That night, Junemakes clam chowder and bakes a fat loaf of soft wheat bread to eat with it. She sets the dining room table with candles and is sweetly maternal with all three boys. She’s kind to me, as well, asking gentle questions about my sketchbook, which she calls an “art practice.”
When I ask her, she tells stories about Meer when he was little. “He loved making pretend tinctures. I gave him lentils and water and organic food coloring and lots of little jars. I set up a worktable for him out by the garden and he’d just mix and fizz and mix and fizz while I pruned the plants.”
She tells stories about Tatum, as well. In the castle’s early days, he and his parents spent summers in Parchment Tower. His momand dad were teachers and had long vacations, but they “wanted to be free of institutions and rigid hours and pension plans and educational legislations,” so they accepted Kingsley’s offer to live in the pool house year-round when Tatum was ten. “We always called Tatum a selkie,” says June. “You know, like a seal who’d turned into a boy but was really a seal in his heart. He was never out of the swimming pool, never out of the sea.” She smiles at Tatum, who is looking down at his plate. “Selkies are ocean folk from Scottish legends. Loyal first to the world beneath the sea. Kingsley painted Tatum that way.”
She gestures at a canvas, about eight feet wide but only two feet tall, that hangs on one side of the dining room. I’ve seen it before but haven’t looked closely since it’s mostly ocean, spreading from one end of the painting to the other. Now I stand to examine it.
“Please don’t,” says Tatum.
“Oh, go ahead,” says June to me. Then to Tatum: “You inspired Kingsley, and that connection of painter and subject is a very special one. Don’t shrink from having it witnessed.”
—
Selkie Childdepictsa friendly sea,
warm blue and lit through with shafts of sunlight.
The waterline is near the top of the painting, and mostly
the sea is empty.
But look a little closer and
on the far left of the wide, wide painting, there is
a seal.
He is nearly the same color as the sunlit sea, camouflaged in its depths.
Keep looking and you see
the same seal, several more times,
so that the painting tracks his passage through the water.
On the right side of the painting,
a boy climbs out of the sealskin, still underwater.
It’s clearly Tatum.
Same coffee curls, same freckles, but he looks maybe ten years old.
The far edge shows the sealskin having drifted to the bottom of the frame, while
the human boy’s head is above the waterline.
—
Hours after dinner,the boys and I sneak out again. We take the scooters to Aquinnah, where the Plum Road Estate is between renters. We swim in the estate’s enormous heated pool, looking up at stars. Steam rises off the water as it connects with the cold night air. My hair floats around me.
Next morning, June takes me out to pick wineberries, deep into the property by a groundskeeper’s cottage. We bring the berries back and make jam, together with Meer. That night, Brock returns from a jaunt to town with a cooler full of oysters. June skips dinner, but the four of us stand around the kitchen island and eat them with hot sauce and lemon, opening them with a single special knife.
On the beach, while the rest of us lay out big cotton blankets, and while the rest of us eat our way through a wicker hamper of potato chips and strawberries, and while we slather ourselves in sunscreen and fuss about with the rusted blue beach chairs, Tatum always throws off his sweatshirt and walks directly into the water.
He wears goggles. He swims straight out to the horizon, like the ocean doesn’t seem dangerous to him. Like it’s his home.
We lose sight of him quickly. He goes off to the left or to the right, and much farther out than I’d ever want to go.
