Colony

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “And I want you to know that I haven’t had a drink since that afternoon,” he said humbly. “And I don’t plan to. I’m taking Amy home the day after the Fourth. It’s time I grew up and began acting like a father and a husband.”

  After he left, Peter and I looked at each other.

  “Do you think he’s serious?” I said.

  “I think he’s sober,” Peter said. “That’s about as far as I’m willing to go. Whether or not he’ll stick to it is anybody’s guess. I think he’d be one of the world’s dumbest shits if he acted up again so soon up here. Everybody’s pretty fed up with him.”

  “Well,” said Mother Hannah, admiring her chocolates, “you can’t say he wasn’t a perfect gentleman today. He’ll straighten up, you’ll see. Blood will tell.”

  “Especially,” I said under my breath, starting for the sun porch where Petie had begun to wail once more, “when it’s full enough of alcohol to cook a rarebit.”

  I was not convinced by Parker’s contrition. Behind the subdued voice and clear, ingenuous eyes something else, goatish and rank, seemed to prance and toss its swollen neck. If I had known the word then, I would have sworn I could smell the powerful odor of testosterone in the air. I remembered all too clearly Peter’s words about the visiting woman friend in Northeast Harbor.

  But for the next couple of days Parker was as good as his word. I saw him walking with Amy at twilight in the gardens of Braebonnie, his arm around her, her head inclined onto his shoulder. They were laughing, and once he reached over and patted the bulge in her stomach that was his baby. I turned away from the window then, not wanting to intrude even from a distance. I felt better about Parker Potter at that moment than at any other time since I had met him.

  On the Fourth of July, Retreat has for generations hosted an invitational regatta for yacht clubs from Brooklin, Deer Isle, and Northeast Harbor. Thick, bland chowder is served at twilight, and after that, in the early, fast-falling New England evening, there are fireworks from the end of the dock, blooming out over the bay and islands like fabulous flowers. Everyone turns out for the chowder and fireworks, even people who have not set foot on the dock or club porch since the last Fourth of July. Babies sleep in waddings of blankets, children shriek and romp and squabble, young husbands and wives vivid with sunburn and spiked punch laugh on the steps and lawn with their peers, teenagers preen and jostle and flirt, dogs thump tails and sniff comradely behinds in pools of shade, and old ladies in cottons and cardigans and pearls colonize the long porches, accepting plates and drinks and compliments from the young and surveying their domain from the inviolable rockers with the eyes of raptors. Visiting yachtsmen and their wives and crews circulate, greeting old friends, tanned and fair-haired and white-clad, so like their hosts in Retreat that in the dusk I have never been able to tell the difference. They sleep the night over, and the punch off, on their sleek cruising yachts or on the sun porches of friends.

  Among them, that perfect day, was a tall, extremely slender young woman with the henna bob and slouch of the flapper we were beginning to read about, although most assuredly without the flapper’s flat bosom. She wore white flannels and a taut-stretched striped sailor’s jersey, and her teeth were brilliant in the dusk. She flashed them often at everyone, and most often of all at Parker Potter, and I suddenly knew without being told that she was the woman friend from Northeast Harbor. Peter knew it too. I do not think Amy did; when Parker volunteered for kitchen cleanup and vanished into the back of the club and the visiting flapper drawled that she would keep him company, Amy only smiled her old, quick, deep-dimpling smile and said, “Better her than me.”

  But Peter knew, and his mouth went straight and hard, and he stopped his foolishness on the lawn with Burdie Winslow and Al and Henry Stallings. Others knew too, I think. Many eyes had followed the two figures into the kitchen, though there was no pause in the babble of conversation. Then the eyes pulled away. Better, simply, not to see and not to say. Something hot and bright flared in my chest. How dare he? How dare she? I handed Petie unceremoniously to Mother Hannah in her rocker and went over to Amy where she lounged in a peacock chair on the lawn, covered with a blanket.

  “You okay? Want anything? Getting a little tired?” I said cheerfully. I hoped she would say yes. I could then whisk her home and stay there with her. I wanted nothing more of this place and this night, and I wanted with all my heart to have Amy quit of both.

  But she said, “No, I’m fine. I want to see the fireworks,” and there was nothing I could do to coax her away that would not have drawn all eyes inevitably to her. I sat down on the damp grass beside her, chattering foolishly, determined to keep her from noticing the lengthening absence of her husband and his handmaiden, and for a while I succeeded. Peter sat silently with us, Petie for once asleep in his arms. I do not know when, in the course of the fireworks and the evening, Amy realized that neither Parker nor the woman had returned. By the time she did, most people at the festivities were a couple of beats ahead of her. Heads turned toward the closed kitchen door and then nodded together, and whispers sprang up like a summer wind in the fast-cooling night.

  “Come on,” I said, getting to my feet and pulling her up behind me. “If it’s too cold for me it’s too cold for you. I’m going to take you back to Liberty and fix you a cup of hot chocolate, and then I’m going to clap you in bed and you can spend the night with us. Peter will tell…your folks. Do, Amy. I’ll sleep in the other bed in the guest room. It’ll be like a spend-the-night party.”

  She looked up at me and in her eyes was fathomless hurt and emptiness and defeat. I almost cried aloud at the force of them. But her face was still, and she only said, “I think I will. I’ve seen all this before, and I’m pretty tired. Please tell Mother Helen and Mamadear for me, Peter; I just don’t feel like arguing with them tonight.”

  “Don’t worry about a thing,” he said, kissing her cheek. “I’ll take care of it.” Above her head, his eyes, meeting mine, were narrowed with anger. Unconsciously, I thought, he bent his head to Petie’s downy one, on his shoulder, and kissed the soft hollow there, under the spiky dark hair. Pain and love knifed through me. I had never seen him do that before.

  Amy did not want chocolate, after all. She said she wanted to go straight to bed, so I tucked her into the little guest alcove over the sun porch and plumped her pillows and smoothed Mother Hannah’s silky old family percale sheets and piled blankets and afghans over her.

  “I’m going to fix you a plate of sandwiches and some cocoa anyway and leave them beside your bed,” I said. “You hardly touched your chowder, not that I blame you. It gets worse every year. You might feel like a bite if you wake up in the night. If you do, I’ll be here beside you. I’m just going to wait up for Peter and Petie now. All you have to do is sing out if you want me.”

  She had rolled over onto her side and burrowed deep into the covers. She did not turn her face from the wall of windows that looked out over a grove of spruce and birches down to the club and the dock and, beyond it, the black sea and sky. Fireworks still arced and bloomed, silently.

  “Thanks, Maude,” she said, and her voice was soft and level and dead. “If it weren’t for you, I don’t think I could get through this night.”

  “Oh, Amy, dear—”

  “No. Don’t say any more. It’s all right. I just want to sleep a little now.”

  “Shall I pull the curtains?”

  “No, I want to see the moon,” she said, and her voice had thickened, and I thought that now she would cry. Well, maybe it would be best. Cry some of it out….

  “I love you,” I whispered, and went out and closed the door.

  Peter came in soon after with Petie and his mother. I took my sleeping son from him and nodded good night to Mother Hannah and went upstairs to put the baby down in his crib. I did not want to get into any sort of exchange with my mother-in-law, at least not yet. If she had words of defense and justification for Parker Potter now, I knew I could not bear to hear them.r />
  Peter followed me up and sat down heavily on the bed. He ran his hand hard over his face and mouth, and I heard the whispery rasp of beard growth. It always surprised me. Peter’s whiskers were invisible.

  “Is she asleep?” he said.

  “I don’t know. She said she wanted to. It’s been an hour or so. Peter, she looked…just dead. Like a dead woman. Oh, how could he? How could he?”

  “I’d say that for him it was as easy as falling off a log,” Peter said. “It’s what he does best, after all. It’s liquor, of course. He was swigging on a pint in a paper sack all afternoon out on the water. And Burdie says he keeps a stash in the club kitchen. I hadn’t heard that, but it must be true. They hadn’t unlocked the door when I left, but from the sounds coming out of there they definitely weren’t washing dishes. I think several people are ready to set fire to the club and burn them out. I tell you, Maude, I’d light the first match.”

  “Somebody’s going to have to do something about it this time,” I said. “She’s got to get back home to Boston; that baby could come any time. If he isn’t going to look after her, somebody else has to. Did Parker’s mother say anything? Or his grandmother? Could they talk to him?”

  “How should I know?” he snapped in frustration. “Neither one of them let on by so much as a blink or the lift of an eyebrow that they knew anything was wrong. When they left for Braebonnie everybody at the club was sneaking looks at the kitchen, and those two old trouts just smiled around and cooed their good nights and sailed off for home as if they’d been reviewing the troops. God, his father would have beat the shit out of him.”

  “Would that he had,” I said bitterly. “Then we wouldn’t have to go through this. Well, I’m going over there in the morning and tell him he’s got to take her home—that is, if he’s even there—and that if he won’t, you and I will, and we’ll stay with her until the baby comes. And I’ll tell her mother-in-law and her horrible old grandmother-in-law too. I’ll bet you anything they hop to and start looking after her if they think they’re going to lose their little handmaiden.”

  “Let’s see what happens,” Peter said wearily. “Maybe he’s already home. If he’s not, I’ll round him up in the morning and put the fear of God in him. I promise you that. You don’t have to go fight Amy’s battles for her. I can do that, and I will.”

  I kissed him good night, and went in and looked in on Petie, and then went downstairs and read Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat until I got sleepy enough to drop off. It was after midnight when I tiptoed up to the guest room and inched the door open. Surely Amy was asleep by now.

  But she wasn’t. She stood by the windows, her bulk wrapped in trailing blankets, her neck heart-breakingly fragile under the weight of her silver-threaded hair, staring out at the woods and the bay. I went up beside her and put my arms around her but said nothing, and she didn’t either. Far below us, out on the black water, a light bobbed and flared. I suppose both of us knew, absolutely and viscerally, that it was one of the Circe’s running lights, but neither of us said it. There was no need to.

  In a moment, I gave her shoulders a little shake and said, “It really is bedtime. And I’m right here. And in the morning, we’ll figure out what to do. Peter will help. You’ll see. Everything looks better in the morning.”

  She turned to me and smiled, a small, wounded smile, and started to speak, but at that moment a great spear of pure crystal green lanced the black sky over the water, and then a huge wash of iridescent white, as if someone had flooded the sky with liquid diamonds, and then vast pulsing tongues of pink and purple and aquamarine. I drew a sharp breath, and she squeezed my hand until it hurt.

  “It’s the northern lights,” she breathed. “The aurora borealis. Oh, Maude, look; I’ve been coming here for six years and I’ve never seen them. Oh, look; oh, look!”

  We stood there for perhaps half an hour, Amy and I, as silent and still as two marble women, watching the entire sky arc and shimmer and bloom. I could not have spoken if I had wanted to. I have seen them several times again, during the long summers in Retreat, those great fires in the heavens, but to me none has ever been as breathlessly, terrifyingly beautiful as that first time from the upstairs windows of Liberty. They ignited the world; they ate the sky and moon and stars and paled the treacherous rocking lights on the Circe down to nothing. When finally they subsided, the light was gone. Amy and I were both asleep, this time deeply and truly, within five minutes.

  Several years later Amy and I were reading Robert Service’s stupefyingly awful poetry aloud together and laughing, and when we came across the line, “Oh, the Northern Lights have seen strange sights, but the strangest they ever did see,” we put our faces down into our cupped hands and howled with helpless laughter. We laughed until we could barely breathe, and Amy scarcely managed to gasp, “If he only knew,” and we were off again. For Amy’s baby was born at noon the next day, in the hospital at Castine as Petie had been, with me and Peter and a fluttering Helen Potter in attendance, and it was not until two days later, when he came limping home in the Circe laden once more with contrition and gifts, that Parker knew he had a daughter named Elizabeth Wainwright Potter, and she was forty-eight hours old. I was there when he came in, and when she saw his face, Amy burst into the first spontaneous laughter I had heard from her that summer. Forever after that, the mention of northern lights would set her off, and usually me with her.

  But I was to think often, later, as I watched Elizabeth Potter grow, that that eldritch light had not been a benign one.

  Chapter

  Seven

  The greatest gift the sea has to give is timelessness. Beside it, if you are able to receive it, that vast blue amplitude of space and time soothes, simplifies, heals. Beside it, if you are very quiet and still, you see clearly that life is and always has been outside time, a thing apart from it, and so you need have no real fear of time’s poison fruits. They will still fall in your lap, of course, but beside the sea they do not taste bitter.

  It is not a thing you can possibly know when you are young and time is an elusive suitor to be seduced, but the old know it. It is what the old women of Retreat always knew. It is what they labored so constantly and fiercely to preserve. When I first came to Retreat with Peter I chafed under the yoke of that enforced timelessness; I fought its enforcers tooth and nail. But now I am an old woman myself, and I sit on my porch and look out at the eternal face of the bay and taste myself the thick honey of timelessness and sameness, and I say in my heart to Mother Hannah and all those others with whom I did battle so long ago, You were right. It is worth everything.

  In this place of sea silence, memories come as clear as pictures in a book. One book: the book of Maine. When Petie was about nine, he and Elizabeth Potter wrote a book on thick, lined Blue Horse tablet paper, and titled it “The True Story of Maine,” and illustrated it with vivid, lopsided, achingly true drawings of children doing wonderful things in boats and on beaches and rocks and piers and lawns, and of spavined adults doing stupid things in those same magical places. I know every one of those drawings by heart, and it is the same with the memories that come to me now, when I sit here in the twig rocker with the balsam stuffed cushion, both of which were old when I came to Retreat a lifetime ago. Speak, memory, Vladimir Nabokov said, and memory did speak. By the sea, it speaks, often, more clearly than reality.

  Sometimes, in a place like Retreat, where the same people live for generations in the same way, years and even decades may seem to pass when very little changes: when the actuality of life has ups and downs and ins and outs that might be seen on a sort of interior seismograph, but the sense of that time, its ethos and essence, remains fixed. Every life has those hiatuses, but they are only seen clearly, I think, in retrospect. It would save everyone a great deal of grief if we could see the hiatus midway and know it for what it is, but that, of course, is not the nature of life. “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen said to Alice; I remember Petie loved
that when I read Lewis Carroll to him. Carroll’s wisdom speaks far too often only to the very young.

  But there sometimes comes a moment, a small, silent white explosion of awareness, that signals the ending of one of those long, sweet, suspended times as surely as the hooting of a great ship as it nears the harbor, and those caught by that awareness feel the great cold breath of endings and beginnings on the backs of their necks and prickle with a portent they cannot name. Only then do they look around them and see beyond the familiar inner landscape the shadow of coming change, feel the wind of its wings. These are frightening moments. Nobody embraces them. When they have passed, most people will put great energy into pretending they did not occur. But you cannot unknow the future once you have sensed it, and so forever after you will mark those epochal passages by the first moment you felt their shapes ahead of you.

  My first came to me on the dock of the yacht club in late August of 1941, my eighteenth year in Retreat, on a night of icy silver radiance, when the very sea and stars seemed on fire with light. Amy Potter sat beside me, wrapped as I was in heavy sweater and blankets, drinking coffee from the thermos I had brought from the cottage. I had impulsively added a good stout shot of rum to it as we left, and it tasted wonderful in the cold stillness. We were waiting for the Retreat boats to come back from the season’s last race, a two-day sortie to Northeast Harbor and back, and we had been waiting for a long time. Priss Thorne had come down to the dock from Mary’s Garden an hour or so before to tell us that Tobias had gotten through by radio to say there had been heavy fog off Long Island, in Blue Hill Bay, which had only recently lifted, so we were not worried about Peter and Petie in Hannah, or Parker in Circe with Elizabeth. Only perhaps just the least bit drunk.