Chapter 11 - The Music on the North Shore
Six months later, on the fourth of July, the lawn of the Long Island estate looked like a photograph from an old magazine that someone had dropped into the sea and pulled back out to dry in the sun.
The hemlocks were dark green, heavy with new cones, and the grass had been mowed in broad, pale-green stripes that ran all the way from the stone terrace down to the gravel beach where the Sound lapped against the pilings.
There were two hundred people on the grass.
Not the cousins from Ozone Park. Not the men with the thick necks who wore their overcoats inside the diners.
The dockers from Local 1814 were there with their wives and their four dozen children, who were running in wild, screaming circles around the bronze fountain with hot dogs in their fists and mustard on their white shirts. The mechanics from the Red Hook terminal were pitching horseshoes by the carriage house, their iron shoes clinking against the stakes with a sharp, summer ring that set the gulls to shouting from the telephone poles.
Mrs. Donnelly sat under a striped awning near the library doors, wearing an enormous straw hat that looked like an inverted fruit basket, pouring lemonade from a silver pitcher for four elderly women whose husbands had spent thirty years working the lumber docks in Greenpoint.
Grace Bennett stood on the dock with a pair of salt-crusted binoculars around her neck.
She was wearing a white linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up past her elbows, showing the small, pale scar on her left thumb and the brown freckles the July sun had brought out across her nose. She was shouting at two teenagers in an outboard skiff who were trying to moor too close to the oyster floats, her voice carrying over the water with the easy, natural authority of a harbor master who didn't need to check the tide tables twice.
I sat on the low stone wall above the boat slip, a bottle of cold beer resting between my boots.
I wasn't wearing a coat.
My white shirt was open at the throat, the sleeves turned back twice to keep the cuffs out of the salt water. The shoulder holster was upstairs in the library, locked in the bottom drawer of the cherrywood cabinet with the Five-by-Seven photograph and the gray canvas ledger that the federal prosecutor in Brooklyn had decided he didn't need to see after all.
Nora came running up the gravel path, her bare feet brown from two weeks on the sand, her yellow sun-dress smeared with strawberry ice cream at the bib.
She hit my knee like a small cannonball, her arms wrapping around my shin.
"Daddy!" she shouted, her curls whipping across her forehead in the south wind. "Sophie took the big net! She took the big net and she found three crabs in the grass!"
"Did she?" I asked, reaching down and lifting her by the armpits until she was sitting on the stone coping beside my thigh. "Were they the blue ones?"
"The green ones with the spots," she said, her voice loud, confident, and completely full of herself. "Olivia said we could keep them in the wash-tub until the fireworks come."
"No crabs in the wash-tub, Nora," Grace called out from the end of the dock, not even turning around from the water. "Mrs. Donnelly will throw them into the chowder before you can get the salt on them."
Nora stuck her tongue out toward the Sound, then looked up at me with that sharp, amused crook of her upper lip that was Isabelle—pure, unadulterated, living Isabelle—looking out from behind seven-year-old eyes.
"Grace is very bossy, Daddy," she whispered.
"She is," I said. "She’s the bossiest woman on the North Fork."
"Are you going to buy her the boat with the yellow roof?"
I looked down the dock.
Grace was helping Olivia haul a wicker crab-trap out of the shallows, their hands working together on the greasy hemp rope, both of them laughing as a great spray of brown sea-water and green ribbon-weed dumped across their sneakers.
"Maybe," I said. "If she teaches your sister how to tie a bowline that doesn't slip when the tide comes in."
The sun began to drop behind the tall chimneys of the manor, casting three hundred feet of cool, blue shadow across the lawn where the children were beginning to light the small, legal sparklers they had bought at the pharmacy in Glen Cove.
From the terrace above, Sophie’s voice came down through the hemlocks.
She was standing on the low parapet with a tin whistle to her lips—not the wooden ones Thomas had carved, but a cheap, nickel-plated pennywhistle Grace had bought her at the five-and-dime.
She wasn't playing a hymn.
She was playing the song she had sung in the kitchen six months ago, when the house was cold and her father was still carrying another man’s blood on his cuff.
The notes were clear, bright, and slightly sharp in the salt air, rising up past the stone urns, past the leaded windows of the library, past the portrait of Isabelle Romano that hung in the dark foyer where nobody died anymore.
Olivia stopped pulling the rope.
She turned toward the lawn, her hands dripping sea-water, and let out a long, clear whistle through her teeth that made every dog between the stable and the gatehouse sit up on its haunches.
"Come on, Dominic!" she yelled from the dock, using my first name for the first time in her life, her gray eyes wide and laughing in the orange light of the sunset. "The water’s warm enough now! If you don't jump in before the sun goes down, Grace says you have to clean the crabs yourself!"
I stood up from the stone wall.
May you like
I didn't check my waistband. I didn't look back toward the gate to see if Sal was in the shack, or if the Lincolns from Brooklyn were coming down the road from the boulevard.
I dropped the beer bottle into the grass, kicked off my loafers, and walked down the creaking boards of the dock toward the three girls who had spent fourteen months learning how to be quiet, and the woman who had taught them that the only thing louder than a gun on the Long Island shore was a Romano child who knew she had the right to make a noise in her own house.
