“I’m fine,” I said. “It’s just five months. I may look like a blimp, but I’ve really never felt better in my life. My doctor at home says it’s good for me to get moderate exercise.”
“He’s that young man from somewhere out west, isn’t he?” she said smoothly. Dr. Canfield from St. Louis, whom Peter and I both liked enormously when I had my first appointment with him in Concord, seemed to diminish in my mind with the speed of light. Mother Hannah was outraged because I would not agree to come to Boston for six weeks before my due date and have the baby there.
“Missouri,” I said, determined to be equable with her this summer. “And he looks far younger than he is. Really, Mother Hannah. I’m going to feel awful if I have to lie around all summer.”
“We’ll see what Dr. Lincoln says.” She smiled thinly. “I’ve asked him to look in on you tomorrow morning. You cannot be up here in this wilderness in your condition without being under a doctor’s care. I cannot take responsibility for you.”
“I’m sure Peter will be happy to do that,” I said, feeling my just-born equanimity die without taking a breath.
“Peter,” she said, in fond scorn. “What does that happy-go-lucky son of mine know about expectant mothers? I’ve been in your condition twice up here, and Dr. Lincoln has attended me both times. Between us I think we can manage to keep you safe and sound. And that, my dear, means no more running around the cliffs or fooling around in the sea. Cemeteries either,” she added, pointedly not looking at me.
“I knew I’d hear about that eventually,” I said to Peter that night as we lay in our upstairs bed, properly tucked up under the Great Seal of Princeton. “I wondered why I didn’t get both barrels last summer, when it happened. And as for Dr. Lincoln: Peter, he’s ancient! They very probably did put pregnant women to bed for nine months in his heyday, but Dr. Canfield said—”
“I know,” he said, patting my cheek and then letting his hand slide down my breasts to the mound of my belly.
The baby had been more active than usual that evening; the drive from Northpoint, though we took it in two days rather than one and stopped frequently, was still rough and tedious. His hand bucked with the baby’s kicking.
“I promise you won’t hear any more about oceans and cemeteries. Just give her and Dr. Lincoln their way for a week or two, and then I’ll bet you anything they’ll let up on the bed rest. Though to tell you the truth I’m not at all sorry Junior, here, will be keeping you out of graveyards and oceans this summer.”
I looked it him sharply, but he said no more. He had said nothing about my careening trip to the village and the old cemetery with Micah Willis when it had happened last summer, except to tell his mother calmly that he’d just as soon not be married to a woman who would let a child bleed to death because it was a native. And when she said, “Well, of course I didn’t mean that, I meant the appearance of it, being in that truck alone with Micah,” he fairly snapped at her, so she rounded on him.
“Peter Chambliss, just because you’re a married man now—”
Then Big Peter came out of his den, where he had been sequestered for the past three days, and said, “The appearance of a dead child on your doorstep would, I hope, distress you more, Hannah,” and went back into the den and shut the door, and she turned and went upstairs. I heard nothing more that summer about the incident, but when we left for Northpoint, I felt as though I was coming out of a paradisiacal prison into blessed, ordinary air.
“Peter, can it possibly be good for me or the baby to spend an entire summer being bored and unhappy?” I said, knowing it was emotional blackmail, but not knowing how else to make my point.
“Maude, if you’re truly that miserable up here this summer—if you really and truly are unhappy—we simply won’t come again. That’s a promise. I’m not going to torture you every year of your life. But give it another try this summer. It’ll be different. She’s going to lay off criticizing you; we had a talk about that. She’s agreed to try, and she will. You try a little too. Try to think like she does, just a bit. She’s worked hard to get where she is in the colony; she knows what the rules are. I truly believe she’s trying to show you what it takes to fit in up here.”
“What good is a place that won’t let you be yourself?” I said sullenly. I was bested, and I knew it. “Do you want your child to grow up always straining to fit somebody else’s mold? Do you want him—or her—to be so fenced in with rules?”
The silvery brows over the gray eyes knitted, and he looked at me, honestly puzzled.
“Why should he be?” he said. “I wasn’t. I’m not. I’ve always been me up here.”
I think I realized only then, clearly and without hope, that in Retreat the men’s supernal freedom had always been bought by the sacrificial chains of the women. Peter truly did not understand what was bothering me.
“Then you better hope this baby is a boy,” I said under my breath, rolling over in bed and trying to find a place in the spavined mattress for my belly. It was a long time that night before I slept.
At first it wasn’t so bad. To no one’s surprise, Dr. Lincoln agreed with Mother Hannah and decreed bed or sun-porch rest for me, but true to her word Mother Hannah did not chastise or instruct me further that summer, and if her company in the afternoons was not exactly stimulating, still, it was soothing and neutral and not unpleasant. She read aloud to me, during the cool clear June afternoons, from books she had read when she was young—Penrod and Sam, Jane Eyre, Silas Marner—and I was surprised to find I soon looked forward to those few hours before I was sent back up to bed for the nap I did not need. In the mornings, when she and Christina were on their errands, Peter sat with me on the sun porch, grading papers and reading over fall assignments. His vocation for teaching was a real one; he was endlessly interested in the minds of young boys and endlessly convinced of the importance of what was put into them. Sometimes we talked of the baby, but abstractedly, not as speculatively as one might think prospective young parents would. I know for Peter’s part only that he was bemusedly charmed with the idea of parenthood but seemingly unconcerned with its reality. He would not talk of formulas and nurses and the logistics of living with a small child. He would talk, instead, of when the baby was grown: what work he would choose, what sort of man he would be, what his odd Boston-Charleston provenance would mean to him. And often he would say, looking at me and pantomiming lewdness, “That kid has pumped the old pillows up there pretty good, Mrs. C. Are you sure we couldn’t, just once—”
“Dr. Lincoln says not,” I would say.
“May Dr. Lincoln rot in hell. Easy for him to prescribe abstinence. He probably forgot what it felt like twenty years ago.”
For my part, I simply could not see past the moment that my pains would start. It seemed to me somehow that I would have the pains and go to the hospital and there deflate like a balloon and come home and resume my old life once more. The fact that the rubbery, elastic mound in my stomach was going to turn us both into different people for the rest of our lives was simply, that summer, beyond my comprehension. I was still learning how to be a wife, still learning to be some sort of daughter-in-law. Surely the role of mother would not be asked of me as well. Not really. I worried endlessly, in those days, that I would be unable to love the baby.
Once I said as much to Peter.
“That’s the silliest thing I ever heard of,” he said. “Of course you will. It comes with the baby.”
“Did you love Peter the minute you saw him?” I asked Mother Hannah.
“Instantly,” she said. “It was the holiest rapture I have ever felt. We are given it with our children, I am sure of that.”
But I was not sure. I would have given much to be able to talk to Amy about these doubts and fears, but Parker had taken her with him on a business trip to Hong Kong, and they would not be at Braebonnie until the middle of July. There was no one else I would dream of talking with in Retreat. Out of nowhere, once, the image of Micah Willis’s dark face swam in
to my mind, and I knew that if I had had access to Micah I would not have hesitated to talk with him. But of course I did not, and would not. That much was understood after he brought me home under the eyes of the Misses Valentine last summer.
In our second week, Peter and Old Micah put the Hannah into the water, and after that I was alone in the sunny morning stillness of the sun porch.
“You sure you don’t care?” Peter said, vibrating at the door in his eagerness to get out onto the dancing blue bay.
“No. Really. Go on. I’d far rather have you out there and know you’re happy than stuck here. I can’t go anywhere anyway.”
“See you tonight,” he said, and kissed me, and was gone. After that, the hours of confinement chafed painfully. I found myself wishing the baby would be premature, so that we could get it over and I could be on my feet again, and then I felt miserable and guilty about the wishing. It was, on the whole, beginning to be a bad time.
At the beginning of the third week my father-in-law came out onto the sun porch and found me crying.
“Maude, dear! What is it? Are you ill? Should I fetch Ridley Lincoln?”
I had never heard his voice so agitated. Poor man, I suppose he thought he was alone with a woman about to give birth. I gave him a watery smile and shook my head.
“No, I’m fine,” I said. “That’s just the problem, Papa Chambliss. I feel wonderful, and I haven’t been off this chaise for three weeks except to go to bed. I’m sorry, I know everyone thinks this is the best way, but I’m used to the outdoors. I miss the woods. Oh, I miss the water so much—”
I stopped, feeling my voice break. I truly did not wish to distress him. He had been silent and withdrawn much of June; I had scarcely seen him. I felt as if a scene with me might be the feather that tipped him irrevocably into his blackness.
He sat down and took my hand in his and squeezed it absently, and I looked at him in surprise. Except for ritual cheek kisses, he had never touched me. He did not notice; he was looking out over the water. The bay was calm and misted; you could not tell where it ended and the sky began. It was warm on the porch for June.
He turned his head back to me and smiled, and I smiled involuntarily in return, he looked so much like my Peter.
“Then you shall have the water,” he said. “Tell me where your sweater is; I’m going to take you for a little drive. It’s a part of Retreat you haven’t seen before. I think you’ll find it very lovely.”
“But Mother Hannah—” I began.
“I will deal with Hannah,” he said, still smiling. “It’s time I spent some time with my daughter-in-law, before she makes me a grandfather again. It’s not easy to be a newcomer in Retreat, my dear. I wish Hannah could remember that more often. She was in your place once.”
He brought out the big Marmon touring car in which he and Mother Hannah motored to Maine each year and installed me in the front seat. We bumped out of Liberty’s driveway and up the lane, past the cutoff down to Braebonnie and the smaller lane that led down to Mary’s Garden, Fir Cottage, and Land’s End. We were almost to the main road into the village when he stopped the car and got out and held back a great armful of leaning rhododendrons and unlatched a silver-weathered gate. There was no sign, no mailbox, no indication of any kind that another lane lay behind the sheltering rhododendron, but I could see that one did. It twisted away through the dense pine and spruce and birch forest, a mere ghost of a white sand ribbon in the green gloom. I would never have known it was there. I wondered how many people did.
“Where are we going?” I asked, as we bumped slowly down the lane. Vegetation leaned so close around the car that we literally pushed our way through it in the Marmon. My voice had dropped to a whisper. In that green stillness, a normal human voice would have seemed a shout.
“To see a very old friend of mine, who has the best view of the water on the cape and who will, I think, be interested in meeting you. I believe you’ll like her too.”
My father-in-law’s face was calm and affable, but there was something in his eyes and voice, something of secrets and pleasure. It reminded me of a child’s, near Christmas.
Suddenly I knew.
“It’s the Aerie, isn’t it?” I said. “I’ve seen just a glimpse of it from the rocks below Braebonnie. Amy told me about the people who live there: the Fowlers? She said Mrs. Fowler was an invalid, and that no one ever saw them—”
“It’s the Aerie, yes.” He smiled over at me. “Sarah and Douglas Fowler. Not many people see them, but a few do. I’ve known Sarah since we were children; the house was her family’s. Douglas came here the summer they married and loved it, and when she got ill he just kept on bringing her back for the season. It seems to do her good. Sarah has always been passionate about the woods and sea.”
“Does she…is she very ill?” I asked. I thought it odd that he would intrude on a sick woman, no matter how old a friend.
“It’s hard to tell,” he said. “Most of the time I can see virtually no change from the way she always was. Sometimes she doesn’t talk, but she never did, very much. I know she is glad to see me; I wouldn’t go if I thought she was not.”
I said nothing; was he in the habit of visiting in this forbidden place, then? When did he come? I had thought he went in the mornings over to the camp on Rosier Pond, but perhaps I had misunderstood. My Peter had never mentioned the Fowlers.
He looked at me again, reading my confusion.
“Sarah’s sickness is called schizophrenia,” he said. “Or at least that’s the name her doctors have for it. She lost three babies in a row, and after the third she just seemed to drift away inside her head, and she stays there a good part of the time. When she’s…with us, she’s almost as normal as she ever was, though she has a tendency to say exactly what comes into her mind, which as you may imagine is a perilous business in a place like Retreat. They could probably go out far more than they do, but Sarah always did hate the social part of our summers. I think on the main she lives precisely the way she wishes to.”
“I hope I’m not going to upset her,” I said anxiously. All at once, dealing with more nuance and uncertainty in this place seemed beyond me. Poor woman: all three of her babies dead, and me obviously, heavily, pregnant.
“No. She wants to meet you. I’ve told her a bit about you. She says she thinks you and she have much in common. She knows about your baby, if that worries you.”
We came out of the tunnel of green and into a land and seascape that made me gasp. The great brown-shingled house sat on the very lip of a cliff, in a clearing surrounded by dense forest and looking straight out to sea. On three sides it hung in blue air, gulls wheeling above and below, and the wind, that had only teased fitfully down at Liberty, boomed in here like a whoop of joy. I had the swift, absurd notion that if you lived in this house, in this place, you would know how to fly. Far, far beyond us, Isle au Haut and North Haven dreamed, and beyond them the Camden Hills. Sails lay like confetti on all that wild, vast blue. One of them, I knew, was Peter’s. Around the foundations of the house flowers rioted, and a railed staircase led over the cliff and out of sight. Everything was elemental: sun, sea, wind, rock. I wanted to cry for sheer joy.
“Is this enough water for you?” Big Peter said, smiling at my rapt face and open mouth.
“Oh,” I said faintly. “Oh, it’s glorious! Oh, my.”
A man came down the steps toward us, an old man, I thought at first, and then saw he was no older than my father-in-law but was stooped and frail and seemed somehow bleached. But his smile was warm.
“You can see why we call it the Aerie,” Douglas Fowler said, when I had been introduced.
“I’d call it heaven,” I said honestly. “I don’t think I’d ever leave.”
And then I reddened furiously because, of course, they did not. But he only said, “Sarah feels the same way you do. The only time I’ve ever seen her cry is when we go back to Vermont every September.”
Not even for her babies? I thought. But of
course I did not say it.
Inside, a great room ran the length of the house and looked through a wall of many-paned windows out over a stone terrace and scrap of lawn and then the wild, all-dissolving blue. I thought you could do anything necessary to sustain life in that room, and they probably did: eat, sleep, work, play, love. At one end a huge blackened fireplace flanked by bookcases and window seats occupied an entire wall, with fat, spraddled sofas and chairs and ottomans grouped about it. At the other end stood a round oak dining table and chairs. An easel was set up by the window wall, and a little farther down a brass telescope trained out to sea. There were old black beams far up in the rafters, and a gallery all around the second story with, I assumed, bedrooms and baths off it. Bright rugs and cushions and afghans and books and papers and magazines were scattered everywhere, and flowers glowed from tables and the mantelpiece. A fire burned on the hearth, and on the shabby old plaid rug before it two massive Scotties dozed.
“When I die, this is where I hope I come,” I said to Douglas Fowler, and he laughed, and so did someone else. I looked quickly around the room and saw no one, and then I did.
She stood behind the sofa table, at the entrance to the foyer through which we had just come, and the first thing I thought was, Dear God, she’s a ghost. I have never seen anyone alive as pale as Sarah Fowler was. She was, in the gloom of the huge room, nearly transparent.
The second thing I thought was, But she’s beautiful! And she was that, too. Tall and seeming taller because of her extreme thinness, she had the bones of a deer or a whippet and the face of a classical statue. You see that face on women on medieval tombs, a little greyhound curled at their feet.
“You brought your little runaway, I see,” she said to Big Peter, and smiled at me, and walked over and kissed him on the cheek. Her face was fine and bloodless and sweet, her eyes spilling light, her hair a wash of pewter watercolor down her back. She seemed all over silver. He put his hand lightly on her hair, just a touch, as if to brush it off her cheek, and suddenly I knew he loved her as a man does a woman—and had, for a very long time. With the swift prescience that comes at such times, I knew also that she loved him too, and her pale husband knew it, and none of the three would ever speak of it. I could not have said how I knew, but that sort of knowledge has come to me a few times in my life, as if on a very breath, and each time I have been sure past any certainty it was true, and it has been. I could have wept with the hopelessness of that kiss and that touch on the silver hair, there in the madwoman’s living room.
Colony Page 14
