(five feet eleven and a half inches) and the color of his eyes (as blue as the Mediterranean Sea) and his prowess at sailing, of course, but also at hockey (he was the team captain at Harvard) and at golf, at which he won the Winthrop Island Club championship last summer, the first summer of the Fisher family’s membership. The Dumonts sponsored them. Bianca knows this because her cousin Laura happened to be stepping out with one of the Club caddies last year, at night and in secret, and he knew just about everything you ever wanted to know about the Families, because they, for some reason, thought the caddies had no ears in their heads except to receive commands. Or maybe they thought a ten-cent tip was enough to buy the loyalty of an impecunious college boy. (The Families were cheap tippers, it was part of their ethic.)
Not so Mr. Fisher. He once gave her cousin Manuelo a whole dollar for helping him push his Buick Battistini roadster back to Greyfriars from the village, where it broke down outside the ice cream parlor. How Bianca had envied Manuelo that magical day, as his manly shoulders strained side by side with Mr. Fisher’s shoulders, even though the road ascended some hundred feet in total before it reached the summit on which Greyfriars was built, and the effort must have been enormous. When Manuelo returned, flushed and sweating, she had asked him what they talked about, and his face went carefully blank and he said, Nothing. So she knew Mr. Fisher had confided some secret in Manuelo, and that made her doubly jealous.
In fact, Bianca’s thinking about that August afternoon right now, as she stacks her cans of soup in the hot, musty interior of the Medeiros’ general store on Hemlock Street, right at the harbor’s edge. She’s remembering how Mr. Fisher took off his linen jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, and how strong his back seemed as he bent himself over the graceful rump of the Buick, how his shoulders formed the broad side of a damp, neat triangle that narrowed and then disappeared down the slim waistband of his trousers. She sets down another can of soup and crosses herself, and at that exact instant, by some arrangement of the universe, she hears none other than Hugh Fisher’s young, enthusiastic, unmistakable voice calling out from the front of the store. The coincidence is so remarkable that at first she thinks she’s imagined it.
“Hullo!” he calls again. “Anybody there?”
Bianca waits behind the tall shelf while her heart pounds and pounds, not breathing, waiting for Tia Maria to reply, for one of her cousins to reply. But nobody does.
“Hullo? Francisca? Anybody?”
He’s going to leave. She lifts her hand to smooth her hair, but there’s a can of soup stuck between her fingers, and she bumps her head with it instead. She shoves the soup on the shelf and darts out into the open, just as Mr. Fisher’s turning to the open front door.
“Hello! Mr. Fisher!”
He swivels back, and all at once he’s looking at her, her, Bianca Medeiro and nobody else, and the whole world lights up under the color of his gaze, the wattage of his smile.
“Well, hello,” he says. “I was hoping to buy a bottle or two of vinegar.”
2.
ANOTHER THING SHE knows about Hugh Fisher: last summer, he fell in love with her cousin Francisca, the third and the oldest of Tia Maria and Tio Manuelo’s children, who’s engaged to marry Pascoal Vargas in the autumn. Francisca, who was perfectly aware of Bianca’s infatuation, tried to keep the affair secret for her sake, but Bianca knew almost from the first, when Francisca made some excuse about taking a walk one night last July, and came back flushed and bright-eyed an hour later, smelling of a particular kind of masculine soap that Tio Manuelo doesn’t stock in his store. In truth, Bianca hadn’t really minded. Francisca going to meet Hugh Fisher at night was almost as close as Bianca herself going to meet Hugh Fisher, and when she heard the back door open and squeakily close, she imagined Francisca running up the slope to the cliffs under the moonlight, Francisca embracing Hugh Fisher while the phosphorescent sea pounded beneath them, in a way she couldn’t imagine Mr. Fisher embracing so distant an object as Miss Dumont. By touching Francisca’s skin the next morning, Bianca felt she was somehow touching Mr. Fisher.
And another thing. Last summer Francisca was fully grown, nineteen years old, lush and beautiful, and Bianca was only sixteen, her period had just started the previous winter, and her face was round and spotty and childlike. As she lay throughout July and August in the little bedroom she shared with her cousins, listening to their clandestine comings and goings, she was happier imagining making love to Hugh Fisher as beautiful Francisca than she would have been to actually make love to him as herself. It was safer and infinitely more pleasant.
Then came the end of summer, when the Families all returned to their houses in New York and Boston and Providence and Philadelphia, including the Fishers. Francisca moped to devastating effect. She appeared at the dinner table tearstained and listless, eating nothing, and she completed her chores like one of those machines in a factory, without joy. When she accepted Pascoal Vargas’s proposal at Christmas, everybody thought she finally saw sense, because the color returned to her cheeks, and her hips reacquired their old sway, and she plunged herself into the assembling of her trousseau, the most elaborate and comprehensive trousseau in the history of the Medeiro women, because Pascoal Vargas had made a great deal of money in his lobster boat during the past few years, a great deal, and now he has just received the appointment to keep the Fleet Rock lighthouse come October. Francisca will live in luxury, almost, so what if her devoted husband-to-be is past forty years old and resembles nothing so much as a leathery, dark-haired gnome? Who cares about romance when you’ve got a fiancé with money in the bank and a steady, respectable job?
But Bianca’s not so sure.
Bianca hasn’t missed the new brightness of her cousin’s eyes, now that the Fishers have returned to Winthrop Island. She hasn’t missed the way Francisca makes excuses to go walking in the cliffs above the village, or offers to help her brother Manuelo make the rounds throughout the Island in their father’s old Model T delivery truck. And this summer is a whole new summer. Francisca’s engaged, she’s practically a matron, and Bianca has finally achieved that transformation of which young girls dream, from duckling into swan. Over the winter, her spots disappeared and her face became luminous and refined, her hair grew in thick and her small, dainty body rounded out in all those places men admire. As Easter passed and the blossoms came out and the harsh New England air turned soft and warm, as she prepared to graduate from the tiny Winthrop Island School and turn free, Bianca felt her hour had struck. Her blood sang in her veins, she woke restless every morning. She felt that something grand beckoned around the corner, the future for which she was destined.
All she needed was a sign.
3.
IS THIS THE sign? Hugh Fisher standing right there in the front of the store, a foot or two away from the wooden counter with the vinegar-not-vinegar hidden inside, wearing a blue seersucker suit that made his eyes even bluer than she remembered? Already his skin is golden with sunshine and pink with heat, and his shiny blond hair reminds her of the helmet of Apollo. (She will cross herself later.)
Bianca tucks a loose strand behind her ear. Tia Maria won’t let them bob their hair, she absolutely refuses to let her girls turn fast like all the others, so Bianca arranges hers in a loose knot at the back of her head and then pulls out the dark, curling locks at the sides, so that the silhouette approximates that of Clara Bow.
“What kind of vinegar do you need, sir?” she asks politely, though her heart knocks like crazy next to her lungs, making speech difficult.
His smile turns sheepish. “Well, now. I’ve heard you stock a special kind of vinegar here, and I’m all out. Fellow was supposed to
