“He wore the hat until one of the Stallings boys—was it Albert or Henry?—stole it and ran it up the Yacht Club flagpole and it got rained on and melted,” Peter said, and began laughing too. There was a soft rustle of pages, and I realized that they were sitting by the fire looking at photographs in one of the big shabby old albums from the bookcase. Three people who had known my father-in-law most or all of their lives, beginning the slow slog through grief toward whatever healing they could find. Like a family. I turned away and went into the kitchen.
Micah and Christina Willis were there, sitting at the old deal table. A drainboard full of clean dishes and a sink full of soaking ones testified to Christina’s presence, and a newly filled wood rack by the kitchen door to Micah’s. Smells of baking curled from the oven, and vases and tin buckets full of flowers added their rich spice. Christina was cutting doughnuts out of yellow dough on the dough board, and Micah was carving an enormous brown leg of lamb into delicate, thin pink slices. Something in a big iron pot on the stove bubbled slowly. Fresh molasses doughnuts cooled beside the stove. I thought I would weep with hunger and hurt.
Micah looked up at me, a long look, unreadable. Then he pulled out a chair and motioned to it. Christina looked up and smiled.
“Sit,” Micah said. “You look like something the cat dragged in. Get some food in you; I bet you haven’t had anything all day. Everybody too busy mourning the dead to look to the living and the soon-to-be.”
“Oh, you poor thing,” Christina Willis said, concern clouding her smooth broad face. “I thought I hadn’t seen or heard anything from you all day. I asked Peter, but he didn’t know where you were. Have you not eaten, then?”
“I haven’t been hungry till now,” I said, not wanting to appear pitiful or deprived. “I’ve been upstairs until just a minute ago. Don’t worry about me, for goodness’ sake. And don’t let me get in your way. I’ve been in somebody’s way all day….”
I hadn’t meant to say that, and the tears welled up again. They must know that Gretchen Winslow sat in the living room where I should have been, comforting my husband and mother-in-law. I turned my head away.
“One of those doughnuts would be wonderful, though,” I said. “And is that coffee I smell?”
“Sit,” Christina said. “You’ll have more than doughnuts, if I have my way. There’s lobster stew from lobsters that Micah just brought an hour ago, and a lamb from his father’s flock, and I’ve made some spoon bread. Your father-in-law always loved my spoon bread—” She stopped and flushed and busied herself at the stove, and Micah bent over his carving so that his face was hidden by the fall of his black hair. In the dim yellow overhead light, he looked older, carved and gnarled and worn, like weathered wood. He was all compaction; there was nothing of attenuation to him at all.
I realized that they had loved Big Peter too, in some manner, and were struggling to hide their grief as I was. It was for some reason an enormously warming and liberating notion. For the first time that awful day I thought I might speak of him without weeping.
“I’m going to miss him more than I can say,” I said simply, looking from one of the Willises to the other. “We had just become real friends, he and I. He showed me…something precious of his…that I might never have known about. I’ll never forget that he wanted me to share it. It’s meant everything to me.”
I had no idea why I was speaking so to them. It could not have been more inappropriate, I suppose, at least not by colony standards. And yet it felt completely natural, and wonderfully comforting. I smiled, inadvertently, at the thought of the big house up there atop the point.
“Ayuh,” Micah said slowly, deliberately, not looking at me. “I reckoned he might take you along up to the Aerie one day. Seemed to me when you first came here you might be the one he’d show it to.”
So he knew. But knew what? I looked at his dark profile and over at Christina. She did not look up from the plate she was filling for me. Knew everything, then. The Willises knew everything about my father-in-law and the beautiful and faded Sarah Fowler. It occurred to me they might satisfy my curiosity there, but I knew I would never ask, and they would not speak of it again.
I ate a plate of chowder and lamb and new green beans, and had two cups of coffee and a doughnut, and felt infinitely better. We sat at the kitchen table, Micah and Christina and I, and some subterranean bond that would hold us forever was born that night. It isn’t often that you know the precise provenance of a love. I have always been grateful for that night of loss and beginnings.
Presently I said, not even wondering at the strangeness of asking the question of hired employees, “Will he be buried here?”
“You mean with us?” Micah said, and I knew he was seeing again the little silent sun-swept cemetery beside the sea and us there among his people, arms full of lavender flowers. “I don’t know. I was going to ask you.”
“I don’t have any idea,” I said. “I hope so. I think he’d love that. Are…any of us, any summer people, there?”
“It’s public,” he said briefly. “There’s some that are. He’d be welcome there.”
I thought, from his tone, that not many of us were welcome.
“You were fond of him, weren’t you?” I asked.
“I was partial to him, yes. He taught me to sail.”
There was something very near a smile on his face, but not quite. I wondered what it would take.
“To sail? Did he really? I thought the club…I thought your father would do that. Being a boatmaker, and all.”
This time he did smile. He looked years younger. “You thought the club was private? You’re right. It set the members on their ears something smart, I reckon. But they couldn’t do much about it. He was commodore that year. I was nine, just a bit older than his own son. And that first summer I beat every colony tadpole up here in the Beast class. After that he didn’t invite me to sail with the summer folks again; I reckon some of the women saw to that. But Peter and I used to have our own races, out of the boatyard harbor. Your Peter, I mean. He got so good he beat me half the time. Yep, I owe your father-in-law a lot, and sailing’s not the least of it. He was teaching my boy, too. Reckon none of you knew that. Been coming down to the boatyard once, twice a week, all summer. I could have done it myself, but he was a better teacher. I wanted Caleb to learn from the best.”
Sorrow flooded me afresh. I felt my face twist and pressed my fist hard against my mouth to keep it from contorting. I did not wish to weep in front of Micah and Christina Willis.
“I guess not all summer people are your enemies,” I said thickly. “I guess there was one of us you called friend.”
I was not looking at him and was surprised when, after a long silence, I felt his hand on my shoulder. It was a gentle touch. When I looked up, his face was gentle too. I had not seen it like that before.
“Only a fool talks in generalities, Maude,” he said. “He was my friend. He had a lot of friends among us natives. There’ve been a few of you who did. Likely there’ll be others. It just isn’t a policy with us. But more than the Retreat folks will grieve for him. I think we’d all be honored if he rested with our own.”
But it was not to be. The next morning Hermione arrived from Connecticut, straw-pale and cold-faced and red-eyed, and set the cottage to ringing with the tempest of her grief and anger. It was the fury of the abandoned child; even I knew that. But it fairly howled. The first object of that bereft rage was Peter’s suggestion that their father lie in the little churchyard by the sea. I heard the explosion from the stair landing, as I was coming down for a late breakfast, having lingered as long as hunger allowed me in the bedroom where I had, for the first time, slept alone. True to his word, Peter had sat up all night beside his mother. Once again I turned and went back upstairs and took refuge in the little cubicle overlooking the bay. I thought at this rate I might never eat a meal in Retreat in company of anyone but the Willises again. I closed the door firmly, but I could still hear Hermie’s hot, bit
ter words.
“No! Not while there’s breath in my body,” she shrieked, strangling on tears. “He will not be all the way up here with all these country bumpkins where we can’t come see him; I won’t have him in that common little…mudhole! This is not our place; Boston is our place! Our people have always been buried in Boston! I never got to see him at all in the summer after I was married because he was stuck up here, and I will not let him stay up here forever! I won’t! Mama, I will not!”
Her voice spiraled up and up, until she was actually keening, and I heard Mother Hannah’s voice murmuring to her, and Peter’s, strong and hard with his own anger. I had not seen him at all since the afternoon before, but I was relieved to hear that iron in his voice. It had not been there yesterday.
There was a hissing, spitting row, an ugly chewing thing that no door could have shut away from my ears, and I could only sit and listen miserably while my husband and his sister fought like starved dogs over the body of their father. Somewhere in it, Hermie rounded on Peter about his refusal to come home and take their father’s place at the bank. She called him, among other things, a traitor to the family and the indirect instrument of their father’s long depressions. Mother Hannah began to cry.
“You probably killed him too, on top of everything else,” Hermie shrilled. “It was all that worry over you that weakened his heart. I’ve always known it would.”
There was a ringing silence, and then the sound of a slap, a gasp, fresh wails from Hermie, and the slamming of the front door. I doubled over the hard melon of my baby, nearly blind with misery. I simply could not cope with the storms of two women who had lost their mainstay, two women who did not, in any case, want comfort from me. I could not do it alone. I knew that Peter would head for the water. The only thing I did not know was when he would return.
I spent another day in my room. At midafternoon Christina brought me a tray and said that Mother Hannah and Hermie had gone over to the funeral home in Castine to take the things Big Peter would wear home on the train to Boston.
“You ought to come down and get some air,” she said, putting her work-reddened hand over mine. “You look some peaked. Dr. Lincoln has stopped in twice to ask about you, but both times he’s had to see about Mrs. Chambliss and Miss Hermie. They’re taking it real hard. He asked me to look in on you. All this stir-up really isn’t good for you, you know.”
“I’m all right, Tina,” I said. “I have books, and I know you’re not going to let me starve. I think I’m probably better off up here for at least one more day. The family has some things they need to work out.”
“Looks to me like Miss Hermie has already worked everything out,” she said primly.
“I guess they’ll be taking him back to Boston, then,” I said. “Do you happen to know when? And…did Peter say when he was coming back?”
“They’re going home with him tomorrow on the noon train from Bangor,” she said. “The funeral home is taking him straight to the train, and Micah is going to drive them over and bring the car back. Don’t you worry about Peter. I’ve been watching him run away to sea for lots of years. He’ll be back.”
She smiled at me, and despite my anguish I smiled too. Odd that in only twenty-four hours she and Micah had become my constants in this place. I had always thought Peter would be that.
To my great relief, I did not see Hermione at all during her visit. I was drifting near sleep when Mother Hannah came up to my room that night and sat down on my bed. Hermie was not with her.
“I put her to bed,” Mother Hannah said. “She’s had a dreadful day. As I have. And, I suspect, you too, Maude. You’ve been very sensitive to us in a trying time, and we are grateful. You must forgive us for abandoning you; I knew that the Willises would look after you, but we’ve quite ignored you, and I know you were fond of your father-in-law. When we return from Boston we shall make it up to you, Peter and I. Meanwhile, I think it would be much the best if you stayed quiet and didn’t try to come with us. I’d much prefer that you stay here where Dr. Lincoln can keep an eye on you. I’ve arranged for you to go to the Potters for the weekend. Amy is going to come over for you early in the morning and put you straight to bed, and Dr. Lincoln will be by a bit later. The best thing you could do for Big Peter is keep his grandchild safe.”
I nodded, knowing I was bested. In any event, I did not want to be part of that sad cortege to Boston. I wanted to stay in Retreat and keep what I had of Big Peter here with me.
“Is Peter…have you heard…?”
“He’ll come home in time to go with us,” she said, smiling fondly. “He’s just upset. Go easy on him, Maude. He always comes back in time.”
He did, of course. He came in at dawn and tiptoed up the stairs and climbed into bed with me, and I turned over and put my arms out to him, and he crept into them. We held each other in silence. His skin was cold and damp, and his heart beat in slow, dragging thuds. There seemed nothing to say, so I said nothing. Presently, when I thought he must be asleep, he murmured, “Are you all right?”
“Yes. Are you?”
“I will be, when I can get all this over and get back here to you. Maude?”
“What, love?”
“I want the baby to be a boy. I want you to have a boy so he can be Peter Williams Chambliss too.”
“Well, then, I’ll do that,” I said, and kissed him. “Go to sleep.”
“You’re the only thing that makes any sense,” he mumbled, and then he did sleep. After a while, I did too. When I woke, Amy Potter was standing by my bed with a breakfast tray and the sun was high, and they had been gone with Micah Willis in the Marmon for over an hour.
For the rest of the summer Peter was someone I did not know. He was silent and distracted, and away more than he was there. When he and Mother Hannah got back from Boston he spent one night prowling restlessly about the cottage and then took the Hannah out for three days. Busy with her stream of visitors and thank-you notes and the minutiae of her new queenship, Mother Hannah hardly seemed to notice his absence. She thrust me smartly back into quarantine on the sun porch and left me with embroidery and yellowing novels, and without my husband or my father-in-law I had no friend at court to help me escape the chaise and the blankets. I lay there, as lonely and alien as I have ever felt, out of the mainstream of the constant flow of women, and wondered if there would ever be anything in this beautiful, sharp-edged place that was mine alone.
“I miss Peter,” I said to her once, when she asked if I was all right.
“Well, you’d better find a way to accept these little trips of his,” she said. “He’s always handled his difficulties like this. He’s sensitive and needs his time alone. His father did it too. We must remember, we women, that this place is really for the men, to help them find the strength they need for their work. When you look at it like that, I’m sure you won’t mind that he goes for a little sail by himself every now and then.”
But I did mind. Peter’s little sails became more and more frequent and lasted longer and longer. I grew larger and clumsier and tireder and unhappier, and the baby dropped low, waiting, I thought, to be born. I told myself that soon it would be time to go home to Northpoint, and in the fall my baby would be born, and then I would surely have Peter back, and all would be well again. I had only to wait. Only to wait….
But I did not wait long enough, it seemed. On the second week in August, while Peter was away on the Hannah far around Naskeag Point and up into Blue Hill Bay, I went suddenly and violently into labor, and it was Micah Willis who drove me those endless jolting miles to the Castine hospital instead of my husband, and Mother Hannah who held me in her arms in the back seat, bracing me against the bumps, Mother Hannah whose voice told me, over and over, “It will be all right. I’m here.”
It was a long grinding labor, and I was blinded with sweat and pain and fear. I knew it was too early. The baby would be too small. I could not seem to help; the pain came in sucking red tides, and I could have no ether because of the
prematurity. I tried to push but my body seemed paralyzed; I tried to breathe shallowly and fast, as I was told by the sweating, distracted house physician and the tired nurses to do, but I could not seem to do that either. There seemed for an eternity only pain and pressure and more pain; nobody had ever told me that pain could be like this. This pain was past monstrousness and consumed the world.
Toward nightfall I thought my mother was in the room with me. I could see her plainly beside the bed, small and dark and lovely and smiling, her hands on my face, her voice soft with the honey and smoke of Charleston. I began to cry with sheer relief.
“Oh, Mama, I can’t do this,” I wept. “Tell them. I can’t make them listen to me, and Mama, I really can’t do this….”
“You can do it,” she said, but her voice was changing; it was not hers any longer.
“I can’t,” I wailed. “Not without Peter, I can’t. He’s left me by myself and I can’t do this without him. Oh, Mama, I hate him!”
The words rose up and up and became a scream, and the scream went on and on. Through it the woman leaned near me and brushed my wet hair off my forehead and held my hands hard, and I knew it was not my mother, after all, but my mother-in-law.
“You can do it,” she whispered to me. “You can and you must. You must forgive Peter and go on. At all costs we must keep things even, we women. This is up to us. And we will do this together.”
And we did. At four that morning my son Peter Williams Chambliss slid into the world, tiny and red and roaring with life, and the awful love that caught and whirled me away when they laid him on my stomach was as strong and old as the earth and would, I knew dimly, abide as long. Even as they lifted him out of my arms and I slid finally into sleep, I whispered, “Mine. Mine. Mine.”
The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes the next morning was a nurse with an armful of silken anemones, as perfect and incredible as butterflies’ wings. She handed me the card.
Colony Page 16
