“The house belongs to the Fowlers,” she said. “From somewhere in Vermont, I think. It’s called the Aerie. I don’t know anything at all about them; they never go to any cocktail parties or anywhere else, and I don’t think I’ve ever even seen her. She’s got some kind of chronic illness for real, but I don’t know what. It all sounds very mysterious and romantic. He’s very protective of her; stays by her side literally all the time. They’ve been coming here for years and years, Parker says, and almost nobody knows them. They don’t have any children, and apparently he does nothing but clip stock coupons and tend to her. I’d love to see that house; it faces its own little cove around the point that’s supposed to have the best view on Cape Rosier. But I don’t guess I ever will. Their property starts at the edge of our beach down there, and he’s adamant about anyone setting foot on it, much less coming up to the house. Has it posted, even. He called the town South Brooksville police once when a gang of colony kids sneaked halfway up his hill.”
“Are they old?” I said.
“I suppose so,” she said. “At least, he looks kind of old. Thin and stooped and always a little sad. I see him sometimes at the general store, or at the market in Castine when I take Mother Potter there.”
“I don’t know but what I envy them,” I said. “Her, especially. I’ll bet she never has to count the damned damask if she doesn’t want to. What about that island down there? The little one?”
She turned to follow my pointing finger, and said, “That’s Osprey Head. There’s been at least one osprey’s nest there ever since Parker was little. He took me over and showed me, the first summer after we were married. It’s right there above that—oh, God. There’s a dog down there in the water.”
“Oh…where?”
“There, just below the ledge right down below us. Oh, Lord, Maude, it’s trapped in a crack and can’t get out of the water, it’s…no, it’s a fawn! Oh, my God, poor little thing! Look, I think its leg is caught, it’s struggling so.”
I was on my feet and at the lip of the ledge in an instant. There, in the foaming white surf where the bay swept up into a narrow cleft in the lowest ledge, a small fawn struggled in the water, desperately trying to keep its drenched head out of the eddy. I could tell, from the way it was positioned, that a tiny foreleg was wedged into the rock. I did not think at all. I jumped up and stepped out of my shoes and was down the rock face and onto the lowest ledge before Amy could even scramble to her feet.
“Maude,” she screamed, “come back! You’ll fall; the undertow is awful there! Please come back; I’ll go get somebody….”
I flung myself down onto my stomach and reached as far down as I could toward the little shape. Spray stung my face and soaked my head and shoulders. It was incredibly cold, like being whipped with tiny iced lashes. I could not reach the fawn. For an instant its head came up and it looked straight into my eyes. There was no fear in its huge brown eyes, only a kind of terrible, intense, focused innerness. It was the will to survive as naked and pure as I have ever seen it. I saw the place where the miniature leg vanished in the cleft of the rock; there was no way it could free itself. I saw, too, that beneath it a pale shelf of rock lay flat, like a platform, just beneath the transparent green surface. If it could only stand on that…or if I could….
“Amy,” I shouted, “go get help. Go get somebody with a rope or something. I’m going in after it. There’s a rock I can stand on—”
“No!” she shrieked. “Don’t go in there! People drown in that cold before they even know it!”
“Go!” I screamed, and went over the ledge and into the sea.
At first it was like plunging into fire. My skin burned with it. And then the cold hit, and breath left me, and I clung there rib deep, thinking I would never get another breath, would die of suffocation before drowning was even possible. And then the fawn gave a tiny, despairing bleat and I clung to the ledge and reached out my hand for it and touched it. It scrambled and thrashed in terror at my touch, so tiny that I could feel each birdlike rib, and the little triphammer beating of its heart. It must be incredibly tired…. I edged farther along the ledge toward it, and finally found secure footholds against the dragging tide and reached out and put my hand beneath its belly, so that it was borne up on my palm. Instantly, with a kind of shuddering sigh, it stopped its struggling and slumped against my hand. Its breathing was ragged and deep, almost a pant. It could not possibly have kept afloat much longer.
I tried to find the point where its leg entered the crevice, but my other hand was so numb with cold that I could feel nothing at all. Then I realized I could not feel my feet, either. And it was becoming hard to breathe. How long had I heard that a person could live in extremely cold water? Not long…it suddenly occurred to me that I truly might die if I did not get out of that water. And that I could not get out unless I let go of the fawn. And then, that perhaps I could not get out even if I did. With all feeling gone, I did not know where my toe and handholds were. I had no recourse but to cling to the ledge and the fawn and pray that Amy brought help fast. I could no longer hear her retreating cries.
Oddly, I do not remember being frightened. Not nearly so frightened, at any rate, as I had been earlier that week, on Parker’s boat. I can remember whispering Peter’s name, over and over, and saying to the fawn once or twice, “I’m here. I’m not going to let you go,” and seeing it look back and up at me before its head dropped again. I remember thinking that I had always rather thought somehow that I would lie one day beside my mother in Saint Michael’s churchyard, and that if I drowned off this lonely cape they might never find me at all. And a little later, I remember thinking that I was not cold at all any more, and that since I wasn’t, this wasn’t so bad and I could hang on indefinitely.
“We’re going to be fine,” I whispered to the fawn. It was probably the last thing I would have said to anyone.
I was very nearly unconscious when I felt hard, strong arms under my arms from above and heard a deep, nasal voice that was not Peter’s saying, “Just a minute now. Hang on, dear. Just a minute more.”
“Take the fawn,” I whispered through numb lips. “Take the fawn….”
“I’ve got it,” the voice said, and the weight lifted off my hand, and in a moment more the arms pulled me straight up out of that killing cold and onto the top of the rock ledge. A heavy blanket went around me, though I could not feel warmth or anything else. Blackness flickered at the edges of my closed eyelids, and I knew it was going to take me down. I felt myself being swung up into someone’s arms and held hard against a wide chest. Whoever held me set off with me at a run.
“Get the fawn,” I whispered, trying to pound my fists against the chest. “Go back and get the fawn.”
“I’ll come back for it,” he said. “It’s all right; I’ve covered it up. I know what to do for it.”
“Thank you,” I managed, and let go, and the blackness took me under. From far above, as if on the surface of dark water, I could hear Amy Potter crying.
When I woke up for good and all, it was a day and a half later, and I was lying in the big bed in Peter’s parents’ room, weighted down with quilts and blankets, a hot water bottle at my feet. Peter stood at the foot of the bed, his face tired and white, his gray eyes puffed with fatigue. My mother-in-law sat by the fire that roared on the hearth, despite the thick heat in the room. Her spine was straight as a birch tree, and her face was white and set. Her lips were a thin sunless line of disapproval.
Peter hugged me and kissed me and said he was going down to bring the hot broth Christina had made up to me.
“Dr. Lincoln said for you to have it once every three hours,” he said, trying to smile. “And he said a little shot of whiskey in it wouldn’t hurt, either. For you and me.”
He went out of the room. His mother and I looked at each other.
“Did I have the doctor?” I said weakly. My chest ached as if I had been hit there, hard. My voice was rasping and frail.
“Four tim
es,” she said levelly. “Including the middle of the night. Not to mention the minister, and every woman in the colony over the age of ten, with flowers and food and notes of sympathy. And Peter, who has not slept at all. And Amy Potter, who has slept only a little more. And, of course, myself.”
“I’m—I’m sorry….”
“You should be, Maude. You should be quite, quite sorry. You have caused everyone no end of worry, and of course you were very nearly killed. I wonder what it is going to take to keep you away from that sea.”
“I won’t go near it again.”
“We all hope that is true. For our sakes as well as your own. Not to mention that of Micah Willis, who could easily have lost his own life trying to save yours.”
“Micah Willis,” I mumbled stupidly.
“Christina’s husband. He’d just come in from the boathouse when he heard Amy screaming. You would be dead now if he had not. We owe him more than we can ever repay, of course.”
I lay there, as miserable as I have ever been, will ever be again. She was right. Of course, she was right. There was nothing for me in that cold sea. That sea was nothing to me but the author of grief.
“Oh,” I said. “The fawn…what about the fawn?”
“The miserable little creature is dead,” Mother Hannah said coldly. “Its leg was broken. It couldn’t have been saved no matter what you did. Micah went back down and shot it.”
Chapter
Four
For the next five days Dr. Lincoln and Mother Hannah conspired to keep me in bed, or at least sequestered on the sun-porch chaise, covered with quilts and throws and the omnipresent Hudson Bay blankets, and for once I was glad of the cover, if not the incarceration. One of the cape’s notorious five-day fogs came ghosting in on the night of the incident with the fawn and held Retreat fast in its cottony manacles for nearly a week. Without the sun, the cottage stayed damp and cold all day, and I would have been grateful to stay in my bed upstairs, where a fire could be lit. But Mother Hannah put paid to that notion.
“With the fog and nobody being able to get out on the water, everyone will be calling on you,” she said. “You can’t get up yet, and this is the only faintly proper place I can think to put you where the men can visit. If it were only the women, I’d just bring them on up to you or put you in our bedroom. Of course, by rights this should be the week we called on them. Your little swim has upset more than a few applecarts, dear Maude.”
“Well, Ma, you can’t blame Maude for the fog, at least,” Peter put in cheerfully from the old Windsor chair at my side. He too was fogbound and seemed content to loll beside me in a heavy sweater, eating apples and reading course literature for his first classes in the fall.
“I don’t blame Maude for anything, of course,” Mother Hannah said, putting plates of Christina’s warm doughnuts about the living room and sun porch. “I only point out that not many new brides have the entire colony come to them instead of the other way around. I can’t recall its ever happening.”
“Time it did, then,” said Peter, snagging a doughnut. “Start a new tradition.”
“Leave the doughnuts alone, Peter, please,” his mother said crisply. “I don’t want Tina to have to make more this morning. She’s got her hands full with the laundry; it will never dry in this mess.”
“There are enough doughnuts there to feed the entire county,” Peter said lazily. “Who do you think is going to come out in this fog to eat them?”
“Everybody, of course,” Mother Hannah said, and went into her bedroom to put on a suitable morning frock.
And they did. By ten-thirty the sun porch was full of the Retreaters who were in residence, muffled in sweaters and scarves and, in the case of the old ladies, hatted and gloved, sipping coffee and tea and munching Christina’s delicate doughnuts with relish. Wrapped in a bright Spanish shawl of Mother Hannah’s that she said had always overpowered her but suited my baroque coloring perfectly, I lay under layers of damp wool and shook hands and had my hot cheek kissed and murmured that I was perfectly fine and they were so kind to call until my head swam and I could remember no names and few faces. I had met all of them, I knew, in the dining hall on the night of my arrival, but it seemed to me that ages—eons—had passed since then. But of course it had scarcely been a week.
The occupants of Braebonnie came first, en masse, led by Parker’s towering father, Philip, red-haired like his son and similarly boyish of face but altogether larger in scale and without Parker’s compensatory slyness. Philip Potter was a mastodon of a man. He roared his greeting at me, thumped Peter on the back, grinned and kissed Mother Hannah on the cheek when she turned her head hastily to avoid being kissed on the lips, and stumped off in search of Big Peter and a glass of something decent for a foggy day.
“Don’t have to wait for the yardarm when you can’t see the damned thing,” he shouted, and I heard, presently, the clink of the decanter that Peter’s father kept on the desk in the little room behind the living room that served as his study, and men’s voices mingled in the patterns of long familiarity. Parker, who came next with his timid, sparrowlike mother, Helen, kissed me on the forehead and whispered that I looked like a Cuban doxy in that shawl and vanished in search of his father and the decanter. Peter looked after him but stayed valiantly at my side to present his bride to his childhood friends and neighbors. I thought that in the close, chilly little sun porch, with only a yellow lamp for light and thick white fog pressing close against the small-paned windows, he was like a fire on an open hearth. People clustered around him as if for actual warmth. Men pounded him on the back and shook his hand in obvious liking; old ladies simpered; young women smiled widely and held his hand for perhaps a beat longer than I liked. I wondered, suddenly and for the first time, if any of them there that morning had hoped to be in my place one day. It seemed more than likely.
Amy came last, with Mamadear tottering fiercely on her arm. The old woman looked like a malevolent baby, muffled to the tips of her ears and chin with shawls and sweaters. She wore on her head, astonishingly, a sailor’s watch cap, or what looked like one, rolled down until it sat atop her falcon’s eyebrows, giving her the look, Peter whispered, of one of those coconut heads you get in Miami, carved to look like a pirate. Her eyes glared out from between strata of wool, yellow as an owl’s.
“All she needs is a dagger in her teeth,” Peter said. He said this aloud, to Amy, and I gasped in horror until I realized that Mamadear was deaf as a post, especially when swathed in wool. Amy grinned at Peter and kissed me.
“Forget the dagger,” Amy said. “Her teeth are all she needs. The better to eat you with, my dear.”
“What?” shouted Mamadear. “What are you whispering about, Amy? I can’t stand it when you whisper; you do it all the time. I shall tell Parker.”
“We’re saying what a becoming cap you’re wearing, Mrs. Potter,” Peter said loudly, taking her savage little talons in his hands and smiling into her face. Incredibly, she stopped scowling and grinned back, an arch, terrible caricature of a flirtatious smile.
“Go on with you, Peter Chambliss,” she shrilled. “I’m wise to your ways. Got them from your grandfather. Step back, now, and let me have a look at this wife of yours. Did somebody tell me she came from Egypt?”
“Charleston, Mrs. Potter,” Peter said, his mouth trembling with laughter. Mine, too, quivered as I put up my hand to the old lady. Amy flushed brick red and turned away. Mamadear leaned over and peered into my face.
“Gussie Stallings said nigger,” she said. “You certainly don’t look it to me. Gussie never could tell the truth to save her life. But you surely aren’t one of us, are you? Are you a Jew? Surely, Peter, you wouldn’t bring a Jew here.”
“Come on, Mamadear,” Amy said, giving the old woman’s arm a sharp jerk. Her face had gone from the pink of mirth to the white of anger. “Let’s get some doughnuts down your craw. Shut you up for a minute, at least. I’m sorry, Maude. She yelled until Papa Philip said to bring her, and of c
ourse that meant me…. I’d say she didn’t know what she was saying, but she does. So I’ll just apologize for all of us, and you won’t have to bother with her again.”
“What are you saying?” the old woman shouted.
“I’m saying it’s time to have some tea!” Amy shouted back.
“Is this the one that stayed out with Parker all night on the boat? That Micah Willis brought in wet as a drowned rat with no clothes on, carrying her right up in his arms?”
“Come on, Mamadear!” Amy dragged her grandmother-in-law away. The old voice floated back to Peter and me.
“She doesn’t look like the kind of girl a Chambliss would marry, does she? Lying up there on that chaise, as la-di-da as a horse. I always thought he’d marry Gretchen Constable. Hannah always favored Gretchen….”
I looked at Peter. His face was thunderous. I laughed. He grinned then, too.
“Gretchen Constable?” I said.
“One of the girls who grew up here summers. Married Burden Winslow the day he graduated from Princeton, just like they’d planned since they were thirteen. We were never anything more than friends, and that old harridan knows it as well as anybody up here. Mama never had any such ideas about her that I know about. Gretch is older and lots richer. God, somebody ought to throttle old women when they hit eighty; it’s when the Cute Old Lady syndrome sets in. You know, where you can just say anything awful you think of, and do any damned spiteful thing you feel like, and people are supposed to say how you’re so feisty and full of life. Or maybe it’s just up here that it happens. Something in the water. I don’t see how Parker stands it.”
“I don’t think he does,” I said acidly. “I think it’s Amy and Parker’s mother who stand it. Mostly Amy, from what I can see. I don’t imagine Parker and his father have had anything to do with her in years.”
He gave me an odd look out of his long gray eyes and then turned to greet the next arrivals Mother Hannah was shepherding onto the sun porch. I sighed. It seemed to me that she was leading in a small army of people, and at their head stumped my first foe in Retreat, the redoubtable Augusta Stallings.
Colony Page 10
