John Casey: Compass Rose

Everyone was getting jostled. Eddie and Dick were looking at a photograph of Miss Perry. Dick said, “That’s a nice picture. So don’t say anything about how she chased you off her land.”

“Wasn’t going to. I know how good she was to you and your boys.”

Dick said, “No need to bring that up, either.” He half turned and said, “Hello, Elsie.” He cleared his throat. “Just keeping Eddie here in line.” He turned back to Eddie.

Here was Dick in this life. Not a flicker of anything else.

Dick and Eddie moved apart, and Elsie looked at Miss Perry’s picture. It was an old picture, Miss Perry behind her desk at school. Thirty, thirty-five, years ago. If she hadn’t made Elsie her pet, coaxed her into Latin and botany, into believing that these woods and marshes needed her and that the genius of the place would reward her, she might have flown away. It had been an arranged marriage. Miss Perry gave her a piece of land, and Elsie built a house. But it was prepared by the teacher-student courtship, the long walks in the woods that had been a mixture of myth and science. One time the two of them had come into a pine grove in spring, the air a haze of yellow pollen shot through with sunlight. “It was perhaps observing this sort of fertile occasion,” Miss Perry had said, “that the Greeks hit on the idea that Zeus came to Danaë in a shower of gold.”

Nature into myth, myth into nature. Had Miss Perry known that she was binding Elsie to her? To this place? Had Miss Perry been a wily spinster weaving spells? Or was she unaware, for all her eccentric knowledge, of how her generosity and loneliness spun around each other to make a magnetic field? Was that what had drawn Elsie into Miss Perry’s long old age?

Elsie stepped back, found her way out the door to the lawn between the Wedding Cake and the docks. The grass was a perfectly even green. The sailboats bobbed at their moorings, all facing the last of the sea breeze blowing just hard enough to ruffle the water and make the halyards chime against the hollow metal masts. Near the mouth of Pierce Creek Eddie’s crew had already put up the new footbridge and the first bit of the boardwalk into the nature sanctuary. Neat work, but nature was meant to be a tangle.

JB came up beside her. “Pretty damn gorgeous.”

“If you’re a member.”

“Ah.” He turned to her. “Try thinking of them as a tribe with their own peculiar rituals … No, wait. I’m sorry. There I go again. Annoying good cheer. Gets me into all sorts of … At Logan one time I was in a long shuffling line, only one ticket agent for the whole mob of us, so I was humming a tune. Maybe I sang a word or two. All of a sudden the little old lady in front of me lifts her head and says — you could hear her the whole length of the line—‘What a little songbird we have here! What a puffed-up little rooster going cock-a-doodle-doo!’ ”

JB tipped his head of white hair to one side, and his face wrinkled. She wasn’t sure if it was from amusement or renewed embarrassment. His eyebrows crept down and then up. She thought, If those eyebrows were caterpillars, we’d be in for a long, cold winter. That tripped her into laughing.

“Oh, fine,” JB said. “Take her side.” But he was laughing, too.

“I wish we could just stay out here,” Elsie said. “I either want to pull myself into my shell or bite everyone.” His eyebrows went up again. “Oh, I don’t mean you. In fact, I want you to sit next to me at dinner and tell me another story.”

“Nothing I’d like better, but I’m afraid there are place cards.”

Phoebe opened the door and called out, “So there you are, you two. We’re about to sit down.”

Walt stuck his head out over Phoebe’s and said, “Yeah, soup’s on. Hey, Elsie, I brought something for you.”

“Not now, Walt,” Phoebe said. “We’re trying to get everyone to sit down. Elsie, you have Mr. Bienvenue and Piero, you lucky girl.”

Elsie thought, I should grow older, have peaceable friendships with people like JB.

Phoebe said, “And Mr. Callahan, you have Sally and me.”

“Then I’m a lucky boy.”

“Oh my,” Phoebe said. “You do turn a girl’s head.” She batted her eyelashes. Elsie couldn’t tell if Phoebe was already tipsy or just trying too hard. At least she was keeping Walt in check.

The four tables were set in a square, all the chairs on the outside. In the pit in the middle there were potted flowers and ferns, all below eye level. Phoebe apparently thought that the seating arrangement meant that conversation was supposed to be general. She asked May what she was planting in her garden. May murmured her list; Phoebe gave a cry of delight and sang a bar or two of “Oats, Peas, Beans, and Barley Grow.”

Elsie thought of saying, “What a little songbird we have here!”

Phoebe kept on around the table. She asked Johnny Bienvenue how his campaign was going. Johnny said Patty was a great help — she’d given a speech in Italian. Phoebe gave a little trill. “Me, too. Anch’io parlo un poco italiano. ” She turned to JB. “Oh, you’re going to just love it here in Rhode Island. It’s tiny, but it’s really very cosmopolitan. I mean, think of Dick’s boat!”

Half the people here didn’t want to think of Dick’s boat. Elsie winced on her own and then again at the hard silence.

“I mean the crew,” Phoebe said. “There were Captain Teixeira’s nephew, who’s Portuguese, and that nice little Vietnamese man.”

There was a low chorus of the older men clearing their throats. Elsie saw Jack drawing himself up, but it was Dick who spoke to Phoebe. “You mean Tran. When I first met him he said his name was Tran. I got used to calling him Tran. Turns out that’s his last name. His first name’s Khang.”

Elsie wondered why Dick was getting Phoebe out of trouble. He didn’t like Phoebe. To be nice to May, then? Penance?

Phoebe murmured, “Khang Tran, Khang Tran. Thank you.”

Everyone turned to a neighbor. Mr. Salviatti said to Elsie, “I have seen a mysterious bird. I believe you know birds, yes? I saw a flock of pigeons over my garden. As they all turned I saw a flash of green. I thought it was perhaps a trick of the light. But they turned again and I saw an entirely green bird — an emerald in that gray setting. Are there green pigeons?”

Elsie savored the pleasure of knowing, the pleasure of another white-haired old man attending to her. “I’ll bet it was a monk parakeet. It’s a kind of parrot. People imported them as pets, and some got loose. There’ve been a lot of sightings. They’re doing okay in the wild.”

“But why is it flying with the pigeons?”

“Monk parakeets like company. They even build nests for three couples.”

“Ah. How satisfying to find someone who knows such things. And I have meant to ask: Phoebe — that is the name of a bird?”

“Yes. A little gray bird, so it’s hard to tell apart from the other little gray birds, but its call really does go, ‘Phoebe, Phoebe,’ and it wags its tail a lot.”

“And sometimes its tongue. Poor Phoebe. She meant no harm, but there is an old saying—‘One does not speak of rope in the house of a hanged man.’ ”

For an instant Elsie warmed herself to the idea that Mr. Salviatti preferred her to Phoebe. Knowing things, getting credit for knowing things, murmuring complicitly with a nice old man — in fact, her second nice old man of the evening — these were minor pleasures, but pleasures.

Jack looked at Mary, who nodded to the waitress, who set about clearing the soup plates.

Elsie added a Miss Perry footnote. “Phoebe is also the name of Diana when she’s the moon goddess, the same way Phoebus is the name of Apollo when he’s the sun.”