Dark Nantucket Noon by Jane Langton Page A

I hope, in the interest of discovering the truth about your wife’s death, that you will permit me to see you for an hour or so. I can be reached at Alden Dove’s house.
    Homer Kelly
    Homer read his letter over, cursed himself for an egocentric bastard because every sentence began with “I,” stuffed the letter back in its envelope and dropped it in the mailbox. Then he crossed the cobblestoned street in the direction of the Pacific National Bank.
    He was thinking of his sailors again, the men who had shipped with Melville. The ones who came back to Nantucket from the ship Acushnet might have brought their shares of her profits to the Pacific National Bank, their three-hundredth lay, perchance, like Ishmael’s on the Pequod. And the backers of those voyages would have had dealings with this bank too, at the rate of so much gain for a barrel of sperm oil or seal oil or a firkin of ambergris rumbling over these very cobblestones on a horse-drawn dray—or so much loss for drowned barrels, drowned seamen, at the bottom of the Strait of Magellan.

    Homer climbed the seven granite steps to the classical portico, right on time for his appointment with the bank’s cashier Richard Roper. He had to step aside for some lady depositors who were coming out the door, because the Pacific National Bank was still very much in business, conducting the transactions of the resort trade, carrying the accounts of the shops and services that waited upon the tourists, handling the mortgages of the residents and the loans and deposits of the clammers and scallopers who made a living out of local waters, and of course cashing the traveler’s checks of the tourists who flooded in and out in the summertime.
    Inside the bank he stood for a minute looking up at the handsome Greek Revival proportions of the lofty room and at the murals on the wall and the old scales for weighing gold, and then he looked around for his landlady, Alice Dove.
    Alice had her eye on him already. She was standing behind one of the tellers’ windows, frowning at him. But that was just Alice’s way. Homer walked up to her window and shook the bars playfully. “Good morning, Alice, dear,” he said, his genial bass voice echoing around the bank. “How’s the old Federal Reserve System this morning? Fattening on the widow’s mite just as usual? Could I see Mr. Roper?”
    â€œSsshhh,” said Alice calmly. She walked around to the tellers’ barred door, and the custodian let him in. Then she tapped on another door, stuck her head in, pronounced Homer’s name, stood back to let him go by, and pulled the door shut behind him.
    Richard Roper had his hand out. He was walking around his desk. He had a ruddy youthful face, a high shining bald forehead, thinning blond hair, a cheery blue eye. He started off the interview with cordial courtesy by talking about the ship’s portrait on the wall between the high windows. It was a happy childish painting, with a fair breeze blowing the chubby sails, whipping the blue water into choppy little waves.
    â€œMy great-great-grandfather owned that ship with his brother, and their cousin was the captain. They were all Ropers. She made four voyages from Nantucket, and she was gone three, four, five years at a time, bringing back thousands of barrels of sperm oil from the Pacific, and thousands of pounds of whalebone from the baleen whale. These pieces of scrimshaw in the glass case over here were made aboard her by one of the sailors. The one on the left is a whale’s tooth, of course, and if you look closely, Mr. Kelly, you’ll see the picture engraved on it, with the ship in the background behind the whaleboat. Can you read what it says on the side?”
    Homer craned his head sideways. “ ‘A dead whale or a stove boat.’ Yes, of course, that’s in Moby Dick , a whaling man’s profession of faith, like the Apostles’ Creed.”
    Richard