Cape Cod Noir by Ulin David L

Author:Ulin, David L. [Ulin, David L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Akashic Noir Series
Published: 2011-05-25T07:00:00+00:00

Albert remembered the loop of summers. First, the beach at Newcomb Hollow, then Long Pond or Great Pond, followed by sandwiches from the Box Lunch, and lobsters—when June allowed—grilled by the porch. He and Mark would run on the bay side, by the house, where they once, at low tide, tried to swim across to Indian Neck Beach. June shouted until they gave up halfway, returning in slimy bay silt.

Rainy days, they went to Provincetown. This, in the 1970s, was truly the land of the “boys.” Mark stared openly. Albert was ashamed—not for himself, but for the men, whom he obscurely felt needed his reassurance. Later, in college, he realized his reassurance was not needed in this or any other areas. June had started to rent the house during the high season and go to Boca. Mark began a series of wanderings from California to India to South America, which even Albert knew enough to dismiss as the check-off destinations of their generation.

When he was in his early twenties, the family began spending Augusts at the house again. Albert married Susan. But Mark had a child. Aunt June liked Susan, yet seemed faintly astonished that Albert had a managed to get a wife at all, as if he’d suddenly revealed a secret mastery of the grand piano, or invented the Post-it. Mark was friendly to Susan, but when was he not? He was so friendly that he had brought home girlfriend after girlfriend from the time Albert was seventeen, culminating, around the time of Albert’s marriage, with a black woman named April.

April was a tall and somewhat forbidding professor of English. Always a little distant, always a bit apart. Albert could never tell whether this had to do with character, intellect, or was simply a defensive reaction to his strange family. There was June, a distracted, wizened chain smoker; the birdlike, chattering Susan, incapable of not flirting with Mark, whose appeal to all women Albert had long since accepted. Albert had difficulty gauging his own presence. He would have liked to think of himself as a comforting figure, calm and self-contained, but in her two Thanksgivings and one Easter with the family, April had barely said two words to him. She had a son from an earlier marriage whom they never met, and shortly after giving birth to Ludi, she kicked Mark out, only releasing the girl at Mark’s insistence after a year.

Given free rein, June revealed a maternal nature that had heretofore found no avenue for expression. Ludi, at age two, had a face like a beautiful smudge, almost a thumbprint of itself, and June delighted in pulling her black silken hair, which April had delivered braided, into soft pigtails that helped frame her gap-toothed grin. Those summer years, in Albert’s memory, seemed almost a constant series in partial visibility: Ludi in profile, bent over with a book in June’s lap, or departing, held aloft in June’s arms, head on the middle-aged woman’s shoulder.

Once, when April was living in

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