Cape Cod Noir - By David L Ulin Page 0,44

like Mark and like her mother, who had elected to attend the ceremony in a different portion of the seating and take Ludi for a dinner with her friends the night before.

He placed June’s few wall hangings and prints in a box, then pulled a stack of photo albums off the bottom of a bookshelf filled with paperbacks he would not bother to save.

He knew what was in the albums. On rainy days, when they were teenagers, he and Mark would look at pictures of their parents: his mother’s high school graduation photo, with the black velvet sweetheart neckline over her shoulders; the wedding photo; some early shots of the family on the lawn of their house in Edison, New Jersey; his baby picture and Mark’s. At some point, June had added a series of Ludi to the album, and Albert was shocked to see how much she resembled his own mother also, of whom he rarely thought. How strange not to remember one’s childhood. But Albert was beginning to feel that, in his case, it was more a matter of failing to pay attention. His life—his attentiveness—seemed to have begun only at his parents’ death, and culminated with Susan’s. Perhaps that’s why Aunt June had backed away from him, and Mark, who had maintained a decent tether throughout their twenties and thirties, absented himself completely. Perhaps Albert’s lack of attention was prescriptive.

He was cramming a stack of maps into a garbage bag when he realized they were the ones Susan and Ludi had used to write those poems so long ago. He took the sheaf of poems, now removed from their frames, and placed them carefully in a neat stack. There were odes to Long Pond, Great Pond, even Indian Neck Road, some in Ludi’s careful, halting hand, and the rest in Susan’s confident, round script. Spectacle Pond: You can barely see the forest for the trees. That was Ludi. This road leads only one way, but the sand leads two. Vintage Susan. Where else would the sand be but on two sides, on the Cape?

He turned the poem over.

All my love, Your Susan, it said.

Susan was the one who had wanted to go to Spectacle Pond. “It’s the only one we haven’t seen,” she’d said.

Albert knew Spectacle Pond. It was barely good for swimming, just two flat rounds of shallow water off Long Pond Road. He had been there once as a teenager with Mark, who found it beautiful. Albert preferred Great Pond, which by that age he had mastered swimming across.

The road to Spectacle Pond was not paved. It was deep, hardened mud, and several times Albert had to back the car up to keep the tires in the grooves. “I hope you like it,” he said. There was no answer, and for a moment he felt certain that Susan was restraining herself from telling him to shut up.

At the pond, there was no proper beach, only the same gaping mud, stringy with reeds. “Come in, darling,” Susan said to Ludi. “It’s creepy,” the girl replied. Finally, she joined Susan in the center, where Susan held her, as if she were still two years old. “Look up!” Susan urged, pointing at the enclosed circle of sky. “Isn’t it beautiful? From above, it looks like eyes!” On the shore, Albert heard Ludi either snort or murmur something like agreement.

Ludi had refused to step in the other pond. “It’s exactly the same!” Susan exclaimed. “That’s what I mean,” Ludi said, her voice filled with that quiet Albert had only begun to learn, in children, meant terror. “Go wait in the car,” Susan said, suddenly impatient. “I’m going to go under, and so are you, Albert.”

How angry had he been as he waded out into the water and dunked his head? He couldn’t remember. He only knew that when they returned to the car, Ludi’s face floated out at them, ghostly, accusatory. She was in his seat. “Don’t be afraid,” he said.

All my love, Your Susan. On the back of the poem that Mark had had framed. He looked at that a long time.

But Ludi hadn’t answered that she wasn’t afraid. She had said: “I can drive.”

He could see them, even now, as he walked by the bay, hovering over his wife, June emerging from the house, cigarette in hand. Was there any chance she hadn’t known? It seemed unlikely. She would have colluded immediately, as would Ludi, who, after all, would only be continuing in her mode of silent