From your lady of the secrets, it read in a slanted black backhand. To this very newest Peter. With all the love left. S.
Chapter
Six
It’s almost uncanny, isn’t it, the way our lives seem to run in parallel?” Amy Potter said to me on a June morning of my third summer in Retreat.
We were sitting on the beach below the Little House, watching the straggling remnants of one of the colony’s Saturday regattas toil out of sight around the point toward Little Deer Isle. They would circle Birch Island and come home again; this race would last all day. Peter had gone ahead early in the Hannah; we had watched him take her past the beach nearly on her lee rail. There was a streaming wind from the east that meant rain tomorrow or the next day. Parker Potter was only now struggling past in Circe; we could see the blaze of his red hair under the high sun. He was laboring with the mainsail, which was luffing badly. Amy sighed. It was not a good summer for Parker.
Petie lay beside me on a blanket, face reddened from the crying fit that had slid him, finally, into exhausted sleep. His small knotted fists still stirred restlessly, and a bubble formed between his red lips and burst. I adjusted the parasol that covered my small furious son and looked over at Amy.
“You mean because of the baby and being up here so close to your time?” I said. Amy was pregnant that summer, vastly and miserably. Her baby was due in late July, and Parker had promised to take her home to Boston in a couple of weeks. Like mine, the summer before, her mother-in-law thought she should not be at Braebonnie at all and allowed her out of the cottage only for Saturday outings with me, and only after my promise that we would come straight to old Lottie Padgett’s tiny house on the shore. I knew that Helen Potter, like most other colony matrons, thought Lottie eccentric and unsanitary but a veritable good witch with children.
And it was true. If worst came to worst, Lottie Padgett could probably deliver babies as well as any midwife. So Amy and I came to her each Saturday morning, me with flailing little Petie, Amy with her troublesome burden. She had been sick most of her pregnancy and was still nauseated from time to time. Lottie Padgett fussed over us and fed us herbal tea and spice cookies and settled us in the sunshine on her beach, or by her fire if the weather was bad, and swept us into the untidy and beguiling circle of visiting animals and children as if we had been one of them. I felt tension run out of me like water here in this arcane doll’s house, and Amy seemed soothed and lightened, and even Petie stopped his crying and slept. This morning Lottie was off down the beach gathering mussels with the tow-haired children from Mary’s Garden and one or two Compound youngsters, and a nest of orphan red squirrels chirred in cotton wool beside her banked fire. I think I have seldom known such utter, seamless peace in Retreat as I did on those few June Saturdays at the Little House.
Amy pushed her hair off her face and grimaced as her baby kicked. It was a terror for kicking; I had seen her stomach literally dancing with its force all summer. I thought it must keep her awake, that and other things. Her dark, impish face was pale and thin that summer, so that the lone dimple beside her mouth seemed a hole poked in the flesh, and her eyes were deep-shadowed. And most startling of all, her dark bob was threaded all over with strands of silver. It had happened over the winter. They had not been there the summer before. I remembered she had told me that her mother was completely white-haired by the time she was thirty, so I was not altogether surprised. But the effect, on Amy, was not that of heredity but of illness and depletion. She seemed exhausted that summer, and very frail.
“Well, the baby, yes,” she said. “And then Father Potter dying so suddenly, like Big Peter did. And Parker being…disturbed, and everything. I know Peter went through a pretty bad time after his father died.”
“It is uncanny, isn’t it?” I said. “Just be sure you don’t have your baby in the Castine hospital. Then I’ll be afraid that anything bad that ever happens to me will happen to you too.” I saw her tired eyes darken and added hastily, “Not that having Petie was a bad experience. But I’d rather have done it at home, with Peter there, and I know you would too. And you will.”
It was odd, that summer, that I, the younger and more inexperienced of us, in all ways the initiate, seemed older than she did. I thought again how very wide was the gulf between a woman who had borne a child and one who had not.
“I hope so,” she said, and her voice was thin and old. “I hate to say it, but I can’t seem to make Parker get serious about going home. Or much of anything else. Half the time I think he forgets that this is a baby in here. His baby, at that. He told Gretchen Winslow the other day that if I got any fatter and sloppier he was going to divorce me. With me and both the Valentine sisters standing right there.”
“Oh, God, I’ll bet Gretch the Wretch adored that,” I said, anger at Parker flashing hotly through me. It was not the first small cruelty I had seen him deal Amy that summer.
“Probably,” Amy said. “Especially since she’s lost another million pounds and gotten a gorgeous tan. Oh, Maude, tell me it’ll be better when the baby comes. It was for you all, wasn’t it? Didn’t it make Peter sort of…start to put his father’s death behind him? I don’t know what will happen if Parker doesn’t.”
I know what will happen, I thought grimly, but did not say. He’ll drink himself to death and you’ll be stuck with his mother and his grandmother and his baby for the rest of your natural life.
“It’ll be better, you’ll see,” I said, patting her hand. Its bones felt like a bird’s under mine, light and impossibly fragile. “Peter got himself together when Petie was born. He doesn’t go off on the boat for days; he’s not distant any more. He stands up for me to his mother. He’s my old Peter; we’re closer than ever. And Parker will change too. Besides the change that comes with being a father, it’s sort of the other side of the coin of death. A birth so soon after a death makes everything seem…natural, a part of something much bigger and older. A cycle of the earth. It doesn’t take the grief away, but it takes the worst of the pain.”
“I wish I thought so….”
“I know so.”
Philip Potter had died on the Brookline Country Club golf course the previous April, of the secret red flower of an aneurysm that, the doctors said, had probably lain dormant there all his life and bloomed only at that moment. It had been lightning quick; he had been dead by the time he hit the fairway. A mercy, everyone told Helen and Parker. He was simply not the sort of man who could have borne being ill or crippled. And that was true and, for Helen Potter, seemed to afford a great deal of comfort. As so many of the older women of Retreat did, she appeared to gain enormous strength, almost power, at the death of her husband. She who had never made a decision in her life, never even voiced a strong opinion, became overnight a woman capable of running a firm and selling the vast ancestral seat and finding a smaller and more modern home in Brookline and telling her mother-in-law, who had been wailing for forty-eight hours like a banshee, to shut up. It was Mamadear who could not handle the death of Philip Potter. Mamadear and his only child, Parker. Parker got drunk the night his father died, and few people had seen him entirely sober since.
He had always been a hard drinker, and to an extent the colony was used to his escapades. But mostly they had had a kind of sophomoric exuberance about them, a bad boy’s panache. They were funnier, in the main, than they were destructive. It was widely considered that Parker was trying to get his red, roaring father’s attention, to be seen by him as an equal or at least a proper heir apparent: a cub trying his claws on an old lion.
But this summer there had been nothing amusing about Parker Potter’s behavior when he drank, which was virtually every day. He lost his fine athlete’s edge on the tennis court and at the helm of the Circe, and blundered and erred and stumbled and fell, and lost matches and races, and when he did he bellowed and cursed and threw his racquet and kicked the flanks of his boat and blamed everyone and everything but himself. He became so abusive on the tennis court tha
t courteous Guildford Kennedy, who was his doubles partner, reprimanded him publicly, and Parker threw his racquet at Guildford and gashed his large, fine nose. He roared at a young native waiter in the dining hall when his coffee came to him cool, and dashed the liquid over the boy and told him to get out and not come back. When Amy tried to reason with him, he told her to shut her damned flapping mouth and stalked out, overturning his chair and leaving her to struggle with tears as she made excuses for him. He ran Erica Conant’s chauffeur off the road into the village in his Mercedes roadster, severely shaking the furious Erica and her visiting bridge club from Beacon Hill. And, Peter told me on coming in from the water one afternoon after a regatta, no one would sail with him any more. His temper was simply too bad and his seamanship too erratic to be safe in deep-water races. I remembered the red-faced, savagely smiling young man who had faultlessly navigated miles of killer fog even when half drunk only two summers before and thought what a long, sad way Parker had come from that day.
“And he dumped God knows how much whiskey in the punch at the yacht club tea this afternoon, and you know there are always old ladies and children who drink that stuff,” Peter said. “It wasn’t at all funny. Burdie Winslow is talking about suspending his club privileges, and Guild Kennedy has spoken to the tournament committee about barring him from court play for a while. I’ve never seen anybody behave this badly in the colony, and there’ve been some pretty high-spirited members before him. His father, for instance, raised more hell than anybody in living memory, but somehow he was never really offensive. It’s the liquor. He’s turned into a bad drunk this summer.”
“Where does he get it?” I asked. “I know there’s always been a little liquor at Braebonnie, but no more than any of us have, and that’s surely not enough to get drunk every day on.”
Peter looked at me quizzically. “Do you really not know?” he said. “He gets it the same place we all do. We buy it up here. There’s more whiskey smuggled into these coves and inlets on dark nights than the rest of the Atlantic coast put together. Best stuff, too. Up here, if a guy has a lobster boat, you can be fairly sure he’s smuggling. Retreat has three or four ‘official’ sources. I’m not going to tell you who they are, but Micah Willis didn’t get that Ford truck hauling, you can bet on that.”
“Micah…oh, I can’t believe that,” I said. “He has a family, a business—are you sure? I thought the liquor in the cottages was just sort of…what everybody had left when Prohibition started. Peter, you know as well as I do that Micah Willis is one of the most moral men we’ve ever known.”
“I agree,” Peter said, grinning. “And if he thought he was doing anything immoral, he’d stop and turn himself over to the sheriff. He thinks, like most of the natives, that it’s the law that’s immoral. That the government’s got no business telling a man what he can drink and what he can’t. I’m not so sure he isn’t right, either.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“You bet your bottom dollar it is,” he said. “And that’s all I’m going to tell you about smuggling or Micah or anybody else. And you’d do well not to mention it to him or Christina or my mother. She still thinks our stock is Dad’s leftovers.”
“I’m not a fool,” I said crisply. And of course I did not mention it to Micah Willis or to anyone else. But forever after that, when I caught a glimpse of Micah’s solid shape pruning shrubbery or carrying the ladder around the house or swinging easily into the kitchen with a load of wood, I saw behind him, as if in a kind of pentimento, the dark shapes of silent skiffs on moonless water, and cloth-muffled oars resting in oarlocks, and the still forms of waiting men peering through the black for a single flash of light far out in the bay and straining for the low throb of idling engines. And something old and dark in my own blood leaped to meet those images.
“Maybe it would be better if nobody would sell Parker liquor,” I said to Peter, but he shook his head.
“Micah and some of the others won’t now, but there’s always somebody down bay who will. If Parker wants booze he can get it easily enough. I really thought when his dad died he’d shape up, but it’s gotten a lot worse.”
“Of course it is,” I said. “He can never win, now. He can never on this earth show his father how tough he is, or how grown up. He’ll drink more and more and act worse and worse, and he still won’t be able to get his father’s attention.”
Peter skinned out of his salt-damp sweater and came and put his arms around me. I buried my face in his smooth, cool, damp chest. I licked his skin lightly; it tasted of salt and the sweetness of his flesh. He kissed the top of my head.
“How come you’re so smart?” he said.
“I’m not,” I said. “I just know how it feels to go around having an eternal one-sided conversation with a dead parent. I railed at my mother for years, for going off and leaving me to grow up without her. And…I think that’s sort of what you were doing when you went off in the boat last summer, after your father died. You were furious at him, and so you ran away from home.”
“Don’t make excuses for me,” he said into my hair. “I was a jerk. A louse. It still makes me cringe to think about it. Leaving you alone to cope with all that shit after he died, and then to have to go to hospital to have our baby with only my mother and the hired man. Christ! I wonder you even let me back in the house.”
“Well, I knew how upset you were,” I said, nuzzling him. “And after all, the baby wasn’t supposed to come for almost two months. And I could do worse than have your mother and Micah around when I had a baby. And after all, you’re back, aren’t you? You haven’t run away to sea once since then.”
He pulled me with him down onto the bed. It was tumbled and warm, and outside the clouds that the east wind presaged were streaming in, sucking the heat from the last of the sun. I was still a bit sleepy from the nap his homecoming had interrupted. Downstairs, Petie slept in the old wicker crib that had been his grandfather’s, watched over by pretty twelve-year-old Polly Willis, Micah’s brother’s child. Mother Hannah had hired her expressly to mind Petie this summer, and she was good at it. She minded several small siblings and cousins at home. I knew that if Petie woke in one of his small red rages, Polly could soothe him back to sleep. I burrowed into the warm bed and curled up into Peter’s side.
“What would I do without you?” he said, sleepy himself, into the curve of my neck. “What if you were somebody else and not you, somebody I couldn’t talk to? What if you didn’t understand me like you do? What if you were stuck up or mean-spirited or stupid?”
“Then I’d know you married me for my looks,” I said, eyes closed. After the distance and trouble of the past summer, Peter’s body against mine felt doubly precious, doubly comforting. I’d told Amy the truth that morning; I did indeed have Peter back and could not imagine ever feeling estranged from him, shut away. But I had.
“What if I couldn’t…do this?” he said, turning me to face him and wrapping his long legs around me. “Or maybe this….”
I let myself go limp against him but said into his ear, “You may want to reconsider. It’s not the best time for this unless you want another baby—”
“Christ, no,” he said, propping himself up on one elbow and running his hand over his face. “Not until this one shapes up.”
I was silent against him. Yes, I had told Amy the truth about Peter that morning, but not the whole truth. The other part of that truth was, this summer, the first great wedge between us.
For Peter could not seem to make contact with his son, not on the terrible subterranean level where I felt my kin with him; indeed, not in any essential way. It was not that he ignored Petie. He played with him in the mornings and held him when he was awake, and fresh from his bath, and fed; he carried him about the colony when we first brought him there and showed him to all the friends of his youth and seemed, at those times, to be every inch and every fiber the proud young father. And I think he was, at those sweet times. It was just that he could not sustain the bond t
hrough the bad times, and there were plenty of those with Petie. Then he gave him back to me or to Polly and, if the crying did not stop, went into his study or back into the big bedroom to talk with his mother or, less frequently, down to the water, to the boat. At home in Northpoint, he seemed more patient with the baby, and more sympathetic with my struggles to calm and quiet him. There, he seemed, if not smitten with Petie, at least moved by his tiny son’s war with the universe and sometimes softly amused by it.
“That’s right, little guy,” he would say. “Go after that windmill and give it hell.”
But in Retreat, he seemed to distance himself from the baby and to slide over into his mother’s stern and implacable camp. “That child needs to shape up. Let him cry, Maude. He’ll never hush if you run in there and pick him up every time he opens his mouth.”
“You sound exactly, precisely, like your mother,” I said early on that summer. “Spare the rod and spoil the child. Children should be seen and not heard. What happens to you up here? You don’t sound like that at home. Shape up, indeed. He’s a ten-month-old baby, Peter! You sound like you want to put him in military school.”
“It might not be a bad idea,” Peter said grimly above the baby’s outraged howls, and I picked Petie up, love and pain at his pain twisting me inside from my throat to the pit of my stomach. Peter Williams Chambliss IV had been born furious, as if racked with helpless rage at being tumbled early from his secret sea, and was, these ten months later, still an angry and inconsolable baby. He fought, he cried, he raged, he hungered, he thirsted, for something we simply could not give him. At times he frightened me badly; at others he angered me in my turn. He seemed insatiable, a ravenous little organism, a living, breathing need. He was dark and simian and red and flailing; I knew that in his grandmother’s eyes, and to a lesser extent in his father’s, he was the very graven image of the dark, low-to-the-earth aliens of the swamp South who were my people. There was nothing in little Petie, in those early days, of his father’s long-boned, flaxen, northern tribe. I think Peter only saw that clearly when we were in Retreat, among those people; saw what Mother Hannah saw and pursed her mouth at. At home, Petie was more his son and less exclusively mine.
Colony Page 17
