“Did they have a fight, do you know? Petie’s in an awful state,” I said. “I never saw him like he was when he came in last night.”
“Well, I don’t think so,” Amy said. “She said she told him she thought it would be the best thing for both of them if they didn’t see each other for a while, and that she’d always think of him as her best friend. And she said he didn’t say much at all about that, so I thought—really, Maude, it’s the answer to all our prayers, don’t you think? I mean, we’ve been at our wits’ end about them, and now there’s nothing more to worry about.”
“Except for Petie,” I said, rage flaring within me. “Only Petie, who looks like the walking dead. My God, couldn’t she have given him some kind of warning, some kind of notice? He literally worships her!”
“It was you who came over here wanting me to keep her away from him, and not so long ago either,” Amy said crisply. “Now she’s taken care of it herself, and just listen to you. What do you want, Maude?”
“I don’t know,” I said, turning away. “I thought it was this. But now I don’t know.”
The next week was a terrible time for Petie, but I think it was just as bad for me. He would not talk with me about Elizabeth, and he ate little and that in his room, and he stayed on the water alone in the dinghy from sunup until long after dark. Only the constant attention that small Happy and Mother Hannah required kept me from dogging his tracks, running him to earth, holding him forcibly to my breast as I had when he was small. Only that, and Miss Lottie’s words not long before: “Give him the gift of his whole pain.”
And so I sat by, my heart physically hurting in my chest for his silent white agony, and let him fly to the sea with it as his grandfather and father had before him. And after that first terrible week he came in one night and asked, in nearly his old, froggy adolescent voice, if he might go to Northpoint and spend the rest of the summer with his father.
“I can get a leg up on calculus,” he said. “I might even pass it on the first go-round, if I get on it now.”
And I watched him off for the Ellsworth train station in Micah’s truck with pride and love and pity for him tearing at me like gulls at a fish on the shore, thinking I could see clearly the shape of the man he might be one day, and liking very much what I saw.
“God, let it be over now,” I whispered as the truck lurched up the lane and vanished, and when they met again the next summer, the one in which Amy and I sat on the dock watching and waiting, it truly seemed to be. Elizabeth was even more beautiful at fifteen, more a creature of smoke and flame and laughter, and she treated Petie with the kind of lighthearted, bantering affection that old friends have for each other. And he in turn treated her lightly, casually, as a lordly teenager might a pretty child. And only I saw the white pain that simmered in him like a fire in the earth, that would never burn out. I knew, that night as we waited for their lights on the black water, that wherever they were, riding the wind side by side in Hannah and Circe, Peter hurt for Elizabeth and labored mightily not to show that he did.
“Oh, yes,” I said to Amy Potter again. “I remember.”
“All those years ago,” she said. “Can you believe it? You think when you’re up here that time doesn’t pass at all, but it does. It does. Oh, Maude! If we could only stop time right now! I don’t ever want this to change.”
She was silent awhile, and then said, “Maude?”
“Hmmmm?”
“Did you ever feel that way about Peter? That wildness, that burning up?”
I smiled in the darkness, though I did not think she could see.
“Still do,” I said.
“Lord,” she whispered, but that was all she did say.
Presently we saw a light, far out on the water, and got to our feet and went down to the end of the dock, but then we heard the soft rumble of a motor and knew it was not, after all, the returning fleet but a lobster boat, and a lone one. We watched as its light rode nearer and nearer, and soon we could see the black shape of it, and see on its white side the black letters: Tina.
“It’s Micah,” I said to Amy. “What on earth is he doing out so late, do you think? He usually finishes hauling by noon. Oh, Lord, I hope nothing’s happened to the fleet.”
A few yards out he cut the Tina’s engine and glided silently into the dock, and I caught the line he tossed over to me and said, as he jumped lightly from the deck to the planks where we stood, “Did you see the fleet? Is everything okay out there? We heard there was fog, and they’re awfully late.”
“Didn’t see ’em,” he said, his eyes showing white in the star-pricked night. I could feel the heat of his body in the cold off the water and hugged myself with my arms. I watched as he tied up the Tina. Who are you? I said to myself, looking at his silhouette moving deftly about his mooring. I’ve known you for eighteen years, and I still don’t know who you are.
Only then did I think to wonder why he was tying up at the club dock. He always took the Tina into the boatyard harbor, around the point.
“Is something wrong?” I said again.
“Peter up at the house?” he said. “Heard he was here this weekend.”
“No, he’s out with the fleet. It’s the Northeast Harbor regatta this weekend. Micah, what is it?”
“Don’t know,” he said. “At least, not for sure. Might be something, might be nothing. I wanted to talk to Peter and maybe Guild Kennedy and the Thorne boys about it, seeing they’re from Washington. ’Course, there isn’t a real brain among them—”
“Micah!”
He looked at me with the white eyes and then sat down on a piling and lit one of the stubby cigarettes he smoked. In the flare of the match his eyes burned blue.
“I was over to the Deer Isle bridge this morning, taking the Tina to pick up a pump at Eaton’s, on Little Deer. There was an almighty big sailing yacht anchored under the bridge, right in the middle, and traffic on each side of the bridge was stopped. Looked like the sheriff’s boys holdin’ it up. There wasn’t any craft in the water around it, just the big boat, shining in the sun like a wedding cake. Couldn’t see her name or her registry, and she wasn’t flying her flags. Thought I’d take a closer look, so I cut the engines and kind of coasted on in there toward it, and pretty soon here comes this military cutter out after me like a chicken hawk, Navy, I’m almost sure, motioning for me to go back, go back. I wasn’t too fond of that, so I came on, and then I could see she was a gunboat, had a couple of 40 mm Bofors mounted on her deck. Trained right on me. So I reversed and got on out of there, but not before I saw a couple of people on the yacht’s deck, sittin’ in easy chairs and drinking and smoking like they were anchored off Miami and not Penobscot Bay, Maine. Saw ’em pretty clearly too.”
“And?” I said, my brow furrowing. Gunboats, under the old Deer Isle bridge? A coldness that was not of the night crawled up the back of my neck.
“And nothing,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette and starting up the dock toward the colony. “Except that one of ’em was Franklin Roosevelt. I’d know that chin and that cigarette holder anywhere. And I’m right sure the other was Winston Churchill!”
“Oh, surely not,” Amy said on a soft little breath.
“I know what I saw,” Micah said, and I knew he did.
“What does it mean?” I called after him, not loudly. Somehow I did not want to raise my voice.
“Means war,” floated back to me from his retreating shape. “Means we’re right before getting in the damned war. And high time, you ask me. We’ve been letting England twist in the wind by itself long enough.”
Amy and I watched him out of sight, saying nothing. I felt fear bloom in a spot somewhere under my ribs and flow like molten lava through my arms and legs; felt my breath stop with it. I felt the change then, the great black pterodactyl shape of change and loss and never-again, off at the edge of the dark. I could almost see the bulk of it. I could almost feel its breath on my face, smell it in my nostrils.
“Oh, my God in he
aven,” I whispered. “That can’t be right. We aren’t going to get into this war. Everybody says so.”
Amy did not answer, and I did not speak again. In another half hour or so, the women of the colony began to gather on the dock, coming silently out of the black woods behind the yacht club in their cardigans and scarves, rubbing their arms against the chill of the night and looking, as we were, for lights out over the bay. We nodded to one another, and exchanged a few words, but it was by and large a silent group. In another fifteen minutes most of us who could leave their cottages were there. I thought of Petie, out on that black water, and of Happy, sleeping in Petie’s old nursery back at Liberty, Christina Willis beside her reading her novel. I thought of Peter coming up the dock, laughing, and a built-up fire and perhaps a snifter of brandy, and deep-piled quilts on the bed upstairs. I did not mention what Micah Willis had seen that morning under the Deer Isle bridge.
Suddenly there were running lights far out on the water, one or two sets at first and then a blossoming of them, far out past Fiddle Head, like a flotilla of fireflies. In a few moments we heard their voices, far away, calling back and forth between boats, laughing. The voices sounded very young, and by some alchemy of night and water and distance, as if they were going away from us, instead of approaching.
And then, as if in a perfect vision, I saw it and knew it with absolute certainty, and nearly fell to my knees under the weight of it: we would have war, and women would gather at the edge of water, as we women were at that moment, and hear over its empty reaches the voices of their men. Voices over water, heard from the edge of water.
Voices going away.
And women watching.
We did have war, of course; Micah had been right about that, even if some of us had our doubts about Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill aboard the yacht off Deer Isle. I myself did not doubt it. Later that month we heard the two met aboard a destroyer in Placentia Bay, off Nova Scotia and very near to Campobello, to begin informal drafting of what became the Atlantic Charter. But even if we had not heard, I would not have doubted Micah Willis’s story. He seldom spoke until he knew what he was talking about, and as he said, he knew what he saw.
So when we heard, on a sleepy Northpoint Sunday just after lunch in the dining hall, the terrible news of Pearl Harbor, it was not shock that struck me white and breathless but the fear that had lain cold and heavy in my heart since that night on the dock the previous August.
“Petie,” I whispered, my nails digging into Peter’s hand. “I cannot let Petie go to war.”
“He’s only sixteen, Maude,” Peter said, staring at the fretted vent of the big Capehart. “It will be years before he can go even if he should want to.”
“But what if it goes on and on?”
“It won’t. We’ll come in fighting mad now; even old Willie Hearst and the isolationists will be behind Roosevelt. We’ll be back home inside a year.”
“No, we won’t,” Petie cried in distress from the rug in front of the hearth, where he was immersed in Jane’s Fighting Ships. He had been perusing it since Germany had begun to bomb England, sure that the war would take to the seas any day. It was his fondest dream to command a fighting ship. He flung Jane’s away from him.
“It’ll last till I turn eighteen; I know it will! They take eighteen-year-olds in the RAF, sometimes younger, if they don’t know…. I’ll lie about my age. I’ll enlist. I’m not going to miss this war!”
“Why don’t you just buy a gun and point it at your head and pull the trigger?” I cried, and ran from the living room and locked myself in the bathroom and cried until I could cry no more. When I came out, the living room was empty and the fire had burned low, and there was a note on the gate leg table by the front door saying that Peter and Petie had gone over to Commons to get the late news.
I sat down on the window seat and looked out at the soft gray December campus. Through the diamond panes the quadrangle looked as empty of human spoor as a lunar landscape, totally stopped and still, a place caught outside time. But lights glowed in the mullioned windows of the old Commons building at the far side, and I knew that inside men and boys huddled together, as they had from time immemorial, drawn away from the world of their women, waiting for news of war. All over the country, all those men, all those boys, waiting…. Softly, hopelessly, I began to cry again. I did not believe that Petie would not have to fight. I did not, then, even believe that Peter would escape it. It was not the last time I wept during that war, of course, but I vowed then that I would not weep again before my husband and son. And somehow, I did not.
Peter did not come to Retreat that summer. Unlike the summer before, he did not even come for weekends; Dr. Fleming had a second and more severe stroke the day after Pearl Harbor, and with the acceleration of the war and the scarcity of gasoline, there was no question of Peter’s driving back and forth to the colony. Petie set his heels and refused to come too; he insisted on staying at Northpoint and taking naval history, and Peter promised to keep an eye on him. If Mother Hannah had not raised such a fuss, I would have stayed too. But she was adamant and Peter backed her up, so I set off with a truculent five-year-old and an ailing old autocrat, now in a wheelchair, on the grinding, swaying Maine Central to Ellsworth. From there we finally found a taxi that would take us as far as Blue Hill, and once there I quite simply bribed the lone taxi driver to bring us the last leg to Retreat. It was after dark when we bumped down the lane to Liberty, and my heart sank into my stomach. Not a single window in any of the cottages we passed showed a light; not an automobile was to be seen in driveways or garages. We might as well have landed, we three ill-assorted and iron-bonded women, on Uranus.
“Are we the only ones here? Where is everyone?” Mother Hannah said querulously from the back seat, echoing my own swallowed dread.
“I want to go home,” Happy whined ominously.
“Ain’t many folks here, truth be known,” the taxi driver said, I thought happily. “But it’s mostly the blackout, y’see. Can’t light your lights without you have blackout curtains. Patrol’ll get you sure. Up and down these lanes ever’ six hours, they are, checkin’ on lights. Good thing, too. U-boats all up and down this coast, they say. Been seen off Mount Desert and Stonington, and some says they come in under the water, all the way up Eggemoggin Reach from Frenchmen’s Bay to right off your cape here, for a little look-around. Quiet as death, they say, like sharks; never know they’re there. Main convoy route’s past Mount Desert. Yup. Heard you folks had you a spy landin’ right down there on your yacht club beach month or two ago. No tellin’ where else they’ll be poppin’ up. Must know all the summer men are off fightin’ the war and you women are all that’s left down here. Don’t know why you come, truth be known.”
I was shaking with rage and fear as I paid him and struggled to extricate Mother Hannah and her wheelchair from the taxi. At the word “spy” Happy had begun to cry. She was convinced that Adolf Hitler was going to come over and personally dispatch her, and she knew in her dark, quick little soul that spies were his outriders. When I did not move to comfort her the weeping rose to a wail.
“Hope you’ve got some stores laid in,” our driver said, leaning out his window. “Heard they’ve got no milk a’tall anywhere about, and no eggs or meat neither. Precious few vegetables, too, and flour’s long gone. Lobsters and fish too; lobstermen all gone to war, like as not. Might be some clams, though, if you care to dig.”
I turned on him furiously.
“Do you think it’s funny to scare three lone women out of their wits? Does it make you feel better?”
“Didn’t feel bad to begin with,” he said cheerfully, and gunned his lightless taxi back up the lane.
“Get that man’s license number and contact his employer immediately, Maude,” Mother Hannah huffed. “I will not be spoken to that way, especially by a native.”
“I want to go home!” bellowed Happy.
“Both of you shut up this instant,” I hissed between clench
ed teeth, and to my surprise they did, and for the first time in any of our lives we went into a cottage that was cold and completely dark. Peter must have forgotten to write Christina Willis, who always opened Liberty before we arrived and had a fire burning, and the icebox stocked with staples, and something simmering wonderfully on the stove.
“If either one of you says one word, I will walk away from here and leave you,” I said, tears trembling in my voice, and I felt in the dark, thick air the nods of both their heads. Shame flooded over my loneliness and fear, and I groped my way to the old writing desk on the sun porch and felt in its top drawer for the matches that always rested there in their little tin. I used nearly all of them lighting the hurricane lamps and candles, but finally we had small pools of shimmering yellow light in the airless gloom, and the living room, its furniture shrouded in white sheets, leaped into life. I whipped the sheets off the sofa in front of the fireplace, and sat Happy and Mother Hannah down on it, and lit some reasonably dry birch logs that had been mercifully left in the fireplace, and looked at my charges. They looked back at me, silenced for the moment, eyes wide and waiting for deliverance.
I know who I want, I thought clearly and fervently. I want Micah.
And as if I had rubbed a lamp, I heard the unmistakable growl of his truck in the lane, and its tires crunching onto the driveway gravel, and his quick, soft steps up the walk. In a moment the front door eased open and he was there.
He was dressed in a dark fisherman’s sweater, dark pants, and boots, and his face was smeared with something that looked like a minstrel’s blackface. In all that darkness his eyes and teeth flashed bright.
“Evening, ladies,” he said. “Thought it might be you when I saw the Blue Hill taxi go past. Couldn’t think who else might be…determined enough to come up here, way things are.”
Colony Page 21
