Brunonia Barry - The Map of True Places

MELVILLE DROPPED ZEE OFF at the ferry.

“Call me if you need a ride back,” he said.

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “It’s just a few blocks, and it won’t be that late.”

“Happy birthday,” he said again. She kissed him on the cheek.

He sat in the parking lot until the ferry pulled out. Then he sat longer, looking at the harbor and out toward Baker’s Island. He opened the glove compartment and pulled out the book of Yeats.

He’d thought about giving it to Zee as a birthday present. He’d even gone so far as to get a card to go with it and inscribed it with her full name before he decided the whole thing was a very bad idea.

He sat for a long while, just looking at the title. Then he opened to the middle of the book and took out a folded piece of paper.

The paper was what he and Finch had fought about that day when Finch had literally thrown the book at him, the afternoon that had ended their relationship.

Zee had always believed that Maureen hadn’t left a suicide note, and it had been important to Finch that she keep believing that. But it wasn’t true. Maureen had known what she was doing. She hadn’t left the note on the bed where Zee was as likely to find it as Finch. Instead she’d left it in Finch’s study, for his eyes only.

Dear Finch,

By the time you read this note, I will be gone. It is best for all.

Secrets are often carried to the grave, but this is one I will not take with me. Do with it what you will.

The child I bore for you to father is not yours. It belongs to the man you betrayed me with. It happened only once, in a moment out of place and time.

The fates are cruel, they make fools of us all…

Maureen

At the bottom of her suicide note was a message that was meant for Melville, completing the inscription he’d left for her so long ago:

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild.

With a faery, hand in hand.

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

IT HAD HAPPENED BEFORE he met Finch, back when Melville was writing the article on the Greenpeace splinter group. He was coming back from Gloucester on his boat when his engine died. He knew what was wrong immediately and cursed himself for not having gotten around to fixing it. He also knew he’d never make it all the way back to Salem, so he put in at Baker’s Island, hoping to use a phone or, barring that, to borrow a skiff and go to Manchester Harbor to pick up the part he needed at the marine supply.

It was June. Few of the summer people had yet arrived. The little store was closed, and Melville had to walk to the far end of the island before he found an unshuttered cottage.

He stopped at the door to ask if he could use the phone.

She’d been hesitant to open the door. In retrospect he wasn’t certain why she had.

She stood in the doorway looking at him. Her red hair was tied back, and she had a pencil stuck through it, holding it in place. Her eyes were piercing blue. He stood outside the door just looking at her. It was a long moment before he remembered to ask about the phone.

She told him she didn’t have a phone. When she heard his story, she offered to lend him her boat. He took it into Manchester Harbor and picked up the part he needed at the marine shop.

By the time he got back with the part, it was early evening. It wasn’t a hard fix, but it was in a bad place, and he had to pull up the deck and several of the floorboards to get at it. He’d shorted out his running lights in the process. When he finished the job, it was after dark. He figured he’d sleep on the boat and head out again at first light.

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.