You’re getting a good education. There’s nothing for you here.”
“You and Dad are here.”
“You know what I mean.” They were quiet, then, though clearly there was something on her mind. “You think you’ll marry that girl?” she said. “The one you mentioned?”
“Jacy? We’ve never even been on a date. Also, of the three of us, she seems to like Mickey best. And anyway,” he continued, “she’s wild as the wind. I don’t think she’s really in love with any of us.”
“Maybe she’s waiting to see which of you has the courage to declare himself.”
Then they fell quiet again, until Lincoln chuckled.
“What’s so funny?”
“I was just trying to imagine introducing her to Dad,” he admitted.
She regarded him sadly. “In matters of the heart that is not where your mind should go.” But she seemed to understand that that’s where it did go, and probably would go for a very long time. Eventually, he might come to repudiate his father’s doctrine, but the man himself would be tougher to exorcise.
* * *
—
“THE THING TO UNDERSTAND about your father,” Lincoln’s mother had once explained when he was in high school, “is that you always have a choice. You can do things his way, or you can wish you had.”
At the time he’d seen her remark as defeatist, but gradually understood that she wasn’t advocating capitulation so much as making sure he fully comprehended the consequences of confrontation. Her husband’s perseverance, she knew better than anyone, wasn’t just dogged; it was positively tidal. And how right she’d been. Arguing with his father was like trying to put a cat in a bag: there was always a limb left over, and at the end of that limb a claw. Not one to be intimidated, especially in front of Anita, Lincoln often questioned and on occasion even repudiated the Gospel according to W. A. Moser, but he never achieved anything like victory because the man refused to admit defeat and never, ever quit the field. “Back when you were a Christian,” Dub-Yay would say, apropos of nothing beyond reminding him that his conversion to Catholicism, decades earlier, was still in play. When Lincoln had explained that he and Anita both felt it was important to present a united front to their children when it came to religion, his father, who would’ve made a fine country lawyer, responded that he couldn’t agree more. However, he pointed out, if Anita had converted to Church of God, the front they would be presenting to their children would be both united and correct instead of just united. Whenever he and his father disagreed, Lincoln was simply wrong.
That he should remain so stubbornly committed to finding a third path—some strategy that halved the distance between angry confrontation and meek acquiescence—was perplexing even to Lincoln. His mother had already pointed out that he only had the two choices. Why couldn’t he quit looking for the third that she’d assured him—and she would know—didn’t exist. Even now, at sixty-six, he was still trying to square the Dub-Yay circle, to reconcile what never could be—that his two very different parents wanted very different things from their son. When he pleased one, he of necessity displeased the other. When his mother died, he thought maybe that would put an end to the struggle, but no. Though she might be dead and buried, she continued at odd moments to plead her posthumous case, especially here on the island, the place she’d loved most. Wasn’t that what her quiet fifth-column insurgency had been about all along? Her need for him to understand that even though his father was a force of nature, he was her son, too? By refusing to relinquish the Chilmark house, she was declaring, in terms her husband had no choice but to accept, that there was some part of his wife over which he’d never hold sway. Clearly, to her the Chilmark house wasn’t just wood and glass and shingle. That it represented a time when her parents were still alive, when she felt happy and safe in a world they’d created, long before W. A. Moser turned up? Had his father, Lincoln wondered, understood all that?
How could selling not be a betrayal? Wouldn’t it hand his mother a posthumous defeat and imply another triumph for the Moser genes, all the more satisfying because it would be transacted by their son, not himself? What saddened Lincoln most was the very real possibility that his mother had known from the start how