The Whore's Child

“Isn’t he the droll one?”
    She then showed the Snows to a room on the third floor, from which they had an excellent view of the town and, in the distance, the harbor. Once she left, Snow followed his wife out onto the balcony, where he was relieved to find her smiling.
    Back home in Ithaca, they had made gentle fun of the language of the inn’s brochure, in which “resplendent” appeared three times. But Snow had insisted it was perfect for them, suspecting that despite their easy mockery, June secretly had her heart set on just such a place as the Captain Clement precisely for its “meticulously preserved, graceful formalities,” its “artful blending of American and English, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiques,” its “finishing touches of crystal and porcelain appointments,” its “romantic ambience and elegant grandeur.”
    And after all, it was thanks to him that their return to the island, so often discussed, had kept getting postponed for well over a decade. Twice they’d canceled their reservations to accommodate some academic conference— most recently just last Christmas when Snow let himself be talked into his least favorite conference so he could sit on the committee interviewing shortlist candidates for his own position. He should have known better, of course, though he never would’ve imagined his colleagues might hire, over his strenuous objections, a young fool whose academic specialty wasn’t even literature at all, but rather, as he proudly proclaimed, “culture.” In the interview he used all the latest critical jargon, and assured the puzzled committee that his research was strictly “cutting edge.” A month later, when the boy visited the campus— he seemed no more than twenty, though his vita stated thirty—he’d shown no deference to the department’s senior scholars and exhibited a smirking contempt for Snow’s own books. That so many of the professor’s colleagues remained so enthralled suggested to Snow that perhaps they secretly shared his dubious opinion of his life’s work. This realization was so bitter that he’d behaved badly, wondering at the question-and-answer session following the young man’s presentation (on “Gender Otherness and Othering”) whether students could apply his courses toward their foreign-language requirement.
    But the boy was hired and Snow retired, willingly enough when all was said and done. The young fool would get his. In no time he’d be a tenured, fully vested
old
fool, by which time Snow himself would be contentedly cold and dead. Until then, however, he had to face June, who certainly understood that with retirement Snow had no excuses left. The Captain Clement beckoned, and he assured her that they’d enjoy traversing “floorboards worn to a glowing patina by two centuries of perpetual footsteps.”
    The morning after their arrival, the Snows slept in and went down for a late breakfast in the small dining room. Already seated were the two couples they’d met the afternoon before at tea, the people whose arrival from Newport had been awaited so anxiously by Mrs. Childress. They had mingled rather uncomfortably for an hour or so, the gathering supervised by their host, who seemed intent on holding it together by sheer force of will and a tray of sticky pastries. Later, at a restaurant close by, when the Snows casually mentioned where they were staying, they’d learned something about the Childress woman’s anxiety from a loose-talking bartender. The Childresses had bought the Captain Clement only three years before, evidently paying well over two million dollars. “You got any idea how many rooms you gotta rent to pay
that
back?” the bartender had asked, arching an eyebrow significantly. No sooner had they closed on the deal than the bottom fell out of the island’s real estate market—not to mention their marriage—and now the woman was good and stuck. The hurricane ruining the last month of the summer season would be the final nail in her coffin. The bartender had explained all this confidently and without visible empathy.
    Indeed, the Captain Clement had an air of abandonment, the Newport foursome being the only other guests. Major Robbins, who owned the yacht, was retired military, and Snow couldn’t decide whether he was naturally loud or compensating for