that the reason they spent so much time with each other was that Melville was his best friend. It wasnât a lie, it just wasnât the whole truth.
Zeeâs mother was the one who told her about Finchâs preference formen. As with many of the inappropriate things Maureen had told her during her manic episodes, Zee would only understand the full impact of the statement in retrospect. At the time the professor had begun to hang out with Mickey and his pirate-reenactor buddies on weekends and during school vacations, and Zee supposed that was what her mother had meant by a preference. Zee was very aware of how much partying they all did together. The pirates drank and they sang, and Finch, who was usually almost prim in his New England reserve, drank and sang with them. Sometimes she would hear him singing as he made his way into the house late at night, the clichéd songs of the gutter drunk that she recognized from the old movies she watched with her mother. Finch was the singing, tippling, happy drunk of 1930s comedies. His joy at such times, especially as it contrasted with Maureenâs growing depression, made Zee believe she understood why her father preferred the company of men. Men drank and sang and had fun. Her only wish at those times was that she could be one of them.
Maureen, being Maureen, eventually told Zee intimate details of Finchâs predilection for men. Much later, when Zee was old enough to have a reference point for such things, she began to understand what her mother had meant and why she had told the stories with such anger. Finchâs misrepresentation of himself to Maureen had become the major betrayal of her motherâs life.
In Zeeâs mind, Maureenâs unfulfilled dream had always been to experience what she referred to as âThe Great Love.â It was what she wanted most in life and what she had sworn to have from Finch when they first met and when they spent the early days of their marriage on Bakerâs Island. She often spoke longingly of the night he had recited aloud to herânot the dark lines of Hawthorne but Yeats. On their wedding night, he had presented her a copy of the book the poem had come from, and that book became one of the treasures of her life. She kept it locked on Bakerâs Island in the room where sheâd spent her wedding night and which had since become her writing studio. That she no longer found such passion in her everyday life with Finch was her cross to bear. Being Irish and Catholic, Maureen Finch was all too familiar with the idea of burden, and hers had become an increasingly loveless marriage within the confines of a religion that vehemently discouraged her escape.
After it became clear to her that Finch had turned to men, a time Maureen referred to as âThe Betrayal,â Maureen had holed up in her cottage on Bakerâs Island and had begun to write the story sheâd never been able to finish, which she had entitled âThe Once.â Finch marked this as the first sign of her impending insanity, though when Zee thought about it now, it was more likely a very bad case of postpartum depression, and one from which Maureen had never fully recovered.
It had been a difficult pregnancy and an even more difficult labor and delivery. The fact that Maureen hadnât bonded with the child sheâd borne him was no great worry to Finchâhe had bonded well enough for both of them. The birth of his beloved Hepzibah was the single factor that kept him in his marriage, for, not being a Catholic himself, he was more inclined to believe that the mistake heâd made with such a hasty marriage might be easily remedied.
The days leading up to Maureen Finchâs death had been so terrible that Zee and her father had never talked about them. Zee had talked with Mattei about them many times during her sessions, but never with Finch. In retrospect she wondered how many of those days Finch actually remembered,
Pierre V. Comtois, Charlie Krank, Nick Nacario