The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [76]
Nights Whaley had to pull her curtains to block out all the twinkling lights of Atlantic Beach. Back home on the island she didn’t even need any curtains.
Liz had asked her on the phone to write some things down, all she could remember. She best be buying the paper, Maggie said when she heard it. Maggie resented Whaley for her memory. Blamed her for paying attention. She was jealous, surely. She didn’t have too much she wanted to remember.
That Boyd. Though Whaley assumed her sister was long over him, it occurred to her more than once since they’d arrived in Morehead that Maggie might try to look the boy up. Though he was hardly a boy now—over fifty he’d be. She never brought it up, for it was one of those things they never had talked about.
That was a story should never be heard: how Maggie threw herself at a near boy, shamed herself and her family name and eventually the whole island when she went across the water looking for him. Whaley stayed mad at Woodrow for years, him and Sarah both, though it was easy now to forgive Sarah for everything, considering what happened to her, Whaley’s hand in it.
Which was what she was wanting to tell Liz. Telling it might make it easier to live with, though she realized she was a hypocrite for claiming so, as every time her sister tried to talk about that Boyd after he left her, Whaley’d cut her off. She felt bad for that. But in a way she had no choice but to tell what happened to Sarah. If little Liz really wanted to know about the social dynamic between the three of them, what happened when she sent Woodrow over to Meherrituck that day changed everything. Plus, she’d given Dr. Levinson and them everything else: the family trees, the accent, the odd sayings, the recipes for making candles and soap, how to cook loon and the correct way to string a net between dunes to trap morning robins, the famous personages who visited the island back in its heyday as a bird hunting paradise, including Babe Ruth and Grover Cleveland. She’d given them everything she had known about her great-great-great-grandmother Theodosia Burr Alston and Theodosia’s famous traitor father, Aaron Burr, how the ship carrying Theodosia ran aground off Diamond Shoals and how her life was spared by Thaddeus Daniels, black-heartedest pirate of them all, because she appeared to be “touched by God.”
Once, with Dr. Levinson egging her on with his “fascinatings” and “interestings,” she’d even revealed how she’d sometimes thought of herself as the reincarnation of Theodosia’s spirit. After all, she was the only one who had been named after her in several generations. More curse than blessing, actually: it was such a cumbersome and antiquated name that for years, after her parents died, she went by her middle name Linda, though changing your name after the age of six months in a place so small was a frustrating endeavor. You really need new people in your life to change your name, and for many years new people were as rare on the island as fresh fruit. Most people just called her Miss Whaley. Prematurely, in fact—they started calling her that when she wasn’t yet thirty—but she knew there was something stiff and self-righteous in her demeanor that encouraged them to treat her like a spinster.
But it wasn’t just the name. Whatever she’d gone by, she’d still have felt the vestiges of some former and indomitable greatness. Theo, as she referred to her in front of the Tape Recorders, had dined with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, her father’s enemy Hamilton; she’d entertained the highest social order in New York and Charleston, had served as official hostess for her husband, governor of South Carolina. She spoke French, played piano, and had been unique among the women of her time for studying Latin and Greek and reading ancient history. Whaley did not in general give a damn about high society or excess schooling—she was way more concerned with putting away enough beans and squash to get her and