The Cumberland Club

The Cumberland Club had occupied the same brick house on High Street since before the Civil War, and it had not changed its mind about much in that time. There was a fire in the front hall, a porter who had known Win’s father, and a cloakroom with brass hooks numbered by hand. Win hung his overcoat on 31 at five minutes to seven on Thursday evening and turned to take Nell’s.

She was wearing the green wool dress.

“It’s the same one,” she said, before he could decide whether to notice. “I own one. If your uncle gives another dinner, he’ll see it again.”

“It was a good choice the first time.”

She gave him a quick look, as if checking the remark for a hidden clause, and handed him her coat. Her braid was pinned up tonight. It showed the back of her neck, and there was a small red mark there, just under the hairline.

“You’ve burned yourself.”

“Monday. Frame fourteen. It’s nothing.” She took an index card out of her pocket, read it over once and put it away. “Aggie gave me this at lunch yesterday. She’s written a line on everybody who’ll be in that room.”

“Aggie briefed you.”

“I asked her to. I don’t walk onto a floor without knowing who’s on it.” She smoothed the front of the dress with both hands. “You don’t need to hold my elbow. Just tell me if I pick up the wrong fork.”

“There are only two. You’ll manage.”

On Monday, Prescott had stood in the shed for a quarter of an hour. He had asked Nell three intelligent questions about the bracket and told Toby Keegan the boat was a credit to him. Then he had invited the whole board to dine on Thursday, so that we can welcome her properly. It was by any measure a kindness, and Win had been uneasy about it for three days.

Normally she would have been on Route 1 by now. She had driven home every Thursday night since she came to the yard. Tonight she would sleep in Portland and leave at five in the morning, and she had told him so on Tuesday in one sentence, without making a favour of it.

The dinner was upstairs, in a long room with green walls and a table laid for twenty. Prescott stood at the door with a glass in his hand, greeting people, and he kissed Nell’s cheek as naturally as if he had been doing it for years.

“Eleanor. You’ve scrubbed up. I hardly knew you without the dye.”

“It took pumice,” she said.

He laughed and passed them into the room.

Win knew every person in it. He had sat across a table from most of them eight times a year for three years. He could have given their shareholdings, their committee seats and how they had voted on every motion since January of 2024. He discovered, as the first of them came toward him, that he had nothing else to give.

“Harlan Coombs,” Nell said under her breath. She had not moved her lips much. “The banker. His wife’s Judith. She fishes fifty lobster traps out of Cundy’s Harbor every summer and she’s had the licence since she was sixteen.”

“How is that relevant to—”

“Ask her about it.”

Coombs shook his hand and said something about the weather. Win said something back. Then there was the pause that always came at this point, when he had used up the weather and the other man was waiting to be released.

He turned to the woman beside Coombs. She was small and tanned, even in February.

“Mrs. Coombs. I’m told you fish out of Cundy’s Harbor.”

Her face opened like a door.

“Who told you that? Fifty traps. Harlan thinks I’m out of my mind. I was out there the second week of October in a northeast breeze, and he stood on the float in his loafers shouting at me.”

“I was not shouting,” Coombs said. “I was expressing a view.”

“What do you haul with?” Nell asked. “A twenty-footer?”

“Twenty-two. My father’s. Wood, God help me.”

“Who built her?”

They were off. Win stood and listened to a banker’s wife and a welder discuss garboard planks. After a minute, to his considerable surprise, Coombs leaned over and said in a low and human voice that he had been seasick every time he had ever set foot in the thing, and that he would be obliged if Win did not spread it about.

“I won’t,” Win said. “I’m sick on the Peaks Island ferry.”

It was true. He had never told anyone. Coombs looked at him with something close to affection.

“Gordon Pike,” Nell murmured, as they moved on. “It’s the left knee. It was done in November and he’s been told he can ski by March. He doesn’t believe it.”

Win asked about the knee. Pike talked for six minutes. He had a daughter in Colorado who was a surgeon and had made him do his exercises over the telephone, and Win learned the daughter’s name and where she had trained. He had sat beside this man through eleven hours of audit committee and had not known he had children.

It went on like that around the room. There was a retired admiral with a new grandson. There was a woman who chaired the pension committee and bred Brittany spaniels, and she wanted very much to hear about a black yard dog named Bilge. Each time, Nell gave him one fact, quietly, a second before the handshake. Each time, he asked, and the person answered.

They always answered, and that was what he could not get over. He had assumed all his life that other people possessed some talent for this that he had been born without. Apparently it was a matter of asking one question, as long as the question was about them and he then kept quiet.

Toby Keegan stood by the window in a blue suit that was tight across the shoulders, with a small fair woman beside him and a glass of beer he was not drinking. Prescott had asked the heads of the divisions as well as the board. Toby looked as if he would rather have been under a boat.

“His daughter plays goal for Orono,” Nell said. “She’s a junior. Danny Arsenault told me. Her name’s Bridget.”

“Toby has a daughter.”

“He has three. Start with the goalie.”

Win crossed the carpet. He had spoken to this man on the telephone every working day for a year and a half and had been answered every time in the fewest words the language allowed.

“Toby. Mrs. Keegan.” He shook her hand. “I hear Bridget’s in goal at Orono this season.”

Toby’s head came round. He looked at Win, then past him at Nell, and then back.

“She is,” he said.

“How’s she doing?”

“She’s—” He stopped. Win waited. He had learned how to do that in a plywood office in Skerry Harbor, across a cribbage board. “She’s got a ninety-two save percentage. She stopped thirty-eight shots against Providence Saturday. Thirty-eight. They put her on the ice at four years old because her sisters needed somebody to shoot at, and she never came out of the net.”

“He drives up for every home game,” Mrs. Keegan said. “Two and a half hours each way. He’s at his desk at five the next morning and he thinks I don’t know how tired he is.”

“Maureen.”

“Well, you are.”

“When’s the next one?” Win asked.

“Friday week. Vermont.”

“Take the Friday. The yard can open without you once.”

It was the wrong thing to say. He saw it land as an order from the office, and he saw Toby’s face begin to close. Then Nell said, mildly, “He means he’d like to hear how it comes out,” and Toby let his breath go and very nearly smiled.

“I’ll tell you Monday,” he said. It was more than he had ever volunteered to Win in his life.

Dorothea Quimby was the last of them. She stood alone by the fireplace in her grey suit, with a glass of sherry, and looked at Nell as she presumably looked at a deed.

“Miss Quimby is the trustee,” Win said. “Dorothea, my wife. Nell Thibodeau.”

“You kept your name.”

“It’s on a building,” Nell said.

“That’s a better reason than most.” Dorothea looked at the bronze band and then at Win’s. “I knew his grandmother for thirty years. She’d have asked what you do before she asked where you came from. So what do you do?”

“I draw boats and I weld them.”

“Both? Good. She had no patience for people who could only do the one half of a thing.” She sipped her sherry. “I shall look forward to knowing you, Ms. Thibodeau. I’m told I have until June.”

She said it drily, and it meant only the meeting. Win felt it in his stomach all the same.

They sat down at half past seven. Prescott had put Nell on his right, which was correct, and Win halfway down the other side, which was also correct and left him too far away to help. He need not have worried about her. She ate her soup with the right spoon and asked the admiral about his grandson, and by the fish she had the pension chairwoman promising to drive up to Skerry Harbor in the spring.

Prescott waited for the roast. He waited for a lull, too, and when it came he turned to Nell with his glass in his hand and spoke with affectionate curiosity, in a voice that reached both ends of the table.

“Now, Eleanor, you must settle something for me. I read the lender’s report every quarter. I’m afraid I’m the only one who does. In December there was a default notice to a boatyard in Skerry Harbor, over Winslow’s own signature. In January there’s a wedding.” He smiled. “I’ve been married thirty-three years and I met my wife at a regatta. How on earth does one meet a husband through a default notice?”

The table laughed. It was a kind laugh, and it was waiting.

Win put down his knife. He had an answer prepared. It was accurate, and it ran to four sentences and included a date.

Nell did not look at him.

“I drove down to shout at him,” she said. “I had the notice in a folder. I stood in his office and told him exactly what I thought of him, and I had a good deal to say.”

“And?”

“And he listened to all of it. He didn’t interrupt and he didn’t make excuses. Then he asked me a question about a weld, and he listened to that too.” She picked up her water glass. “I’d never met a man who did that. My father says it’s the only thing worth knowing about anybody.”

There was a little silence. Then Judith Coombs said, “Harlan, are you taking notes?” and the table broke up, and the moment was past.

Every word of it had been true. Win went back over it as he would have checked a column, and there was not a false entry anywhere. She had told the whole board the exact history of the thing, and it had sounded like a courtship.

He noticed, some seconds later, that he was still looking at her. He noticed that Prescott was looking at him.
***
After the coffee the men drifted to the fire and the port. Prescott touched Win’s sleeve and tipped his head toward the small library across the landing. It held two leather chairs and a wall of bound harbor reports, and it was empty.

His uncle did not sit. He stood at the window with his hands behind him, looking down at High Street.

“She’s formidable,” Prescott said. “I mean that. I went over to the shed on Monday expecting to be polite to somebody decorative, and I found her with a grinder. Keegan is afraid of her, which I didn’t think was possible. I like her very much.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m not saying it to be thanked. I’m saying it so that you’ll believe the next thing.” He turned around. “I want you to understand me, Winslow, because I don’t think you ever have. You think I want the money.”

“Four hundred and eight million dollars is a reason.”

“It’s a number, and you would know it to the dollar. I have enough money. I’ve had enough for thirty years.” He said it without heat. “I went to the Lines in 1995. There were nine tugs and a barge contract that lost money every winter. I ran it for twenty-nine years. When I handed it over there were thirty-one hulls and eight hundred and forty people, and it had never missed a dividend. Not once, through two recessions and a pandemic.”

“I know what you built.”

“Do you? Then tell me what it earned me. In 2019 your father died. He was my older brother and I loved him, and he couldn’t have read a balance sheet if it were printed on a billboard. I was fifty-three. I’d been ready for ten years. And Mother took his office herself, at eighty-two, sooner than give it to me.” His voice stayed perfectly even. “In 2024 she finally let it go. She gave it to you. You were thirty-one and you had never run so much as a launch.”

Win said nothing. There was nothing in it he could dispute.

“That’s twice. I never said a word, either time. I went back to my tugs and I paid for her shed, year after year, because she’d grown up in the shadow of it and couldn’t bear to see it go dark. Fifty-eight million dollars. And now she’s gone, and she’s tied the votes to your bedroom, and I’m expected to stand by a third time and watch a yard that has never once earned its keep pull down the thing I spent my life on.”

“The yard has fifty-four million in firm orders.”

“The yard has one boat with a new frame in it.” Prescott came away from the window. He stopped close, and he put his hand on Win’s shoulder as he had in the boardroom. “I won’t watch it sink this family. I’ve told you that to your face so that you needn’t wonder later. I’ll do it decently and I’ll do it in the open, and I’ll go on being fond of you. But I mean to win in June, Winslow. I don’t want you to mistake my manners for doubt.”

“I haven’t.”

“Good.” The hand tightened and let go. “You were better tonight, you know. With people. I noticed. Was that her?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so. Hold on to that one.” He said it lightly, on his way to the door, and Win could not tell what was under it.
***
They were home by half past ten. The hall light was on, as he had left it. Nell went up to change. Win stood in the kitchen with his tie loosened and did not want to go to bed with his uncle’s voice still in his head.

He filled the kettle instead.

She would work for an hour. She had done so on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, at the oak table, with the brass lamp pulled down. Each of those nights she had come down at about this time and made herself coffee, and the lamp had been out by midnight regardless. He took down the big blue mug, which she had picked out of the cupboard on her first morning and used every day since. He made it black, with one level spoon of sugar, and carried it up.

Her door stood open. She was in jeans and a grey sweatshirt, with her hair down out of its pins and braided again, and she was on her knees beside the drafting table with one of the lead weights in each hand.

“Come and look at this,” she said, without turning. “Mind the drawing.”

He set the mug on the chest of drawers. A sheet of vellum was taped to the table. It was the wheelhouse, he saw, the forward face of it, in her square hand.

“I’ve had these lined up along the back all week. I haven’t needed them. Tonight I wanted a batten for the cabin-top curve, so I went looking, and there’s a drawer under here that sticks.” She nodded at it. It stood open four inches. Inside lay a bundle of long thin wooden strips wrapped in a piece of flannel. “Those are a loftsman’s battens. They’re pear wood. They’re a hundred years old and they’re still dead straight. And then I turned one of these over.”

She held the duck up, belly first.

Two letters had been cut into the lead with a knife point, small and neat. A.G.

“They’re all marked. All nine. Who’s A.G., Win?”

He took it from her. It was heavier than it looked, and worn smooth on the back where a hand would rest.

“Amos Gilley,” he said slowly. “Her father. She was Honor Gilley.”

“What did he do?”

“He was a loftsman. He laid down Liberty ships in South Portland during the war, and afterwards he came to our yard. He worked there until he died. She used to bring him his dinner.” He turned the weight over. “That’s how she met my grandfather. She was the loftsman’s daughter and he was the owner’s son.”

Nell sat back on her heels.

“You told me this table came out of the drawing office and she wouldn’t let them scrap it.”

“That’s what she told me. It’s true. I knew what her father was. I never put it together with the table.” He heard how that sounded. “I didn’t keep it from you. I didn’t know I had it.”

“I believe you.” She said it at once, and plainly. “You’d have had it in a column otherwise.”

She took the duck back. She got up, unwrapped the battens and chose one, flexing it gently between her hands. Then she laid it on the vellum and bent it along three pencilled points. She set the first weight down with its wire beak hooked over the wood, and then the second. She worked along the curve, nudging and sighting, and set all nine. The batten lay under them in one long, easy sweep.

“There,” she said softly. “That’s what they’re for.”

She ran a pencil along it. Win watched the line come out from under her hand. He thought of a girl in the 1940s, carrying a dinner pail up to a mould loft. He thought of an old woman calling these things her whales, and keeping the table sixty years, and saying that somebody would want it.

“Your coffee’s on the chest,” he said.

Nell looked round. She saw the blue mug. She picked it up and tasted it, and her eyebrows went up.

“I never told you how I take it.”

“There’s one spoon in the sink every morning when I come down. The level in the milk hasn’t changed since Friday. The mug was a matter of observation.”

“You audited my coffee.”

“I’m told that’s what it’s like.”

She laughed. It was the first time he had heard it, a short, real laugh that seemed to surprise her as well. She covered it by drinking.

“Thank you,” she said. “And for tonight. I know that room wasn’t easy for you.”

“You made it considerably easier. I didn’t know Gordon Pike had a daughter.”

“You do now. Ask after her next time. It only counts if you ask twice.”

He said good night and went down to lock the back door and turn off the kitchen light. He stood for a while in the dark there. He was doing a sum with his uncle on one side of it and a row of lead birds on the other, and he could not make it balance.

When he started back up, she was coming down.

They met on the narrow flight above the second floor, where the stairs turned and the wall came in close. She had the empty mug in her hand. He stepped to the left to let her by. She stepped the same way, and then they were both standing on the same tread with nowhere further to go.

Her shoulder was against his chest. He could smell soap, and under it something faint and clean that he recognised after a moment as metal. The top of her head came just to his collarbone. She had tipped her face up to say something and had not said it.

He ought to have moved. It would have taken half a step. He stood exactly where he was, with his hand on the banister. She did not move either. In the light from the landing above he could see her pulse beating in her throat.

It lasted perhaps three seconds. He counted them.

“I’m just rinsing this,” Nell said. Her voice was not quite level.

“Of course.”

She turned sideways and went past him, and the sleeve of her sweatshirt dragged across his shirt front as she went. He heard her feet on the lower stairs, quick and light, and then the kitchen tap.

Win stayed on the stairs with his hand closed hard around the rail. Two. Separate rooms. It was two words in her handwriting, and he had agreed to them three weeks ago in a cold loft without a second thought. He was having the second thought now, a full year too early. She would be gone by five in the morning, and he already knew that he would be listening for the truck.
***