Find a Stranger, Say Goodbye

Snob, she thought, laughing at herself.

She lifted her backpack to her shoulders, pulled her hair loose from its webbed straps, and locked the car. Following the instructions Tallie had provided over the phone, she walked along the docks and looked for a small lobster boat named Egret. It was moored ignominiously behind a larger, more luxurious, cabin cruiser and moved up and down slowly as the water lifted it and let it go again.

Natalie looked down and waved at the man who sat on the boat with his legs up and a pipe in his mouth.

"Sonny?" She felt a little silly, but Tallie had told her someone named Sonny would be on the Egret.

"You the one goin' to Tallie's island?" he asked.

She smiled, nodded, and he reached up to help her aboard.

It wasn't Tallie's island. Natalie didn't know who owned the rest of it, but Tallie owned only four acres of Ox Island, which was two miles long and a half mile wide. It was typical of Tallie, though, thought Natalie, that people thought of it as Tallie's island.

It was typical, too, of a Maine lobsterman that he would have his jacket buttoned up tight against his chin in June, when the tourists were all in shirt-sleeves and alligator-adorned jerseys, and would be freezing and covered with goose bumps on the water. The breeze was very strong even before the Egret was out of the tight harbor, and downright cold as they crossed the open ocean to Ox Island.

"Do you know Tallie?" asked Natalie. "She's my grandmother."

Sonny was at the wheel, steering toward the island, watching the bay, not noticing the cold salt spray that struck his face as the boat moved.

"Yep," he said.

Natalie smiled to herself and didn't attempt any more conversation. If I were Tallie, she realized, I'd have him talking in long paragraphs, and before the fifteen-minute boat ride was over I'd know his life history.

Oh well, I'm not Tallie. No one is.

Sonny eased the boat gently toward the decaying dock at Ox Island. He muttered to himself, something about how they'd better fix that before the ice bust it up next winter, someone going to get hurt out here. When the boat was fast against the dock, he took Natalie's hand firmly and helped her up.

"You be here Sunday at two," he said roughly. "I'll take you back."

"Shall I pay you then?" she asked.

"She took care of it." He turned to his engine, ignoring her thank you.

Tallie wasn't at the dock. Natalie hadn't expected her to be. Tallie had never, according to Natalie's mother, been on time to anything in her life.

But she was at the house. Natalie walked up the dirt road, opened the never-locked door, and found her there, busy in the kitchen, singing "Un bel dì vedremo" from Madama Butterfly, loudly and slightly off-key, as she stirred something on the stove.

She looked up in surprise. "Natalie! Is it four o'clock already? I meant to be at the dock to greet you! But one of the local fishermen stopped by this morning with the most wonderful gift of lobsters and scallops and halibut that I decided to make a paella ... have you ever tasted paella, Natalie? Look, how the saffron changes ordinary rice to such a marvelous shade of gold!...and my goodness, I've lost track of the time. You look absolutely beautiful. I have always thought of you as a Modigliani person, and look ... you've proven me correct by wearing your hair that way, so that it falls into those elongated lines. Are you hungry? Warm enough? In need of music? Let me put on some Bach, so that everything will seem orderly and precise."

Natalie shrugged off her backpack, laughing, because Tallie never changed; she was still the same; no matter what happened, Tallie would always be indescribable. She ran to her and hugged her, and they held each other for a long time.

10

THEY HAD TALKED and talked.

"Natalie," Tallie said at last, "even though you're certain that you want to—that you have to—make this search, you're frightened. Don't be. You can handle whatever you find. And of course one must find out everything. It's exactly what I would do myself. I've spent my life finding out everything I possibly can."

They were sitting, after supper, in the living room of Tallie's tiny, eighteenth-century farmhouse. It was, Natalie thought, her favorite room in the whole world. The past was in it, in the ancient pine boards of the floor, and in the small-paned windows with their interior shutters that had once been used to keep out unfriendly Indians, or, more often, the bitter winter wind. But the past was layered over by the present, and by Tallie's presence, in the form of the brilliant white paint with which she had painted the plaster walls, and over which she had hung vivid and abstract paintings. The hanging plants. The shaggy Danish rug in earth shades of brown and gray on the floor. The thick pottery ashtrays and bowls on the low tables. The bright woven pillows strewn at random on the low white couch. Everywhere, the books. And the music. Tallie's life was always filled with music. She had put a recording of noisy, quick Russian dances on her stereo; there were clapping and stamping combined with the abrupt and discordant melodies. Tallie had served tea on a tray: a murky tea to which she had added herbs that she had collected on the island and dried herself. She poured it from a rounded earthen pot into deep gold glazed-clay mugs. Natalie blew ripples into the surface of hers, and tested it with the tip of her tongue.

"But you know, Tallie," she said slowly, "Mom and Dad say they understand why I'm doing it, but they don't really. They're very hurt. And I'm not sure I understand myself, why I'm doing it."

"You have incredibly lovely feet, Natalie. You should always go barefoot. Of course they're hurt. Sometimes we have to hurt people, in order to keep ourselves whole. We must just do it with love, that's all."

"That doesn't make much sense to me," admitted Natalie.

"Where is it written that anything has to make sense? All I mean is that when you have to hurt someone you love, do it honestly. And you're doing that. You could have sneaked around and done what you're doing. It would have been more difficult, of course, but you could have done it, Natalie. And you didn't. You told them exactly what you were doing. And it hurt, but they know you love them."

"I bet you never hurt anyone, Tallie."

Tallie hooted with laughter, and reached for the pot to pour more tea. Her rings glittered in the soft light, and made small noises as the silver touched the thick pottery. "How do you think I learned? Of course I've hurt people. I ran away from my first husband in order to go off with your grandfather. You look shocked, Natalie. Didn't your mother ever tell you that?"

Natalie shook her head.

"Well, it's true. I lived in sin for quite a while before my first husband finally divorced me on grounds of adultery.

"Actually—" Tallie sipped her tea. "I lived in Italy." She chuckled. "Technically, it was in sin, at least according to my family and to the New York newspapers. But geographically, it was in Italy. That seemed the more important thing, since I couldn't speak a word of the language at first. Goodness; I wonder if there is a language for people who live in sin."

The music had ended, and the old farmhouse was very quiet. A pale moth fluttered close to the small flame of the candle; the woman and the girl watched with vague amusement as the translucent wings drew it again and again to the potential danger. Finally Tallie caught the moth lightly with her quick hand, opened the window behind her, and released it to the night.

"They're so terribly fragile," she said. "I hope I didn't damage the wings. One tries so hard to save something, and sometimes things are injured in the saving."

She sighed. "It's the same thing we were talking about. I hurt people, by trying to save myself. Perhaps that was a brutal example. But there I was, twenty years old, madly in love with the most exciting man I'd ever met ... have still ever met ... and I was married to someone else. So what was I to do? Stay in New York the rest of my life, as the wife of a stockbroker who tucked his pajama tops carefully into the bottoms and wound his watch four times exactly every night before he went to bed?"

Natalie giggled.

"Or run off to Florence with an incredibly fine painter? Did I ever tell you how I met Stefan, Natalie? That he came over to my table in a New York restaurant and said, 'I want to paint you'? It sounds so trite, now; but nothing about Stefan was trite. Oh, Natalie, it was so exciting. And so painful.

"But there simply isn't any choice when you know you have to do something. So you inflict the hurt, and you smoothe it as much as you can by saying 'This is my fault, not yours—' Your face is brightening. You said that, did you?"

Natalie nodded. "More or less."

"And it works out. You get through the pain, and it works out. In my case, I found incredible happiness. And my first husband married again, to a woman who was perfectly suited to him, who gave elegant dinner parties using the china he had inherited from his mother." She grimaced. "It was hideous, Natalie. Big green birds of paradise in the center of each plate; can you imagine? And they lived happily ever after. His obituary in the New York Times was twelve inches long, which surely would have pleased him; and it never mentioned that once, long ago, he had announced that he was going to jump out of his office window if I left. He did, Natalie, he said that as I was packing my bags, and all I could think of, even though I knew he would never really do it, was that he had always abhorred anything messy."

Natalie sipped more of her tea and smiled. "Well, Mom and Dad aren't that upset."

"Of course not. Your parents are sensible people. I'm being silly, dredging up my own insane past as an example. They'll get through it, and so will you, and you'll find your own past. If you like what you find, embrace it. If you don't, shrug it away."

Natalie curled into the corner of the wide couch, against the pile of bright cushions.

"Your mother used to do that when she was a little girl. Curl up into corners. I suppose it was because Stefan and I were forever taking her to places where we stayed longer than we thought we would. Sometimes days longer. Poor Katherine, we would find her curled in corners, fast asleep. Sometimes I think I was a bad mother." Tallie fitted a long cigarette into an even longer holder, and leaned forward to light it in the flame of the candle that still burned in its squat sculpted container on the table.

"Oh, you weren't, Tallie. I'm sure of it. Mom tells wonderful stories of her childhood."

Tallie smiled. "It's good having you here, Natalie. My Modigliani granddaughter. Do you think I look old?"

Her face was lined, and her hair was gray, but her eyes were dark and vivid, her mouth and hands alive and expressive. She was slender and small. "No," said Natalie honestly. "You don't even look old enough to be a grandmother, to me."

"Damn." Tallie laughed. "Thank you, I guess. But I am dying to be a fascinating old woman. Next year, perhaps."

She picked up the empty tea things and took them to the kitchen. "Let's go to bed now, Natalie," she called, "so that we can get up early tomorrow and have an all-day picnic. I'll take you to my favorite cove. How do you feel about going skinny-dipping in ice-cold water with an elderly friend?"

"I'll try anything once." Natalie laughed as she carried her backpack up the stairs.