Louisa Hall - Trinity

I CALLED HIM CHESTER, AND I ALWAYS LIKED HIM BECAUSE HE TREATEDme like a man. He was in the early stages of building his cottage, so we talked about pouring cement and choosing sawn lumber, and he often asked my advice. By the end of our stay there, he was my favorite of the sad clowns and exiles who hid away on that island.

We only met him after we’d already spent eight months on St. John. When we first arrived, in the summer of 1958, we lived at the Caneel Bay Hotel, because Alice was coming off a bad run. I liked her to have luxuries she wasn’t used to.

In the mornings, we drank strong coffee on the tiled patio. We ate toast with butter and guava jam, surrounded by potted palms and a wide view of the ocean.

We only read the local papers. I checked the headlines before I handed them over to Alice. There were stories about the sugarcane harvest, ferry repairs, and local art shows.

She read them and seemed unperturbed. Of course the island had its own problems, but it was a relief to me at least to know that Alice wouldn’t have to read any more news about “pervert purges,” or “the homosexual menace,” or see Roy Cohn on national television, saying that if you weren’t with McCarthy, you were either a cocksucker or a Communist.

For a little while, at least, I wanted her to have peace over breakfast. Especially in those early months, when she was trying so hard to be better. All morning, she stuck with strong coffee. After breakfast, we went out walking, and in the afternoons she’d try to start painting.

Still, I felt the effort involved. The days went on forever, and we didn’t have any friends. With each passing hour, surrounded on all sides by blue water, I was aware that it had been my idea to move out there. I watched her too closely for signs she was unhappy.

I was like Circe, watching Odysseus sneak down from the palace to the beach, planning new spells to keep him enchanted and hoping he wouldn’t ready the ship. She tried to reassure me that she was content, but I could see she wasn’t painting well. For months, she worked on one canvas of the anemic potted plant in our suite.

That plant was obviously dying. It had some secret disease. She’d set it on a marble table, and all summer, she painted its curled yellow fingers, making slow progress, then blotted it all out by the evening.

The whole suite smelled like turpentine. It smelled like mistakes getting rubbed out. We waited until dark to go down to dinner, but the sun never set.

And after dinner, at night, it was so quiet: the two of us alone in that hotel room together.

She tried to reassure me that I was enough, but Alice was used to being surrounded by people. Even in Washington, she had so many friends. In New York she had admirers. On St. John, I worried she’d lose her mind. She stuck to her word about drinking, but sometimes, in the evening, after she’d given up painting, I saw her striding in from the beach, holding her sandals, her eyes fixed on a point somewhere beyond the hotel and ignited by lights from the houseboats beyond her.

I DID WHAT I COULD TO HELP HER FEEL AT HOME. I TRIED TO FINDpeople who might entertain her. In July, for example, I remembered the Gibneys. We’d met them in New York, where Nancy was an editor. She’d worked at Vogue, but she quit when she married Bob, and they moved to St. John so he could finish his novel.

One day in July, I looked them up and invited them to the hotel to have dinner. We had a table on the patio, and I watched Alice the whole time, to see if she was enjoying herself. Nancy told stories that were funny and mean, and Bob laughed along with her, but when the check came, he became fascinated by a detail on the toe of his shoe. He remained entranced until I’d already paid, when he acted surprised and offended.

Later, when Alice was asleep and I’d gone down to the bar, the bartender told me that Bob sometimes did electrical repair work at the hotel. The novel, apparently, was not coming along. The longer the Gibneys stayed on the island, the less he actually wrote. Which probably at least partly explained why Nancy’s anecdotes were honed to such a sharp point, as though the whole purpose was to show Bob how easy it is to bring a story to a satisfactory ending.

STILL, THEY WERE THE ONLY PEOPLE WE KNEW. AND EVERY SO OFTEN,if I thought Alice seemed particularly caged, I asked them to dinner. We learned how to get along with them well. It was best not to ask Bob about writing. Nancy was the more intelligent one, so we let her talk.

Once, while night fell on the patio, she entertained us with the story of the time Chester and Kitty stayed in their guest room. Two years before we came to the island, Bob and Nancy had sold a small piece of their beach to Chester and Kitty. They’d never intended to sell, but they’d used all of Bob’s inheritance to buy the beach in the first place, and ten years later, Bob was still at work on that novel.

They needed the money. But they wanted to sell to people they liked, so they waited around a long time, and then they met Chester and Kitty at a luncheon at the Trunk Bay guesthouse.

According to Nancy, they were all dressed up in tourist gear: cotton from head to toe, and as pale as if they’d just stepped off the ferry. Right off the bat, Kitty made some rude comment about the heat and Nancy’s thick hair. But Chester was polite, and Nancy and Bob—as Nancy made very clear—were good expatriate liberals.

They’d read about the security hearings. They were disgusted by McCarthy. They hated Roy Cohn. What was happening in Washington, Nancy said, giving me a meaningful look, was nothing if not a disgrace.

So when Chester and Kitty announced over lunch that they were looking to build a house on the island, Nancy and Bob decided to sell them the parcel. It was just after the sale that Kitty called to ask if they could come stay in the guest room while they were drawing up plans for the cottage. Nancy assumed that they wanted to stay for a weekend. But then they showed up with their daughter. And the daughter brought a school friend. As soon as they’d unpacked all their things, they announced that they couldn’t possibly stay the whole summer, but they might be able to manage July.

While Nancy talked, occasionally taking a break to light another cigarette, darkness was creeping over the island. The lights of the houseboats were coming on in the harbor. Whenever Nancy came to a punch line, Alice laughed, politely, but she didn’t draw her eyes away from the houseboats.

They stayed for seven weeks, Nancy said. The girls slept in a tent in the backyard. They were so quiet she often forgot they were there. But Robert and Kitty stayed in the guest room, and they were up every night until dawn, smoking and drinking in bed. Kitty would come out every five minutes to rattle around in the kitchen. Then, finally, when the roosters were just starting to crow, they’d go deathly quiet and sleep until noon, when they’d finally emerge, blinking in the bright light, wearing cotton shorts and big floppy sun hats.

While Nancy went on, I watched Alice light a cigarette. Her fingers weren’t trembling so badly as they had in those last months in Washington. When she inhaled, she crossed one arm over her chest and looked out again over the darkening water.

No matter how much time they spent outside, Nancy said, Chester and Kitty were too pale and thin to be human. After a day on the beach, they’d come back paler than ever, and the first thing they did was pour a fresh drink. They never ate more than a few crackers for dinner. And then, all night, they’d be at it again, smoking and drinking in bed, knocking around for hours in the kitchen.

At that point in the story, the food finally came. Nancy paused her account. Bob assaulted his lobster croissant and when he finally came up for air, there was a fleck of mayonnaise on his chin.