The Whore's Child

become aware that the incision on the inside of my thigh has started throbbing.
    When I plop back down in my own chair, his trance is broken. “We stopped home on the way here,” he says.
    By this he means the town we grew up in, and I realize how wrong my conclusion was. I should know by now that his concern runs only in one direction, which is toward the certain past.
    Gene pushes his wineglass to the center of the table. “I need a glass of water,” he says, pushing his chair back.
    â€œThere’s bottled in the fridge,” I tell him. “The tap water’s not so great out here.”
    â€œIt can’t be any worse than what we drank growing up,” he says, not unexpectedly.
    The mill where our fathers worked, Gene has told me on the phone, has recently reopened after nearly a decade’s shutdown. For half a century, chemical byproducts were dumped into the river until the water tasted like brass and the fish grew tumors the size of golf balls. As did my father, who grew one of those golf balls in his brain and died a man nobody could recognize, and who himself could recognize nobody, including his son.
    It’s been my intention to nurse this beer, but I’ve nearly finished it by the time Gene returns with his glass of tap water, and my head now contains a seed of distant pain which I can tell will grow and bloom.
    â€œHow’s your father?” I ask, since Gene won’t mention him otherwise. The last I heard, he was still living there in the house where Gene was raised.
    â€œWe visited the oncology ward,” Gene says, throwing me until I realize the “we” here is Gene and Portia, not Gene and his father. “I invited him to come see all the people he poisoned, but he wasn’t interested.”
    Gene’s father had been a foreman and later a shift supervisor, a company man to the marrow of his bones, and it’s this that Gene can neither forgive nor stop rebelling against. Only tenure protects him from being fired from his university, whose policies, political practices and investments Gene protests loudly, in and out of the newspaper.
    â€œI wanted Portia to see,” Gene says, staring at his ice cubes as if the amount of toxin in them might be gauged by the naked eye. “I was honest with her about who I am. She knows she’s getting damaged goods.” He looks out to sea. “But I wanted her to see the long shadow of the mill.”
    I stifle an unkind smile. For if Gene were to see it, he’d certainly realize that I consider his new wife yet another facet of that shadow.
    Clare slides the glass door open and wonderful aromas waft out onto the deck.
    â€œShould we go find Portia?” I ask her.
    â€œWe’ve still half an hour at least,” she says, leaving the decision to me and returning to the kitchen.
    â€œI wouldn’t mind taking a little walk,” I tell Gene. “Just to see if I can.”
    There are three or four houses along the path to the beach, all grander than our own, and I’m grateful that they put our modest property into a context that Gene can appreciate. There’s our kind of money, and then there’s
real
money. He’s eyeing these houses with undisguised contempt, as if he already knows and loathes who lives in them. As he most likely would. I’ve called several neighbors to explain that strangers will be staying in our house for the next two weeks. I made a special point of alerting a quarrelsome man named Connor with whom I’ve had a couple of run-ins. Our stretch of beach is private by statute, though of course the island’s handful of cops can’t enforce it when people ignore the signs and stroll the three miles up from the public beach. Connor is rumored to have set his dogs on such trespassers, even to have chased them off in his dune buggy.
    When we climb the last dune, I’m pleasantly distracted by the scene before us—the sun a few degrees above the water, miles of deserted sand in either direction, the crashing of the waves. Indeed, it has even broken through Gene’s morbid focus, which is itself on the order of a natural force, like sun and tide and wind.
    â€œWow,” he says, taking a deep breath of salt air. “This is just perfect.”
    â€œI wish,” I tell him. “We had hypodermic needles washing up here last summer.”
    Gene nods, looking almost relieved to hear it. “That’s what people