Maxwell’s Island
MAXWELL’S ISLAND
The lake is far enough north that only summer residence is feasible.
The nearest town is far enough away that residents bring supplies for two or three weeks at a time.
By mutual consent, there are no outdoor lights at any of the houses, making the lake, and particularly the island, an ideal spot for stargazing.
Whether Horatio Maxwell Jr., Tess’s father, loved the lake because of his fascination with the stars or developed an interest in astrophysics because of the view from the island, Tess never knew.
To her, it didn’t matter. The lake and the stars were inextricably interconnected.
Her memories of the lake were as liquid as its dark waters.
She remembered most clearly lying on her back on the dock, long past her usual bedtime, gazing up at a sky ablaze with a hundred million stars and listening to her father explain the universe.
She remembered his story about the night he lay on that same dock looking up at the moon knowing that men were walking on its surface.
The fact that, for the first time in human history, its representatives were strolling about on a celestial body seemed miraculous to Harry Maxwell, then a six-year-old boy who already knew more about celestial bodies than most adults.
Tess remembered her father telling her that, even though the word in the corner of the television read Live, the images his parents were watching and the words he heard through his transistor radio, like the light from the moon itself, took over a second to make their way back to Earth.
What Harry Maxwell saw when he looked at the night sky was the past.
Tess remembered the night—she couldn’t have been more than six or seven herself—when her father told her about measuring the speed at which a star is moving away from Earth by looking at the Doppler shift.
She could still feel that moment of epiphanic clarity when she realized that the amazing panorama above her was not a stationary vista—every dot of light was in incomprehensibly rapid motion.
And so was she. That realization made Tess deliriously happy.
And of course, she remembered the night he had first told her about his special star—the one he said would always be watching over her.
Even now, so many years later, if she came across a reference to orbital wobbles or Hubble’s law or the search for Earth-like planets, whole conversations with her father on the dock would come flooding back, as if the recordings had been locked away waiting for her to discover the key.
What she found harder and harder to remember were the ordinary moments.
Vivian, in her rare nostalgic moods, had told her about rainy afternoons reading books by the fire and playing endless rounds of canasta, but those memories slipped away from Tess, as impossible to catch as a slithering eel in murky waters.
And of the house itself, other than the silhouette seen in the moonlight from the end of the dock, she could recover only snippets, as if it existed in another universe—close enough to feel yet infinitely far away.
What she did remember about the lake was Marie and Vivian and Harry.
Her mother, Marie, emerging from her kitchen with a tray of cookies or pulling Tess close on the sofa to read aloud a favorite book; Vivian taking her for walks around the island or swims in the lake on warm days; and especially Harry.
She remembered the way he smelled after a day on the water (all sweat and fish and a hint of oil from the outboard motor) and the way he smelled after he showered and dressed for dinner (Old Spice and tweed and some sort of hair tonic so old-fashioned it might as well have been Macassar oil).
She remembered the feel of his corduroy pants on her bare calves when he hoisted her into his lap after dinner and the sharp taste of the hard lemon candies he’d slip her when her mother wasn’t looking.
She remembered his voice, so comforting in its basso profundo, whether he was talking about his day on the lake or explaining the uncertainty principle.
She could remember, too, the shadows cast by her father and Vivian as they sat by the dying fire late at night talking about science.
Silhouettes and shadows—like Plato’s cave—were the memories Tess carried of the lake house.
It seemed to her, though, that those shadows, and not the figures that cast them, represented the ideals: the ideal father, the ideal mother, the ideal family friend, the ideal spot in the world, protected from everything in the middle of a lake.
The real people, and the real house, had not lived up to those ideals.
But the shadows remained perfect in her memory.
She remembered captured fragments of those conversations between her father and Aunt Vivian—whispered tête-à-têtes that lasted deep into the night.
Like a radio straining to catch a faraway signal and achieving only brief flashes of clarity, she would discern words like universe and paradox and Armageddon.
But, although so much of life at the lake was hazy with time and nostalgia, Tess remembered three nights with cinematic clarity: the night the voices first spoke, the night she heard every word of Harry and Vivian’s conversation, and the last night she ever saw Maxwell’s Island.