Colony

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “I think I like them better than any other Maine birds, even the eagles,” I said to Peter. “They seem so…I don’t know: willing to share themselves with people. Not that they’re tame; they’re the wildest things I know. But they don’t run away from you. They’ll make their homes among you, if you let them. It somehow seems like a kind of blessing to have them near.”

  “I know,” he said, smiling at my fancy. “A good example to their human counterparts. Pity we can’t always live up to them. Here’s to you, Pandion haliaetus carolinensis. May your tribe increase.”

  We started back down through the dark stand of firs and moss to the little shingle beach where we had left the picnic basket.

  “How did you know that? Their Latin name?” I said.

  “Dad told me the first time he brought me over here,” he said. “He made me memorize it. He said a thing as noble as the osprey deserved to be known by its proper name, and we ought to know it even if we didn’t use it.”

  “Then I’ll learn it too,” I said, and felt a sudden savage spasm of grief for my father-in-law. My eyes flooded. “I miss your father so much,” I said to Peter. “I don’t ever stop thinking about him when I’m up here. I can’t tell you what he came to mean to me.”

  Peter dropped down onto the blanket I had spread in the shelter of a huge boulder, a sentinel left on that wild beach from the march of the last great glacier. He was silent for a while, looking out across the still blue water toward the shoreline of Retreat.

  “I think I know,” he said.

  I followed his gaze and saw that he was staring up at the distant chimney tops of the Aerie, just visible in the shimmer of noon light and the haze of heat. I had not been back there since the summer Big Peter died and Petie was born; Sarah and Douglas Fowler had sold it the following year to a family from New Haven, who only came in August, so we did not see much of them. I heard a few years later that Sarah had died, but no one seemed to know of what; it did not seem real to me. It still seemed she must be there, in her wonderful house high in the air and sun and wind; I still had the fancy that sometimes, when she was alone, Sarah Fowler flew triumphantly in the blue air around her home.

  “So much has changed,” I said softly. “It looks the same, it seems the same, but there are so many of them gone now, and you can feel the holes where they were. What long shadows they cast….”

  My eyes fell to the beach below the sheer cliff on which the Aerie sat. The Little House, that enchanted place of refuge for small creatures ruled over by Miss Lottie Padgett, also stood empty now. Since her death in the first year of the war the feckless Frankie, mired in his urban sanctimony, had never set foot in it and, so far as we knew, wished neither to sell nor rent it. It was as if his mother and her sanctuary for the colony’s lost had never existed. Several of us had written Frankie with offers, mainly because it was so painful to see the cottage closed and dark and falling further into disrepair, but none of our letters were answered. Of all of old Retreat, except Peter’s father, I think I missed Miss Lottie most. I often wonder what might have become of my poor Happy if Miss Lottie could have taken her under her wing. When I think, as I often do, that Retreat and Cape Rosier have the power to heal, it is chiefly of Miss Lottie Padgett that I think.

  Many others who were so indelible in my early years in the colony were gone too. Mamadear long ago, of course, and Helen Potter just the winter before, so that Amy was at long last the sole mistress of Braebonnie. Dr. and Mrs. Lincoln had both died, and Land’s End was now the property of the still-interchangeable “boys,” who alternated summers with their interchangeable wives and children. Miss Isabelle and Miss Charlotte Valentine had left Petit Trianon to a disinterested niece from Mobile, who summered at Point Clear and sold the cottage to the Winslows; Gretchen promptly made a guest house of it, flossing it up with no end of expensively shabby, brand-new wicker and chintz. Only Augusta Stallings, older than Mother Hannah, was, incredibly, still alive and contentious, if bedbound, in Utopia while her aging sons and desperate daughters-in-law and burgeoning tribe of grand-and great-grandchildren burst the seams of the Compound. My mother-in-law was, for all intents and purposes, the matriarch of Retreat. I sometimes thought that fact was keeping her alive.

  Peter poured wine and we drank it, and ate our sandwiches, and then lay back and let the sun pour over us like wild honey. Then came that sound I listen for each summer, and hear only once or twice, and only in moments of perfect suspension and stillness: the high, eerie hum I always fancy is the music of the earth itself, or the real old secret of the sea. I wondered if Peter heard it; I was about to break the spell of it and ask when he said, “Dad took you up to see Sarah Fowler at the Aerie, didn’t he? The summer he died?”

  I lay there for a moment, the weight of the sun red and heavy on my eyelids, and said, “Yes.” And when he did not speak again, I said, “I didn’t know you knew that he…went there sometimes.”

  “Yes. I knew. I knew that he did, and that he’d gone there for many summers, and why. I knew he was in love with her. I followed him there once, when I was about eighteen, I guess, and watched them through the windows. He never touched her, but you could tell by his face, and hers. I’m glad he shared her with you. She was a special person, and it’s a special place. I wish he’d felt he could have shared it with me.”

  “Peter, you can see why he couldn’t…I mean, your mother…he always loved your mother. This other thing didn’t take anything away from that.”

  “I know,” he said, and he rolled over and sat up and looked once more at the chimneys and roofline of the Aerie.

  “How did you feel about it?” I said.

  “Shocked at first, and angry, and somehow embarrassed, as if there’d been some kind of public disgrace. You know how conventional the young are. But then I came to think—I don’t know—that it was sort of his right. That Retreat was always more Mother’s than his; that he had a right to something of his own here. I always knew it didn’t touch Mother, or how he felt about her, and it didn’t threaten me and Hermie. It was just…a part of him we couldn’t share, or know about, and maybe that was all right; maybe everyone has a right to that. You can love two people and be faithful to both of them, you know. In the end, I came to be glad for him. I think it was a real tribute to you that you’re the one of us he chose to share it with.”

  I sat silent in the sun. I thought of Micah Willis, and my face went hot. Yes, it was true about two people…. And then I felt cold. Could it be, was it possible, that he spoke of himself as well as his father? There had been several years now when Peter had not come to Retreat in the summers but had stayed behind at Northpoint; he was headmaster now, and I knew he had very real prospects of going on to a place like St. Paul’s or Deerfield or Choate, if he chose to do so. And I knew full well the price he would pay for that in killing hours and sacrifice. I had minded only because he had always loved the summers in Retreat so and would not have them again for many years if he kept to this trajectory; I was proud of him, and willing to have him gone from me as often and long as necessary, if it brought him to a place in his work that he truly aspired to. I had never once thought there might be, somewhere in his summers, someone to whom he went as simply and directly as his father went to Sarah Fowler at the Aerie.

  I looked at him, there in the sunlight, and thought, It is not possible, and then thought, But if it was…if it was…would it be all right? Could I understand with Peter as I did with his father?

  And knew that I could not, never could.

  But you have feelings for Micah, and they do not even begin to touch the thing you have with Peter, I told myself.

  That’s entirely different, I thought. And knew that it was, even though I could never explain why, to myself or anyone else. If my husband ever had another woman and I knew about it, it would somehow be the end of me. Something vital that animated and warmed me and enabled me to live in the world would die.

  I made a small, stricken sound in my throat, an
d he gathered me against him, and presently we made love, there in the sun and silence of the beach on Osprey’s Head. It was the first time in our life together that I did not feel utterly whole afterward.

  After that day, after Peter had gone back to Northpoint, I could not settle in to the summer. It was not the constant, small tension that accompanied any life in a house with Happy; I was used to that. It was not that I was lonely, now Petie and Sarah had left; I was never lonely in Retreat. It was not even the fact of Mother Hannah’s pervasive malaise. She had been disabled for several summers now, and we had managed. It was just that somehow nothing could occupy me totally, fill me. There was an ache, a hollowness deep in the middle of me as if I were literally starving.

  Somehow, Mother Hannah knew it. She had never, in all the years I had known her, seemed intuitive, but that summer she sensed the emptiness in me, felt my loneliness herself. And even though she grew perceptibly weaker, and had more nights of pain and sleeplessness, she made a real effort to be kind to me. I have never been sure if she knew the hunger had to do with Peter; we never spoke of him in that respect. But I think now that perhaps she suspected it did, for she spent many hours, over luncheon and drinks or at dinner, and even before the fire on the evenings that she could stay up, talking lightly and fondly of his boyhood. Her voice was softer on these occasions than I had ever heard it, and the Peter she evoked for me was a different child than the one I thought she had carried in her memory; he was funny and sweet and quicksilver, reckless and even foolhardy. I was surprised that sometimes she even laughed at the exploits she told me of. The Peter I had imagined to live in her mind was a far tamer and seemlier one than this remembered Peter Pan. We laughed together at this child, and I was grateful to her as I had never been before.

  She talked of her own younger days in the colony too, and that slow, mannered world at the turn of the century came alive for me as it might never have; it gave me a deep and poignant sense of the continuity of life in Retreat that I have never lost, a gift beyond price in a world beginning to flame with change. I think it is among the most valuable of all the things she left me. She never spoke of her own feelings about Retreat, only of its customs and mores and taboos, and anecdotes that made me smile or, far less often, feel tears gather behind my lids. But somehow, in the measured words, in the stilted and homely little stories of her summers by this sea, the ghost of another lost and ill-fitting girl formed in the quiet air between us, a girl who, like me, might have wept in the nights and walked in fear and resentment of a stern and unforgiving older woman. I knew I would never ask her about that girl, but I found I could quite literally love her and, in so doing, come close to loving the old woman who had carried her locked in her breast all these years. After all, she knew. And she had prevailed.

  In early July she had a kind of respite from the pain and weakness and refused the pills her doctor had sent, which I cajoled her into taking four times each day. Nor would she take the sleeping tablets he prescribed.

  “I’m really feeling quite well, Maude,” she said. “I think I would like to go to the Fourth of July regatta, at least to have a cocktail and a bowl of chowder and see the fireworks. It’s been years since I’ve gone. I do believe the last one was when Erica came and brought her entire dreadful bridge club.”

  “Mother Hannah, do you really think it’s wise?” I said. “You know how the crowd is, with all the Blue Hill and Northeast Harbor people milling around, and all that drinking and yelling. It makes me tired; I hadn’t thought I’d go this year.”

  “I’ve really an urge to see everybody,” she said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve felt like it.”

  “Then let me ask a few people in, have a little cocktail party. Whoever you like. Guild and Dierdre Kennedy, and Erica, and the Stallingses, and the Mary’s Garden girls—”

  “No. Please, just for a little while,” she said, and smiled. “I think I’d like to see the children, and the dogs, and all of it.”

  She had not smiled much that summer. My heart twisted. Such an impulse toward life could not be denied.

  “Then we’ll do it,” I said. “It will be fun.”

  The Fourth of July dawned sullen and misted. I could hear the starting guns for the first race, flat little pops, and knew the air was heavy and we were likely to have fog with the setting of the sun. The humidity made my movements slow and my head ache slightly; outside, the world looked flat and bleached. I thought again how strong the alchemy of the sun was here; with it, the landscape was sharp and dimensional and magical; without it, everything looked, simply, banal.

  Happy was snappish and heavy-eyed and announced that she wasn’t going to the stupid race. She and Carlton Anderson were going to paint his dinghy and then go up to the general store and play skittles. I did not especially like Carlton Anderson; he was truculent and would not meet the eyes of colony adults when he came to collect his pay for the mowing and painting and trash hauling he did, but he was Micah’s cousin’s son, and we had known him a long time, and I would have enough on my hands getting Mother Hannah to the regatta without dragging a mulish Happy along with us.

  “Fine,” I said, and went to wake Mother Hannah. Happy slammed the screen door on her way out. I sighed. I had hoped she would find in her Retreat summers what her father had found in his: days of childhood almost magical in their perfection. Memories to warm the nights of adulthood. But Happy did not want her father’s childhood. This summer, as always, Happy wanted only her father.

  Mother Hannah was pale and moved slowly, and I knew she had had another sleepless night, though she said she had not and was looking forward to the day. I managed, finally, to get her to agree to cocktails and lunch instead of a long afternoon and evening at the club, but when I went to help her dress I found her breathless and weak-voiced and knew I would never get her down the lane along with her cane and shawl and the hamper of drinks and hors d’oeuvres I’d made the night before. Midge and Buck Fletcher at the general store catered the chowder and slaw and rolls for the race crowd, but lunch-goers historically brought their own cocktails and nibbles, and Mother Hannah had asked for Bloody Marys and crab sandwiches. I knew I would never get the car down the traffic-choked lane. I thought a moment and then went to the telephone and called Christina Willis. She and Micah were there in fifteen minutes, talking easily to Mother Hannah as if they dropped in before lunch every day, dressed like the rest of the colony in open-collared shirts and boat shoes.

  “Micah and Tina are going to walk us down, Mother Hannah,” I said casually, hoping she wasn’t going to be high-handed on this of all mornings. She arched one of her dark brows but said only, “That’s kind of you, Tina. Micah. I don’t get about as well as I once did. A couple of strong arms will be welcome.”

  I breathed a sigh of gratitude to all of them. She’s come a long way, to accept help from the hired man, I thought. And he’s come a long way to offer it, after that thing with Parker Potter.

  We set off down the sandy lane to the yacht club, Micah and Tina supporting Mother Hannah on either side, me bringing up the rear with the hamper and her accoutrements. It took a long while, and we had to stop frequently to let her catch her breath. Her face had the sheen of a lit wax candle in the overcast morning, and I did not at all like the sound of her breath in her chest. But all along the way colony people called to her, and came up and embraced her, and kissed her cheek, and when we came in sight of the clubhouse, a swell of voices rose to meet us, and several people broke from the crowd assembled on the porch and steps to come to her. It was, after all, what she needed and had missed; I could tell by the light in her eyes and the strength of her voice. An old queen had come among her people, and they met her smiling and calling their allegiance. Over her head Tina smiled at me, and Micah winked solemnly.

  On the porch I saw George motion to us to bring her up. I waved my thanks. All the other rockers were occupied by the oldest ladies in the colony, as they had always been; Erica Conant and her group had many
of them, and Dierdre Kennedy was in one, next to Jane Thorne’s elderly mother visiting from Providence. The last three, the ones that had the best view of the harbor and the islands beyond it, were occupied by Gretchen Winslow and Burdie and his autocratic old mother, Aurora. Beside them stood their children, the bored and attenuated Freddie and Julia, and a couple of equally equine teenagers I did not recognize, obviously visitors. I was glad Happy had not come with us; Freddie and Julia could not seem to resist baiting her, and Happy could not seem to resist reacting precisely as they planned. No good would have come of it.

  Gretchen Winslow looked up and saw us then, and I knew no good was going to come of it anyway. She looked wonderful that morning, seeming to give off light like a pearl in the dull, queer light, dressed in khaki pants and a pale bronze sweater so that she seemed all over a veldt creature, a lioness among cattle. Damn her, would she never age? I thought in irritation. And if she did, would she never mellow? Her light green eyes, as they took in Mother Hannah between the Willises and me bringing up the rear like a native bearer, glinted with malice, and she smiled her slow, pure smile. A lioness among cattle indeed. That blood would run and it would be my own equine red, I had no doubt. I just did not know the occasion of it.

  She came to meet Mother Hannah, and kissed her on the cheek, and led her to the vacant chair and settled her in, and took the shawl from me and tucked it around her legs.

  “It’s good to see you again, Mother Hannah,” she said silkily, and my face warmed as she must have known it would, for the smile widened. Gretchen was the only person in Retreat besides me who called my mother-in-law that, and no one, in my mind, had less right to do so. I saw Dierdre Kennedy’s head turn toward us, and some of the faces in Erica’s group, and knew that I was not the only one who had noticed. Mother Hannah smiled up at Gretchen and took her hand.