Colony

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  But Sarah Fowler smiled in real delight, and took my hands, and said, “I asked Peter to bring you to me when I heard about Ridley Lincoln’s putting you to bed. Old fool. Of course you must be up and out in the sun; of course you must have the sea. It’s what healed me when…I was sick. It will keep you well. I want you to go down that flight of steps to the beach and just sit there and let it all wash over you, while I have a talk with Peter and Douglas runs into the village. When you’re quite full up, come on back and we’ll have a cup of tea.”

  “Sarah, I don’t know about Maude going down all those steps alone—” Big Peter began, but she put her finger to her lips and he stopped.

  “It’s the solitude she needs, Peter. Believe me, I know. There is magic here, but it needs solitude to work.”

  “Please,” I said, suddenly frantic to be off down the stairs to the sea, dying of my thirst for the water.

  He nodded, and I was out the French doors and across the terrace in an eye blink, into the stream of the wind. It caught me and washed over me like water itself, cool and damp and smelling of pine and salt and distance and dark, secret green places, and I threw out my arms and laughed aloud and rode the wind down the steps on the face of the cliff to the beach and the sea.

  It was in all ways a secret beach, a perfect little half moon of sighing shingle, with great, beetling pink boulders shielding it on both sides and, above it, the cliff top and the house and the sky. No one not in that house would ever know you were there. No eyes or voices could follow you. No tongues could tell of your being here. I stood there alone, washed and washed with sea and solitude and the salt wind, and then I pulled up my skirt and waded into the water.

  It was light green and cold as iced seltzer, bubbling and fizzing, and as terrible as it had felt to me last summer, it was that wonderful now. The shelf of sand beneath the water was level and gradual, and I waded and splashed and stooped and swooped cold water onto my face and arms, and I capered and kicked and sang.

  “ ‘Yes, we have no bananas,’ ” I shouted. “ ‘We have no bananas today,’ ” and “ ‘I been working on the railroad, all the livelong day,’ ” and “ ‘It’s three o’clock in the morning, we’ve danced the whole night through.’ ”

  And suddenly I was a creature of lightness and grace again, a girl who might, indeed, dance the whole night through with the man who had brought her armfuls of lilacs. The sun was shining and the water lapped and dreamed, and I was young, and all things seemed possible. I will remember that morning on the beach below the Aerie as long as I live.

  After I finished wading, I found a sun-warmed hollow in the great, tumbling pile of rock and sat down and closed my eyes and let the wind and sun and sea run into me through my skin, until no conscious thought was left and I could not have told where my boundaries were, or the sea’s, or the sky’s. The baby was very still, and there was a high humming in my ears that seemed the very music of the earth itself. I think I slept a little. When I heard my father-in-law calling me, the sun was a bit higher overhead and my cheekbones and nose were beginning to sting. Leaving that beach was one of the hardest things I have ever done.

  We had tea and talked of nothing special, comfortable talk about who was in the colony and who would not be coming; about books and music and plays and Prohibition; about gardening and music and movies. We did not talk of my baby or of Peter or Mother Hannah or of Douglas Fowler, and I did not find that strange at all. When presently Douglas came back from the village with an armload of groceries, Sarah smiled with real fondness, and when we got up to leave, she gave me the same smile and said, “I think my hiding place has agreed with you. It’s the one thing you need to know about Retreat, Maude: a few of us will always need a hiding place from time to time. I think you are one of those. I know I am. I hope my beach can be yours. Use it whenever you like, only remember that it really is a secret.”

  “I’d love that,” I said, tears coming into my eyes and surprising me with their sting. “I really would. I’ve never seen a…better place.”

  “Come soon, then,” she said, and turned to Peter. “You come too,” she said, and put one finger on his cheek. “You come and bring Maude as often as you think you can.”

  Her voice was different when she spoke to him. I turned away to the car so as not to see her eyes, or his, murmuring my thanks over my shoulder. Douglas Fowler and the two Scotties walked me across the terrace.

  “I hope you will come again,” he said, in his clipped New England voice. “She hasn’t had a woman visitor in years, besides old Lottie Padgett. Only Peter. I think it’s done her a world of good. I can tell she likes you.”

  “Well, I certainly hope I can,” I said. “Thanks so much for having us.”

  “Good luck with your little one, Miss Maude,” he said. “It’s a lovely time for a woman. Enjoy it. Next summer you’ll be running your legs off.”

  I thought of his own babies, never to be chased by the beautiful, transparent woman in the house on the cliff.

  “Thank you,” I said, my lips trembling. Just then Big Peter came, and we said our goodbyes and were off. We did not speak until we were nearly back at Liberty, but the silence was not oppressive.

  “I go once or twice a week,” he said, as if he were speaking of the weather. “It gives Douglas a chance to get to the village, and me a chance to see how Sarah is getting along. I suppose it’s like running away; I’m sure the family thinks I’m at the camp. Not that Sarah would care if they knew, but…it’s such a special place. I like feeling that I have one secret up here.”

  I knew he was asking me, delicately, not to mention our visit or that he came frequently, and had for many years. I knew I would not have anyway, not even to Peter. The beach was my secret now too.

  “I can see why,” I said. “To go there often would just be paradise.”

  “Then, my pretty Maude, we shall do just that, at least once a week, until you leave to go home and have your baby,” he said, smiling at me. “After that I don’t expect you’ll have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting loose to go driving alone with your father-in-law, but this summer will be yours and mine, to get acquainted with each other and let you sample the forbidden delights of solitude and salt water. Nobody can object to the former, and what they don’t know about the latter will never hurt them.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “It isn’t that I don’t like being with…everybody. It’s just that—”

  “I know,” he said. “I really do.”

  And so, once a week until mid-July, we left in the Marmon, my father-in-law and I, and drove decorously down the lane and headed for the Aerie like children out of school, and I will always be grateful for those quiet, sea-blessed mornings. They gave me back a measure of myself that summer, and they gave me all I would ever have of the man who was my husband’s father. On July 18, Big Peter had a heart attack, swimming in the frigid water of Rosier Pond, and died before the hastily summoned sheriff could get him to the hospital in Castine. The first thing I thought when they came to tell us was, Who will tell Sarah? Oh, who is there who can do that?

  If I had thought to comfort my mother-in-law, I soon found I was both mistaken and unnecessary. There is a drill for death in Retreat, an immutable ritual, and its name is Us. No one outside the ranks need apply.

  It was Dierdre and Guildford Kennedy from Camp Corpy who came, with Dr. Lincoln in tow. The Kennedys had a small rustic camp over on Rosier Pond, as Peter’s family did, and I learned later that Guildford had been swimming with Big Peter and had climbed out on the dock to take the sun only minutes before he heard my father-in-law call. He had dived in instantly, and pulled Big Peter to the dock, and shouted for Dierdre to call the sheriff and Ridley Lincoln. The Kennedys had ridden with Sheriff Carter to the hospital, holding Big Peter in their muscular arms and murmuring to him. The sheriff broke all existing speed records into Castine, but somewhere along the way, Dierdre Kennedy said, “I could tell he had lef
t us,” and Ridley Lincoln, who was waiting on the steps of the hospital, confirmed it. Mother Hannah sat as still as stone while they told her, white and silent, and I sank faintly to a chair in the sun porch, feeling the blood surge out of my arms and face. I knew that after the bloodless silence the grief would strike and would be terrible. I had come to love Big Peter, in those few weeks, very much.

  There was a small, soft sound, like a sigh—only that—from my mother-in-law.

  “Hannah, darling. Let me call someone for you. Maude’s here, let me get Maude—”

  “No,” Mother Hannah said, and her voice was very old. “Peter. I want Peter.”

  “Oh, my dear,” Dierdre Kennedy murmured, and I knew she thought Mother Hannah was talking about Big Peter. I knew also that she was wrong.

  “My son,” Mother Hannah said. “I want my son.”

  “Guild has already sent some of the men out after him,” Dierdre said. “They’ll have him in as soon as possible. But meantime, Maude—”

  “I don’t want Maude,” my mother-in-law said. She was very calm.

  And so, for a long while on that terrible day, I sat alone on the sun porch of Liberty and waited for both Peter and the grief to come, while the cottage filled up with women.

  I am familiar with it now, of course; know in my own bones the resonance of the jungle drums, as Peter always called them, that announces to the women of Retreat that one of their own has been bereaved, even before the news of it comes. I still cannot account for it, but it has long ceased to surprise me. But on that day I was truly mystified. One by one, in the bright sun of noon, the women came. Helen Potter from Braebonnie was first, holding Mother Hannah lightly and pressing her cheek to that marble one. Helen’s eyes were closed and her face still, but I could read real grief in the tightness of her mouth.

  “My dear Hannah, I am so sorry,” she whispered.

  Mother Hannah nodded, still silent. Her eyes were wide and white-rimmed and stared beyond Mrs. Potter’s shoulder at nothing, but the awful composure held.

  Mary Lincoln came next, twittering; then Augusta Stallings, carrying a bottle of something done up in tissue and looking ferocious; then cool Aurora Winslow, and pillowy little Erica Conant, and the Misses Valentine, peering suspiciously at me wavering in the sun-porch door before bearing down on my mother-in-law, arms outstretched, treble voices piping. Others came; in half an hour the cottage living room had filled with women, come to circle the wagons around Mother Hannah. A few men came with the women, but they did not come into the cottage. They stood on the lawn or the porch, smoking and talking in low voices, shaking their heads. There was sorrow in their group too, I knew; Big Peter had been popular, and these were his boyhood friends. But mainly they seemed merely diminished, a straggling herd of old males, their dwindling number down this day by one. It was the women who seemed to radiate strength, almost like body heat. And I saw then what I only came to fully realize much later: a man’s death in Retreat does indeed diminish the men of the tribe, but it confers on his wife a new power. In Retreat, a new widow passes, literally in a heartbeat, from chatelaine to queen. And so it was with Mother Hannah.

  I saw something else that day too: that in the great rites of passage here it is the old women whose place it is to come, to minister, to soothe, to witness. The young women stay behind to tend the children and the infirm. Peter said once, only half in jest, that when somebody dies in the colony the old ladies get first seating. I yearned for Amy but would have welcomed the interchangeable Stallings girls from the Compound, or the ubiquitous girls of Mary’s Garden, or the featherheaded Clio, Thalia and Calliope Kennedy. I would even have been middling glad to see Gretchen Winslow. But for what seemed hours of anguish, while I sat or stood lumpenly on the sun porch waiting for Peter to come home, the young women did not come. Later, I learned, it would be their turn; all that evening and the next day, they would come and knock softly and hand in casseroles and cakes and armfuls of flowers from colony gardens with little cards affixed that said Courtesy of Ella Stallings or Priss Thorne or whoever the bearer happened to be. And they would hug Peter and inquire after Mother Hannah and ask if there was anything else they might do, and say no thank you, we won’t come in just now, we must get back to the children, or dinner, or Mother Someone-or-other, and perhaps they would think to wave to me in my exile on the sun porch and perhaps not.

  But until midafternoon I was alone. When I ventured into the living room where the women clustered, I was shooed out firmly and told to go and put my feet up, for goodness’ sake; did I want to have the baby here and now on top of everything else? Or I was asked, politely and coolly, if there was anything I wanted, and when I said, miserably, no, they turned back to the circle in whose center Mother Hannah burned like a dark candle. Once Dr. Lincoln came in from the yard and put his fingers distractedly on my pulse, nodded, said, “Good, good,” and went away again. After that, no one came until Peter did, finally. By the time I heard his running steps on the porch I was fighting tears with all my might. When I heard his voice they spilled over.

  I flew through the living room to meet him, oblivious of the clustered women. I held out my arms and he came into them as naturally as a duckling into water, and I held him as hard as I could, my face pressed into his chest, and I wept, over and over again, “Oh, I’m sorry. Oh, Peter, I’m so sorry….”

  I could feel, rather than see, that he was crying too. His breath came in ragged gasps, and there was a fine trembling all through his torso and his arms. I could feel and taste the damp salt of the bay on his sweater and hear the galloping of his heart. I could not even imagine the awful sail home. He put his head down on top of mine, and then I could feel his tears scalding through my hair. But he did not speak.

  Mother Hannah began to cry then. It was a strange sound, like a doll’s silvery crying, or a very small child’s. I had never heard her cry, could not even imagine hearing it, and so when she began I did not know what the sound was. Peter lifted his head and looked blindly around him, and I saw his face, and my heart squeezed as if someone had grasped it, beating, and wrung it. He looked smashed, ruined, destroyed. I don’t think I would have known him if I had come upon him unexpectedly. I had never seen such grief.

  “Peter, oh, my baby,” Mother Hannah sobbed, and Peter’s face cleared magically of grief and turned to marble. I saw it happen as I looked at him. I saw the wounded child Peter leave forever and the man Peter slip into the space that was left. He still stood, holding me, looking over my head at his mother. She stretched her arms out to him and wriggled her fingers at him as if she was waving goodbye. For a moment they looked at each other, mother and son, and I looked at them. Then Peter put me away from him and started toward her. The honor cadre of women parted and she stood up, swaying faintly, and then ran across the sisal carpet and threw herself into his arms.

  “Petie,” she sobbed, against his chest as I had, “Daddy’s gone. We’ve lost Daddy, darling.”

  “I know, Mama,” he said, rocking her back and forth in his arms as you would a child. “I know. I know.”

  “Maude, go in and get your husband a glass of whiskey,” Augusta Stallings boomed from across the room. “I brought some in case you don’t have it. Make it neat, and a strong one. And bring Hannah a glass of sherry while you’re at it. Shock’s wearing off.” And, when I hesitated, “Well, go on, girl. You said you wanted to do something, then do it. Don’t stand there gawping. Let them have some privacy, for God’s sake.”

  My face burned and tears stung afresh. Privacy? From me? I was Peter’s wife. His father was my father-in-law. I had lost this day too. I turned and went into the kitchen and poured out the whiskey and the sherry. But it was a moment before I could clear my eyes of the tears of anger and hurt, and in that moment I heard Mother Hannah say, “Petie, promise you won’t leave me alone tonight. I’ll be all right in the morning; Hermie will be here. But I’ve never spent a night in Retreat alone. Please don’t make me do it now.”

 
“No, Mama,” Peter said. “I won’t.”

  I took the tray of drinks into the living room and handed it to Augusta Stallings.

  “Perhaps you’ll take these for me,” I said, and, not waiting for her reply, went upstairs to Peter’s and my bedroom and closed the door behind me. I sat down on the bed and looked out the window over the rooftop of Braebonnie and saw, above the line of firs and spruce on the farthest point, high up against the sky, the chimney pots of the Aerie. I began to cry then. It was full dark before I stopped.

  When I went back downstairs, cried out and ravenously hungry, the women were gone. There seemed to be no one in the living room, so I started there, and then I heard voices and soft laughter in the out-of-sight alcove by the fire. Though I had heard it only once, I recognized the laughter instantly as Gretchen Winslow’s. I stopped on the bottom stair.

  “Oh, there he is in that silly sombrero and serape Mother and Daddy brought him from Mexico,” Gretchen said in a soft voice that mingled laughter and tears. “I was eight or nine, I think, and couldn’t decide if I was in love with Big Peter or Little Peter. The sombrero definitely tipped the scales in favor of Big Peter.”

  There was answering laughter that I realized, incredulously, was Mother Hannah’s. “He wore that hat and serape in the Chowder Race that year, do you remember, Petie?” she said. “Philip Potter said it was like being beaten by Ramon Navarro in a Friendship sloop. I must admit I thought it was all quite dashing.”