Joy Williams - Honored Guest

“She was instrumental in saving the whales last week,” her mother said. “The first time, not when they beached themselves again. The photographer was there from the paper but he always excludes Guinivere, she doesn’t photograph well.”

Every year brings the summertime tragedy of schools of whales grounding on the shore. It’s their fidelity to one another that dooms them, as well as their memories of earlier safe passage. They return to a once navigable inlet and find it a deadly maze of unfamiliar shoal. The sound of their voices — the clicks and cries quite audible to their would-be rescuers — is heartbreaking, apparently.

Pauline pointed out that those sounds would seem that way only to sympathetic ears. It was simply a matter of our changing attitudes toward them, she argued. Nantucket’s wealth was built on the harpooning of the great whales. Had they not cried out then with the same anguished song?

Starky murmured liltingly, “Je t’aimerai toujours bien que je ne t’ai jamais aimé.”

It was impossible to tell if she possessed an engaging voice or not, the song, or rather this fragment, being so brief. It was quite irrelevant, in my opinion, to the topic of whales.

Pauline frowned. “‘I will always love you though I never loved you?’ Is that it? Certainly isn’t much, is it?”

“One of Starky’s daughters has a wonderful voice,” Betty said, looking about distractedly.

Pauline nudged me as if to say, Here it’s beginning and now we’ll have to hear about all of them, even the dead one. She then continued resolutely, “As a statement of devotion, I mean. But perhaps it was taken out of context?”

“Everything’s context,” Bruce said, “or is as I grow older.”

Guinivere returned with a bottle of cherries and munched them one by one, dipping her fingers with increasing difficulty into the narrow jar.

“Those aren’t good for you,” Pauline said.

The girl tipped the liquid from the jar onto the flagstones and retrieved the last of the cherries.

“They’re very bad for you,” Pauline counseled. “They’re not good for anyone.”

The girl ignored her.

“Guinivere has a job,” Betty said. “She works at the library. She puts all the books back in their proper places — don’t you, Guinivere?”

“Someone has to do the lovely things,” Bruce said.

“And someone does the ugly things too,” Guinivere said without humor. “In Amarillo, Texas, more cattle have been slaughtered than any other place in the world. They make nuclear bombs in Amarillo as well.”

“You must read the books then,” Pauline asked, “as you put them back on the shelves?” Her efforts at engagement with this unfortunate child were making me uncomfortable. She wanted a child, but of course a lovely one. She had no doubt it would be lovely. Would even a bird build its nest if it did not have the instinct for confidence in the world?

“I have a joke,” Guinivere said. “It’s for him.” She pointed at me. “They name roads for people like you.” She paused. “One Way,” she said, and she smiled a round smile. She was much older than I initially though.

“You’re such a chatterbox tonight,” her mother said. “You must let others speak.”

Guinivere immediately fell silent, and for a moment we all were silent.

“I’m going to get more ice,” Pauline announced.

“Thank you!” Bruce said. “And more ingredients for the rickeys all around, if you please.”

Starky rose to accompany her into the house, which I knew would vex Pauline as she wanted only to remove herself from this group for a while, a group I’m sure she found most unpromising.

“You look good, my boy,” Bruce said.

“Thank you, it’s Pauline,” I said. Betty’s look was skeptical. “I’ve found there’s a trick to knowing where you are,” I said. “It’s knowing where you were five minutes ago.”

“Why, you were here!” Betty said.

“I know where you were long before five minutes ago,” Bruce said.

“Yes, you do,” I agreed. “And if that man, that man you knew, came into the garden right now and sat down with us, I wouldn’t recognize him.”

“You wouldn’t know what to say to him?” Bruce asked.

“I could be of no help to him.”

“Those were dark times for you.”

I shrugged. I had once wanted to kill myself and now I did not. The thoughts I harbored then lack all reality for me.

Quiet voices from the street drifted toward us. The tourists were “laning,” a refined way of saying they were peering into the lamplit and formal rooms of other people’s houses and commenting on the furnishings, the paintings, the flower arrangements and so on.

My thoughts returned to the whales and their deaths. They were small pilot whales, not the massive sperm whales Pauline had made reference to, the taking of which had made this island renowned. The pilot whales hadn’t wished to kill themselves, of course. But one was in distress, the one first to realize the gravity of the situation, the dangerous imminence of an unendurable stranding, and the others were caught up in the same incomprehension. In the end they had no choice but to go where the dying one was going.

Or that’s one way of putting it. A marine biologist would know far better than me.

Pauline returned carrying a tray with an assortment of bottles and a plastic bowl of melting ice. “Starky is on the phone,” she announced.

“It’s probably her real estate agent,” Bruce said. “She told me he might be contacting her tonight. She’s selling her home, the one where she raised all her girls.”

“I’m sure she’ll get whatever he’s asking,” Pauline said. “People are mad for this place, aren’t they? They’ll pay any price to say they have a home here.”

The night was growing colder. Bruce had brought out several old sweaters, and I pulled one over my head. It fit well enough — a murrey cashmere riddled with moth holes.

Betty placed her tanned and deeply wrinkled hand on mine. The veins were so close to the surface I wondered that they didn’t alarm her whenever they caught her eye. She had to look at them sometimes.

“We are all of us unique, aren’t we? And misunderstood,” she said.

“No,” I replied, not unkindly, for I was devoted to Betty, though I was beginning to wonder if she wasn’t becoming a bit foolish with age. The world does not distinguish one grief from another. It is the temptation to believe otherwise that keeps us in chains. “We are not as dissimilar from one another as we prefer to think,” I said.

The rickeys were not as refreshing as they had been earlier, perhaps because of the ice.

Starky reappeared, as gaunt and unexceptional as before and giving no explanation for what had become a prolonged absence.

“Oh, do begin now,” Betty said.

“Begin what?” Pauline asked.

“Without further preamble?” Starky said.

“Or delay,” Bruce said.

“What must this place be like in the winter!” Pauline exclaimed.

We all laughed, none more forgivingly than Starky, who then began, as I had suspected, to describe her children.

“My first daughter is neither bold nor innovative but feels a tenderness toward all things. When she was young she was understandably avaricious out of puzzlement and boredom, but experience has made her meek and devoted. She is loyal to my needs and outwardly appears to be the most praiseworthy of my children. She ensures that my lucky dress is always freshly cleaned and pressed and waiting for me on its cloth-covered hanger. Despite such conscientiousness, I feel most distanced from this child and might neglect her utterly were she not the first.

“My second daughter is the traveler of the family even though she seldom rises from her bed. One need only show her the shell of a queen conch or a paperweight with its glass enclosing a Welsh thistle and she is swimming in the Bahamas or tramping the British Isles, though this only in her mind for she is far too excitable and shy to make the actual journey. She prepares for her adventures by anticipating the worst, and when this does not occur she delights in her good fortune. Some who know her find her pitiful but I believe she has saved herself by her ingenuity. The bruises she shows me on her thin arms and legs, even on her dear face, incurred in the course of these travels, evoke my every sympathy.”