Two: The Settling (1930-1935)
The first winter in Providence was the longest winter I have ever spent, and I have spent one hundred and sixty-two winters on this coastline so I want you to understand the weight of that statement.
It was not the cold. Cold is not something that has troubled me significantly since well before I left Innsmouth, the transformation having long since renegotiated my relationship with temperature in ways that are difficult to explain to someone who has not experienced it and unnecessary to explain to someone who has. It was not the unfamiliarity of the city, which I was navigating carefully but with increasing confidence as the weeks passed and the streets became known to me in the way that streets become known when you walk them at odd hours with the focused attention of someone who needs to know where the exits are.
It was the silence.
Not the silence of the river, which was never silent, or the silence of the house on Wickenden Street, which had its own rhythms and voices and the particular creaking language of a nineteenth century building settling into another winter. The silence I mean was the one that lived in the space where Innsmouth had been. The absence of it. The particular quality of a life from which something large and defining has been removed, leaving not a wound exactly but a negative space, the shape of what is gone outlined by everything that remains.
I had known Innsmouth for sixty-odd years. I had known its streets and its smells and its people and its reef and the specific quality of its water at every season. I had known what I was in it. I had not known, until Providence, how much of knowing what I was had depended on being somewhere that knew what I was in return.
Providence was learning, slowly and at the careful pace we set for it, but it did not yet know, and the not-yet-knowing left me, in those first months, feeling the particular rootlessness of someone who has arrived somewhere new and has not yet given the place enough of themselves for the place to hold them in return.
It held. Eventually it held. But that first winter was long, and I am glad it is behind me, and I mention it here because I think the ones who have come to us recently, the new blood, the ones still in the early months of their own settling, deserve to know that the patriarch of this community spent his first winter in Providence feeling unmoored in ways he would not have admitted to anyone at the time and is only now, ninety-six years later, putting into squid ink.
We are none of us as certain as we appear. This is perhaps the most useful thing I know and the thing I was longest in learning.
The community that received me in March of 1928 was small but it was not fragile, which is a distinction worth making because small and fragile are often assumed to go together and in my experience they frequently do not.
The Marshes had built something functional in their four years on Wickenden Street. The fish market was established and profitable in the way of businesses that know their product with an intimacy their competitors cannot replicate, and the arrangement with the Portuguese fishermen was working with the quiet efficiency of a partnership that benefits both parties sufficiently that neither has reason to ask too many questions about the other’s methods. The houses they occupied backed close enough to the water that the river was accessible within minutes, which was not a luxury but a necessity, the transformation requiring regular immersion in ways that the surface world’s infrastructure was not designed to accommodate.
Others arrived through the spring and summer of 1928, following the same coastal routes I had followed, in the same large coats and pulled-down hats, carrying the same grief and the same nothing-in-the-pockets and the same everything-in-the-head. Each arrival was the same and each was different. The young ones who had never known Innsmouth as anything other than the place they had barely escaped. The older ones who had known it in its better years and carried that knowing like a second skeleton inside the first. The ones who arrived angry and the ones who arrived broken and the ones who arrived with the particular focused blankness of people who have decided that feeling things will have to wait until there is time for it, and there is never quite time for it, and eventually the decision calcifies into a permanent condition.
I received them all. Or rather the unnamed woman whose name I will not write received them and I assisted, which is a more accurate description of the dynamic in those early years. She had been here longer. She understood Providence in ways I was still learning. She had built the thing that was receiving us and she ran it with the unsentimental competence of someone who has never confused sentiment with effectiveness and has found that effectiveness, reliably and over time, does more good.
I learned a great deal from her in those years. I have not always been gracious about acknowledging this. I am acknowledging it now, in this document, where she cannot hear me be gracious about it and therefore cannot be insufferably right about having deserved it all along.
She would enjoy that. I hope wherever she is in the deep water she can feel the acknowledgement reaching her through the current.
Among those who arrived in the summer of 1928 was someone I did not expect to see again.
His name was Henryk. He was twenty years old and he had his mother’s colouring, which is to say the grey-green of deep water on an overcast day, and he had found his way to Providence by a route different from mine and considerably more difficult, which I learned over the course of several evenings sitting by the river before either of us said anything of substance to the other. He was my son.
He had not known, until Providence, that I was still alive.
I had not known, until Providence, that he was.
It was complicated. For all of my talk on how we as a people exist as a family, perhaps I speak with some hypocrisy as a father who had little to do with his son’s upbringing. I saw his face and immediately understood that my failure was not all his mother’s fault.
It was, in its way, a new beginning. I was not certain either of us knew what to do with that.
By the end of 1929 we were twenty-three.
Not a large number. Not by any standard of what we had been in Innsmouth or what I hoped we might eventually become. But twenty-three was considerably more than six, and twenty-three people in a tight neighbourhood of close-packed houses near the waterfront, with a fish market and the Portuguese fishermen’s network and the river close enough to hear at night, was something that had the beginnings of a shape. The beginnings of a community rather than a collection of refugees.
The Depression arrived in October of 1929 and improved our camouflage considerably.
This sounds callous and I acknowledge that. The suffering of those years was real and I watched it from the waterfront with something that was not indifference, regardless of what the younger ones may assume about those of us who have lived long enough to see suffering repeat itself with the reliability of tides. Hunger is hunger. Cold is cold. The particular desperation of a man who has lost everything he built and does not know how to build it again is not something you observe without feeling the weight of it, even from beneath the surface, even after a century of surfaces.
But the practical fact was this: when everyone is gaunt and strange looking and wearing whatever they can find and living somewhere they had not expected to be living, we were considerably less conspicuous than we had been. Fox Point, always a neighbourhood of hard work and harder circumstances, became in those years a place where nobody looked too closely at anyone else because everyone had reasons they preferred not to discuss. The fish market on Wickenden Street became, in those Depression years, something more than a business. It became a neighbourhood institution, the kind of place that a community in extremity gathers around not because it is the best option but because it is a good one and good options are not abundant in a Depression.
We fed people. This is the plain fact of it. Not through any organised charity or civic programme, the kind of thing that requires forms and administrators and the various human mechanisms by which generosity is formalised into something that can be measured and credited and occasionally corrupted. Simply by knowing where the fish were and making sure that knowledge benefited more than just ourselves.
Lord Dagon provides for his faithful. He provided for our neighbours too, in those years, and they did not need to know why.
The man who would eventually become famous for writing about us was living on College Hill at the time of my arrival, not three quarters of a mile from the Fox Point house where I was sleeping off two weeks of coastal migration. His name was Howard Phillips Lovecraft and he was, by 1928, already writing the stories that would eventually make him the most famous person ever to have almost understood us.
I did not know this immediately. I learned it gradually, the way you learn most things in a new city, through fragments of conversation and overheard remarks and the slow accumulation of neighbourhood knowledge. There was a writer on College Hill. He wrote strange stories. He walked the streets at night, which in Providence is neither unusual nor noteworthy, but he walked them with the particular intensity of someone conducting a private investigation into the nature of reality and finding the results alarming.
I passed him for the first time on Benefit Street, perhaps two weeks after my arrival, on one of my cautious early excursions into the city in the large coat with the brim pulled low. He was walking south, I was walking north, and we passed each other in the narrow space between the old houses with the ease of two people who have both decided that eye contact is not something they are interested in pursuing.
I noticed him because he was tall and angular and moved with the distracted purposefulness of someone composing something in his head as he walked. He noticed me, I believe, because something in his considerable sensitivity to the uncanny registered that something was not entirely right about the figure in the large coat, but his social instincts, which by all accounts were powerful in the direction of avoidance, overrode whatever his instincts about the uncanny were telling him, and he continued south and I continued north and that was that.
The second time was on Angell Street, perhaps a month later, and he looked at me directly for just a moment with eyes that were doing something more than casual observation, something that was almost recognition without having any basis for recognition, and then he looked away and crossed to the other side of the street with the decisive air of a man who has made a choice about something and intends to stick to it.
I respected that. I have always respected the people who choose not to know. The ones who look at the edge of something they do not have a category for and decide, consciously and with full awareness of what they are deciding, that they are going to walk to the other side of the street and keep walking. It is not cowardice. It is a particular kind of wisdom that I did not fully appreciate until I had watched enough people choose the other option and seen what it cost them.
I read one of his stories eventually, in the early 1930s, passed to me by one of the younger ones who had found it in a magazine with a lurid cover and brought it back to Fox Point with the particular expression of someone who is not certain whether to be offended or entertained. It was the one about Innsmouth, which he had apparently written in 1931 without, as far as I could determine, having visited Innsmouth or spoken to anyone who had been there.
He had gotten some things right in the way that a man who has pressed his ear to a wall and heard fragments of a conversation gets things right, accurately but incompletely, the outline without the interior. The gold was right. The reef was approximately right. The general architecture of the covenant between our people and Lord Dagon was recognisable if simplified. The transformation was right in its broad shape if wrong in almost every specific detail, which I found both reassuring and slightly irritating in the way you find it irritating when someone describes your home and gets the address correct but the colour of the door wrong.
What he did not get right was the feeling of it. He wrote about us as though we were a horror to be uncovered, a secret that once known could only destroy the one who knew it. He wrote about Dagon’s covenant as a corruption, a degradation, something that unmade the human rather than completed it. I understand why he wrote it that way. He was a human man writing for human readers and the human relationship with transformation is, to put it diplomatically, complicated.
But he was wrong about what it meant. The deep is not a horror. It is a home. The change is not a corruption. It is an arrival. What he described as the terrible fate of his narrator I have experienced as the longest and most clarifying journey of my extremely long life, and I will not apologise for that even to a man whose literary estate has been making money off my people’s existence for the better part of a century without so much as a royalty cheque.
He died in 1937 and I will say more of that in its proper time.
By 1935 we had established ourselves along the waterfront with the quiet permanence of things that have found their depth and settled there.
The community had grown carefully through those first years, new arrivals from the scattered Innsmouth diaspora finding their way to us by coastal routes and water channels and the particular underground of information that a dispersed people develops when official channels are closed to them. We took them in. We fed them. We gave them narrow beds in narrow rooms with the sound of the river nearby and we let them sleep for as long as they needed to sleep, which was always longer than they thought and never quite long enough.
The fish market had expanded to two premises on Wickenden Street by 1933, the second acquired during the Depression at a price that reflected the times rather than the property, and between them they provided cover and income and the legitimate waterfront presence that kept our community’s relationship with the neighbourhood on the right side of visible. The unnamed woman ran both with the efficiency I have already described and which I will not belabour, having learned that she has a long memory and I am not yet certain she cannot read what I write in the deep water.
I am joking. Mostly.
Fox Point had become, by 1935, something I had not dared to name in the first years for fear that naming it would somehow undo it. It had become familiar. The streets had the quality that streets acquire when you have walked them enough times in enough weathers that your feet know them independently of your attention. The river had the quality that a river acquires when you have been in it long enough that it has stopped feeling like a river you are visiting and started feeling like a river you live in, which is a different quality entirely and one that I do not think I can describe to anyone who has not experienced it.
It was not Innsmouth. I want to be clear about that because I have been clear about it to myself for ninety-six years and I see no reason to be less clear about it here. It was not the reef and the deep gold and the freedom of being entirely what you were in a place built for what you were. The streets were not ours in the way Innsmouth’s streets had been ours. The river ran through a human city that did not know what was in it. We were still hidden, still careful, still wearing the large coats and the pulled-down hats whenever the surface world required our presence in it.
But the river knew us. The current carried Dagon’s presence with a strength that had been growing since the first of us arrived in 1924 and would go on growing as long as we tended it. And we had each other, which is not a small thing, and we had the fish market and the Wickenden Street houses and the unnamed woman’s cooking and the particular consolation of a community that has survived something terrible together and found, on the other side of the surviving, that it is still a community.
Providence had taken us in without knowing it was taking us in.
That is, I have decided after ninety-six years of thinking about it, a form of grace.
Not the kind that gets written about in the churches on the hill. A quieter kind. The kind that does not require you to be understood in order to be sheltered.
I have found, in my long experience, that this is the best kind.
– S.Z., Providence, March 2025
