The Three Doors

Salt Harbor made its living out of two things, and both of them were leaving.

The first was boats, and the fleet had gone from forty-one working hulls in 1981 to nine, and most of the nine were pleasure, and the pleasure was rented. The second was houses, and the houses had gone from families to strangers, and the strangers were from the city, and they came up on Fridays and they did not join anything and they did not put their children in the school and they did not come to the firemen's breakfast, and by the spring of that year there were more doors in Salt Harbor that opened twice a month than doors that opened every day.

Delia Hartley staged those houses for a living, and she had a gift for it that had nothing to do with taste. What she did was this: she went into a house that a stranger had bought and she took out everything that told the truth about it, and she put in just enough that a person standing in the hall could believe a life was possible there. Ruth had watched her do it three times. It was, she said once, exactly like a stage set, and Delia had said: no, it's the opposite of a stage set, on a stage the furniture is there to be looked at — this is furniture for not looking at.

The ice house on the point had been empty for twelve years.

It sat at the end of the road past the yacht club, a low building of grey concrete with a steep slate roof, built in 1911 to hold twenty thousand tons of ice cut off the pond and hauled down in winter, and closed in 2011 when the last of the fishing fleet stopped needing any. It had been in the paper twice since: once when the town tried to buy it for a museum, and once, in March of that year, when it was sold.

Nobody in Salt Harbor could say who had bought it, and this was discussed for about a week and then stopped being discussed, because it was discussed at the counter of a store that had also been bought that winter, by the same buyer, in cash.

The buyer was represented locally by a broker from Albany named Sacks, who came down twice, and who was, in the words of the one person in the town who actually talked to him, "the most forgettable man I have ever had lunch with, and I have had lunch with him twice."

The three men came up for the regatta in July.

The regatta was the one weekend of the year when Salt Harbor invited the city to itself, and it was also, by long tradition and by the silent votes of every woman on the committee, the weekend when Delia Hartley was expected to make up her mind, since she had three men and the season had three days and the town had a very long memory.

Ruth watched it from the porch with a glass she refilled twice.

Grant Halloway arrived first and got out of his car with a box of things for the house because he could not arrive anywhere without his hands occupied. He had bought Delia a brass barometer off an auction because he had heard her say, once, in September, that she liked knowing what the weather was going to do before it did it.

Rico Barrera arrived next and parked on the grass because the drive was full, and went straight around the side of the house and started on the screen door, and did not come in until it closed properly, and brought in his bag afterwards. He had brought nothing for her at all and he never once in his life brought her anything, and he was the one she called at three in the morning, and everybody in the town, including the other two, understood what that meant and nobody said it.

Adrian Vance arrived last, in the anonymous car, and did not come up to the porch for four minutes because he was in the car making a phone call about a patient, and when he did come up he sat on the step rather than the chair, and asked Ruth — not Delia, Ruth — whether Delia had been sleeping, and Ruth said yes, and Vance looked at the marsh for a while, and Ruth said: "I lied. She's been up twice this week."

"Why did you lie?"

"Because she's standing eight feet away and if I say it out loud, she'll be a problem to be solved for the rest of the weekend, and she has three days a year when she isn't one," Ruth said. "You're the psychiatrist. Tell me that's wrong."

"It's wrong and I'd have done it too," Vance said, and that was, in Ruth's private accounting, the moment she stopped disliking him.

The weekend itself was ordinary. There was a race and a dinner and a band on the green and the two of them laughing in the kitchen at one in the morning, and on the Sunday the four of them took the boat out and the water was flat and the light came off it the way it does in August, and Delia lay on the foredeck with her eyes shut and said, out loud, to nobody: "I'm going to take one of them in September."

She did not take one of them in September. But on the Sunday night she came out onto the porch at half past two and stood at the rail in her nightdress and looked down the hill at the harbor with her head tilted, and Ruth, sitting in the dark of the porch with her feet up, said her name and got no answer at all, and got up and took her by the wrist and turned her around, and Delia woke in the doorway and said — this is in the notebook, in Ruth's hand, dated that night — that she had been dreaming about a room with no windows and that somebody in the room had been very kind to her and had told her that her father was fine.

Her father had been dead for nine years.

In the morning Delia laughed about it at breakfast in front of all three of them, and got it wrong — she told the story with the window in it, and the window was not in the story, the window was the one thing that was not in the story — and Ruth, who had it written down, said nothing, and went out to the porch and stood looking at the harbor.

There was a ship at anchor in the roads beyond the point, dark and low and too big for the town, and it had come in on the Thursday and had not moved since.

Ruth Kessler stood on the porch of a house in Salt Harbor and looked at that ship for a long time, and then went in and wrote in the notebook, in the back, on a page of its own, the date and the words: there is a ship standing off the point and nobody knows who chartered her. Then she went upstairs and slept on the daybed in the front room, which she had begun to do without ever once announcing that she was doing it.