The Fisher Boy Read Free Page A

Provincetown—and to inaugurate the season. And I’m happy to report that attendance is near one-hundred percent, except, I regret, we are missing the crew of our visiting tall ship, the
Vasa.
I refuse to believe they are confined to their hammocks with scurvy. And besides, our bartender has a plentiful supply of limes.”
    People laughed and glanced at the
Vasa,
floating far offshore.
    “There’s a lot of excitement in town this year, in addition to the solitary Swedes. Roger Morton has redone the White Gull, making it more beautiful than ever, if that were possible.”
    The twins started the applause, which Roger acknowledged with a limited wave of his hand.
    “And we have talent galore here today, theater talent, in the form of Mark Winslow and his friend…” Arthur had forgotten Roberto’s name. “…Mark and his amusing companion, who’s just too witty for words…”
    To my embarrassment, my amusing companion shouted across the crowd to our host: “My name is Roberto, Roberto Schreiber—and we’re looking for gigs in Provincetown this summer, doing improv comedy! Hey, we’re fabulous, honest!”
    “So
hire
these poor troopers!” Arthur laughed, missing a perfect opportunity to suggest Roger Morton do exactly that.
    “Now for a more serious note,” Arthur said, beginning his Swim for Scholars pitch. Though teeming with summer people and summer jobs, Provincetown suffered the highest winter unemployment rate in Massachusetts. Arthur was proposing a Labor Day swim across Provincetown Harbor to fund a college scholarship for local high school students. Most of the people on the terrace were listening to their host out of good manners or middle-class guilt. Except Ian Drummond. He was laughing and swilling beer with Barton Daggett. I tried to snag Roger Morton’s attention, but he was fixed on Arthur, avoiding eye contact with Roberto and me.
    “…It will be a worthy cause, with lots of beefcake,” Arthur was saying, as someone tugged at my elbow. It was Miriam, white and distressed. “Do you have a car?” she whispered. “I feel sick. I thought local mussels might be, you know, more benign. I guess I’m allergic.” Her shop was a short ride away.
    “I hope I don’t faint.” She clasped my arm as Arthur rambled on, and we slipped through the crowd, passing Ian, who got no response by cracking, “Chin up, Miriam, the party’s not that bad.”
    In the house, Miriam retrieved a shawl stitched with llamas from the dining room, then, shuffling in her thick leather sandals, led me toward the door to the street. She pushed open the screen door, wobbled, then screamed—a ragged cry of shock and rage. Then she fell against me and I caught the door as she began gasping and sobbing.
    There, on the granite stoop, lay the corpse of a dog, its belly bloated and slashed open—the first blood of that summer of death.

Chapter Two
    I had first come to Provincetown as a small boy. My mother was singing at a club on the outskirts of town, out by the ponds where it seems that everything is just sand and pines.
    My mother didn’t plan to become a jazz singer. She was studying classical piano at the New England Conservatory when she became pregnant by my father. He was an officer on a destroyer. They’d met one evening at a jazz club, Lulu Wright’s, in the South End of Boston. He was handsome and smart, he’d been all over the world, but “the Orient,” as he’d called it back then, was his favorite. That evening at Lulu Wright’s, he folded my mother a piece of origami, a paper puzzle of interlocking cranes that in Japan was associated with ten thousand years of happiness.
    But longevity was missing from their relationship: it lasted barely ten hours. His ship was bound the next morning for the Panama Canal. She’d loved him “oh, so passionately,” they were “soul mates,” they’d talked about jazz at my mother’s apartment until dawn. “His name was Douglas,” my mother told me. “Douglas,