did not return, so he finally went home. It was dark by then, and still raining. He figured he’d have to see her another day.
They were married the next August. It wasn’t a hasty wedding. It wasn’t an unexpected wedding, in that Stan told Mary back in June of 1956—the day after she returned to Fort Niles Island with the Ellis family—that they were going to get married by the end of that summer. He told her that she was going to stay on Fort Niles with him from now on and she could forget about being a slave to goddamn Miss Vera Ellis. So it had all been arranged well in advance. Still, the ceremony itself had the marks of haste.
Mary and Stan were married in Stan Thomas’s living room by Mort Beekman, who was then the traveling pastor for the Maine islands. Mort Beekman preceded Toby Wishnell. He was, at the time, the skipper of the New Hope. Unlike Wishnell, Pastor Mort Beekman was well liked. He had an air about him of not giving a shit, which was fine with everyone concerned. Beekman was no zealot, and that too put him in good standing with the fishermen in his far-flung parishes.
Stan Thomas and Mary Smith-Ellis had no witnesses at their ceremony, no rings, no attendants, but Pastor Mort Beekman, true to his nature, went right ahead with the ceremony. “What the hell do you need a witness for, anyhow?” he asked. Beekman happened to be on the island for a baptism, and what did he care about rings or attendants or witnesses? These two young people certainly looked like adults. Could they sign the certificate? Yes. Were they old enough to do this without anyone’s permission? Yes. Was it going to be a big hassle? No.
“Do you want all the praying and Scriptures and stuff?” Pastor Beekman asked the couple.
“No, thanks,” Stan said. “Just the wedding part.”
“Maybe a little praying . . .” Mary suggested hesitantly.
Pastor Mort Beekman sighed and scraped together a marriage ceremony with a little praying, for the sake of the lady. He couldn’t help noticing that she looked like hell, what with all the paleness and all the trembling. The whole ceremony was over in about four minutes. Stan Thomas slipped the pastor a ten-dollar bill on his way out the door.
“Much appreciated,” Stan said. “Thanks for coming by.”
“Sure enough,” said the pastor, and headed down to the boat so that he could get off the island before dark; there was never any decent lodging for him on Fort Niles, and he wasn’t about to stay overnight on that inhospitable rock.
It was the least ostentatious wedding in the history of the Ellis family. If, that is, Mary Smith-Ellis could be considered a member of the Ellis family, a matter now seriously in question.
“As your aunt,” Miss Vera had told Mary, “I must tell you that I think marriage would be a mistake for you. I think it a big mistake for you to handcuff yourself to this fisherman and to this island.”
“But you love this island,” Mary had said.
“Not in February, darling.”
“But I could visit you in February.”
“Darling, you’ll have a husband to look after, and there will be no time for visiting. I had a husband once myself, and I know. It was most restrictive,” she declared, although it had not in the least been restrictive.
To the surprise of many, Miss Vera did not put up further argument against Mary’s wedding plans. For those who had witnessed Vera’s violent outrage over Mary’s mother’s pregnancy thirty years earlier, and her tantrums at Mary’s mother’s death twenty-nine years earlier (not to mention her daily bouts of temper over sundry insignificant matters), this calm in the face of Mary’s news was a mystery. How could Vera stand for this? How could she lose another helpmate? How could she tolerate this disloyalty, this abandonment?
Perhaps nobody was more surprised by this reaction than Mary herself, who had lost ten pounds over the course of that summer from anxiety about Stan Thomas. What to do about Stan Thomas? He was not pressing her to see him, he was not taking her away from her responsibilities, but he persistently insisted that they would marry by the end of the summer. He’d been saying so since June. There did not seem to be room for negotiation.
“You think it’s a good idea, too,” he reminded her, and she did think so. She did like the idea of marrying. It wasn’t something