The Map of True Places

They didn’t talk about Maureen’s death, not directly anyway. One night almost a year later, Finch turned to Zee and invoked another quote from Hawthorne, speaking of “ ‘That pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere. The firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage-scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the chasm.’ ”

Finch was clearly distraught. Family life, strange though it might have been with Maureen, was nonexistent now. So when Melville came back and moved into the house to stay, with him came a certain peace that Zee had not previously known. Finch stopped spending all his leisure time with Mickey and the pirates. And he slowed his drinking to a pace that was quite respectable for a seacoast town in New England— that is to say, more than moderate but not too extreme. He didn’t sing anymore, but Zee could see that Finch was truly happy.

One day in Zee’s freshman year of high school, she came home and announced, “My friend Sarah Anne says that our home is not a normal place.”

Finch thought about it for a long moment before he spoke. This time, instead of quoting Hawthorne, he quoted Herman Melville: “It is not down in any map; true places never are.”

Zee recognized the quote immediately. Though Finch usually quoted Hawthorne, he had schooled his daughter well in all the American Romantic writers. Moby-Dick was her all-time-favorite book.

Zee had to admit that, for the first time she could remember, there was a semblance of family in the old house on Turner Street. And though it might seem an odd situation to the outside world, it was far more normal than anything Zee had yet experienced in her young life.

For his part, Finch seemed rather to enjoy shocking people with his new status, a fact that ultimately turned Mickey against him. Taking it up a notch, Finch often introduced his new partner to people he’d known his entire life, telling them that Melville was not only his live-in lover but an ecoterrorist as well. Actually, Melville was a journalist. Before he met Finch, Melville had been investigating a Greenpeace splinter group that was trying to interfere with minke whaling off the coast of Iceland. The nickname Finch gave him stuck. Everyone in town now called him Melville.

He wasn’t a bad guy. In some ways Melville was easier to be around than Finch. Her only real objection was that Finch always let Melville run interference for him. Melville handled everything that Finch found difficult in life, which was a lot. And although Finch was happily letting the rest of Salem know of his relationship with Melville, he had never really talked to his daughter about it. It had been Melville, finally, who explained the kind of love that he and Finch had for each other, though by the time he got around to talking to her about it, she had pretty much figured things out for herself.

Finch and Melville had started seeing each other during her mother’s final and longest hospitalization. The way Melville explained it, Finch had led him to believe that Maureen was probably never going to get out of the hospital. Zee always wondered about that. It was the opposite of what Finch had told Zee on their Saturday trips to see her mother. Every Saturday, on the way to the hospital, Finch assured his daughter that Maureen would be coming home soon and that they shouldn’t give up hope.

Still, she believed Melville when he told her that he’d been misled by Finch. It seemed important to Melville that she know this, desperately important somehow that she not think he was a man who would intentionally break up a family. Surprisingly, she believed him. Zee knew all about The Betrayal, though she was certain that Finch didn’t know she knew. Maureen was a talker, particularly when she was in one of her manic periods. Over the years she had told Zee much more than was appropriate to tell a daughter about her father. And Zee could do nothing with the information her mother had given her. Maureen had sworn her to secrecy. So Zee became aware, as Maureen had intended, that her father was sometimes less than honest and forthcoming when it came to getting what he wanted. She didn’t fault him for it. Zee knew better than anyone how difficult Maureen’s illness had become. But she noted it.

When Maureen had finally come home from the hospital, it was Melville who had disappeared, accepting a writing assignment that took him first to California and later as far away as the Aleutian Islands. He didn’t return to Salem until two years later. By that time Maureen was dead, Finch was spending his summer vacation drinking with the pirates, and Zee was out stealing boats.

Finch immediately sobered up, quit pirating, and moved Melville into the house.

Months later, when Zee was caught stealing a cuddy-cabin boat, it wasn’t Finch who came to post bail but Melville. It was also Melville who accompanied her to court and Melville who made certain that her juvenile records were sealed.

And when she was required to go to therapy in Boston, it was Melville who drove her. Finch, who had no idea she was stealing boats to get herself out to Baker’s Island and the house her mother had left her, not only was disgusted by her behavior but accused her of being just like her mother.

“You don’t understand,” she heard him say to Melville. “This illness runs in families. She’s showing the same kinds of signs, doing the same kinds of dangerous things. She’s skipping school. She’s stealing boats. I can’t have it,” he said. “I’ll send her away to school before I will deal with this again.”

And so Melville took her to a therapist and waited for her in the waiting room. The therapist found no signs of manic depression. While it was clear that Zee was acting out, the therapist thought it was a cry for help, or at least for attention from her father.

If the therapist was correct and it was a cry for help, it had been Melville, and not Finch, who answered it.

“He’s threatening to sell your mother’s house on Baker’s Island,” Melville told her on the way home from her session with the psychiatrist.

“He can’t do that,” Zee said.

“He can. You’re a minor, and Finch has been paying upkeep and taxes.”

Zee panicked. The house was the last thing she had of her mother’s. “I’ll get a job,” she said.

“It wouldn’t be enough.”

“I’ll quit school and get a job.”

“If you quit school, he will sell the house immediately. Don’t even think about quitting school.”

“What am I supposed to do? He can’t sell my house.”

“If I were you,” Melville said, “I think I would learn to behave.”

It was simple advice, and she heeded it. From that day on, Zee didn’t steal another boat. She didn’t skip school again. And, to the best of her ability, she tried to learn to please her father and do what was expected of her.

The ride back from Boston had taken forever. Finch was weary, and so was Zee. She turned the car onto Turner Street, stopping to let a group of day-campers, who had just come from the Gables tour, get back onto their yellow school bus. After they passed, Zee pulled the car into the driveway next to Melville’s boat. Dusty, the cat next door, who had become the mascot for the House of the Seven Gables, was sunning himself on the bench in the stern. He looked up, yawned, then stretched and settled back into a more comfortable sleeping position.

The old lobster boat was wrapped in white plastic that had begun, over the years, to flake and tear. A screen door that was cut into the wrapping over the stern showed through to the boat’s interior ribs, revealing the vital internal organs: the galley, the bunk beds, the head. A yellow slicker she recognized as Melville’s was still slung over the brass cleat near the captain’s chair. The old boat gave the impression of a sugared Easter egg, the old-fashioned kind that contained a whole world inside.

Seeing the boat, Zee was prompted to ask one more time after Melville.

“What do you mean, gone?” she asked when Finch repeated the word for probably the fourteenth time.

“Gone, disappeared, poof!” he said, making an upward sweep with his hand.

In a way she wished, hoped, he had not altogether given up speaking as Hawthorne. At least Hawthorne would have answered her question with a recitation that might have yielded more meaning.

This time she changed her question. Instead of asking where Melville had gone, she asked, “Well, when do you think he will be back?”

“Never,” Finch said.

She should have let him off at the kitchen door, she thought. It would have been a much easier walk. Because they used the front door, there was a long and cluttered hall that Finch had to negotiate. She grasped his arm to guide him down the hall to the kitchen, but he shook her off. He could do it himself, he told her.

It took several minutes for Finch to travel the long hall from the front door to the kitchen of the old house. She followed his stiff-legged shuffle the length of the hall. The ceilings were low in this house. The wide pine floors sloped on the diagonal. A child’s marble dropped in the living room would end up in the kitchen, which made walking difficult enough. But the piles of newspapers Finch had collected over the years seemed to grow precariously out of the floor every few feet. They were waist-high in some places, and they seemed to sway when she walked by them like Disney rocks that were about to tumble. And then there were Finch’s books, piled on every surface: the mantels, the desk, the raffia awning-striped wing chair in his den. She was reminded of a pinball machine as she watched Finch navigate unsteadily through the room. His walker stood in the kitchen fireplace. Still wrapped in plastic, it was the same yellowing white as Melville’s boat.

After she helped Finch inside, Zee went around the side of the house and began to collect the assorted things that he had placed outside the window of the cent shop he’d created: two pairs of shoes, fishing gear, several lightbulbs of varying wattage, and a set of binoculars. Slowly she began to realize that most of the items Finch had been selling actually belonged to Melville. The hand-lettered sign he’d hung on the window, the one saying that everything must go, began to take on a new meaning.

Some people throw people’s belongings to the curb. Finch, ever the practical Yankee, had opened Hepzibah’s Cent-Shop and tried to make a profit.

“Don’t bring that stuff back in here,” Finch said when he saw her coming through the door with a pile of Melville’s shirts.

“What the hell happened between you two?” Zee asked.

“None of your business,” he answered.

She put the shirts and the rest of what she could gather on Melville’s boat, forgetting Dusty was there and almost tripping herself in a last-minute effort not to step on his tail. “You’d better be getting on home,” she said when the old cat looked up at her. “It’s going to rain.”

By dinnertime Finch seemed almost his normal self again. She wondered how much of this was the meds. Though he was considerably better than he had been, she knew that the drugs were still in his system. The doctor had told her they wouldn’t totally clear out of his bloodstream for another forty-eight hours.

“Let me make you something for dinner,” she offered.

“No, look, I’ve got it right here,” he said.

He opened the fridge to reveal a row of labeled sandwiches. She noticed the script on the labels, cursive and feminine, decidedly not Melville’s. Peanut Butter, Tuna, Deviled Ham—dates scribbled under the titles. Finch took out the deviled ham, pointing to the others and telling her to help herself.

He couldn’t swallow very well anymore. She remembered Melville’s telling her that. Melville had also told her that bowel movements were becoming increasingly difficult for Finch, peristalsis slowing with the disease. She remembered he was supposed to eat prunes. She looked around for some, searched in cabinets and in the fridge. Then she wondered if they had settled on some medication instead.

She needed to ask Melville these questions. Even if he was gone, as Finch insisted, she still needed to talk to him.

“What do you want to drink?” she asked.