“Old school ties,” I said.
“There’s one like it on practically every bed in Retreat,” Peter said. “It was my grandfather and some of his club members who found this place and established the colony. For years afterward they only let in fellow Tigers, and then they started to have their own little tigers—conceived literally under the orange and black, you might say—and one thing led to another, and now Retreat is almost a Princeton alumni colony. You’re going to get sick of ‘Going Back to Old Nassau’ pretty soon.”
“No Yale? No Harvard?”
“Very few. They go to Northeast Harbor, or Bar, or somewhere. Or buy their own islands. Just Princeton. And virtually all of the Seven Sisters, of course.”
“Of course,” I said in despair. “Oh, Peter, I’m going to stand out like a sore thumb. No Boston, no New England, no tennis, no sailing, no Seven Sisters. Not even a college degree. Not even a year of college. What am I going to do?”
“You could always stay in bed and fuck your husband,” he said. “You’d be the envy of every woman from sixteen to ninety. Like I said, nobody does it in Retreat.”
“Well, how come there’re so many of you?”
“Oh, we screw at home,” he said. “That’s what those long dark winters are for.”
I looked at the huge bed. “It’s hard to think about anything else, with that thing looming up like an iceberg,” I said, grinning.
He laughed. For some reason, there was little mirth in it. I looked at him inquiringly.
“Well, think hard,” he said. “Because it’s apt to be what you do the most of in that bed.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She’s put us right over her head,” he said. “This room is directly above the big downstairs bedroom they use, and this bed is directly above theirs. You could drop a pin in here, and they’d hear it down there. My old room is at the other end of the house; I’ve actually set off firecrackers in it and no one knew. Unless you like the idea of my mother and father lying there listening to every hump we hump, we’re going to have to come up with something else.”
“Well, let’s just move back into yours.”
“Dry rot,” he said, “Remember?”
“Surely there are other places?”
“Yep. A nice room directly next to theirs where you can hear even better, and four bunk beds in a room up under the eaves where nobody could breathe from July on, and four hammocks on the upstairs sun porch. With huge holes in the screen. So that every black fly and mosquito in Maine would feast off your ass from now until September.”
Red rage flooded me. “I don’t care if she hears us every night,” I said hotly. “She must know we do it. She must have done it at least once. Here you are, after all. I will not stop…doing that…just because she moved us in over her head. Peter, I know it was on purpose.”
“Of course it was,” he said. Laughter and anger warred in his long face.
“Well, are you going to let her stop us?”
“No,” he said. “I’ll figure something out. We could wait and do it when there’s a thunderstorm. Or we could sneak up here and do it at midmorning, when she’s out calling. Or we could do it over on one of the little islands; the moss there is as soft as a mattress. Or we could take the boat out and drop anchor around the point and do it.”
“Peter! I think you’re afraid to let your mother know you make love to me!”
“Not afraid of her. Just afraid she’ll spoil it for us, if she catches us at it. I don’t want that to happen.”
I looked at him more closely. The laughter had left his eyes. He was serious.
“Well, she’s not going to spoil it for me, and she’s not going to catch me at it, as you say, and I’m going to do it with you whenever I please, and I please this very night, after we get back from dinner,” I said indignantly. “The very idea!”
“Maude…”
“Hush. Don’t say another word. You are as good as fucked right now, Peter Chambliss. You are at this moment a walking fucked man,” I said.
“Well, since you put it that way,” Peter said, and put his hands around me from behind and cupped my breasts. I felt the little point of flame lick at my groin.
“How long does dinner last?” I whispered, reaching around to stroke the hardness of him against my back.
“Too long,” Peter said. “Way, way too long.”
He was right. The rest of the evening, though it was essentially over by nine thirty, was too long. When we went back downstairs, Augusta Stallings was there working on a large martini and Peter’s father had retreated to the long sofa before the fireplace and Peter’s mother introduced me and made her destined-to-be-legendary remark about the French and corruption, and from then on the evening and night blurred into one long smear of hot-cheeked, blinded misery. It has remained so in my memory ever since. I can recall certain highlights—the memory of Mrs. Stallings sitting down in a low wicker armchair in the living room and missing and landing on her ample, corseted rump on the sisal rug, spilling not a drop of her third drink, is the most vivid, but there were others—but mainly, my first full evening in Retreat is a cipher, a void.
When I think back now, a low hum of seemly New England voices in the rustic dining hall rushes at me out of memory, and the warm fragrance of clam chowder and hot rolls, and the nodding of many narrow fairish heads, and the pressure of many cool fingers on mine, and the flash of many fine teeth, and the following wash of low conversation as we made our way on to our table. I get a sense of many young men and women who looked much like Peter reaching out to enfold him, not so much with their arms as their smiles, and thinking that I would never, never feel that welcome; I get a flash of several individual faces above cardigans and pearls or blue blazers. One—dark, clever, impish, framed in bobbed hair nearly the color of mine—stands out clearly: Amy Potter, the first time I ever saw her. I hear soft, flat voices asking me if I sailed or played tennis or bridge and assuring me I’d learn in no time. But there is no order and progression to the images. I was too tired and too cowed and, suddenly, too homesick for that other, warmer sea and the indulgent old city beside it.
When we got home, it was my mother-in-law who finally shooed us upstairs. Peter had lapsed into silence, sitting beside his father on the sofa with the birch logs snapping in the fireplace, and made no move to rise, and I would have died in my tracks rather than initiate any movement up to where that huge bed crouched. I sat looking at yellowing old magazines, my eyes growing heavier and finally drooping, until Mother Hannah came out of the rudimentary little kitchen and said, “You children should get some sleep now. You’ve had a full day, and you’ll want to be out and around with the birds in the morning. Peter, Parker Potter said to tell you he needs a partner on the court at eight, and he’ll wait until eight fifteen for you. Tina’s making pancakes in the morning; she said to tell you. She brought you the first of the blueberry jam. Maude, dear, is there anything you need?”
Nothing but a long, hard, teeth-jarring, eyelid-rattling fuck from your son, I thought, getting to my feet.
“No, thank you,” I said.
“Well, then, good night. If you should want anything, just call out. I’ll hear you.”
No, you won’t, I thought.
But of course she did. Peter was reluctant when at last we slid under the heavy covers in the big bed, but slowly, and in total silence, I teased him with my fingers and then my hands, and then arms and legs and feet, and soon he had no choice but to roll over to cover me with his body, and only a moment after that he entered me. He was quieter than he had ever been before, and so was I; we strained and thrust together in total silence, our muscles clenching to keep from shaking the old iron bed. But it was no use. Both our climaxes were beginning when I heard her voice, as clear as a funeral bell, drifting up through the floor. “Peter? Are you ill, dear?”
He stiffened and lay rigid; I felt him slip out of me.
“No, Ma,” he called, his voice tight.
<
br /> “I thought you called out.”
“No, Ma.”
He lay beside me in the darkness for a moment, quiet and still, and then he said, “You still game?”
“Oh, yes….”
And again, as the damp heat flowered deep within me and all of that secret darkness opened for him, came the voice.
“Peter? Petie?”
“Ma, I’m fine,” Peter called back. His voice now was flat and furious. For some reason, I began to laugh. I laughed and I laughed, even as, inside, I ached for him, burned with incompletion. I could not stop. I stuffed the covers into my mouth, but the silent shaking went on and on.
“By God, come on, Maude,” Peter said between clenched teeth, and got out of bed and jerked me after him, and caught up the Princeton blanket and pulled both of us into the tiny, freezing bathroom off the bedroom.
“What?” I whispered, doubled over with laughter. “What are you doing, you damned fool?”
He threw the blanket into the stained old claw foot bathtub and half pushed me in on top of it.
“I’m fucking my wife,” he muttered. “I started it and by God I’m going to finish it and Mother can go kiss a quahog if she doesn’t like it. This sonofabitch is bolted to the floor; if she can hear it thumping and squeaking she’s a goddamn witch. Lie down, Maude.”
I did. My head hung over one end of the bathtub and my feet over the other, and my stomach heaved with silent laughter. I looked at my tall thin naked husband, standing over me. He was shivering with cold and rage and his hair hung down in his slitted eyes, and he was fully and powerfully erect. I loved him absolutely. The laughter threatened to burst from my lips and sweep down the stairs and drown my mother-in-law.
“She is a witch,” I gasped. “I could have told you that. She’s turned me into a pig and you into a whooping crane with a hard-on.”
And so it was that we made love for the first time in Retreat, Peter and I: laughing and wallowing in a cold porcelain bathtub on a black-and-orange Princeton University blanket, with a washcloth in my mouth to stop my cries and the sound of Peter’s mother’s voice over his laughter as he came: “Peter? Are you sure you’re all right?”
I awoke the next morning to pale sunlight in a square on the bedclothes and the flickering wash of sea light on the ceiling. I was alone in the bed. Downstairs I could hear nothing at all, and I had no idea what time it was. Summer dawns come very early in Retreat; it could as easily be five thirty as nine. Peter might well be on the tennis court by now.
I lay still, not wanting to go downstairs after last night’s bedroom farce. It was chilly in the little room, but my body still held the warmth of his. I might have him to myself in the nights, I thought, but each morning that dawned would draw him up and away from me and out into this place where he walked as surely and carelessly as a young king, where I did not think I could ever truly follow. I felt my throat tighten and my eyes begin to sting. I felt as abandoned and alone as I ever have in my life.
From somewhere close by I heard a voice, old and fairly quavering with malice, say, “If I had treated my husband’s grandmother as badly as you do me, he would have divorced me. You are an ill-bred and thoughtless and self-serving child, and I shall have to tell Parker that you have forgotten my breakfast again for the third time in a week. He will not be pleased, Amy. Oh, no.”
I got out of bed and went in my thin nightgown to the window and looked out. The morning was still and yellow and blue; the sea glittered. The big house just behind ours, Braebonnie, was undoubtedly the source of that malignant voice. The Potters’, I remembered. The Potters senior and junior, and the senior Potter’s old mother. It had to be her voice I had heard. And its target must be, had to be, the vivid dark-eyed girl I had met last night at the dining hall. Amy, young Parker Potter’s wife. My heart actually contracted with pain for her pain at the old woman’s hands, and knife-edged sympathy.
“Oh, poor Amy,” I said aloud, but only just. “I know, I know.”
And then, incredibly, I heard the sound of a young girl’s joyous laugh. And that remembered voice, as cool and light as rain, said, “Oh, Mamadear, what an old fool you are! You had your silly breakfast two hours ago. You’ve forgotten again.”
And a door shut and the voices trailed away. I got back into bed and lay there, watching the sun square creep across my comforter. I smiled. I knew, as surely as if I could see into the future, that in Amy Parker I had an ally and would soon have a friend.
Chapter
Three
The first week I was in Retreat I met three people who altered the channel of my life as surely as dynamite will alter a watercourse. The first, of course, was Amy Potter; before Amy I had never really had a friend; afterward she was the benchmark against whom all friendships were measured. The second was her husband, Parker. The third was a man who saved my life before I knew his name. They are all dead now. It is ironic that so often the stream outlives the cataclysms that shape it.
I met Parker Potter the morning of my first full day in the colony and by its end had come to wish the meeting had never occurred. Though he never in his life ceased to hug or kiss me in greeting, or to tease me with what seemed to be affection, I always knew he saw me through a scrim of enmity. Parker was as bad an enemy as his wife was a good friend.
When I came downstairs that morning the cottage was deserted. I had been unsure what one wore mornings in Retreat, and so had put on the dressing gown that Kemble had given me for a wedding present. It was a beautiful heavy satin that fell like spilled syrup, coral piped in white, with handmade lace on the lapels. I walked in it through the gloom of the downstairs and out onto the porch and breathed in the sights and sounds of Retreat in the morning, and my heart, despite its ballast of uncertainty and apprehension, rose up singing like a lark. The air was crisp and damp and pine-scented, the bay danced cobalt, white sails flitted sharply against the faraway blue of the Camden Hills like butterflies, and the crystal air swarmed with birdsong, so that it seemed to rise up out of the very earth, seep from the birch woods, pour from the rocks. There was a whole web of sounds and smells that were alien to me, and all of a sudden I was very happy. This entire exotic northern world lay waiting for me to explore, to come to know through my very pores, as I did the wild country of the Wappoo Creek swamp forests. I thought of the long lazy summer days ahead of me, this and all the summers of my life, spent with Peter deep in the woods or on the rocks of the shore with a book or a sketchbook, or even on the calm surfaces of the little coves that I could see from the porch, in a canoe. I smiled and stretched my arms out as far as I could, and closed my eyes, and breathed deeply.
“Good morning,” two nasal voices called from the path in front of the cottage, and I opened my eyes to see, first, two ramrod-straight old ladies in many layers of starched cotton, gloves, and sun hats, and, second, that my lace lapels had lapped open and the morning sun was shining on an unmistakable suck mark on my left breast. One of the old ladies lifted a lorgnette from her bosom and examined me. I pulled my lapels together hastily and grinned, as Kemble once said, like a possum in the middle of a cow plop, feeling the heat flood up my neck to my hairline.
“Good morning,” I called. “Isn’t it a glorious day?”
“Very nice,” said the first, averting her eyes delicately.
“Please tell your dear mother-in-law that we’ll call again when…you are more settled in,” said the second. In her hand I saw, silver against the white glove, her card case at the ready. They marched down the path in lockstep, and into the road, and on toward the next cottage, heads together. I could just imagine the gist of their conversation. So much for dressing gowns in Retreat.
I crept into the kitchen, found it empty, and opened the old icebox door. It was nearly empty except for a blue earthenware pitcher of milk. I poured some into a tumbler and drank it, sweet and fresh, and then my eye fell on a note propped against the sugar bowl on the old scrubbed deal table in the very center of the slanting floor. It
was from my mother-in-law:
Maude, dear,
Peter and Parker Potter from Braebonnie have gone sailing and will likely be out until dinnertime. I have taken Christina to the fishmonger’s truck. We will be back about ten. I thought we would start our calls this morning, and then Mrs. Stallings wants us for a little luncheon. This afternoon I’ll show you the cottage routine. A simple cotton morning dress will do nicely.
Love, Mother Hannah.
My heart fell to my feet. Calls? Luncheons with other old ladies…perhaps, even, the two I had just put to rout? The cottage routine? Why had Peter left me alone? Why had he not even wakened me? Last night had, in the end, been transcendent…. Suddenly, as clearly as if I had the Sight, I saw the shape of my days in Retreat.
“No, I won’t,” I said aloud. “Not today. Tomorrow, maybe, but not today, not until I’ve seen Peter and talked things over with him; not until I’ve seen the colony and the countryside and been down to the ocean. I haven’t even been down to the ocean yet.”
I flew upstairs and skinned into slacks and a sweater and tennis shoes, such as I might wear into the woods at Belleau in the autumn, and ran out of the house and down the dirt road that led, I knew, to the yacht club. I would pretend I had not seen the note. Time enough tomorrow to begin my sentence.
The Cove Harbor Yacht Club was then, as it is now, a rambling brown-weathered shingle Cape Cod, sagging porches spread around it like skirts, sunk gently into the long grass at the very tip of Cove Point. Early wildflowers nodded around it. On one side, that morning, the great empty bay stretched away toward Islesboro, which lay like a cloud in the middle distance. Beyond it the Camden Hills, that had been so sharp they seemed to vibrate in the eye when last I looked, were losing their definition in the dazzle of the sun. There was a peculiar softening to the edges of the nearer, smaller, dark green islands. It was hard to calculate the time of day.
Colony Page 7
