"So's not to embarra.s.s the families?"

He had scooped up some of the soft candle drippings and was rolling out a little wax ball.

"That's tame," I said. "Tamer even than William. He was capable of divorce."

"Do you admire my father?" he said bluntly.

"No. Do you admire mine?"

"You want me to testify before the committee?" he threw out. "What do I care? You don't have to remind me what my father's capable of. In fact I may go him one better, why not? I've had his example after all. I've had my mother's example my whole life. There's a lot to be learned from family unity."

"Never look on the floor," I suggested. "Never call a thing off."

"You prig. I don't give out credos. My father called off plenty, didn't he?-never mind that marriage to your mother, I mean this so-called museum and G.o.d knows what else. And called off all his G.o.dd.a.m.n credos while he was at it. I wouldn't call this off if I had a written guarantee signed by her in blood that I'd find her on the floor every night from now till doomsday."

"That's loyalty. That's love. That's no credo."

"I'll tell you what it is, it's utility. It's making do. It's the lesson of family unity. If I called it off she'd get away with it. She's made a monkey out of me and she's not going to get away with it. My father let your mother get away with it and it made a monkey out of him for the rest of his life-she did her job on him and then just went on her way and never paid for it."

"She paid and she paid and she paid. You saw it yourself. You snooped it out.-Connelly's ledgers," I said.

By now the wax ball had ears and a nose. He said steadily, "It's not going to be that way for me. What I learn I apply."

"Aha, you'll make do."

"You bet. I'll make it h.e.l.l for her," he announced in his deepest lung, and with the nail of his little finger he dug out a pair of eyes.

"Ssh. You'll wake them."

He gave a hiss: "The sleep of the just."

"My father's a pagan, he doesn't have a sense of justice."

"Oh h.e.l.l. Let the Senate worry about it. He's a shoo-in, I told you. Quit worrying about it."

I said, "Why do you keep talking about Enoch?"

"You brought him up."

"I brought up justice."

"Well drag it down again. I'm not in the mood to hear about what doesn't exist. Shove metaphysics."

"Sometimes," I said warily, "you think something doesn't exist and then it turns out it does."

"Honest to G.o.d I'm not in the mood."

"Like Nick. He exists."

A draft annihilated the last candle. "He exists," he said in the black.

"And you didn't think I had a father. See, I know something about family unity on my own," I said.

"What's this all about?"

"Boats. My father is asleep on the floor. In the morning they're going to take a boat-"

"What's this all about?"

"I'm explaining. I," I said, "am issue of the floor. You," I said, "are issue of the nuptial couch."

He almost yelled. "Come on, what's this all about?"

"Please don't wake my father," I said.

19.

In the end it turned on the issue of who he was. I said at once he was my father, but the Purses denied it with so much seriousness they were at length believed.

Town Island had become a town. There were goings and comings; and a doctor; and large boats with crews and special machinery; and men with notebooks; and a man with doc.u.ments full of dotted lines and boxes to put crosses in; and men without uniforms who said they were from the police; and men wearing caps like sailors who were not sailors; and Polygon's j.a.panese; and some county politicians who walked everywhere and called the house "the old museum," as though it was a well-used phrase among them; and a helicopter clattering spoons into the sky.

Polygon's j.a.panese found the bottle with the note in it. It had washed up overnight; the tide had swung it far up on the beach, and it rolled into the crevice of a motor. A wave knocked it against a carburetor (it happened to be the one-eyed old sea-salt) but it did not break, and in the afternoon Polygon's j.a.panese, heading back to his launch without the pa.s.sengers he had come for, caught the wink of sun on gla.s.s and picked it up. It was only an empty wine bottle with the cork left in, wreathed with seaweed, so he threw it down on the sand again and fled to call the Coast Guard.

I knew my father's alphabet. Water had seeped into the bottle and blurred the letters-that made them all the more recognizable: ah, my father's name in a smear of glue, inside an envelope, hidden: the letters wild, quick, overtaken. The hand that set the letters down heaved cartons, pushed off hulls (I saw what rough force had snapped the B flat dumb)-that hand is surprised by pens and pencils, little narrow quicksilver things too subtle to catch hold of solidly. The hand of a man. The mind that set the letters down loved no one. Love broke in me: infatuation, and I would have scratched the signature in hope of touching him. There was no signature. When you write to the ocean you do not leave your name. Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck does not leave his name for the ocean or for me. The lip of the bottle smelled of wine but did not taste of it. I gave it a lick. It tasted salt.

A Letter from Harriet B.S.P.

To Poseidon M.D. (Master of the Deep)

By an Amanuensis

The G.o.d of love is always

a baby.

Cupid! Christ!

It was the unmistakable voice of Marianna Harlow, Chapter Twelve.

At evening shouts spouted from the middle water. Over the distance the heavy calls of men came to us reduced. Tinkle after tinkle-the men roared their find, and we at last caught the high light flake of a syllable.

At evening they took him up in a net, like a fish.

They laid him on the sand. The net was tangled. They cut it away.

The Purses swore he had no next of kin they knew of.

Then in the full red of sunset a man wrote words on the dotted lines and drew crosses in the boxes. He took close note of everything, and tried to be accurate about weight and length and color, the way a fisherman who views his day's catch tries to be accurate. Among much other information, and below Eyes blue brown other, he put down that my father's hair was dyed blond.

My father's body was covered with vomit; but this required a separate paragraph.

20.

"The point was to go out all quiet, well what in the world d'you think we took it for? He's the one said the other rode like a nymph, he said nymph and he said the wood looked like out of silk-he said things like that. He said Almighty G.o.d himself knew it rode like a nymph, and I said if you ask me it's just like splashing around in a lawyer's office, all brown, anyhow I hate that ship, my father picked it not me, I said what I really wanted was a little thing, you know one of these little free things that look like they don't belong to anybody especially not a lawyer and you can practically sail them in a bathtub, not that that was the crux, the crux was to go out all quiet-"

In long strokes, like a swimmer, all that afternoon Stefanie re-told her story. She sat on the flat end of one of the motors and talked while the men wrote. Then another boat arrived, a wire was pulled across the sand, a man tapped a microphone, and she had to begin again.

The county men came back down to the beach from the house. They had gone into the cellar and seen the wine. They had climbed to the top and seen all the dressers and bureaus and chests and finally a room full of books. They had seen the piano and the ceiling harps and the kings of France and Spain. They said the place would never have stood up as a museum-the foundations were no good. Built on piles, they said, into sand, and you know sand. Never expect anything from sand. The story was the old man meant to bring in a school of whales, live ones in a tank. One whale in the pantry, they said, and before you knew it you'd have your whale bang in the cellar. The floor wouldn't hold. Sagging bad enough already under that refrigerator-talk of things outsize and whalish. Dangerous place. Vandals. Attractive nuisance. Tear it down, sell it for sc.r.a.p-The county men murmured; the men with the notebooks wrote.

Into the microphone Henry David Th.o.r.eau spoke a sermon: it seemed to be mostly about a junior lifesaver's certificate, but it was long, and soon it was about a senior lifesaver's certificate. The man holding the wire asked, "You believe it could have been prevented?" and another man laughed and said, "Get the kid out of here. A blowhard. And wasn't there. Get the girl back." Purse looked at the sky and said, "Our plane." Mrs. Purse said, "Well that's plain, we'll miss it if we don't start" and Purse said, "It's all over, there's nothing we can do." One of the men in uniform and one of the men not in uniform surrounded them: "Where will you be if we need you?" Mrs. Purse said, "How lovely and hilarious, I've never actually heard that spoken, not outside of a murder mystery movie-" Purse said, "Shikarpur, Pakistan." The Coast Guard officer said, "Good G.o.d." William's son left Stefanie's side. "It makes a difference, it hits on what they do with the body," he said. "I'm afraid we're of no help there," Purse said. "We've identified him sufficiently," Mrs. Purse said, "we don't know him, after all. A stranger. A fraud. We know his name. Maybe it isn't genuinely his name." The Coast Guard officer frowned: "Get in touch if you hear of any relatives or connections, will you?" Mrs. Purse frowned equally and said nothing. "No connections we know of," Purse said, "a stranger you see. A confidence man. We met him in the Automat." "Among the nickels and dimes," Mrs. Purse noted. William's son said, "He has a daughter." "No no," Mrs. Purse said, "no daughter. No connections at all. A man alone. A tramp. A cheat and swindler. An immoralist. -About the dead nothing evil however." "No daughter," Purse said, "that was only for protection. Cover-up you see. The Lord knows what's in a man's heart. There's no good in pretense. Well, the dead don't need protection," and Polygon's j.a.panese took them away.

William's son said: "Tell them who you are."

"I did tell them," I answered, "over and over. I said what I am."

"Say it again."

"I have no respectability. n.o.body listens. They don't believe me."

He said sharply, "You want potter's field for him?"

"In a way he was a potter. -That's all right," I said.

He misheard in the din. Polygon's launch roared. "A pauper?"

"A potter too."

"Look, if you don't care what they do with him, all right Otherwise you better get your mother to come out here p.r.o.nto."

"What for?"

"To claim him."

"That's law school advice," I said. "My mother has her own lawyers. My mother has William. She claimed what William tells her to claim, right? It's in his discretion-you told me that once yourself."

"My father doesn't as a rule send persons to potter's field. He doesn't have that sort of clientele."

"No, William doesn't have paupers," I agreed.

"He doesn't have potters. I'm telling you, you better get your mother over," William's son said.

I said again, "What for?"

He scowled with exasperation. "To give some decency. The whole thing is sordid enough-good G.o.d, to bury the man."

"She wouldn't do it. William wouldn't let her do it."

"My father doesn't get in the way of what your mother wants."

"Right," I said. "She wants the Amba.s.sadorship."

He turned to view Stefanie-she was sobbing noisily into the microphone.

"It would ruin Enoch," I said. "That's the whole point of everything-not to ruin Enoch. It's why I came."

She was explaining how her skirt was rent to pieces in the water. She had lost it finally. The county men and the man in charge of the microphone looked away, reminded by the drying rosebuds on her underpants. Her naked thighs were slick with oil.

William's son said: "She's worse."

"Who?"

"Your mother."