2.
MY FATHER NAMED me Miranda. He was a teacher at a pureblood girls’ boarding school in Virginia: not an English teacher, as you might expect from a name like that, but an art teacher. Painting, mostly, although he also taught sculpture, as the traffic allowed.
Still, he loved books, especially old ones. He taught me to read when I was very small, two or three years old, and by the time I was five we were decanting Shakespeare aloud to each other, each of us taking parts. We sat in his study, a fusty, tiny, comfortable room with large windows. I took the leather chesterfield sofa while he filled the armchair nearby. We drank cocoa and the air smelled of chocolate and leather and especially books—you know the smell I mean—I don’t know if it’s the ink or the paper or the glue in the bindings, but it’s a very particular odor. I still smell it, somewhere in my memory, and it carries me back to that room and the sound of my father’s voice as he began John of Gaunt’s dying speech—
Methinks I am a prophet new inspired
And thus expiring do foretell of him …
He had a beautiful round baritone, and as he sat there in his armchair and spoke, one leg crossed over the other, wearing his soft shirt and tweed jacket and woolen vest while his blue eyes fixed not on the page—he knew the words—but upon or rather through the opposite wall of the study, I might have thought he really was the Duke of Lancaster, the great Plantagenet prince, splendid in his despair. To my mind, there was no man more heroic than my father.
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation throughout the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it
(here his voice shook with agony)
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame …
And he named me Miranda. Prospero’s daughter, raised alone by her magician father on an uncharted island of fairies and strange creatures. I used to wonder why he chose that particular character, that particular daughter, that particular play. I think it had something to do with the sea, which he always loved, and with tempests, which also fascinated him. There may be more than that, but I’ll never know. He embarked for England—“This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this precious stone set in the silver sea”—on the second day of November 1943, when I was ten years old, and I last glimpsed him waving at the rail of a gray-painted troop ship, before it dissolved like a ghost into the dark mist of New York Harbor. That was all.
Still, I don’t think I’ve ever forgiven the sea for swallowing up my father like that. As I stood there at the end of the Greyfriars dock, watching the lobster boat tear toward me, the drone of its engine filled me with an unnamable thrill. Terror or joy, I couldn’t tell. It just seemed to me that watery Neptune, having swallowed my father, was now spitting something back eight years later.
Something in the shape of a stripling boy with dark, curling hair and tanned skin, who could rescue a man from drowning.
3.
NOW, I DIDN’T know much about boats in those days, but I knew enough to grab the rope the young man tossed me and loop it tight around one of the bollards. The tide was high and slack, and the boat rode only a foot or two beneath the wooden planks. Inside the boat lay Popeye, coughing and wheezing, bleeding all over the place from I don’t know where.
The young man lifted Popeye in his arms and hoisted him up toward the dock, where I hooked my arms around his shoulders and dragged him away from the edge. He was heavier than I thought, made of wet, compact bone and muscle, and my bare feet slipped against the wood. “Careful!” exclaimed the young man, leaping up beside me, and he tore open Popeye’s shirt and checked his heart, his breath, because he’d stopped wheezing and now lay limp in my arms.
“The doctor’s on his way!” I gasped out. “I saw you from the window.”
“Ah, Jesus Mary. His arm.”
I looked at Popeye’s left arm, which was bent horribly, leaking blood.
“Here,” said the youth, “hold it steady while I lift him. Can you do that? One, two, three.”
I scrambled to my feet and bent to cradle Popeye’s elbow while the young man scooped him carefully upward, lifting that weathered old fellow like—I don’t know—like a knight would lift a damsel. Now I could see the bone sticking through the skin, through the wet plaid shirt, but I wasn’t going to be sick, oh no. I thought, the nurses in the war saw far worse, didn’t they? Some nurse maybe tended my father. They hadn’t flinched, and neither would I. I laid Popeye’s arm across his middle as best I could, and we started down the dock to the lawn. Popeye remained still. I prayed he wasn’t dead. The sun hit the side of my face as we loped up the slope of the lawn, past the boathouse and the tents, up the steps of the terrace and around back to the kitchen, where the maid was waving for us.
“Put him right here, Joseph! I cleared the kitchen table. Doctor’ll be a minute. Oh Jesus Mary!” she cried. “Look at him! What happened?”
Down he went on the table. Joseph checked his chest again and swore. Bent over his face and pinched his nose and laid his mouth on Popeye’s mouth, breathed the air of his own lungs into Popeye’s lungs while the maid ran for kitchen towels or something. I just stood there, holding Popeye’s arm together, not knowing what else to do. After a breath or two, Popeye started to heave, and Joseph rolled him quick on his side. Out came another quart or so of water, more sputtering, a groan of misery, and the doctor burst through the door right that second, dressing gown flapping around his legs, thank God.
4.
THERE HAS NEVER been any such thing as a hospital on Winthrop Island, as I later learned. Either you were sick enough to head for the hospital on the mainland, or you made do in your bed at home. This doctor—Dr. Huxley—didn’t have a regular practice here. He was a summer resident who made himself available for emergencies on the understanding that he wasn’t to be disturbed during cocktail hour or golf.
Lucky for Popeye, the good doctor was an early riser who just happened to live half a mile up Winthrop Road from Greyfriars. He set Popeye’s broken arm and stitched up the holes in his hide, and Mr. Fisher had him put up in one of the guest bedrooms with strict instructions to watch for signs of pneumonia.
“What about his family?” I said. “Shouldn’t we telephone them or something?”
Joseph looked down at me kindly. “He hasn’t got any family. Wife died two years ago. Kids moved to the mainland.”
“Oh, that’s a shame.”
“That’s the way it is on the Island, I guess. Kids move away.”
He was blushing a little, looking down at me, and I realized I still wore my old green flannel nightgown, which was wet with seawater and blood and stuck to my skin. I crossed my arms over my chest. Mr. Fisher and Dr. Huxley were upstairs with the maid, settling the patient in some spare bedroom or other. The kitchen was growing warm as the sun penetrated the window glass, and I noticed the smell of something baking, something sugary and vanilla-scented, something for the wedding, so I supposed the oven was on, too, adding to the general heat. I stared at the kitchen table, which Joseph had helped me clean up just now, dishcloths and hot water and vinegar that still stained the air. All immaculate, erased, you’d never know what happened. Just any old big kitchen