her, but the wind was against him, and she couldn’t hear. He watched her disappear onto the blackening path.
Melville took his flashlight along with him to her house. He could see her lone light ahead, but the path was narrow and hadn’t yet been mowed for the summer. A false step in any direction could sprain an ankle, especially in this darkness.
She was waiting there for him, framed by the doorway. He’d meant to tell her no, that he was fine on the boat, but then he saw the table set for two. The oil lanterns that lit the room cast him back to another place and time, and he suddenly noticed her lace dress. She was beautiful. Her red hair hung wild and curling halfway down her back. Without saying anything he had planned to say, he found himself walking through the doorway to the table. She poured the wine.
Later he would remember thinking it had been as if he were awakening to something possible, something he’d never before considered. He noticed the ring on her finger; she didn’t hide it. Something about his senses heightened, and every movement of her hands seemed like flight. Her neck was pale and long, a swan’s neck, he thought. His thoughts ran to poetry and art, imagery of Leda and the swan, Leonardo’s sensual sketch and the lost Michelangelo. She was beauty of form and movement. The feminine ideal. And he found himself speaking aloud the poetry that came to him:
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
She came to him. He lifted her hair away from her neck and kissed her. And more poetry came to his lips, all the Yeats he’d learned and forgotten came back to him, and he spoke the words in chant as they made love. And when the verses he hadn’t known he remembered ended, all the magical words of “The Harp of Aengus,” they slept soundly in each other’s arms with the innocence of children.
HE LEFT THE NEXT MORNING, not entirely certain what had happened. It wasn’t that he didn’t like women. At one time he’d considered himself not gay but bisexual, but that had been so long ago he’d almost forgotten that early period of his life. He laughed to himself now, thinking he had been seduced by a siren. It was all so strange and dreamlike that he wasn’t truly certain it had ever happened.
For the next several weeks, he wanted to go back to the island. Instead he went to Gloucester and booked on one of the sword boats, then a bigger boat that was going out for several months. He slept with every man he could, in every port, dangerous and nameless sex meant to remind him of who he really was.
But he couldn’t get her out of him. He heard her poetry on the sound of the wind and the tides. He left the ship in Newburyport and hitched back to Manchester. He stopped in the bookstore and bought the white volume of William Butler Yeats. And he inscribed the book to her and scrawled a quote meant for her across the title page: Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild…
He took his boat to Baker’s Island and walked to the cottage. But he found it boarded up for the season.
Feeling both disappointment and relief, he placed the book between the two doors, hoping it would last through the winter, through the rains and snows that were to come, and that one day, if she existed at all, she would find it.
MELVILLE LEFT SALEM FOR THE second time the night Finch and Zee brought Maureen home from the hospital. As they helped her into the house, Maureen stopped and slowly turned around to see Melville standing across the road looking at the house. She saw his face just for an instant before he recognized her, and in that moment she understood. Their eyes met, and held. They stood in the moment frozen like statues until Zee and Finch turned to see what Maureen was looking at. Guiltily, Finch hurried Maureen into the house.
Melville had left that same night, this time for California and later north to the Aleutians. He hadn’t come back home to Salem until almost a year after Maureen died.
When he eventually returned, he took the job at the Athenaeum and settled into a quiet life, keeping to his side of town.
When Finch finally found him, he brought the suicide note. “Come back to me,” he demanded.
“I can’t,” Melville said. “It could never work. Not after what happened with Maureen.”
“Don’t you see?” Finch said. “This relationship has to succeed, not in spite of what happened with Maureen but because of it.”
MELVILLE MOVED INTO THE OLD house on Turner Street with Finch and Zee.
Though they were never able to forgive themselves for Maureen’s death, they found it in their hearts to forgive each other.
They loved their daughter, delighted in her in a way that surprised them both. Finch had always wanted to be a father, but Melville had never considered the possibility. Still, he embraced it and was fulfilled by it.
Together they took the book and the note that Maureen had left and placed them where Zee would never find them.
The years had not been easy, but real love rarely is. They learned to put the past behind them. At least it seemed so until the progression of Finch’s disease and his crossover into dementia brought the past back to them as if it had happened not years ago but only yesterday. And the betrayal, once experienced anew, had become real enough for Finch to feel its sting in such a strong way that his anger was able to unravel all the years they had woven together as family.
57
MELVILLE WAS UNAWARE THAT he’d been crying until he saw the teenagers staring at him as they walked across the ferry parking lot. He recognized one of them from Mickey’s store. Melville looked away.
TONIGHT MELVILLE HAD ALMOST MADE a huge mistake. He had almost told Zee that she was really his daughter. Though he would never have given her the suicide note, he had almost given her the book. He had even gone so far as to label the birthday card he’d intended to give her with her full name, Hepzibah Thompson Finch.
He knew he had to talk to Finch, and that it had to be tonight.
MELVILLE CARRIED THE BOOK AND Maureen’s letter into the nursing home. He signed the visitors’ log at seven forty-five.
“Charles Thompson?” the receptionist asked.
He nodded.
“Are you family?”
“Yes,” Melville lied.
“Visiting hours are over at eight,” the receptionist told him.
“I’ll be just a few minutes.”
Melville walked down the long hallway toward Finch’s room. When he got to the door, he paused. If Finch was asleep, Melville would have to wake him.
Feeling himself being watched, Finch opened his eyes.
“Who’s there?” he asked.
“It’s Melville,” he said. “I came to talk to you.”
Finch didn’t move. Then, finally, when his eyes focused, he looked at Melville.
“Could you please put my bed up first?” Finch asked. “I can’t breathe with it so low.”
Heart pounding, Melville walked over to the bed. His fingers found the control buttons, he pushed the “up” arrow, and the head of the bed began to slowly rise, bringing Finch to a sitting position and the two men eye to eye.
“Is that good?” Melville asked.
“Wonderful,” Finch said, and sighed. He looked at Melville for a long time. “This is the weekend, right?” he said, trying to remember.