Mary Lincoln poured coffee for him, and as he drank it he told the doctor briefly, “We didn’t find him, but somebody will. Lot of blood leading off into the woods; looks like he might have headed for the shore right below the yacht club. Came ashore there, we think. There’s marks where a right big shallow-draft boat came ashore and went back out. Must have left him off. If he made it back I’ll be surprised.”
“Could it have been…one of us, somebody from around here?” I said through numb lips. It was what horrified me most, that I might have shot someone who meant me no real harm. But I did not think there was much chance of that.
“No,” Micah said. “It could not have been.”
Dr. and Mrs. Lincoln left then, and Micah and I sat looking at each other across the old deal table.
“You look like five miles of bad road,” he said.
“You look like ten,” I said.
“It was a good thing you did tonight, Maude,” he said. “I’m proud of you. Peter will be too.”
I wanted to say something matter-of-fact, lightly disparaging, fine and ironic, something he would have said, or a Maine woman would. Instead, I put my head down on my arms and cried. Even as I did it I felt contempt for myself, and a kind of dull hopelessness. I knew I would never measure up in Micah Willis’s world.
But I could not stop crying. After a moment, he came around the table to me and put his arms around me and lifted me up to him and held me there against him, his hand smoothing my hair back.
“There, now, Maude,” he said softly. “There, now.”
It sounded as if he were saying, “Theah.” I felt laughter bubble in my mouth, hysterical laughter, probably, but laughter, and I raised my face to his, and as simply as if he did it every day of his life he kissed me on my tear-stained mouth, a long, soft, searching kiss. When he pulled away we looked at each other for a long time and then I said, idiotically, “There’s something in your shirt pocket that’s poking me.”
He stood away from me and reached into the pocket and brought out a small dark-brown nut.
“It’s a chinquapin,” he said. “They’re supposed to be good luck. My dad gave it to me; his dad used to carry it. I wouldn’t leave home without it.”
I took the little nut and fondled it in my fingers. It was smooth and silky, surprisingly heavy.
“At home we call them buckeyes,” I said. My voice was dreamy and fluting. I realized I was tired nearly to death. “My brother used to call me Buckeye because I was little and brown and round.”
He smiled then, and I saw the fatigue in his face and eyes, too. Fatigue, and something that had not been there before.
“And do you have good luck, Maude?”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess I do.”
Chapter
Eight
In 1950, the United States government closed the tiny post office in South Brooksville that had served Retreat since the colony was established and built a new, larger one. On the last day of business in the old one, Miss Charity Snow, who had been postmistress for more years than most Retreaters could remember, finally and most reluctantly retired. It was said about the colony that it had taken a very stern official letter from Washington to get Miss Charity out of her doll-size post office, and everyone knew she had not spoken to Elsie Borders, the officious new appointee, since April, when the official letter announcing the changing of the guard arrived.
“It’s ironic, isn’t it, that Miss Charity’s death sentence arrived via the U.S. Mail,” Peter said. “They ought to frame the stamp and hang it right under Elsie’s nose in the new building.”
“Don’t be silly, Peter; Charity Snow was far too old to handle the mail properly, and her temper was getting really dreadful,” Mother Hannah said. “Half the time she wouldn’t even speak to me when I went for the mail, and I always had to tell her my name. It isn’t as though she hadn’t seen me almost every day of her life for fifty years. No, it was her arteries, I’m sure. She knew she was failing. She didn’t want to go through a long, undignified decline. Charity was a vain woman.”
“Nuts to that. It was being canned,” Peter said. “That dinky little place was her life.”
And it must have been. I never knew her to have any outside it. A spare, starched, erect maiden lady rooted for generations in the hard Maine earth, Miss Charity lived alone in a tiny white house beside her minuscule post office, both of which sat beside the road and looked over a salt meadow down to the bay. Aside from the tuberous begonias that she grew in the window boxes in the post office, Miss Charity seemed to have allegiance to no living thing; she had no relatives, no pets, and kept no garden. She simply tended her post office and went home to wait for morning, when she could tend it again.
Miss Charity knew three generations of summer people, though she spoke to few of them by name and took pride in never misplacing anyone’s mail, be he an original settler or first-time visitor. Her stamps, waiting to be sold, were lined in T-square-edged rows and rolls, and her coin wrappers were dusted every morning after she had swept the faultless floor. She blacked her potbellied stove once a month and solemnly lowered the flag just at sunset each evening, consulting her time-and-tide chart to be sure of the exact moment.
On the evening of her last day as postmistress, as she had done each evening for probably fifty of her seventy-odd years, she realigned her stamps and money orders, swept her floor, consulted her time-and-tide chart, lowered her flag and folded it precisely, and locked the door. The next morning an early lobsterman, heading out at first light to haul his traps, found Miss Charity’s body bobbing gently in the flat calm of the dawn bay, half in the water and half out.
I was just starting breakfast in Liberty’s slant-floored old kitchen on the late June morning that it happened, and when Christina Willis came running in with the news, I felt a stab of shock and grief far out of proportion to my connection to Miss Charity. Tina, too, was deeply affected; it was the only time in my life I ever saw her cry. She had not wept when Big Peter died, and I know she was heartbroken about that, and I never even saw a glint of tears in her serene blue eyes on the terrible day that Caleb came home from the war without his leg or during the long bad time after that, when he seemed intent on finding a sort of surcease in liquor and fast driving and fights. When Old Micah Willis, Micah’s father, had died on the floor of the boathouse from a swift and merciful heart attack at age ninety-one, it had been Micah, not Tina, who had been unable to speak of his father without his voice breaking. But now tears ran down her brown cheeks and into the corners of her mouth, and her voice trembled.
“It was such a little thing; what could it have hurt to let her keep on until she couldn’t any longer? What would it have been, a year more? Two? Her eyes were going; she knew that. She never had anything else in her life, and to fire her, like you would a bad worker…it’s like shooting a bird, an osprey or an old eagle. It’s just pure waste and meanness. I hope Elsie Borders is happy; there’s talk that somebody sent the government an anonymous letter saying Miss Charity was getting sloppy and contentious. Well, contentious, maybe, but never sloppy.”
She actually put her face in her hands and sobbed, and I put my arms around her, feeling tears start in my own eyes. I had been irritated at Miss Charity’s highhandedness myself, over the years, and had not infrequently come home muttering to Peter about her, but Tina was right. The firing was gratuitous and cruel. It was, indeed, like killing a grand old sea bird. It and the subsequent death of the old woman felt wrong, askew, freighted with some sort of import I could not name but felt would cast a long and smoking shadow. It seemed to me a thing that presaged cataclysm, and I came later to think that it divided time as surely as the great catastrophes of history and brought to Retreat not only grief, not only the modern world in the shape of the new post office, but a kind of generic change and loss.
I said as much a few nights later to the family at dinner.
“I thought the war would change everything, but it didn’t,” I
said. “At least not in Retreat. Nothing is different here now, not really. But this is going to change things. I don’t know how, but it is. You can feel it up ahead, the change; it’s like somebody has poked a hole in the dike, and it’s all going to come in on us now.”
“What is?” Petie said, pouring wine all around the table.
“Whatever is out there,” I said, knowing as I said it that it sounded quasi-mystic and a shade mad, something a dotty old medium might say. But it was as near to what I felt as I could get.
“Shall I get the Ouija board out for you, Ma?” Petie said, grinning first at Sarah Forbes and then at me. He was almost twenty-five and had been in his position as an assistant vice president in the family bank for more than two years, but in the light from the guttering candles he looked like a round-faced, slightly pudgy teenager. He had not had a haircut for weeks, and the dark tendrils were curling around his ears and at his neck, and his white teeth were still nearly as small as baby teeth. He had my teeth as well as my small, round stature and black hair and eyes, and the receding hairline that gave him the look of an ingenuous baby came straight from my father. Kemble had it early, too. Only his chin, thrusting and incongruous, spoke of Chambliss. Mother Hannah had long since stopped remarking on the unseemly peasantlike strength of the Gascoigne genes, but I knew that she felt the sting afresh every time she looked at Petie. I smiled at him across the table for that and many other reasons. I had known he would laugh at my fancy. Peter was, as he had always been, as earthbound as a totem pole. That, at least, he had from his grandmother.
“You know, don’t you, that you come from a long line of conjure women?” I said, my grin widening at Mother Hannah’s barely audible sniff. She probably thought it was true. Petie laughed aloud, Peter’s joyous, rich laugh, and I laughed with him, in pure relief. There was a time, just after the summers with Elizabeth Potter, that we did not hear that laugh for a very long time. Indeed, I had not heard the original much lately. Both were precious to me now.
“Then when are you going to get around to turning Gretchen Winslow into a toad?” he said. Gretchen had given him a rather severe tongue-lashing on the tennis court the day before, and I had seen the old, smoldering anger of his childhood leap in his eyes, though he said nothing.
“Petie, really,” Mother Hannah said fretfully.
“Her days as a human being are numbered,” I said. Across the table from me Happy pushed lamb chops around her plate, and made mountains of mashed potatoes, and crowned them with peas.
“I hate her,” she said matter-of-factly. “I hate that stupid Freddie and Julia, too. They all think they’re something. I hope they fall in the bay like Miss Snow and drown. I hope they don’t come up till Christmas. I hope their stupid boat sinks, too.”
Happy was thirteen that year, square and prickly and far removed from the bubbling, chattering toddler who had earned the nickname. We had named her Camilla for Peter’s favorite aunt, but by the time she took her first steps, stumbling determinedly after Peter and crowing with joy when he picked her up, she was simply Happy, and Happy she remained, even though the sunny temperament had vanished somewhere in her middle childhood, when Peter had begun to submerge himself in the school in earnest. She looked like Peter and his father in some respects; she had the same soft fair hair and skin and the gray-water eyes, but hers were usually wintry with discontent now, and the long bones and slenderness that went with the coloring never materialized. She had my lack of stature and roundness; the effect was of her father somehow foreshortened and broadened, as if he had been squashed by a great weight. She had not lost her baby fat, either; at thirteen, she weighed a bit more, I thought, than I did. I was not sure because Happy had hidden or broken every scale both in our house at Northpoint and in Liberty.
I sighed. It was not easy, I knew, to be a dumpy adolescent in this place of young sun-browned gazelles, and in truth the Winslow children, Freddie and Julia, both years older than she, had snubbed her badly and overtly and refused to let her sail with them when she asked. And her father had left for the summer only days before and was thus out of her grasp for months; that always sent her wild. But still, her outburst was unattractive and excessive, almost shocking, and I knew that Mother Hannah would say something cold and cutting to her if I did not reprove her first. Damn Mother Hannah, I thought wearily.
“Not funny and not allowed, Happy,” I said. “Let’s not have any more of it at dinner.”
“Petie started it. And you said something bad about Mrs. Winslow. If you can, I—”
“I think you can take your plate and finish it on the sun porch,” I said evenly.
“Oh, sure, it’s okay if you and old Saint Peter there say awful things, but just let me make a little joke—”
“Happy.”
She jumped up and blundered out of the room, leaving her plate and banging the door onto the sun porch.
“Daddy wouldn’t say rotten, stinking things like that to me,” she flung back over her shoulder. I could hear the tears thick in her throat. She would work herself into one of her shrill rages, and it might or might not have subsided by morning. Poor Happy. She was right about her father, though not in the way she wished. Peter would not have reproved her or sent her from the table. Indeed, he would have said nothing at all. That silence was the weight that had smothered the flame behind Happy’s smile years before.
“She is badly spoiled, I’m afraid,” Mother Hannah said with satisfaction to the table at large. “I’ve said so all along to Peter. This modern permissiveness will be the ruin of many a child. In my day such an outburst would not have been permitted.”
My cheeks burned with annoyance at her, enthroned in the armchair at the head of the table where she had sat ever since Big Peter died, even though for years it had been I who had served our meals and seen to the comfort of guests and done most of the cooking too. To get back and forth from the kitchen I practically had to climb over her, but I knew she would not think of relinquishing her throne to me. Once or twice during every meal I could see that she groped with her toe for the button on the floor that once had summoned servants from the kitchen, forgetting we had disconnected it when I had finally insisted that Tina Willis leave for her own home at midafternoon. Mother Hannah was very old now, and quite ill, and frail to the point of incapacity, and her short-term memory was close to nonexistent. But her autocratic will was unchanged.
“Where is Tina? I’ve been ringing for five minutes,” she would say.
“You remember, Mother Hannah. Tina doesn’t come in the evenings now. She hasn’t, for almost five years. The button doesn’t work. We disconnected it.”
“Nobody told me. Why wasn’t I consulted? Who took it upon themselves to tell her not to come?”
“I did, but only after you agreed that it was ridiculous for her to come when there were so few of us here. She’s entitled to some life of her own, you know.”
“Who’ll cook for Peter? And Petie?”
“Mother Hannah, I’ve been doing it for years. It’s only you and me and Happy most of the time now; you know Peter and Petie only come for a week or two in the summer.”
“No, I don’t know. Why don’t they come? Did you tell them not to? I want Tina back. Everybody else in Retreat has a cook in the evenings. How will it look, you doing our cooking?”
“Almost nobody has a full-time cook now,” I would repeat. “The Winslows are the only ones; everybody else let most of their help go during the war.”
“You’re being very contrary, Maude,” she would say. “You know that is not true. Augusta Stallings has Marjorie, and Mary and Ridley Lincoln have Marva, and Helen Parker has Dorothy.”
And I would be silent, because Augusta Stallings and her Marjorie were both dead, as were Dr. and Mrs. Lincoln and their Marva, and Helen Parker was now nearly as old as the fearsome Mamadear had been when I first came to Retreat. In the early days I would point this out to Mother Hannah, but it had upset and angered her so I had stopped, and much o
f the time she lived among an army of genteel ghosts, attended by faithful phantoms.
On this night, I did not respond to her remark about Happy’s behavior. Instead, I looked across the table at Sarah Forbes, Petie’s visiting girlfriend, hunched down in her chair in embarrassment like a small brown wren fluffed against a gale. Petie had met her the year before at a dance at the club; her father was a visiting professor of economics at Boston University, and they were new to the city. He had been seeing her fairly steadily, and Peter and I liked her, though it was sometimes hard to remember her name. She seemed to me indistinguishable from many of the other young newcomers we had met in Boston or in New Hampshire since the war: bright, well-dressed, educated, polite, anonymous. There was no panache to Sarah, but there was no overt danger either; I thought on the main that she might not be a bad match for my stolid son. They seemed in many ways cut from the same good serge cloth.
But if Petie was serious about her, no one could tell; they acted together like comfortable childhood friends. I thought she was serious about him, though, very definitely; at times I saw in her round brown eyes something intense, something so hungry and devouring as to be almost alarming. I thought that little brown Sarah Forbes, under her chaste Miss Porter’s exterior, literally starved and burned for my son. It might have frightened me a bit, but it didn’t. I had seen that same desperate hunger in my son’s eyes, hunger for Elizabeth Potter, and it did not displease me that someone now hungered for him in his turn.
But I was fairly sure Petie did not see it, and even though he had brought her to Retreat for the first time to meet us all, I did not think she was yet, as the young say today, part of his agenda. I was faintly disappointed and said so to Peter, but he simply shrugged.
Colony Page 23
