Cape Cod Noir - By David L Ulin Page 0,42

own presence. He would have liked to think of himself as a comforting figure, calm and self-contained, but in her two Thanksgivings and one Easter with the family, April had barely said two words to him. She had a son from an earlier marriage whom they never met, and shortly after giving birth to Ludi, she kicked Mark out, only releasing the girl at Mark’s insistence after a year.

Given free rein, June revealed a maternal nature that had heretofore found no avenue for expression. Ludi, at age two, had a face like a beautiful smudge, almost a thumbprint of itself, and June delighted in pulling her black silken hair, which April had delivered braided, into soft pigtails that helped frame her gap-toothed grin. Those summer years, in Albert’s memory, seemed almost a constant series in partial visibility: Ludi in profile, bent over with a book in June’s lap, or departing, held aloft in June’s arms, head on the middle-aged woman’s shoulder.

Once, when April was living in New York and Mark was held up somewhere on unspecified “business,” Albert and Susan picked up the girl to drive her to the Cape. Albert was shocked at her surroundings. He’d pictured April in a bohemian but charming area, someplace in the city that would be new for him and Susan, different from their three-bedroom in Forest Hills. Instead, deep in Brooklyn, it was the kind of neighborhood where playgrounds were made of steel piping and concrete, as if to emphasize their durability. There was charmless green paint over all the streetlights.

“I have her bathing suit in her bag,” April said pointedly. Last year, it had been nowhere to be found, a brief matter of contention when Ludi was returned with a pink flowered bikini Mark had picked up in a roadside shop.

“She’ll have a wonderful time,” Albert said, grasping the girl’s hand. Ludi seemed to know him, looking up with a smile. He was shocked to find himself rocked with a wave of protective affection. He squeezed her hand and Ludi forgot immediately who he was. She ran to the car, where Susan opened the door to welcome her with outstretched arms, then waved to April.

“She’ll have a wonderful time,” he said to April again, who was looking at him skeptically. She had aged very little but looked far less happy—unsurprising, Albert thought, if she had been brought low enough to live in this place. Mark’s bootless wandering certainly couldn’t have been contributing to the household. Albert thought again how stupid a name Ludi had been to give to the girl, a play on Liudmila, a favorite character of April’s from some Russian novel. It was one of the many crimes his absentee brother had helped visit upon his daughter.

“I’m sure she will,” April said, making to close the door, then paused. “Tell Mark I say hello,” she added carefully. It was always hard to grasp the essence of any couple, but for Albert, April and Mark were harder than most.

In the morning, Albert awoke and immediately felt glad of the silence and the lack of tourist traffic, which would make it easier for him to get the furniture hauled away and clean the house. He fished out one of June’s phone books from under the filigreed, fake wood counter. It was ten years out-of-date.

He decided to walk into Wellfleet. The Bookstore Restaurant, where he and Mark had once fingered stacks of overpriced vintage comics, was closed for the weekend, as was the small ice cream and candy stand at the end of the dock. Galleries had begun to spring up on Water Street toward the center of town, but Albert was not moved to examine them. It was the kind of thing Susan had liked.

The summer she died, she had taken to making flowery observations about the region, hauling out maps to show a now-gawky Ludi that the ponds—Great Pond, Gull Pond, Long Pond, Spectacle Pond—looked like fingers, as if God had pressed His hand into the damp ground and let the impression fill with mud, then water.

Albert had wondered whether Susan thought of these things in advance to announce to the girl, or if they sprung from her on the spot. Toward the end, it seemed a kind of mania, to be so lyrical about everything. Put it in a poem, he felt like saying. Once he had actually said it. Ludi and Susan had spent the weekend writing just such poems, and when Mark returned Sunday from wherever he had