The Rumor

NANTUCKET

We didn’t like to gossip; we loved to gossip.

Did you hear?

Most of the time, living on Nantucket comforted us; we felt like Mother Ocean was holding us in the palm of her hand. But sometimes, the island made us restless and irritable. Winter was bad, but spring was worse, because except for a few short weeks, it was indistinguishable from winter.

What had T. S. Eliot written? April is the cruellest month.

Gossip was always the most rampant in the spring. It ran like water in a newly thawed brook; it circulated through the air like pollen. We could no sooner refrain from repeating what we’d heard than we could keep from rubbing our swollen, itchy eyes.

We weren’t mean spirited or vindictive or cruel; we were simply bored, and after the long stretch without summer visitors, summer money, summer magic, our reservoirs were dry.

Besides which, we were human beings, saddled with our own curiosities and our own insecurities. We were aware of things happening in the wider world-human genomes being decoded on the MIT campus, tectonic plates shifting in California, Putin waging war in Ukraine-but none of these events captured our interest like those taking place on the 105 square miles of our home island. We gossiped at the dentist, in the salon, in the produce section of the Stop & Shop, around the bar at the Boarding House; we gossiped over appetizers at the Anglers’ Club on Friday nights, between the pews of five o’clock Mass on Saturday nights, and in line at the Hub as we waited to buy our New York Times on Sunday mornings.

Did you hear?

There was never any way to predict who would be our subject. But if someone had told us, in the frigid, steel-skied middle of April, that most of our summer would be spent whispering about Grace and Eddie Pancik…

… and Trevor Llewellyn and Madeline King…

… and about the renowned landscape architect Benton Coe…

… our mouths might have dropped open in shock.

No way.

Not possible.

They were some of the loveliest people we knew.