He did write. He wrote every day and sometimes twice a day, short funny notes and an occasional longer letter that was like he was: acridly witty, sweet-natured, introspective, full of unsuspected sensuality, wonderfully articulate. I got to know him, really, through those letters. Some were almost frighteningly intuitive; Peter seemed to sense each new doubt and anxiety of mine as it sprang to mind and addressed it in his letters.
You’ll be fine in the East. You’re smarter than most of the girls I’ve met up here, and what you don’t know you can learn in a minute. I won’t go off and leave you alone with any Yankees until you’ve learned the drill.
And in all my visits to Princeton that winter, he never did. To my own surprise, I did well enough with his clubmates and friends on that dreaming old campus. Perhaps it was merely that they all liked Peter so genuinely, but I was given just the proper modest rush by the other members of Colonial when I visited there, and I came home thinking that maybe I could, after all, make my way among the alien corn.
Your clothes are perfectly okay, he wrote another time. Nobody expects anybody from Charleston to have a closet full of tweed and fur. We’ll get you what you need for the next winter. What you have is like a bouquet of flowers after all the plain summer cotton I see up here.
And:
I spent this weekend in the Adirondacks at Shoe Parson’s family’s camp, and saw deer, pheasant, about a million raccoons, a pair of gray foxes, and one skinny black bear. There’s enough wild in the East to last you all your life, Maudie. I’ll let you roam to your heart’s content. I won’t pen you up in a city after Wappoo Creek.
And, in the spring of the next year, he wrote:
It’s time to come visit my folks. I’ve told them I’m bringing you in April. Hermie and the kids are coming up from Connecticut then, so you’ll get the whole lot of us at once. You don’t have a thing to worry about. They love Kemble, and they will love you too.
But Peter was wrong about that. The Chambliss family of Boston, Massachusetts, and Retreat, Maine, did not love me like they did my brother, Kemble. The female members of it, at least, did not; when I walked into the tall, ivy-shawled brick house on Charles Street at the end of that April, Hannah Stuart Chambliss looked at me interestedly and said, “Well, Petie, whom have we here?”
And the tall, stooped, fair-haired girl in the plain water-colored linen who could only be Peter’s sister, Hermione, said, in a light, cool voice that was a caricature of Peter’s, “I thought you said you were bringing Kemble, Buddy.”
I stood in that dim old foyer, looking at them in the arched doorway of their dim old drawing room, feeling my rose-flowered chintz and pink cloche beginning to glow in the century-old gloom like rotting garbage, and felt a cold endless tide rolling toward me.
“I told you Kemble’s sister, Hermie,” Peter said fondly. “You too, Ma. What idiots you both are. Come and say hello to Maude Gascoigne from Charleston, about whom you have heard a great deal, and why you’re behaving as if you hadn’t I can’t imagine.”
The Chambliss women let a little space of time reverberate into the silence, and then his mother said, “Well, my dear, of course you’re more than welcome. I cannot imagine why I thought…well. We’ll have a lovely weekend getting to know Peter’s charming southern friend. Peter, if you’d only told me, I could have gotten a few people together to meet…Maude, is it? Hermie, run ask Lorna to make up the room at the end of the hall and the bath across from it. I can’t put this pretty child in that cubbyhole Kemble insists on when he’s here. My goodness, I don’t think I even knew he had a sister.”
“Please don’t go to any trouble on my account,” I said faintly, my accent feeling as thick as clotted cream in my mouth. “Kemble’s…the room Kemble uses will be fine. I’m really not used to big rooms.”
I fell silent, heat flooding my chest and face. The edges of my hairline were suddenly wet. My room at Belleau was spacious and high-ceilinged.
Hermie gave me a slow smile, very like Peter’s but without the sweetness. I saw that she would be considered, in her circle, a beauty, but she did not capture the eye as he did.
“I’m not sure you’d thank us for that,” she said, “unless you relish the idea of listening to Peter snore all night. The rooms connect to each other, and the lock’s broken. But maybe that’s not such a liability?”
Her smile widened. Innocence and contempt fairly radiated from it.
“Hermione!” Hannah Chambliss said.
“You have a filthy mind, Herm,” Peter said, grinning. But the grin did not reach his eyes. He put his hand lightly on my shoulder.
“Is Dad around?” he said. “I want him to know Maude; she’s as nuts about birds and butterflies as he is.”
“In his study,” his mother said. “I’m sure he’ll be glad to see you…both. I’ll just…” She gave us a crystalline smile and turned away toward the back of the house, no doubt to alert the luckless Lorna. Over her shoulder she said, “Don’t bother with your luggage, my dear; I’ll have Marvin bring it up to you in a bit. You won’t need to dress for dinner; it will just be us. Unless I can persuade Peter’s father to take us to the club.”
And she vanished into the all-pervading rich dimness. It was, I thought miserably, probably the dust from much impeccable old money.
“Never mind, Ma, I’ll get it,” Peter said.
“I don’t imagine Maude brought a lot just for the weekend…unless, of course, you’ll be able to stay longer, Maude?” Hermione said.
“No,” I said. “I have to go back on Sunday.”
“Pity,” she said, as Peter went out into the sunshine to fetch the heavy, scarred old leather case that had been my grandfather’s.
I looked brightly around the foyer and into the drawing room and across into the enormous, vaulted dining room and up the wide, polished stairs. Everywhere there was velvet and brocade and rich, dim old figured carpets and acres of gleaming mahogany, and dull gold shining softly from picture frames and brass and copper trim. Ancestors—with those noses and chins, they could only be Stuarts and Chamblisses—lined the rooms and the stairwell. Their eyes, light gray and cool on me, were no warmer than those of the living Stuarts and Chamblisses in this house. I did not look at Peter, as he came in with my suitcase.
“What a stunning house,” I said.
“Don’t mind Mother,” he said, hugging me briefly. “It’s just her manner. Cold as a dead cod. She can’t help it, it’s pure Stuart. She treats Kemble the same way, and she adores him. Hermie, now, is being a bitch. She does it very well. I always thought she had a crush on old Kemble, even after she married William. Probably came hotfooting it up here to dump the kids on Lorna and get in a little flirting with Kem, and instead she gets his baby sister, and a gorgeous one besides. Herm is used to being the only beauty around here. They’ll be straightened out by dinnertime.”
“Peter, they really don’t like me at all,” I said in a near whisper. “I’d really and truly rather go to a hotel or something….”
“Not on your life. They’ll be straightened out by dinnertime. You’ll see,” he said, hugging me harder. “Come on, now, and meet Dad. He’s the nice one of the family.”
I followed him through that cold, silent house, thinking that I could always simply call a taxi and flee in full rout, if I had to, and wondering how in the world such a family had produced Peter.
Peter was right about his father. Peter senior was just the father I might have fashioned for my Peter: tall, fair-haired, handsome, with the same fine narrow head and features, the same commanding presence, even if, on the older Chambliss, considerably dimmer. And he was kind to me, and interested, then and always. He was knowledgeable, even quietly passionate, about his birds and wildlife, and his hunger to hear of those in my wilderness on Wappoo Creek was unfeigned. He smiled at me and called me “my dear” and said he was glad to have me in his house, that I brightened things up considerably in that cold, muddy Massachusetts spring and he hoped to see a great
deal of me. And I thought he was sincere; it was simply that nothing about Peter’s father truly…connected. He did not, in a sense, displace air. It was, I told Peter much later, like being entertained by the ghost of the original squire of that great old house.
“I know,” Peter said. “Poor Dad. He just sort of faded out somewhere in my growing-up years. He went straight from Princeton into the bank—my great-grandfather’s bank, really—and he’s been there ever since. But I really think that all he ever wanted to do was watch birds and paint wildflowers. He’s really good; it’s what he does every day when we’re in Retreat. When I told him that’s pretty much what your father does, he said he thought your dad must be the luckiest man alive, and the wisest, and I ought to hang on to you. He’s going to be the only ally I have when I spring my little bomb about Northpoint. Mother is going to blow sky high.”
I looked at him, aghast. “You haven’t told them yet?”
“Nope. I’m going to do it this weekend, when I tell them about us. That way most of the fuss about Northpoint will be mitigated by the to-do over the wedding. Mother’s been waiting to get me married off since I could walk. We are going to get married after graduation, aren’t we? I mean, I just assumed we were….”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess so, sure. Of course. But Peter, I don’t think you’re at all right about your mother. I don’t think she’s anywhere near ready for you to get married—not to me, at any rate. If you dump that on her on top of telling her you’re not going into the bank…Lord, she’ll think it’s all my doing and never speak to me again. Really, I wish you’d wait awhile about the wedding. Tell them about teaching, maybe—in private, without me—but wait on the wedding.”
And he said he would, to both those things. But that evening at dinner in the vast candle-flickering dining room, with spaces and unsaid words echoing between the four of us and the hovering Marvin looming large with tureens at our shoulders, he broke the news to his family after all that he would not be going into the family bank in September but had already accepted a position as American History instructor at a small, spartan boys’ preparatory school in Northpoint, New Hampshire, and was going directly there from Princeton to settle into the cottage on campus that came with the position and get things set up to begin teaching in the fall. And his mother did, indeed, blow sky high.
When Hannah Chambliss blew, it was, instead of a white-heat explosion, a white-ice implosion. I came to know those outbursts well over the years, and the later ones were not one whit less wounding or terrifying than that first one. But it had the virtue of newness. I watched in anguish as she stared at her son, her face whitening and her eyes widening until they were ringed with white like those of a maddened horse, and then rose slowly from her seat and laid her hand across her dark silk bosom. Peter watched her too, warily, and Hermione with something near a smile, and Peter’s father, with a sort of faint distaste mingled with distinct apprehension. Marvin took his tureen and left the room.
“You must do what you fancy, Peter,” she said in a throbbing, strangled voice. Tears ran richly under it. “But know that if you do, you will not be welcome in your home again. You will break my heart if you do this, and your father’s too, and disgrace your entire family…but it must be your decision. I have never interfered in your affairs, and I will not do so now.”
“Thanks, Ma,” Peter said, and picked up his fork once more. He turned his attention to the lamb on his plate, and his expression was mild, but I saw that his shoulders were rigid and the skin around his mouth and nose was white. Hermione and Mr. Chambliss both picked up their forks, not looking at either Peter or Hannah. Hannah stood like a woman of snow, or stone. I could not think where to look.
She turned her face to me.
“May I assume that you knew about this…decision of my son’s, Miss…ah, Gascoigne?” she said. Her voice was like an iced lash across my face.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“And you approve, do you?”
“I think Peter should do what he wants with his life,” I said, my voice quavering like a chastised child’s. I could not imagine how I would get out of that awful dining room and away from there.
“Well, I submit that it is less your affair than anything I have ever heard, and your presumption in coming into my home uninvited and abetting my son in this…this…business is the very epitome of tastelessness, and—”
“It’s very much Maude’s business, Mother,” Peter said, looking at her with eyes like dead glacier ice. “Because Maude is doing me the very great honor of marrying me as soon as graduation is over, probably in the Chapel that same afternoon, and will be going to Northpoint with me from there. We hope you will give us your blessing and your attendance, but we are going to do it anyway. And I hope I never hear you speak to Maude like that again.”
Hannah Chambliss turned and walked away from the table and went up the stairs, her dark Grecian head held high, her spine straight, and I did not see her again until the day two months later that Peter brought me to Retreat. By that time she had made her apologies and what she must have considered adequate amends: a car, a van full of family furniture for our small stone cottage in Northpoint, some fine Georgian silver, a check for five thousand dollars “to start you off properly,” and a letter to me in which she said that I must forgive her her outburst, as she had always been a woman of temperament and we had given her two very grave shocks, and that she was sure we would be the best of friends.
But I knew that first day, and Peter did, and probably his father and sister too, that the battle lines between us had been drawn and no tide on earth would really wash them away.
Peter’s father looked at us and started to speak, then did not. Hermione said, “Really, Buddy, you do have the most awful sense of timing.”
And Peter stood, held his hand out to me, and said, “Maude?” I took it, and we walked out of there, stopping only to pick up my heavy old suitcase, which still lurked in the foyer like a poor relation, and waited on the front steps in the chill twilight for the taxi Peter had called. When it came, we went to the train station and boarded a train to Elkton, Maryland, sat up in a dingy Pullman all night while the train plowed south, got off in the soft Maryland dawn, asked a taxi driver to take us to the nearest justice of the peace, and were married by 10 A.M. that morning.
I don’t remember that Peter looked back at his home when we rode away from it.
We were happy during the few June days we spent in the little house on the edge of the Northpoint campus. It stood on the edge of a small birch wood, and I was enchanted with the ghostly silver gleam of the white trunks in the dusk, and the alien smells and sounds of these northern foothill forests, and the strange birds and animals that came close to our small veranda at evening. It was so totally unlike the woods and the swamp at home; the air smelled of pine wine, not sweet heat-heavy old earth, and nipped and bit, instead of pressing down; the nights called for fires and sweaters and piled blankets and the days for brisk movement. It was a minimal little cottage at best, the lowest rank of housing for the lowest rank of faculty, which Peter was, but we did not care about that. The old stone and brick school was nearly deserted in those cool June days, as the summer term had not begun and Peter’s work would not begin until September. We were alone in those green-blue old hills except for the headmaster and his nice no-nonsense wife, who had us to dinner to see that we were comfortably settled in and then mercifully left us alone, and for a few of the custodial staff, small brown men in overalls. We arranged furniture and hung a few prints and pictures and ate the unspeakable meals I cooked and explored the campus and ranged farther afield into the hamlets and villages and up to Laconia and Lake Winnepesaukee itself, twenty miles to our north. There, alone with Peter in a still green twilight on the shores of that beautiful old lake, I heard for the first time the neck-prickling, heart-swelling cry of a loon.
I turned a rapt face to Peter. He smiled.
“You’ll get used to them,” he sa
id. “We have them in the harbor in Retreat.”
I was silent for a while, and then I said, “I don’t want to go, Peter. I’m afraid of Retreat. I’m afraid of everything there. I’m never ever going to be able to please your mother. You think because you can sweet-talk her out of any mood that I can too, but I can’t.”
He laughed. “You just have to let her know right up front she can’t boss you,” he said. “Who’s ever bossed you, Maude? What have you ever been afraid of? You, who handle water snakes and paddle right up to gators and swim in that godforsaken black swamp water and stay out in the jungle by yourself for hours and days?”
I said nothing. I don’t think Peter ever really understood the depth or quality of the fear I felt for his mother and her world and the cost for me of accommodating to it all those years. He could always handle her; she doted on him as I have never known another woman to dote on a son, and her marblelike imperiousness never daunted him as it did me and others. It was useless to try to explain to him how I felt.
But I did say, “Why couldn’t we just vacation somewhere else this one summer and go to Retreat next year? Along the coast here, or on this lake even; it looks wonderful, and there are all sorts of cottages we could rent.”
“Because I don’t start getting paid until September,” Peter said. “And we have just about enough money left to get us up to Retreat. We’re pretty poor, Maudie. We’re not apt to have much money ever. Even if I got to be a headmaster someday, somewhere, there wouldn’t be a lot.”
“I don’t care about that,” I said honestly. “You know that. We’ve talked about it. I’ve never had any money to speak of. I won’t miss it.”
“Well, I’ve had lots. Really lots. I probably won’t get any more, because it’s in Mother’s name and I don’t think she’s going to part with any of it unless I go into the bank. It’s her last weapon; she’s not going to give it up. And I won’t do that. I don’t think I’m ever going to want anything more than teaching here or somewhere. I’m not very ambitious, my poor Maudie. I just wanted to be sure you didn’t mind.”
Colony Page 5
