The Book of Speculation: A Novel

“That I’d find a good woman and that my life would settle, even though you long to drift like a boat, she said. She was good.” He stands up, stretches his back, and sets his empty bottle on the porch railing. “Your mom gave me the cards before,” he gestures to the water. “I guess it was her way of saying goodbye. Wish I’d known.”


She’d told me goodbye and I hadn’t known either. “Was she acting strange at all?”

Frank coughs. “Strange was relative with your mother. If she’d seemed different to me or your dad we would have tied her down to stop her.” He looks at my beer and grunts, “Drink up. I’ll show you the shop and we’ll talk about you paying me back. I’d straight up give you money, but the wife would murder me if Alice didn’t skin me first. Something going on with you two? She looked ready to kill you all night.”

“Not that I know of.” Not anymore. He steers me behind the house to the large barn that serves as his workshop.

I’ve looked at the workshop but have never been inside; it was off-limits growing up. The walls are lined with tools, vises, lathes, saws, and things I can’t begin to know the purpose of. At the end of the barn are two drafting tables. Frank leans against one. In the heart of the room a boat’s skeleton waits for its skin.

“Sloop?” I ask, shrugging at the frame.

“Too small for a sloop. A dory, or will be.” He makes a note on a drawing. “You’ll learn. You can work the money off with me, do some of the first part of the finishing, the first sealing coats, nothing detailed. If you do get a job you can work weekends.”

Alice must have told him I was let go. I told her nothing about the house or the money—I broke more rules than she did—but still, it was my failing to disclose.

Behind the drafting table, just past his head, is the most extraordinary thing: a huge dark purple curtain that hangs the full length of the wall. By all appearances it’s velvet. Something about it reminds me of sketches from the book. Curtains drawn over a cage, drapes on the inside of a wagon. “Where’d you get that?”

“What?”

“That’s a theatrical curtain.” At the bottom there’s a chain to weigh it down and seal out light. “Seems out of place in a workshop.” I look around the barn and see a series of small portraits in oval frames hanging in the open wall spaces. Relatives? There’s something vaguely Slavic about them, the moustaches on the men, the curved shape of a young woman’s brow.

“It keeps the glare off the drawings in the afternoon and shuts out drafts in the winter. Was in a box of stuff that belonged to my dad. The pictures were in there too.”

“Family heirlooms, then.”

He shrugs. “Guess so.”

“Do you know anything about them?”

“Nope. I never really went in for heirloom stuff. Things are things, you know? I just like them. They make the place look a little nicer, keep it warm.”

There’s a knock on the barn door, Leah with more beer. I refuse but a bottle winds up in my hand. Leah leans in to kiss her husband’s cheek and brush sawdust from his shoulder, gestures made soft by habit. Out one of the windows I can see the Sound all the way to the harbor. The lights from the ferry amble toward Middle Ground Light and eventually Connecticut. People spend their entire lives moving back and forth over the same water, moving but staying.

When my bottle thumps on the drafting table it startles the both of us. A wide sweat mark swipes across the drawing, blurring the ink. I look back up at the curtains. They couldn’t be the same ones, of course. But they’re striking, individual, but very familiar. My eyes come to rest on the oval-shaped painting of a bearded man. His gaze is unsettling. I should check in the book for him, just in case. If only to prove that I’m imagining things.

“The paintings, are they relatives?”

“Might be. Don’t really know. Like I said, they were in a box with the curtains and some of my dad’s things. They were probably my grandfather’s. I think I remember seeing them at his place when I was a kid. He kind of liked to accumulate things.”

The bearded man stares back at me, demanding I look at him, look for him. I’m sure I’ve seen that face staring out at me from a page. “Frank, I’m sorry. I need to go.”

Enola and Doyle are lying on their backs in the sea grass by the bluff, looking at the stars. Enola has one hand behind her head, and the other tucked away in her pocket. The cards again. They don’t notice when I walk past.

*

The book is on my desk, closed as I’d left it. I start at the beginning, methodically searching for sketches, here a drawing of a tiny horse, one of what looks to be a llama, and there, the frame of a skeleton—the very beginning of a tarot card. A note about shoes and boots, costuming, a wig—and there they are, the curtains—draped over what looks like an animal cage with a young boy sitting inside. Not ten pages after, sketches of a wagon interior, hung with small oval paintings. And after, yes, there is the painting of the bearded man—Peabody’s rendition. I’ve seen the actual thing; it’s more eastern, the book’s sketch vaguely anglicized. An interpretation.