Elin Hilderbrand - The Matchmaker

I suffered a pretty serious loss about six months ago, and I’ve been slowly recovering from it.

He had lost his arm.

Dabney’s vision grew dark at the edges, but there was still color-the red of Clen’s T-shirt and the green glen and weak tea of his Scottish hazel eyes. I could not stay, and you could not go. She couldn’t speak. Nina Mobley would be looking for her, as it was time to judge the picnics. It doesn’t matter, nobody ever eats them anyway. Clen! She wanted, at least, to say his name, just his name, but even that was beyond her. She was in the power of some other force; something had her by the back of the neck and was pushing her down. I hope that “never” has an expiration date. She wanted to ride away on his handlebars. Any second now, she would relax. He was there. It was him.

She did not stop for him. She walked on. Even if she could have spoken, what would she have said? She was unprepared. She wasn’t feeling well. Around the corner, hidden by hedges, she tried to breathe, but found she could not breathe. She heard the sound of breaking glass and realized the champagne flute had dropped to the road and shattered. There was wind in her ears. Her knees gave way.

Blackness.

Silence.

Couple #30: Dr. Gary Donegal and Lance Farley, partners ten years

Dr. Donegal: I started seeing Dabney in 1978, my first year on Nantucket. Dabney was, in fact, my first patient. She was twelve years old; her mother had left the family four years earlier, and Dabney’s father, who was a policeman, was worried about Dabney’s emotional well-being as she entered adolescence. Dabney refused to leave the island; she was convinced that if she left Nantucket, she would die. Or something worse.

“Something worse?” I said.

Officer Kimball then explained to me that the last time Dabney had been off Nantucket was in December 1974, when her mother, Patty Benson, took Dabney to Boston to see The Nutcracker. They had orchestra seats for the evening performance of the ballet and a suite at the Park Plaza afterward. Patty, Officer Kimball said, had come from money and was used to doing things this way. She was also spoiled, selfish, and entitled, he said. A summer person, he said-as if this were the explanation for her unpleasant qualities. He then went on to tell me that Patty Benson had left the Park Plaza Hotel in the middle of the night and had never returned.

“Never returned?” I said.

“Never returned,” he said. He knew Patty hadn’t met with foul play because she had given the hotel’s concierge Officer Kimball’s phone number and a twenty-dollar tip to call and tell him to come to Boston to collect their daughter.

When Dabney awoke in the suite in the Park Plaza, Patty was gone. The concierge sent up one of the chambermaids to stay with Dabney until her father arrived.

Dabney never saw or heard from her mother again. Eventually, Officer Kimball hired a detective and discovered that Patty Benson was living in Texas, working as a flight attendant on the private jet of some oil millionaire.

I realized I had my work cut out for me with Dabney. The refusal to leave Nantucket was a natural response to having lost her mother, to being left behind in a hotel room like an empty shopping bag, or a half-eaten club sandwich.

Dabney was happy enough to talk about her mother. Her mother had grown up spending summers in a big old house on Hoicks Hollow Road. The Benson family had belonged to the Sankaty Beach Club; her mother used to say that tan skin was healthy skin. Her mother liked black-and-white movies with singing and dancing, liked lobster tails on Christmas Eve, and did not care for her husband’s Wharf Rat tattoo. Her mother read to Dabney every night before bed and some nights fell asleep in Dabney’s bed; she promised that Dabney could get her ears pierced on her twelfth birthday, but that the only acceptable earrings were pearls.

Dabney wouldn’t talk about The Nutcracker trip or waking up in the hotel alone or the fact that her mother had not contacted her in two, then three, then four years.

I had seen my share of obsessive-compulsive disorder and agoraphobia and paranoia, but I had never seen a combination of the three the way they presented in Dabney. I am, perhaps, making things sound worse for her than they were. She was an exceptional child, and as she grew into a teenager, she only became more exceptional. She was lovely to look at, intelligent, clear-eyed, perceptive, kind, poised, articulate, and funny. But when it came to leaving Nantucket, she had a blind spot. She wouldn’t leave the island unless her life depended on it, she said.

I met with her twice a month. We tried antianxiety medications, none of which proved very effective, but we finally made enough progress that when she was accepted to Harvard, she said she would go.

Even I was surprised by this.

She said, “I told you that I wouldn’t leave the island unless my life depended on it, and now my life depends on it. Am I supposed to stay here and wait tables? Work as a nanny? I have to go to college, Dr. Donegal. I’m smart.”

I agreed with her wholeheartedly: she was smart. I was sure that when she got to Harvard, she would realize there was nothing to fear. No one else would disappear.

This didn’t end up being quite true. Her boyfriend, Clendenin Hughes, went to Yale and became engrossed in his studies and his life there. Dabney traveled once to New Haven to see him, and it ended badly. Officer Kimball was working double shifts that weekend, and hence I was dispatched to go get her.

It was on the ride from New Haven back to the Cape, eight years after our therapy started, that I finally got Dabney to talk. She started with things I knew: she was fatally in love with Clendenin Hughes-“fatally” meaning she was pretty sure the love would kill her, or the fact that he didn’t love her the way she loved him would kill her. He wanted to go places and see things, and she couldn’t, and he didn’t understand, and she couldn’t explain. New Haven had changed Clen, she said. I told her that going new places did sometimes change a person, new experiences shaped us, and Dabney said that she liked who she was and was determined to stay that way. She had not been changed by Cambridge, and I suggested that was because she hadn’t truly let Cambridge into her heart. She didn’t respond to this, and the next time she spoke, she told me that the night her mother left, she told Dabney that she was woefully unhappy with her life. She was no longer in love with Dabney’s father; she had been blinded, she said, by the romantic notion of a war hero. She used to love Nantucket as a summer haven, but living there year-round had spoiled it for her. She hated it now with every cell of her body. She felt like a coyote in a trap, she said. She would chew off her own leg to escape.

Dabney said, “When I looked at my mother, she was sitting in a cloud of green smoke. I knew she was leaving, and the thing was, I also knew it was for the best. My father and I were Nantucketers to the core, and my mother hated us for it.”

I was just about to reassure Dabney that her mother did not hate her, but that she, Dabney, was in some sense the coyote’s leg. She was that which her mother had sacrificed in the name of freedom.

But before I could articulate this, Dabney asked me a surprising question.

She said, “Dr. Donegal, have you ever been in love?”

I stopped seeing Dabney as a patient after she graduated from college, although she never truly left my sights. I heard about Clendenin’s exodus to Southeast Asia and Dabney’s pregnancy, and a few years later I heard about her marriage to the Harvard economist, and when I bumped into Dabney and her daughter and said economist one morning having breakfast at the Jared Coffin House, I told her how happy I was for her. Then, a few months later, Dabney called me. At first I suspected marital trouble, or grief counseling because her father had just died of a heart attack, but what Dabney said was, “There’s someone I want you to meet. When can you come for dinner?”

The person she wanted me to meet was a man named Lance Farley, who had recently bought an antiques store in town and who had just joined the Chamber of Commerce. It was clear from the moment I shook hands with Lance Farley what Dabney was up to. I, of course, knew about Dabney’s reputation as a matchmaker, about her supposed “supernatural intuition” when it came to romance. I had heard about her many successes and how she saw either a rosy aura or a green fog. I remembered the story about her mother on the night that she left. But still, I put as much stock in Dabney’s matchmaking as I did in the answers on a Ouija board.

But as we drank gin and tonics in the Beeches’ secluded, grassy backyard and then dined on grilled swordfish and Bartlett Farm tomatoes and homemade peach pie, and as Lance and I discovered a shared love for Bach and the early novels of Philip Roth, and the northern coast of Morocco, I admitted to myself that maybe even after eight years of spelunking in the hidden recesses of someone’s brain, there were still things to be discovered. Maybe Dabney did have a supernatural intuition about romantic matters.

Who was I to say she didn’t?

Dabney fainted on Main Street in Sconset. Box hadn’t even noticed that she was missing; he had been too busy pouring a glass of Montrachet and fixing a ham sandwich. Nina Mobley had come looking for Dabney; the judging of the tailgate picnics was about to begin, and they couldn’t start without Dabney. Box had waved a casual hand at the mayhem around him. “I’m sure she’s here somewhere.” Dabney was the most popular woman on the island. She knew everyone and everyone knew her. She was probably off talking to Mr. So-and-So about the window boxes of his house on Fair Street, or she’d bumped into Peter Genevra from the water company and was feeding him marshmallow-and-Easter-egg sandwiches.

But fifteen minutes later, Dabney still hadn’t turned up. Nina was antsy. Should she start the judging without her?

“Judge without Dabney?” Box said. “Is that even an option?”

“Not really,” Nina admitted. “I need her.”

Box nodded. Dabney and Nina were best friends, but Dabney was the dominant one of the pair. She was Mary Tyler Moore to Nina’s Rhoda, the Lucy to her Ethel.

An instant later, the son of the fire chief-Box recognized the youth but couldn’t recall his name-approached to tell Box that Dabney had fainted in the street, and the paramedics were tending to her now.

It was as Box threaded his way through the crowd on Main Street that he saw the man on the bicycle.

Box took a stutter step; his right knee had been replaced the year before and still wasn’t 100 percent reliable. Box hated himself for looking again, but something about the man struck Box. Big guy, bearded like a lumberjack, one arm.

The man raised his good arm, not in greeting, Box thought, but as an acknowledgment. I’m here.

Clendenin Hughes? Was that possible? Box was terrible with names but far better with faces. He had looked up Hughes several times on the Internet and had even read a few of his pieces, including the series on Myanmar, which had won him the Pulitzer. Furthermore, the man looked just like Agnes; it was uncanny. That was him, Box was almost certain.

Had Dabney seen Hughes, then? Was that why she’d fainted? Her old lover. Agnes’s father. It had been more than twenty-five years since Hughes had left Nantucket. He lived overseas, in Southeast Asia somewhere. As Box understood it, Clendenin Hughes was a man who needed political unrest and foreign women and espionage plots to keep his gears turning.

As Box understood it, Hughes no longer had any connection to the island.

And yet, there he was.

Clendenin turned the bike around-skillfully, considering he had only one arm-and pedaled away.

One arm?

Box hurried to the rotary. He was sixty-two years old, way past the point in his life where he should feel threatened or jealous. But something gnawed at him. He quickened his step, to tend to Dabney.

Box took Dabney home and put her to bed with three aspirin and a glass of water. Daffodil Weekend had gotten the best of her this year. She had allowed herself to stress out over a pagan celebration.

As her eyes fluttered closed, he thought to ask her about Clendenin Hughes. But he didn’t want to upset her-or himself-any further.

Box had met Dabney twenty-four years earlier at the Sankaty Head Golf Club during a Harvard alumni event. Box was attending at the request of the development office; they liked certain faculty members to show up at such events and glad-hand. Box had been to Nantucket once before, in the late seventies, when he and a few buddies from Harvard had hiked out the slender, sandy arm of Coatue and slept on the beach in tents. He had hardly been to the beach since then.