“I almost feel like locking her up until she’s twenty-one,” I said that night, getting ready for bed. “She looks like she’s twenty-one already. We’ll be beating boys off with clubs.”
“She hasn’t shown any interest in them so far,” he said. “I wouldn’t worry. What kid her age would risk making a pass at that stone face of hers?”
“I’m not worried about kids her age,” I said. “We can run those off. I’m worried about old lechers age eighteen and up. Look at that body; it looks like what we used to call jail bait.”
Peter grinned.
“It looks like yours when I met you,” he said. “In fact it looks not unlike yours now. So you may be right at that. Here’s one old lecher who means to crawl all over you inside five minutes.”
“Wait till you’re invited. So you think there’s no need to worry?”
“At least not until she starts sending out signals,” he said. “I’d say you had ample time until you have to fret. Am I invited?”
“You’re invited.”
When the appointed six months were up Happy wrote and signed a brief and, I thought, dignified letter to the Maine Wildlife Protection Agency on behalf of the ospreys and enclosed a check for the amount of her allowance for that period of time. Her father took her to the village to mail it and bought her a soda at the drugstore in celebration, and then we three had a celebratory dinner at the Northpoint Tavern.
“I’m very proud of you, Happy,” Peter told her over the lobster dinner that had always been her favorite. She only picked at it that evening.
“Thank you,” she said, not meeting his eyes.
“You’ve behaved like a trooper and a very grown-up young lady,” I said. “I think we can lift the restrictions on your time now.”
She raised her head and looked at me with Peter’s eyes, and then at her father.
“Have you forgiven me?” she said.
“Oh, darling, of course we have,” I said quickly and warmly, and Peter nodded.
“You’ve handled yourself very well, Hap,” he said.
“And have you forgotten about it?” she said. She was not looking at me.
Peter gave her back the look, and for a long time he did not speak. Oh, please, I said silently.
“I’d be lying if I said I had, Happy,” he said finally. “It’s not the kind of thing you forget. Isn’t forgiving enough?”
“No,” Happy said. “I don’t think it is.”
We spoke no more of it. Happy was quieter than ever. Near the end of February she came to us as we were having a drink before the fire and told us she wanted to transfer to Miss Cawthorne’s School in the suburbs of Providence.
“They have the best riding facilities in the East,” she said. “You can have a horse there if you want to. I thought I’d save up for one; by the time I’m sixteen I should have enough if it isn’t a very good one. I hope you’ll let me. I really want to do this.”
“Well, gosh, honey,” I said, nonplussed. “I suppose we could think about it. Fall term’s a long way off.”
“I want to go for the spring one,” she said levelly. “It starts in less than a month. They have an opening, I know, and I think they’d take me, with Daddy’s being a headmaster and all. I’ve already written them about it. I know it’s more expensive for me to board, but there are jobs I could take. In the school store, and as a waitress in the Commons…. I’ve looked into that, too. You wouldn’t have to worry about me. It’s all girls and very strict. I wouldn’t have any choice but to behave.”
My heart gave a painful plunge, and I looked quickly at Peter. His eyes closed involuntarily.
“You haven’t been a worry this year at all, Punkin,” he said. “No complaints.”
“And I wouldn’t, you know, be in anybody’s way,” she went on. “I know you’ve both stopped doing a lot of stuff to stay with me. I don’t want you to have to do that any more. It makes me feel awful.”
“We’ve loved being with you, baby,” I said.
“A changed woman, you are,” Peter said, smiling painfully.
She simply looked at him. Then she said, “I hope you’ll let me know soon. I really want to do it.”
And she went back to her room.
In the end we let her. I was against it; she was so young, and I was worried as well as gratified at the change in her that autumn and winter, beginning to think we had been far too hard on her. But she was undeniably handling herself better than she ever had, and she did adore horses and riding, and Miss Cawthorne’s School had a grand old luster to it. As Peter pointed out, she was practically a shoo-in for one of the Seven Sisters with an undergraduate degree from that august academy. And as he did not point out, but I well knew, Happy out of the house and in a chaste fortress of rectitude hundreds of miles away was the answer to Peter’s prayers. He could go back to his duties with a lighter heart and a clear conscience. Happy out of sight was for Peter, I am afraid, Happy out of mind.
And so she set off on a blue, wind-booming day in early March for Providence, with me and a trunk full of new clothes and riding gear and her radio and phonograph in the station wagon and Peter behind us in the Volvo pulling a trailer containing a newly purchased mare, a light hunter named Quicksilver. Both the school and Quicksilver had cost more than a headmaster could afford, but Peter and Hermie had shared Mother Hannah’s estate equally, and our portion was, to me, an astounding amount of money. Even though we had bought a sprawling old Dutch Colonial in the village at Christmas and contracted for extensive and much-needed repairs to Liberty, and Peter had promptly turned the balance of the estate over to the discreet old man in the trust department of the bank who had always handled his family’s investments, we could afford the school and the horse. There was little else to spend money on. Peter had given the family house in Boston to Petie and Sarah for a wedding present and set aside a sum to be held for its management, and nothing else except the bank, which was running well under its own momentum, claimed our allegiance.
“It’s well worth it if it makes her happy,” Peter said on the way back to Northpoint the day after we had settled Happy in at Miss Cawthorne’s. “New friends and new experiences and a horse of her own. What more could she ask?”
I thought she could have asked for her father to protest her decision, beg her to stay, tell her he would miss her. But I didn’t say it. I knew his work had piled up, and this moratorium on strife of Happy’s probably could not last. Instead I said, “I feel like I’m seeing the last of her childhood. I feel like she’s going to be someone I don’t know when she comes back.”
“I doubt it, since she’s coming back in two months for the summer,” Peter said, smiling over at me. “Relax and enjoy it, Maude. We haven’t been alone in an awfully long time. She’ll be the same old Happy; you’ll see. How much can she change in three years?”
It wasn’t long before we found out how much.
In November of the following year Happy was discovered to have spent the night in the apartment of a young instructor of mathematics and, when charged with her sins by an appalled Miss Cawthorne, said defiantly that it wasn’t the first time by any means; she had been sleeping with him for weeks. The instructor was dismissed immediately and Happy was, of course, expelled. To Peter and me she said nothing at all for a long time, merely smiled and went up to her room and closed the door. She would not let either of us in at first, and when Peter finally got her to open it, to ask her in low, cold tones of anguish for God’s sake why, the smile only deepened.
“At least I got his attention,” she said.
Within a month, by dint of what cajoling and calling in of old debts I will never know, Peter had enrolled her at the French School in Boston, known far and wide as the institution of last resort for recalcitrant young women, a forbidding pile of red brick that lacked only crenellations and arrow slits to complete its air of medieval fortification. She went there for the winter term, saying scarcely a word to Peter or me and without Quicksilver. There w
ere no horses, no town privileges, nothing at the French School to distract or seduce its charges.
“Looks like it could use a little livening up.” She grinned at us when we drove into the driveway of the French School. It was not a smile I wanted to remember.
“I wouldn’t advise that,” Peter said, smiling the awful smile back at her.
“Wouldn’t you, Daddy? That’s a shame. A girl only wants to have a little fun now and then.”
She was barely fifteen on that day. On the silent drive home I wondered bleakly what the next trouble would be, and how long before the call came.
“We shouldn’t have sent her away again,” I said. “We should have kept her at home; I should be looking after her, not some blueblooded warden.”
“I’m not going to have you spend all your time being a jailer for Happy,” Peter said tightly. “Barbara French can do that better than anybody else alive. Happy needs a firmer hand right now than you could give her; probably than I could, either. This is best,” Peter said.
“I don’t think we really know what she needs,” I said miserably. “I wonder if we ever did.”
“Let there be an end right now to the dithering over Happy,” Peter said. “She’s where she should be and where I want her to be, and that’s all I want to hear about it for a while. Say about a year.”
“Oh, the children,” I had said to Amy Potter on the night Happy had stoned the ospreys’ nest.
“Yes, the children,” she had replied, and I knew she had been thinking of the heart-wrenching, careening course of Elizabeth’s life. Through her teenage years, Elizabeth had given Amy no end of grief, and the stories of that beautiful, flame-kissed girl had floated back to us at Retreat: of drinking, of experimentation with drugs, of flagrant affairs with an astounding range of men, of her eventual flight to Paris and subsequent involvement with what came to be called later the jet set. There were whispered accounts of this infamous yacht and that notorious house party and the publication in foreign newspapers of scandalous nude photographs on a white Greek beach that included Elizabeth, and of a long string of titled and unsavory men. Parker would not discuss his daughter, and Amy grew drawn and completely white-haired, and the rich laughter did not float from Braebonnie on the morning wind often any more.
And others of our friends had had heartbreaks with their children. We were not alone. Albert and Louise Stallings’s son Gus had refused the family patent medicine business and struck out as a jazz saxophonist; we had heard terrible stories of heroin addiction and degradation in the slums of the Lower East Side of New York. Marie Conant’s daughter Ceile, Erica’s cherished only granddaughter, had had a baby out of wedlock two summers before and had vanished after giving it up for adoption, lost for long months to her anguished family. And Micah Willis’s Caleb had, I knew, spent years in a darkness of his own after coming home without his leg from the war. Micah had spoken little of him to me in those years, but stories of the drinking and fighting and nights in jail, the drifting and disappearances, the midnight phone calls from sheriffs’ offices in small towns all over the coast, reached our ears in the colony. After my first attempt to speak to him of it, Micah’s frozen face warned me off, but his face was blanched and drained throughout those years, and Christina’s was often blotched and swollen from her tears. Oh, yes, the children. None of us had really escaped, it seemed.
But the other children came home again, one by one, if only metaphorically. Elizabeth Potter abruptly renounced her freewheeling life and went back to Paris to study art at the Sorbonne; Amy had been as radiant as a candle when she told me, lit from within with relief and joy. Elizabeth met a wellborn young Frenchman in Paris, the son of an old banking family much like the Potters, and married him quietly in a small ceremony in the chapel of Notre Dame at Christmas time two years later. Now she was pregnant with her first child and glowingly happy. Even in my pain for Happy I had felt real joy for Amy’s joy. I needed her caroling laugh myself in those years, and had missed it as one misses the sun in a season of rain.
And Gus Stallings was back in harness at the family’s offices, I heard, free of all his addictions but that to the saxophone. And Marie Conant’s Ceile came home. And Caleb Willis had some years before met a forceful young woman from Bucksport and been entranced and changed by her, so that finally, in his early thirties, he married her and stopped his carousing and settled in a new house on Cove Harbor that Micah and his Duschesne cousins helped him to build himself, and now he worked side by side with his father in the boatyard his grandfather had begun. I saw him often, as I had not in the years he spent in his wilderness; he was now a quiet and soft-spoken young man with his father’s thick dark hair—though his was receding as Micah’s never had—and his mother’s enduring serenity. He smiled and spoke whenever we met, and I could still see in his dark face something of that brown, darting child I had held in my arms on that endless drive to the doctor so long ago, on the day he cut his foot in the front yard of Liberty. He had, I knew, children of his own now, two small dark daughters who looked uncannily like he had at their age.
“I’m going to keep after him until he gets us, a boy,” Micah would say, looking after his pattering grandchildren. Grandchildren! Micah? “Drownin’ in women, I am.”
But I knew he adored the little girls. How could he not? They were the visible proof of his prodigal son’s return.
Yes. The children had come home. And so, I thought—hoped, prayed—would Happy. In her own time, so would Happy.
And she did. In the late spring of 1953, after slightly more than a year of incarceration without incident in the French School, Happy came home to Northpoint with a red-haired, extraordinarily handsome Irishman fully ten years her senior in tow and announced that she was planning to marry him as soon as possible and wanted to have the wedding in the Northpoint chapel, with a reception following the ceremony in our drawing room. She introduced him to Peter and me as Thomas O’Ryan and said he had been employed until recently as a bus driver and mechanic by the French School, but that he was eager to expand his horizons and try his hand at something that was more suitable to his talents. Happy was sure Peter could find more challenging work for him, either at Northpoint or the bank. The bank would be best, she thought. Tommy O’Ryan was a native of Boston, as was Peter, and he’d feel more at home there. She hoped he might stay in one of our guest bedrooms until the wedding, but if that did not suit he would be happy to find lodgings in the village.
Happy was still sixteen on that tender green day in June. She was also two months pregnant. The swift, cold quietus Peter started to deliver to her plans died in his mouth when she told us that. He stared at her in shock and disbelief, the sharp angles of his face leaping into relief as if flesh were actually draining away from bone. I felt the breath leave my body and could not seem to regain it. Happy smiled a beatific smile; she seemed in every way that evening a woman, ripe and totally contained and indolent in her glowing skin. Tommy O’Ryan gave Peter a practiced smile both obsequious and familiar. He did not even look at me.
“So what do you think?” Happy said, and only then did I hear the tremor in her voice and understand that she was terrified and trying to bluff it through. “Can Tommy stay with us or not?”
“Are you out of what passes for your mind, Camilla?” Peter said in a low, terrible voice. Even I, shocked and horrified, flinched instinctively from it. It cut like a lash. “He may not stay with us, nor may he remain in this house. He will leave this instant and you will go to your room and wait until your mother and I have had a chance to think, and then we will tell you what we are going to do next. How in the name of God did this happen? The school bus driver? The school mechanic? How on God’s earth did this happen?”
Happy’s face contorted. It rearranged itself into a smile that had nothing in it at all of childhood or innocence. I shut my eyes against that smile.
“It’s easy, Daddy,” she said. “You just drop your pants and he puts his thing into your thing and soone
r or later there’ll be a baby. I thought you knew. I’ve heard you and Mother often enough.”
I thought he was going to strike her and moved swiftly between them. Tommy O’Ryan, still smiling, moved back a step or two. Peter stopped and scrubbed his face with his hand.
“Go upstairs,” he said. “There will be no marriage. Mr. O’Ryan will leave us now and be thankful that I do not shoot him. Whether or not I have him arrested remains to be seen. We will decide later what to do about your…child. I don’t want to see you again until we have worked this out. If Mr. O’Ryan still entertains any ideas about staying in this house I will call the police right now. That goes for this town, too. I assume he cannot go back to the school, so he may go wherever he wishes and he had better start this instant.”
“If he goes, I go with him. I’m sixteen. You can’t stop me,” Happy said, and her face was almost as white and old as Peter’s. I looked from one to the other in anguish. What would become of us now?
“Then do it,” Peter said, and turned and went upstairs.
The three of us stood in the twilight in the foyer of our home and looked at one another. I still could not speak.
“Mama?” Happy said, and suddenly my child was back behind that woman’s face. “Mama? We don’t have any money. We don’t have any other place to go. Can you talk to Daddy? If he’d just give Tommy a chance I know he’d like him. And he’d have a grandbaby….”
Tommy O’Ryan spoke for the first time, in a rich, musical tenor that faintly charmed me even as I recognized in it the practiced lilt of the born charlatan.
“I’m not such a villain, Mrs. Chambliss.” He grinned. “I’m on the ropes temporarily, but I mean to better myself and make a home for Happy and our babe. I’m a hard worker and I can make myself handy at anything. This was all a bit hasty, I suppose, but I do love your girl, and everything can still come right.”
Colony Page 29
