Dabney left the Chamber office at four-thirty as usual. All preparations for Daffodil Weekend were in place; Dabney could have organized it in her sleep—thank goodness—because her afternoon had been consumed with rereading Clen’s e-mail and then obsessing about it.
I suffered a pretty serious loss about six months ago, and I’ve been slow recovering from it.
What kind of loss? Dabney wondered. Had he lost a good friend, a lover? Dabney had lost her father from a heart attack a decade earlier, and her beloved chocolate Lab, Henry, had died at the age of seventeen, just before Christmas. But neither of these losses compared with the loss of Clendenin.
Not a day has gone by—honestly, Cupe, not an hour—when I have not thought of you.
She would be lying if she said that she had not thought of him, too. The love of her life, her perfect match, her Meant to Be. The father of her child. How it had pained her to break off contact. But years and years later, Dabney was stunned by the wisdom and maturity of her decision.
The only way I am going to survive is with a clean break. Please respect my wishes and let me, and this child, go. Please, Clendenin Tabor Hughes, do me the favor of never contacting me again.
He had been so, so angry. He had called Dabney in the middle of the night, and over the staticky, time-delayed phone line, they had screamed at each other for the first time in their relationship, often stepping on each other’s words until Clen ended the call by saying,
We all make choices,
and slamming down the phone. But he had let her do things her way. He had not contacted her.
IMPOSSIBLE SITUATION: I could not stay, and you could not go.
That was about the size of it.
Despite this, Dabney had thought Clendenin might appear at the hospital when she gave birth. She had thought he might materialize in the back of the church on the afternoon she married Box and, just like in the movies, interrupt the priest at the critical moment. She had thought he might attend Agnes’s first piano recital, or show up at Dabney’s fortieth birthday party, at the Whaling Museum. She had thought he might come back to the island when his mother, Helen, died—but Helen Hughes had been cremated and there was no service.
Dabney had always thought he might come back.
If all goes well, I should be back on Nantucket tomorrow morning
.
Dabney walked home from work, wishing it were a weekday so that she would have the house to herself, time and space to think. Dabney’s husband, John Boxmiller Beech—Box, to his familiars—held an endowed chair in economics at Harvard and spent four nights a week in Cambridge, teaching. Box was fourteen years older than Dabney, sixty-two now, his hair gone completely white. He was a brilliant scholar, he was witty at dinner parties, he had nurtured Dabney’s intellect and saved her in a million ways. Not least of all, he had saved her from the memories of Clendenin Hughes decades earlier. Box had adopted Agnes when Agnes was only three years old. He had been awkward with her at first—he had never wanted children of his own—but as Agnes grew, Box enjoyed teaching her how to play chess and quizzing her about European capital cities. He groomed her to go to Harvard and was disappointed when she chose Dartmouth instead, but he was the one who had driven back and forth to Hanover—sometimes through ferocious snowstorms—because Dabney wouldn’t leave the island unless her life depended on it.
Tomorrow morning.
It was Friday, which meant that Box was at their house on Charter Street. He would be Dabney’s escort all through the festivities of Daffodil Weekend, although he was slower now after his knee replacement, and he had a hard time with the name of anyone he hadn’t known for twenty years. Box would be working, and therefore distracted, but if Dabney knocked on the door of his study, he would set down his pen and turn down the Mozart and he would listen as Dabney spoke the words he had surely been dreading for more than twenty years.
I’ve had an e-mail from Clendenin Hughes. He’s coming back to Nantucket for an indefinite period of time. He’s arriving tomorrow morning.
What would Box say? Dabney couldn’t imagine. She had been honest with Box since the day she’d met him, but she decided, while walking home, that she wouldn’t tell him about Clen. She revised history so that she had deleted the e-mail without reading it, and then she deleted it from her deleted file, which meant it was gone, so gone that it was as if it had never existed in the first place.
Albert:
Dabney Kimball was the first person I met at Harvard. She was sitting on the side steps of Grays Hall, crying her eyes out. All the other freshmen were carrying their trunks and boxes across Harvard Yard with their good-looking, well-dressed parents and their rambunctious brothers and sisters in tow. I watched people hug and scream—happy reunion!—they had gone to Camp Wyonegonic together, they had been bitter lacrosse rivals, one at Gilman, one at Calvert Hall, they had sailed together from Newport to Bermuda, they had skied in Gstaad—it just got more and more absurd, and I could not listen a second longer without feeling woefully displaced. I was from Plettenberg Bay, South Africa—my father a truck driver, my mother the head of housekeeping at a tourist hotel, my tuition at Harvard paid by a scholarship through the United Church of Christ. I did not belong in Grays Hall, at Harvard, in Cambridge, in America. I slipped out the side door with the intention of escape—back to the T-station, back to Logan Airport, back to Cape Town.
But then I saw Dabney crying, and I thought,
Now, look, Albert, there is someone else at Harvard who seems as miserable as you.
I sat down on the hot step and offered her a handkerchief. My mother had sent me half a world away, to the planet’s most prestigious university, armed with little more than a dozen white pressed handkerchiefs.
The first white handkerchief won me my first friend. Dabney accepted it, and unceremoniously blew her nose. She did not seem surprised by my presence, despite the fact that I was six foot six and weighed 165 pounds and had skin the same purple-black color as the plums sold by the fruit vendor in Harvard Square.
When she finished blowing her nose, she folded the handkerchief into a neat, damp square and laid it on her dungaree-covered knee.
“I’ll launder this before I give it back,” she said. “I’m Dabney Kimball.”
“Albert,” I said. “Albert Maku, from Plettenberg Bay, South Africa.” And then, as a flourish, I said,
“Ngiyajabula ukukwazi,”
which means, “It’s nice to meet you,” in Zulu.
She burst into tears again. I thought maybe the Zulu had frightened her and I made a mental note not to use this tactic ever again when introducing myself to someone in America.
“What’s the matter?” I said. “Are you lonely? Are you scared?”
She looked at me and nodded.
I said, “Yes, me too.”
Later, we walked to Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage. This was a famous burger place mentioned in the freshman handbook. We ordered burgers with onions and chili sauce and cheese and pickles and fried eggs, and we ordered fries with gravy, and as I ate I thought happily that this was American food, and I loved it.
Dabney Kimball had been born and raised on Nantucket Island, which was sixty miles away on land and another thirty over the sea. She told me she was the fifth generation of her family to be born on the island, and I understood that for an American, this was an accomplishment. Her great-great-great-grandfather had traveled to Nantucket when he was only newly graduated from Harvard himself.
Dabney didn’t like to leave the island, because of something that had happened when she was a child, she said.
“Oh, really?” I said. “What?”
I thought maybe she had been mugged or had been in a highway accident, but she pressed her lips together and I realized I had probably overstepped the bounds of our brand-new friendship by asking.
“There is no university on Nantucket,” she said. “Otherwise, I would have matriculated there.” She picked at the last remaining fries, swimming in gravy. “It’s a phobia. I leave the island and I panic. I only feel safe when I’m on that island. It’s my home.”
I told her my home was Plettenberg Bay, and that I had not, until two days earlier, ever been out of South Africa. But Plettenberg Bay wasn’t an island, and I had traveled around the country quite a bit with the choir of my church youth group—to Cape Town, Knysna, Stellenbosch, and Franschhoek, to Jo-burg and Pretoria, the capital, and to the fine beaches of Durban. Compared to Dabney, I felt worldly.
“Also,” she said, “I’m in love with a boy named Clendenin Hughes. He goes to Yale, and I’m afraid I’m going to lose him.”
Ah, she had me there. At that time, I knew nothing about love.
Dabney and I remained friends for all four years at Harvard. She went home to Nantucket each weekend and over the span of each school vacation, and every time she left for home, she invited me to come with her. I had an idea of Nantucket as a white place, an expensive place, an elitist place, and despite the fact that someone as fine as Dabney lived there, I felt that a painfully lean, dirt-poor African boy with purple-black skin on a church scholarship would not be welcomed, and I always said no.
But then finally, during spring break of senior year, when I had been accepted at medical school at Columbia Physicians and Surgeons, and I had a pocket full of money from working as a bellman at the Charles Hotel, and my self-confidence was plumped not only by my future as a doctor and ample pocket cash but by the realization that I had become sort of American (I enjoyed movies with the actor Mickey Rourke, I drank the occasional beer at the Rathskeller), I said that yes, I would go.
Dabney drove, at that time, a 1972 Chevy Nova, which I folded myself into for the ride to Hyannis, where we would catch the ferry to Nantucket.
Dabney said, “And guess what? My friend Corinne Dubois is coming, too.”
I didn’t want Dabney to sense my disappointment. I craved Dabney’s attention; I didn’t like the idea of being rendered mute while Dabney gabbed with her girlfriend, this Corinne Dubois.
“She’s great, wonderful, beautiful, smart, you’ll love her,” Dabney said. “She’s about to graduate from MIT with a degree in astrophysics.”
We picked up Corinne Dubois outside the Museum of Science on Edward Land Boulevard. She had curly, copper-colored hair. She wore long silver earrings and a long peasant skirt and dark round sunglasses. I noted these things in an instant and I was not particularly overcome except by thinking that Corinne Dubois did not look like a person about to graduate from MIT with a degree in astrophysics. But when she climbed into the car, I smelled her perfume, and something stirred in me. She slammed the door and pushed her sunglasses on top of her head and I introduced myself.
“Albert Maku,” I said, offering my hand.
She shook it mightily. “Corinne Dubois,” she said. “Lovely to meet you, Albert.”
Her eyes were green, and they were smiling at me. And although I had not known what love was, I felt it then.
Dabney noticed. She looked at me and said, “Albert, you’re rosy.”
And I thought,
How does a man with the blue-black skin of a plum look rosy?
But I knew she was right.
Dabney Kimball Beech was descended from a long line of strong women, with one exception.
Dabney had been named after her great-great-great-grandmother, Dabney Margaret Wright, married to Warren Wright, who had served as captain of the whaling ship
Lexington
and had died during his second trip at sea. Dabney had three sons, the youngest of whom, David Warren Wright, married Alice Booker. Alice was a Quaker; her parents had been abolitionists in Pennsylvania and had helped fugitive slaves. Alice gave birth to two girls, and the elder girl, Winford Dabney Wright, married Nantucket’s only attorney, Richard Kimball. Winford was a suffragette. Winford gave birth to one son, Richard Kimball, Jr., called Skip, who dropped out of Harvard and scandalously married an Irish chambermaid named Agnes Bernadette Shea. Agnes Bernadette Shea was Dabney’s beloved grandmother. Agnes gave birth to David Wright Kimball, Dabney’s father, who fought in the Americans’ first efforts in Vietnam, then came home and served as one of Nantucket’s four policemen. He married a Nantucket summer girl named Patricia Beale Benson.
Patty Benson, Dabney’s mother, represented the weak link in the genealogy. She left Nantucket when Dabney was eight years old and never returned.
When Dabney discovered she was pregnant (and really, if one wanted to talk about scandal, there was no greater scandal in the year 1988 than Dabney Kimball’s becoming pregnant out of wedlock), she had wished for a son. To have a daughter after growing up without a mother seemed a challenge beyond Dabney’s capabilities. But when a baby girl was set in Dabney’s arms, the love specific to all new mothers overtook her. She named the baby Agnes Bernadette after her grammie and decided that the only way to ameliorate the pain of her mother’s abandonment was to do right herself. She would be a mother first, a mother forever.
As Dabney approached her house on Charter Street, she saw Agnes’s Prius in the driveway.
Agnes!
Dabney’s spirits soared. Agnes had come home for Daffodil Weekend! Agnes had surprised her, which meant, Dabney assumed, that all was forgiven.
Dabney didn’t want to think about the misunderstanding at Christmas. It had been the worst misunderstanding since, well…since the only other real conflict Dabney and her daughter had ever had, back when Agnes was sixteen and Dabney had explained who her real father was. Compared to that hurricane, the blowup at Christmas had been minor.
Dabney stepped in through the mudroom door.
“Agnes?” she cried out.
Agnes was in the kitchen, eating a sandwich at the counter. She looked skinny to Dabney. Her jeans were hanging off her hips. And—even more shocking—she had cut her hair!
“Eeeek!” Dabney said. She reached out and touched Agnes’s shorn head. All that beautiful, straight dark hair, the hair that had reached down to Agnes’s nearly missing behind, had been chopped off. She looked like a boy.