“Jesus,” muttered Peter under his breath. “It’s Stallings, Inc., with Grendel’s Mother at the fore.” He raised his voice. “Good morning, Mrs. Stallings. It’s a lovely morning for ducks, isn’t it?”
Augusta Stallings ignored him and came to peer down at me as Mamadear had done. I smiled tightly up at her, vowing silently that if I ever got to my feet no old lady in Retreat was ever going to be able to look down on me again. It was definitely a position of weakness.
“Well, my girl, not a week here and you’ve put the colony on its ear twice,” she said. “Looks like you southern girls just can’t stay out of the water. I was telling Hannah that we won’t need to have concerts or musicales this summer; we can just put you in the water and watch the fireworks.”
“They were accidents, Mrs. Stallings,” Peter said levelly, and I knew that he was finally angry. “You know, like when you fell out of the chair here the other night? Just accidents. I know Maude regrets them as much as you do.”
She rounded on him to say something, but one of the younger women who had come in with her took her arm and murmured, “Mama Gussie, did you fall and not tell us? What are we going to do with you?” And one of the men said, “Mama, you promised you wouldn’t go visiting without one of the girls along.”
I looked at them all. There were, besides old Augusta Stallings, four middle-aged men and four slightly younger women, and at first glance they seemed as identical to me as buckshot. The men were round and soft and short, like their mother, and had wet-looking black hair and hooded hazel eyes and full pink mouths, and the women looked remarkably like them except that their mouths were thinner and paler and their eyes more shadowed, as if with fatigue. All eight had a high color in their cheeks, and all wore prim, too-tight clothes under their sweaters, and all talked in the same loud, uninflected tones as Augusta Stallings, and all their conversation was of themselves: their cottages, their children, their servants, their boats, their activities back in Providence over the past winter, the state of their health. When old Augusta led them off toward the doughnuts and coffee, still talking at full bore among themselves about themselves, I turned to Peter and said, “I will never on this earth keep them straight. Except that they’re all Stallingses, aren’t they?”
“How could they be anything else?” he said, amusement and annoyance in his voice. “The Stallingses are our collective punishment for defrauding the natives of their land. They’ve been here since day one, and if nothing else they have heeded the Lord’s dictum, ‘Go forth and multiply.’ They have God’s own amount of money from the old grandfather’s patent medicine, which I gather cured an entire nation of its hemorrhoids or something else unspeakable before it merged with Bayer, and since then they’ve never lifted a finger. Oh, the boys—that’s Albert and John and George and Henry, whom you just met—sit on the board and go to offices back in Providence, but nobody pays any attention to them there. Here either, for that matter, but they never notice, since they stick together so and hardly ever mingle with the rest of us. For which we give silent thanks every day. They’re duller than dishwater and dimmer than unlit bulbs, but they’re too arrogant to realize it. They drive everybody nuts, but I think the only real harm they’re capable of is voting in a bloc at the yacht club. As many of them as there are, they could turn us into a skating rink if they wanted to. Fortunately, they all live together, so you’ll know how to avoid them, anyway.”
“All together in one cottage?” I said incredulously. “It must be the biggest one in Maine.”
“Well, the big house is, practically,” Peter grinned in enjoyment. “It’s enormous. ‘Utopia,’ the old man named it. Thirty rooms, I’m told. But old Gussie lives there by herself. Won’t let any of the boys or her daughters-in-law or her thousands of grandchildren spend the night under the ancestral roof. The boys all have identical smaller cottages on the shore down from Braebonnie toward the club, clustered around the big one like baby pigs around a sow. And they and their ever-swelling broods are jammed in there just waiting for the old bat to kick off. There’s going to be a fight for that big house when she does that will put the Civil War to shame when it comes to brother against brother.”
“And these are the people whom the soul selects as her own society and shuts the door?” I said. “These are the plain-living high-minded people for whom Retreat, according to your mother, is famous?”
“To mother, the Stallingses are the horrible exception that proves the rule,” he said. “And to give us our due, I don’t think you’ll find anybody else precisely like them here. The Winslows and the Conants may not be exactly plain-living, but they’re about a million times higher-minded than Stallings mère et fils, which may not be saying a lot.”
Dr. Lincoln and his wife came in then, and I smiled in genuine pleasure to see him. His had been a consistently kind face and voice to me during the past week, and I had found nothing but succor at his cool, gentle hands. He leaned over me as he had done many times already before, holding my hands in his, his long index finger automatically finding my pulse, and smiled his vague, sweet smile. Though I knew that he was near seventy, he looked nearer fifty, thin and erect, with a full head of only slightly graying dark hair and mild blue eyes with the soft cloudiness of myopia in them.
“I see our little mermaid is much recovered,” he said, and I remembered through the fog of the past few days that his speech was gentle, formal, and nearly archaic, and his entire demeanor absolutely correct, if softened by a kind of otherworldliness. I had heard from Peter that he was a distinguished physician on staff at a number of fine Boston area hospitals, retired now; a classical musician of some note; father to three seemingly interchangeable pale aesthetes known in Retreat simply as “the boys”; and totally devoted to his piquant small wife, Mary. She stood beside him this morning, petite and very pretty and as seemingly untouched at sixty-odd years as a child or a doll, her porcelain face sweet and unlined.
“We’ve worried about you a great deal, dear,” she said in a soft silver treble. “Such a terrible introduction to this lovely place. I was afraid you’d be quite put off. But Ridley said he thought you were made of sterner stuff, and I can see that he’s right, as usual. You’re looking very well and pretty. A fine choice, Peter.”
“Thank you,” Peter and I said together, and laughed. Dr. Lincoln straightened up and turned to his wife.
“Are you all right, my dear?” he said, and, to us, “Mary is having trouble with her back this summer. We’re sleeping on a board.”
I bit back laughter and saw Peter do the same.
“I do hope it isn’t serious,” I said.
“Oh, no,” Mary Lincoln said. “I think it’s just the fog and damp. I do so look forward to July. Well, Maude dear, you must come over to Land’s End and see us when Ridley says you can get up. I make a lovely lemon sponge on Tuesdays. And I’d love to see a bright young face in that dark old barn; the house belonged to his grandfather, and Ridley won’t let me change a single thing. I’d have let some light in long ago, I can tell you. I think the dark and damp is one reason the boys don’t come oftener.”
“The reason they don’t come oftener, dear heart, is that they all have jobs,” her husband said fondly, with the air of one saying something he has said many times before.
“Oh, toot,” she said blithely. “They could come if they wanted to.”
The doctor rolled his eyes comically to heaven and led her back into the living room. I squared my shoulders and looked at Peter.
“They’re all going to remember me as the girl who fell into the bay twice in one week and may be a darky to boot,” I said. “But there’s no way on earth I’m going to be able to remember all of them. You’re going to have to help me.”
“You’re doing fine,” he said. “Don’t worry. I won’t leave your side. And I’ll fill you in on everybody; you’ll have all summer to get them straight. Nobody expects you to remember so many people at once.”
It was a good thing. Lookin
g back, I cannot quite separate the ones I met that morning from those who came later that June, but of the stream of faces that emerged out of that first fog I recall especially Guildford and Dierdre Kennedy from Corpore Mens Sanos (Camp Corpy) around the point, Philadelphians both, he a professor at Hamilton College, she a former suffragette, and their three daughters named, astoundingly, Clio, Thalia, and Calliope.
“They’re eccentric as hell and terrifyingly athletic,” Peter said later. “They do all manner of good works here and at home, are relentlessly hearty and hardy—I hear she swims naked in the open bay every morning, two miles exactly—and they’re one-worlders with a vengeance. Dress up in some kind of international dress once a month and have a ghastly dinner party and serve the food of each chosen nation. I happened onto Japan last year and got, as God is my witness, squid and seaweed. They named the girls for the Muses, of course, but in poor Callie’s case I think Calliope is a fair description. She sings at the musicales and sounds just like a merry-go-round whistle. And talk about high-minded: when you go there for bridge, he bids in Greek and she replies in Latin. It’s a pain in the ass, but they’re good sorts, really.”
Next came the Valentine girls, two old maid sisters who lived in a vine-shrouded, falling-down cottage in the grove behind the dining hall, near the Compound, called Petit Trianon. One look told me that the Misses Charlotte and Isabelle Valentine from Baltimore, genteelly rich from their piratical papa’s railroad fortune, were the two old ladies I had outraged with my coral satin on the morning after my arrival. The same white-gloved fingers raised the same lorgnettes, and the same old lips puckered into well-worn grooves of disapproval, and the same raptor’s eyes took my measure as they had that morning. They had faint, exhausted southern voices and skin like finely wrinkled silk velvet, and smelt powerfully of some kind of jasmine bath powder.
“So sorry to hear of your misfortunes,” Miss Isabelle (I thought) drawled.
“We’ve never been in that dreadful ocean ourselves,” said Miss Charlotte…or, at least, the other one. “Papa always said bathing in northern water was too great a shock to the female system. Though he swam himself, every day, from the yacht club deck, didn’t he, Sissy?”
“Not at all,” Sissy said tartly. “Papa never went into the water here. That was at Rehoboth; you’ve forgotten again.”
“Well, I have not.”
“Yes, you have. You always do—”
Mother Hannah came in just then and lured them inside with promises of tea, and they marched away behind her, still in lockstep, still arguing.
“They’ll be at it all day,” Peter said. “It’s what they come to Retreat for. I hear they never fight at home. I think it probably keeps them alive. Everybody goes nuts with it until they learn not to listen. They’re like the Ancient Mariner; people run when they see them coming. I’ve seen grown men cut through the birch woods off the main road and sneak by on their hands and knees, rather than meet the Valentine girls head on. They visit around endlessly, and they gossip incessantly, and they’re always getting themselves into some kind of mess, or breaking something, or losing it, and then somebody has to go bail them out and listen to them peck at each other all the while. They drive the Compound women wild. You’re going to be their main target this summer, just because you’re new. Don’t let them monopolize you, or you’ll spend the whole summer taking them places and fixing things for them, instead of…whatever else you wanted to do.”
Instead of running errands for my mother, I thought he was going to say. But perhaps, after all, he wasn’t.
Next came three young women alone, slightly out of breath and with hair and clothes pearled with fog droplets and what looked like cereal. Two were the tall, fair, long-boned New Englanders I was growing accustomed to, and the other was dark and a bit overweight, but somehow they had a familial look to them.
“Ah,” Peter said. “The Mary’s Garden girls. Come and meet my wife, Maude. She is going to have need of the likes of you this summer.”
“Hello,” three crisp New England voices said in unison. Three tanned, capable hands shook mine firmly, and I felt, along each one, the ridge of callus on the outside of the palm that speaks of tennis rackets. Kemble had it. My own hand, with the nails I’d struggled so long to grow painted a delicate pink, felt puffy and effete in those serviceable hands.
“Priss Thorne, Jane Thorne, and Fern Thorne,” Peter said. “Married, respectively, to Tobias, Clovis, and Phinizy Thorne. They live on the strip of beach just below Braebonnie; you can’t even see ’em from the cliff top. They’re here all summer with the children, and the guys come up from Washington in August. I don’t know what anybody in Retreat would do without the Thorne girls. Whenever you need anything, from a tennis game to a pressure bandage to somebody to fetch bath salts for the Valentine sisters, you just stop by Mary’s Garden and see who’s there. They’re the glue that holds us together.”
“We’re always glad to help out,” Priss Thorne said. Her face was tanned like glove leather, and her hair was the straw blond of one who spends many hours in the sun. She had very blue eyes that crinkled attractively at the corners, and the long sculptured muscles of a young boy.
“If you ever need us and can’t raise us at the Garden, just post a note on the tennis court bulletin board,” Jane said. She was the other fair one, with strong, mannish features and hair cut in a straight bob around her long face.
“Do you play tennis?” said the one who, by default, must be Fern. She was square and resolute, really not at all pretty, and deeply tanned like the others. “We’d be glad of a decent partner. We can’t seem to get any other of the younger women up here interested.”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” I said, thinking they probably couldn’t interest the other young women because they were too busy being handmaidens. How did these three manage enough free time for daily tennis? I had not yet met a young woman in Retreat who did not have an older woman attached.
“Well, we’ll be glad to show you,” Priss said. “I’ll bet we could make a player out of you in one summer.”
“I’ll take you up on it,” I said, sensing an activity that might spring me from Liberty periodically.
“We’ll check back when you’re feeling better,” Jane Thorne said. “That water can be ferocious if you’re not used to it.”
Her tone was that of one who swam hours in that liquid ice. I felt cosseted and fussy, and hated it.
“Why aren’t they at home taking care of Mommy-in-Law?” I said nastily to Peter. I was growing tired and wanted the stream of visitors to abate. But it showed no signs of doing so.
He laughed. “Because Mommy-in-Law cut out of here the minute old man Thorne died and deeded the Garden over to the boys and bought a place in Palm Beach. She always did hate cold water.”
“So now the poor girls get to come up here every summer and mind children and take care of everybody else’s mothers-in-law and all the widows, and the guys come in August and get waited on like kings,” I said, seeing the shape of it all too clearly. When he did not reply, I said, “Sorry. I’m tired. Why is it called Mary’s Garden?”
“Well, there are three cottages, all alike, side by side. The old man built them. He was a children’s book illustrator, a funny, fussy little man, and there’s a lot of family money, I think. He named the cottages Silver Bell, Cockle Shell, and Pretty Maid. You know, as in ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?’ Mary was their mother’s name. But everybody just calls it Mary’s Garden. How would you like to tell people you lived in Cockle Shell or Pretty Maid? They’re three of the few cottages that have telephones. The boys had them put in the first summer the girls came alone with the children. Everybody goes over there to call. The girls really are the heart and soul of this place. They’ll make good friends for you. Show you the ropes.”
I doubted that but did not say so. I was watching a woman watch Peter. I did not particularly like what I saw.
She was a beauty. She always
was. Gretchen Constable Winslow was one of the few Retreat women I knew when we were young who was truly a great beauty and kept her looks far into old age. Hers were the kind of looks born of perfect bones and teeth and a fortunate symmetry of all her parts; nothing about Gretchen did not match, or was out of scale or proportion, or failed to please. I don’t think I have ever seen such clearly genetic loveliness. Most beauty depends in some part on animation or coloring or expression. Gretchen’s never did; she had little of any of those. If you carved her in marble she would still look exactly as she did that morning standing living and real in the door of the sun porch in Liberty, staring at my husband with eyes that were the pale green of sunlight on marsh water.
He felt her gaze and looked up.
“Hello, Gretchen,” he said, and smiled, and the woman came over and kissed his cheek lightly, and laid her hand along the other one for a moment before turning to me and giving me a small, polite smile. Her lips, cheeks, chin, and the dimples on either side of her mouth looked as if they had been chiseled there by a loving sculptor.
“I’m Gretchen Winslow, a very old friend of Peter’s,” she said, and her voice was cool and smooth, not New England but not anything else I could name, either. Like her face and hair and body, it had little color. Gretchen’s hair was the pale Gold-brown of sun-steeped tea, and her skin was only a few shades lighter. It was like looking at a woman created entirely out of warm, honey-toned Carrera marble.
“I’m Maude Gascoigne,” I said mindlessly, and then added, I mean “Maude Chambliss, of course.”
“Of course,” she said. “We were all very surprised to hear about you. Peter never let on last summer.”
“I didn’t know her last summer,” Peter said, smiling still. He still held her hand in his. “I only met her in November.”
Colony Page 11
