“Oh, Lucy, don’t say ‘huh.’ That is so coarse.”
“Sorry, Mother. What were you saying?”
“I said I hope you will take tennis lessons.”
“Oh, Mother, I don’t think I’d be very good. You know, my foot and all.” Lucy tried to imagine herself chasing a ball on a tennis court, stumbling about in much the same manner she did in conversations at parties with people like the Ogmonts and the Drexels. She could imagine Denise De Becque, Elsie Ogmont, and Lenora Drexel in their tennis whites snickering at her, and felt a twinge in her stomach.
“Nonsense!” her father boomed. Stephen Snow was speaking in a voice he seldom used in the pulpit but often used in his home when contradicting either his wife or Lucy. “Your foot is so much better. Vastly improved, and the only way to keep improving is to try new things. There are such opportunities in store for you, Lucy. You must not squander them.”
“Absolutely! Listen to your father, dear!” Marjorie Snow had resumed her knitting. “Like dancing. You’ve danced before. Such opportunities …”
Tennis, dancing — opportunities for marriage, Lucy thought as she returned her gaze to the coastline. The train seemed to be devouring the track, and the coastline fled by, but then new vistas would open up, and the boundless sea stretched before her.
“I’m so glad, Stephen,” Marjorie Snow said as she picked up a dropped stitch, “that the church decided to pay for first-class compartments on the train and the steamer.”
“First class all the way. We have to arrive in style, for the good of St. Luke’s. We must reflect well on our church. They don’t invite just any Episcopal priest to go to the Little Chapel by the Sea.”
“Yes, of course. And you see, Lucy, that is why you must enter into all the young people’s activities. We must all reflect well.”
“We are emissaries of the church,” her father said, rather grandly.
“You mean like missionaries?” Lucy asked.
“Heavens, no!” her mother exclaimed. “We aren’t here to proselytize. Good gracious. It’s Bar Harbor, not Africa! Father was saying that we must reflect well on the church. We must shine. Be our best.”
Lucy was trying to process what her parents were saying. It sounded like a fashion show. She pictured an immense oval mirror holding the reflections of the three of them in their new summer wardrobes. Her father in his summer clerics. Herself in one of the lawn cotton tea dance dresses, and her mother in her walking suit. The images changed — new outfits. Her father in his formal dress clerics for an evening event, her mother in an evening gown of ice blue silk, and herself in a ball gown of sea-foam green silk and lace that Mrs. Simpson said set off the deep green of her eyes.
There was a sudden knocking on their compartment door.
The Reverend Snow stood up and opened the door. It was the conductor. “Next stop Boston, South Station. Porter will meet you on the platform with your trunks. You’ve booked a cab?”
“Yes, sir. My secretary made the arrangements for our transport to the steamer dock in the harbor.”
“Fine, fine, Reverend.” The conductor seemed to linger a moment. Lucy saw her father jerk to attention.
“Oh!” His hand reached in his pocket. She saw him pull out a half-dollar coin. He flushed slightly as the conductor took the coin.
As soon as the door closed, Marjorie Snow whispered, “A half-dollar, Stephen?”
“We can’t appear cheap, my dear,” he said brightly. “We are going to be consorting with Van Wycks, Astors, Bellamys — the whole lot!”
Lucy’s parents beamed at each other. They had never appeared more ecstatic.
And she, too, felt a thrill surge through her as she stepped off the train. She sniffed the air. The scent of the sea threaded through the coal fumes of the locomotive’s steamy belches. Salt air! One never caught such a scent in New York.
She inhaled deeply as they followed the porter with their four steamer trunks. She ran a bit ahead to catch up with the fellow.
“Pardon me, sir, but how close are we to the sea?”
“The habber?” he asked. She realized that he meant harbor, but with his thick Boston accent, the r had vanished.
“Yes, sir.”
“Not far, missy. Take the cab twenty minutes but that’s because of the traffic. Less than half a mile to Lincoln wharf, where you catch the steamuh.” He had a plain-as-pudding face, and his hair, which stuck out under his cap, was the color of pale carrots. She detected a slight Irish lilt, which she found lovely.
When they arrived at the wharf, she was nearly overwhelmed with the most marvelous sensations. She took off her bonnet, faced into the breeze, and flung back her head. A hairpin came undone and the carefully wound bun fell loose, cascading in ripples down her back. The wind caught it and whipped it in streams across her face.
“Lucy, for heaven’s sake, what are you doing, child? Your hat! Your bun!”
“Oh, Mother, doesn’t this air feel wonderful? And look, you can really see the ocean from Boston.” They were standing near the end of the wharf where the Elizabeth M. Prouty, the coastal steamer, lay against the pilings, bobbing gently. This was the ship that would take them across Massachusetts Bay, up the coast of New Hampshire, across Casco Bay, Muscongus, then Penobscot Bay, and finally into Frenchman’s Bay and Mount Desert Island.
“What’s this?” Her father took one look at her and gasped. He appeared mortified, as if she had stripped off all her clothes and was standing naked on the wharf. Surely the absence of her hat and the sight of her disheveled hair could not be that unnerving.
“What is wrong?” Lucy asked, worried by her parents’ transfixed expressions.
“You look so different,” her mother said, staring at her as if she were a stranger. Lucy’s hair, touched by the sun, was a flaming conflagration, and her eyes sparkled a fierce green.
“Ain’t she a looker!” A stevedore whistled low and then suddenly the air was crosshatched with such whistles.
“Come along, child, it’s time to board. And for God’s sake, put your hat on.” It was more a prayer than a curse that her father uttered as he grabbed her arm and steered her toward the gangplank.
The wind was on their nose, which was unusual for this time of year, and the captain informed them that, due to the contrary breezes, they would arrive at six the next morning. Lucy couldn’t have been happier. The longer she could be at sea, the better. She did not plan on sleeping a wink. Why spend any time in a stuffy cabin when one could be outdoors? Her parents might worry if they knew her plans, so it would be best if she did not tell them. She had firmly decided that she would try her best to be the model daughter, the perfect emissary. She would even agree to give tennis a try if it would really help her father’s designs to become bishop of the diocese of New York.
And she was the perfect daughter that night, going down to dinner in the ship’s dining salon in a gray cashmere dress with a fitted jacket. They were seated at the captain’s table and the captain, Andrew Burch, asked that the reverend give the blessing. Marjorie was pleased with the honor but slightly disappointed that there was no one of note at the table. It was too early, as Mrs. Simpson had said, for the summer people. There was a dentist and his wife who were disembarking in Portland, a businessman and his ten-year-old son, also from Portland, and a governess who had come in advance of another family — the Greens — whom Marjorie had never heard of but who apparently summered in Bar Harbor. The talk was mostly about weather, and though Marjorie attempted to ask the governess a few discreet questions about the Greens, she was able to extract precious little information. At the conclusion of the dinner, they bid their tablemates farewell and wished them all a good summer.
The Snows’ cabin was a double suite, thanks once again to the largess of St. Luke’s, and when they had returned, Marjorie sank down on a settee and sighed. “Now I hope I don’t get seasick.” The ship was rolling a bit as they had steamed beyond the deep bays of the Massachusetts coastline and were expo
sed to the open sea. “My goodness, Lucy, how do you stand there and keep your balance without holding on to anything?”
Lucy shrugged. She loved the rhythm of the waves; it was as if she had known this motion all her life. She felt almost cradled by it. But how could she explain any of her feelings to her parents, who both looked a bit queasy? She tried to change the subject. “Mother, you said good-bye to Miss Burnham, the governess, as if we’ll never see her again this summer. Surely our paths will cross.”
She saw her mother and father exchange glances. “Oh, I don’t think her employers are our kind, dear,” her father answered quickly.
“Mr. and Mrs. Green?”
“Yes.” Her mother coughed slightly. “It’s an … iffy name?”
“What? Whatever do you mean?”
“Well, you know …” She lifted her short, thin eyebrows, which arched steeply like tiny commas over her somewhat vague hazel eyes. Her lips clamped together as if she preferred silence to any sort of explanation.
“Your mother is trying to say … that these are not our kind of people. The … the name suggests a different race.”
“A different race?” Lucy asked.
“Jews — possibly.” This comment took Lucy aback. She had never heard her parents speak this way. It was something she could imagine someone like Denise De Becque saying, or Eldon Drexel. But her parents, particularly her father, were quite careful in how they spoke of other faiths.
A different race? What exactly did that mean? Lucy wondered. It was a religion, she thought — but a race? She was confused. She had seen Jews in New York, met some. The cobbler, Mr. Hurwitz, was Jewish. So was the lady in the New York Public Library at the reference desk. Miss Gold was her name. She had been very helpful. They perhaps looked slightly different, but so did the Irish porter who had carried their trunks in the station, and so did Anna, the Swedish lady who cooked for them. But would you say they were different races? She thought about how her parents had stared at her on the wharf when she had removed her hat — their shocked countenances. It was as if she had not been stripped naked but become something else entirely — another race, another being, something not quite human — an alien apparition.
These disturbing thoughts lingered with Lucy as she crawled into her bunk. Although she had no intention of sleeping, the rocking motion of the steamer, the swells rolling in from the vast Atlantic, were seductive. Despite the dull thrumming of the engines, she could still hear the hypnotic rhythm of the crush of the sea against the hull.
I don’t want to play tennis. I want to swim. No one had ever taught her, but she did not doubt that she could swim. She simply knew it.
As she drifted off to sleep, she thought about the Begats, the little doll family that inhabited the dollhouse Aunt Prissy had given her. Lucy had invented the Begats long before she ever discovered those papers in her father’s study, her adoption papers from St. Luke’s with the words “mother unknown.” So had she wondered even then who had begat her? Who was “mother unknown”?
She had always listened so carefully in church when her father read the verses from Matthew. She had loved the rhythm, the cadences, as the people, starting with Abraham, then Isaac, Jacob, and Judas, tumbled out of that cataract that was Jesus’ original family. And the names became odder as the people, all of whom seemed to be men, were born. There was Aminadab after Aram and then Nassoon and Salmon and Booz. Occasionally a girl or woman was mentioned. In Lucy’s Begat family, it was just the opposite — mostly girls and sometimes a boy.
Lucy’s eyes began to close. Her kin were not mythical. Somewhere, they really did exist and they had begat Lucy. Was this the edge she was approaching, a precipice over which she might peek and discover who she was and from where she had come? Discover her kind?
Lucy sat bolt upright in her bunk. How could she have fallen asleep? Peering through the porthole, she could see two stars. Thank heaven it was still night. There was still time to go up on deck. She could hear the soft snores of her parents in the adjoining cabin suite. The ship was moving smoothly now. There was very little rocking motion. The wind must have died down. She put on her warmest coat, added a thick shawl, and slipped out of the cabin.
As she stepped on deck, she knew she had stepped up to the brink, the elusive edge of another world. Wrapped in the light breeze, the scent of the sea, she gasped as she saw the wobbling reflection of the moon on the water. Tears started to stream down her face. She wondered why she was crying. She had never been happier and yet the world suddenly felt fragile to her, as fragile as that quivering reflection.
GAR PLUM LEANED against the rail of the circular walkway on the outside of the lighthouse that he tended. The signature of the light was two one-second flashes every ten seconds. It was in this ten-second interval of darkness that he could catch a glimpse of her, his daughter May, her tail lifting like a waterborne comet from sea to sky. What he had known yet denied for years, from the time he had first fetched her from that sea chest floating offshore, had been confirmed nine months earlier, in September, when he first caught sight of her swimming straight out to sea on a blustery night. It had taken him that long to accept the inevitable — that his May, his dear May, belonged to the sea. They were as close as any father and natural-born daughter could be. And yet he could not bring himself to confess that he knew her secret. He had rehearsed it in his mind so many times, but it always came out wrong, as if he were forgiving her for being what she was. There was no need for forgiveness. He often wondered what would have happened if he had not found her. Would she have died? Had he really rescued her? Or had he committed her to a life of suffering shut up in this lighthouse?
“Crossing over” — that was how he had thought of May’s transformation. She hadn’t always been this way, or rather, she had not always known that other secret part of her self. He was pretty sure it had happened a year or more ago. The previous spring when the last nor’easter blew through. She’d kept it a secret, though, even from Hugh, her beau from Cambridge — a Harvard man. He wondered if Hugh would be back this summer.
There! He saw it. The dazzling tail lifting from a swirl of phosphorescence. She was a quarter mile out. The light’s sweeping flash blurred the colors that were more beautiful than any rainbow. Where did she go? he wondered. What would he do if he lost her? Would she someday swim away forever?
May could hear the thumping reverberations of the Elizabeth M. Prouty coming through the passage between Egg Rock and Bar Harbor. No more acrobatics, she thought to herself. She didn’t want to attract the attention of any crewmembers on deck or the pilot who stood on the prow. She was about to dive straight to the bottom, but then the void that so often pressed against her left side began to quiver, then pulsate with a stronger beat. Once there had been two such voids pressing against her, but the one on her right side had disappeared after she found her sister, Hannah Albury, at the end of the previous summer. She and Hannah had discovered each other while swimming right in the center, the windless eye, of the hurricane. May had felt that pulsing in the void just moments before they had caught sight of each other. Soon after meeting, May and Hannah became convinced that there was a third sister. Could she be coming now? May could hardly contain her excitement as her flukes twitched with anticipation.
May felt the flutter in her stomach harden into concern. What if she was rich and snooty? What would she think of a sister who lived in a lighthouse? Who owned only three dresses that had been patched and repatched so often that her summer one made her look like a walking quilt? At least Hannah, who served in a rich family’s house, had some sense of the finer things — like finger bowls and harp music. But May knew none of this. She had grown up in almost perfect isolation on this small island, only venturing into town to attend school or visit the library.
May knew it was wrong of her to assume that all rich people were snooty. Hannah said that little Ettie Hawley was the sweetest person ever. But it was one thing to be friendly with your employer’s young dau
ghter. It was quite another to build a relationship with the sister you’ve never met — who might not even know that she had sisters.
She was very close. May sensed it. Perhaps she was on the deck of the Prouty. May dove and swam deep beneath the keel stream of the steamer. She could not tear herself away. She knew the girl was on that ship and she had to follow it.
She’d experienced a similar sensation when she and Hannah had made the long swim to the shipwreck of the Resolute and found where their parents had died. It was as if they had been pulled toward the long-lost shadows of kin. One did not need a compass; one was just inexorably drawn. May had begun to call these instincts the Laws of Salt. They were not mere passing urges but something more primal, and they told May that one who had crossed over could not approach one who had not.
May and Hannah were mer. The salt flowed through their veins, but if this sister had not yet completed the transformation, she had to be allowed to find her own way to the sea.
May left the keel stream and began to swim quietly next to the Prouty, just inches beneath the surface of the water, disturbing it no more than a small school of fish. She moved alongside for several minutes, then swam aft and followed in the white curl of the wake, rolling over onto her back so she could try to spot her on deck.
When nothing was revealed aft, she swam toward the prow. It took no effort at all for her to keep up with the steamer. Just as May rolled onto her back again, she glimpsed her. It was her hair really that caught her eye. It swirled around her head like a pale fire in the night.
The Laws of Salt did not, however, prevent May from telling Hannah. She couldn’t wait. She hoped Hannah came swimming tonight instead of spending the evening with that painter. He was so — She broke off the thought. She had no right to think such things. And it was not that she thought ill of the painter Stannish Wheeler. Not really. There was just something about him that she found slightly — what was the word she was looking for? — disquieting.