“Well, she’s certainly no threat to him. That’s one good thing. What’s that line from the Hippocratic oath? ‘First do no harm’?”
“You romantic devil, you,” I said. “Don’t you like her?”
“What’s not to like?”
It was Mother Hannah who did not like Sarah Forbes, and though she did not, of course, say so, her disapproval radiated out from her in small symmetrical waves and I knew Sarah felt in her presence the same outlander’s discomfort that I had known, when I first visited the old house on Charles Street. Sarah and her parents had moved to Boston from Michigan. From Grosse Pointe, to be exact, but still Michigan. Sarah might be forgiven much, but not that.
“Forgive us this high domestic drama, Sarah,” I said. “Peter has often said that children should be put into cages at puberty and let out the day they leave for college, and he may have a point.”
“Please don’t apologize, Mrs. Chambliss,” she said with a shy smile that slid, even as she looked at me, over to Petie. “My sister Charlotte didn’t eat an entire meal with us until she was nearly eighteen.”
I smiled at her, and Petie laughed aloud. She looked pleased at his laughter, and blushed, and I felt a surge of affection for her. My son would be safe with this small bird of a girl. He might not soar to dizzying heights in her company, but neither would he plunge into lightless depths. And he would laugh. I had come to know in Peter’s dark times what the lighthearted ones were worth, and at that moment, in the old twilight dining alcove of Retreat, I was ready to trade a good part of my life to Sarah Forbes in order that she become a part of my son’s. How many mothers, I have wondered since, have wanted just that for their children and labored with all their might to obtain it: safety. I have wondered, too, how many have come to find the victory hollow. There is no safety; of course there isn’t. But still, the specter of it powers the world.
Mother Hannah was displeased with the dinner hour in its entirety, I knew. Sarah Forbes annoyed her only slightly less than Happy in a tantrum. I knew also she was tired, and if I could not coax her to bed, her temper would rise until it spilled over onto one or more of us, probably Sarah. She tired very easily now; even though I brought her breakfast in bed and helped her down for a long nap after lunch, she still found it almost impossible to sit up with the family after dinner. But she sometimes insisted, loving, I knew, the quiet, dark hours with music and a book before the whispering birch fire, and so I did not push early bedtimes very hard. But when she did not have them the rest of us usually paid. The debilitating weakness, and the pain from the ulcer her old doctor in Boston had diagnosed two winters before, were constant and, I thought, severe. I could not know for sure because she refused to speak of her stomach trouble and would not let me take her into the new medical center in Castine on the mornings that she woke white-lipped and sapped from a pain-racked night. They were more frequent now, and more than once I said worriedly to Peter that I thought she might have something more serious wrong with her than a duodenal ulcer. The bland foods I cooked were no longer helping.
“He’s so old himself; can he possibly have misdiagnosed her?” I would say. “Or know something he should be telling us?”
“He’s a good doctor,” Peter would reply. “He’s been our family doctor all my life and a lot of hers. Let it go. Even if there’s something more, she’s where she wants to be: at home in her own house or in Retreat. Do you think she’d be better off if she couldn’t come to Retreat?”
And so I kept silent. But I worried, and when I could, I got her early to bed. This night was, I thought, one of the nights I would insist. I did not want Mother Hannah’s acid to spill over Sarah, and I did not think it would occur to Petie to stand up to his grandmother on her account, as his father had always done on mine. Petie dealt with Mother Hannah by simply tuning her out. I don’t think he heard three fourths of the things she said.
To my relief, she did not argue when I suggested an early bed.
“All this talk about omens and holes in dikes and Ouija boards; what nonsense,” she said in the breathless ghost of her old imperious voice. “I found a whole stack of Mary Roberts Rinehart novels that someone must have hidden all these years; I’ve never seen them. She’s far better company than gypsy fortunetellers.”
“She probably is at that,” I said, giving her my arm to pull herself up with. Over her head Petie grinned at me; he knew, as I did, that she had read and reread the Rinehart books in the long summers at Retreat, and he knew also that she sometimes still flicked at me with her oldest whip, that of my dark gypsy coloring. For I had, in all the years in the Northeast, lost none of the ripe, excessive bloom of the Low Country. “Madame Maude,” Peter and Petie both sometimes called me, and Peter once observed that his mother must be disappointed indeed that my time in this land of long nights and longer winters had not bleached some of it out of me.
Coming back into the living room after settling her in with her books, I stopped to look at my reflection in the wavery, underwater old mirror over the sideboard. In the dimness, it was indeed a gypsy who looked back at me, eyes black pools, hair still rioting around the dark face in dark laps and whorls, body still round and inelegantly lush, breasts and hips fuller now but waist still small. I smiled experimentally, and small pointed teeth flashed ferally. I picked up a crystal bowl from the sideboard and held it up before my face.
“Cross Madame Maude’s palm with silver and she’ll tell you a wonderful fortune,” I whispered, and then shook my head and went to join the children before the fire. Of course none of them had taken my talk of Miss Charity’s death and its portent seriously; who would have?
Micah would, I thought suddenly and clearly. Micah would know what I meant.
But I was not likely to have a chance to speak of it to him, not privately, at least. Since the night of the German spy—or, to be more accurate, the morning of that first and last kiss in the dawn kitchen of Liberty—Micah Willis and I had not been alone together for any length of time. By some tacit mutual consent, we had, in the intervening years, seen each other only in the presence of another person. He came just as frequently to attend to his customary chores around the cottage, and I ran into him just as frequently on my rounds on the cape or in the little Congregational church in whose quiet churchyard we had first spoken at length to each other. But always, since that morning, Christina would be there, or Peter, or Mother Hannah, or one or another of the children.
It was not, I knew, constraint that kept us from being alone together, or any lingering pangs of guilt, or even any dark sense that to be together in privacy would court more than a kiss, would lead to a dangerous and desperate passion. I was not sure what it was: a kind of comfortable accommodation to each other’s well-being, I think, and the well-being of others who were dear to us both. I know that with both of us the kiss could easily have become something else, something deeper and fuller and infinitely real. I had, I think, always known that. But it was as if, given that knowledge, we were content to keep the friendship that preceded it intact, each of us knowing in his deepest heart that this lovely other thing hovered always just at our horizons, perhaps not ever to be tasted, certainly not to be hurried. Just there. It by no means changed the love I felt for Peter or, I knew, the quality of the affection and commitment he had to Christina. It was, for both of us, other and apart. There are no limits to our capacity for love; that is the one sure thing I have kept out of a lifetime’s scant store of truths. I first sensed it with Micah Willis.
He and Christina came often to Liberty in the evenings, after we had all had our dinners and the washing up was done. These evenings had begun that lonely, uneasy first summer of the war, and we had simply, in the manner of old friends, kept the habit going. We did now what we had done then: we listened to music and talked of anything in the world that intrigued and comforted us, we drank coffee and sometimes a little brandy and ate leftover pie, we laughed and told stories of our childhood and made fun of the people around us who, w
e felt, merited it. Just as old friends do everywhere. Sometimes, when he was in Retreat, Peter joined us and enjoyed the evenings almost as much as I did. He had always been fond of Tina, saying she was a veritable mother lode of unmined gold, and Micah Willis had long had both his liking and his respect.
The children were fond of the Willises and saw nothing unusual in the sight of the people who worked for their family in the daytime laughing and drinking brandy in their living room at night. But I have always suspected that the taunts of their colony peers and, less frequently, their peers’ parents sometimes found their mark. No one in the collective memory of Retreat, I’m sure, had ever had the hired hands in their homes as guests. I think Petie and Happy took not a little friendly fire over the situation from time to time, especially from Freddie and Julia Winslow, who took their cue from Gretchen. Whenever something snide about me and the Willises made its way back to my ears, it usually had its genesis with Gretchen Winslow. I cared very little about the talk, and in the main I don’t think Petie did either. He was already grown up and away from Retreat, essentially, now, a creature of a larger and newer world. But the talk could always wound Happy, sensitive as she was in her very soul to criticism, and I shielded her from the tongues of the assorted Winslows as best I could. In the long run, it did not matter. She heard far worse from Mother Hannah.
It was not that my mother-in-law disliked either of the Willises. In fact, in her austere way, she was as fond of them both as she was of many of her neighbors in Retreat, though in a different way, and probably fonder than she was of a few. It would not have occurred to her that Micah might remember with bitterness her outburst at him on the awful day he found Parker Potter molesting his young niece, Polly, in her living room, and to Micah’s credit, if he did, he never showed it.
“Micah and Christina are fine people, the salt of the earth,” I heard her say often over drinks, when the eternal colony litany of servants, second only to that of sewage disposal, came up. “I am proud to have them as neighbors.”
But not, she might have added but did not have to, since everyone in Retreat understood, as guests. The fact that Micah could play a respectable classical violin and was reading his way through the world’s great philosophers, and Christina had a library twice the size of Mother Hannah’s back in Boston and was fluent in three languages, cut no ice with her at all. I think she thought of them as idiots savants or laboratory chimpanzees, who could by rote perform wondrous tasks. Amazing, but still chimpanzees. I was used to this attitude and paid little attention to it, since it did not deprive me of the pleasure of the Willises’ company. Micah and Tina had delicate antennae for such things and simply did not appear when Mother Hannah stayed up with the family after dinner. I never did learn how they knew, but they did.
But it drove Peter wild. On the evening before he left to go back to Northpoint, he and his mother had had an argument about it. The Willises had been at Liberty the previous evening, and Mother Hannah had simmered and fretted all the following day and then jumped Peter at dinner.
“It’s so ostentatious, Peter, such a showy and unattractive gesture. What on earth can you possibly find to talk about with our caretaker and our cook?”
I grinned and crossed my eyes behind Mother Hannah’s back, because the showy and ostentatious gesture was so obviously mine. But I saw the familiar dull red come into Peter’s cheeks.
“Well,” he said, “last evening I believe we discussed Maslow and the nature of peak experiences. And then we moved on to Jung and his notion that the concept of time shuts out eternity. Because, as you know, Mother, eternity is by definition beyond time. Micah was interested in how the image of God becomes the final obstruction to the experience of God, and I believe it was Christina who pointed out that Jung said that religion was the best defense against a religious experience. Finally, we all agreed that the images of Christ in our culture are very dangerous, because it’s so hard to get past the image to the reality of him. You should come to Maude’s next salon. You might be intrigued.”
Mother Hannah sniffed. Two red spots flamed on her desiccated cheeks.
“That’s monstrous,” she said. “I thought the Willises were at least good churchgoers.”
“Well, now, monsters,” Peter went on thoughtfully. “We touched on that too. Micah said he’d read in his philosophy books about the notion that a monster can be a sublime being. That he can be someone who breaks all concepts of ethical behavior. Someone literally beyond ethical judgment, about whom all human concepts of morality are wiped out. The French call those beings monstres sacrés, sacred monsters. You may know some of them yourself. I think I do.”
“You cannot sit there and tell me that you discussed…those things with people we pay to do menial work for us,” she said coldly. “I find that impossible to believe.”
“Well, we talked about other stuff too,” Peter said, beginning to grin. “Micah said some of Caleb’s sheep had bad cases of chapped teats, and the lambs’ suckling wasn’t making them any better. And I asked what Caleb was doing for them, and he said he was using Bag Balm. Cleared those teats right up, it did.”
“If you are going to be vulgar, I am going to bed,” Mother Hannah said, and when I had settled her in, I came back into the living room and collapsed into Peter’s lap in helpless laughter. Finally, unwillingly, he began to laugh too.
“Sometimes I wonder how you’ve stood her all these summers,” he said. “You’re the one who’s been stuck with her.”
“Now you wonder,” I said. “Just when it’s getting easier.”
“Is it, my poor little Maude?” he said, smoothing the hair off my forehead. “I’m glad. I’d hate to think Retreat meant only drudgery for a sick old woman to you. Even if she is my mother, and I do love her of course, I see every day I’m here how difficult she is. It’s funny; for the longest time I didn’t see that. I guess I didn’t want to. If I’d seen it, I’d have had to do something about it, and that would have meant giving up a few days out on the water or on the tennis court. You’ve never had it easy up here, have you?”
I felt tears flood my eyes and buried my face in his shoulder so he wouldn’t see them.
“I’ve had other things up here,” I said. “I’ve had Maine itself, the cape, the woods and the fogs and the ocean, the pointed firs…that’s worth almost anything to me, Peter. And I’ve had friends. Amy has been a wonderful friend. The Willises, too. And Miss Lottie, and the Mary’s Garden girls—God bless them, they finally taught me to play tennis. And the children having their summers here, discovering this magical place for the first time…it’s more than balanced out.
“And,” I added, taking a bite out of the side of his neck, “I’ve had the supreme good fortune of making love in a bathtub and in the bottom of a Brutal Beast, and just yesterday on a bed of moss that was not only infested with redbugs but an inch deep in osprey shit. Talk about your peak experiences!”
“Well, yes,” he said, biting my neck in return. “I can see how those transcendent moments would be worth anything.”
We had taken the dinghy out the afternoon before, because the day was as still and warm as August, and the bay was glassy and only heaving gently, like the breast of a sleeping woman, and rowed over to Osprey Head. We usually did this each year in late August, just before we left Retreat, to see how the young ospreys had fared during the summer and to picnic on the deep, silky, acid-green moss that covered much of the rocky little island. It was an immutable ritual with us; I do not think I could have left for Northpoint without my farewell engagement with the ospreys.
It had felt distinctly queer yesterday, though, almost eerily wrong, to make the pilgrimage in early summer. But as Peter said, the weather was too perfect to last; we could be sure of a nor’easter before the week was out. And it might be that he would be tied up at Northpoint at the end of the summer, and unable to come and drive us all back, and Petie would have to do it. So I packed a lunch and a blanket and we rowed the half mile from the
yacht club harbor out to the round, green little island, first of the small archipelago that lay off the cove.
The osprey nest stood on the very crest of the island, on the ridge of naked pink rock that always reminded me of a dragon’s spine. It was in a dead tree that had somehow withstood the winter gales that howled in from the open ocean out past Deer Isle for as many years as Peter could remember. Some nests, he said, were used for a century, being added to each year by the birds until they reached a diameter of five feet or more. This one looked to be about four feet: an old nest. We stood looking up at it in the warm, insect-buzzing silence, slightly sweated from the climb and the high sun. The young ospreys were there, four of them, almost as large now as their parents but still swiveling their fierce, helmeted predator’s heads and shrieking for food. The adults were gone.
“Big babies,” Peter said. “Plenty big enough to fend for themselves, but still sitting there waiting for tired old Ma and Pa to haul lunch to them. Probably won’t leave home till their folks kick them out. Not unlike a few youngsters I know.”
I smiled and stared at the fledglings. I loved everything I knew about the ospreys of Osprey Head: their clean, lovely grace in flight; the fierceness of their attack on the fish they dove for, sometimes actually being drowned by their struggling prey because of their talons’ extraordinary grip; their faithfulness to their homes and their young. Maine had almost lost most of its ospreys in the early years of the century, I knew, because their reluctance to leave their nests made them attractive prey for hunters. But now by mid-century they were back in good numbers, because the state finally moved to protect them and because there was an old and pervading superstition that to kill an osprey brought bad luck. Standing there in that old blue sea silence, looking at the beautiful young birds, I hoped the superstition was true. I felt a pure and shaking rage at the thought of anyone harming them.
Colony Page 24
