Chapter 1 Lucy
Lucy
As a teacher, I’m no stranger to standing up in front of a tough crowd to lay on a few facts. Delivering my father’s eulogy is on another level.
The assembled audience is not large. If I were to pause and count heads, I would maybe hit thirty.
Labor Day is a hazy dream—two weeks ago and counting—and Winthrop Island is for summer people.
The heads are mostly gray, mostly male. A few of them seem to be checking their eyelids for holes, as my father would say. If he were still alive.
Even after twelve years away, I recognize a few faces. Sedge Peabody sits attentively in the second pew—you never forget your first crush—though the blond woman who sits by his side is unknown to me.
Of Sedge’s sister Laura, there’s no sign. Thank God for that, anyway.
On his other side, old Mrs. Peabody holds her patent leather pocketbook on her lap and waits to hear what I have to say.
She was the one who called my mother to break the news, so Maman could inform me that my father had folded up his clothes in a neat pile on Poseidon Beach, just above the high tide line, and disappeared into Long Island Sound exactly one week to the day before I was due to arrive for the winter.
We do not, therefore, have a body to eulogize.
We do not even officially have a death, at least according to the State of New York.
People pile their clothes on beaches all the time, apparently, in the hope that their families and creditors and life insurance claims administrators will think they’re dead, and the state requires at least three years and a decent search before it will hand over a death certificate for a missing person.
But Bud Cooper was not the kind of man to fake his own death, as pretty much everybody on Winthrop Island would agree. So here we are.
A celebration of life, we’re calling it.
Though what’s to celebrate, I’m not exactly sure. I’ve spent the past week laboring over these words on the page before me. How do you eulogize a man whose life, by just about every human measure, was an abject failure?
How do you eulogize a man who walked into the ocean for no apparent reason, leaving his only child to clean up the mess he left behind?
How do you eulogize a father you haven’t seen in twelve years?
In the front pew, Father Jake smiles encouragingly.
My daughter sits next to him. Having lived all her life in Paris, Punkin knows how to dress for a funeral.
Maman snuck her out shopping before we left and bought her this tragically chic black dress and a pair of black patent Mary Janes with pointed toes and a small black quilted handbag hung by a braided gold chain.
I’m praying the handbag is not an actual real-life Chanel.
(Although, if it is, I could probably sell it on eBay for grocery money.) Before we left the house, she made me arrange her dark hair in a chignon at the nape of her neck and slipped on a pair of gigantic tortoise sunglasses.
“Let’s do this,” she said.
Let’s do this.
I look down at my notes and continue.
“Those of us who knew and loved Bud Cooper will remember him best for the great love of his life. His true abiding passion. In fact, if I were to write the story of my father’s life, it would have to be a pirate romance.”
There are laughs. I look up from my notes, and for some reason my gaze falls not on the first or second pews, on my daughter or Father Jake or my father’s friends and neighbors and Harvard classmates, but on a man who sits by himself in a pew at the back, half-hidden by a column.
A large man, wearing a dark suit jacket over his gigantic shoulders and no tie. The column cuts off half his face. But there is a jaw like a chunk of granite. Some thick, glossy hair the color of an Irish setter.
The shock hits me everywhere at once. My heartbeat stutters. Glass shatters at the ends of my nerves. My scalp buzzes, like when you see a ghost. The ghost of my Winthrop Island past.
The hair is too long, I tell myself. And he has a beard.
It’s not him. It couldn’t be him. In the first place, Ben Ressler would never set foot on Winthrop Island again. The Peabodys wouldn’t stand for it.
In the second place, why would Ben Ressler—of all people—turn up for my father’s funeral?
The crowd starts to rustle. From the front pew, Father Jake gives me an encouraging nod.
I drop my gaze back to my notes and clear my throat.
“But I’m not here to write the story of my father’s life. That story is written on the hearts of all of us here today. The friends who loved him. Who encouraged his passions. Who listened to his tall tales and his big dreams of pirate treasure without—you know—telling him the truth.”
More laughs.
“We may never understand why my father chose to end his life when he did, but I hope everyone here understands that it wasn’t your fault.
Your friendship was everything to him. Your friendship sustained and nurtured him, all these years.
So what I really want to say is thank you.
Thank you for being his friend. Thank you for loving him.
Thank you for coming here today to say goodbye. ”
When I look up again, the ghost behind the pillar is gone.