I looked at him. Nothing would come right. Everything Tommy O’Ryan seemed and was and ever could be was total anathema to Peter. I knew that viscerally. But, oh, Happy!
“Mama?”
“Wait a moment. Wait and be quiet,” I said, and went into the kitchen where I had left my handbag. I took out the week’s grocery money that I had in my wallet and gave it to Tommy O’Ryan.
“Go down to the inn and get a room,” I said, my mouth numb with pain and shock. “I’ll talk with my husband. I can tell you now that I think it will do no good at all, but I can’t have my daughter out in the night with no place to sleep, and I think it would be better if she weren’t here for a while. Wait in your room until I call you in the morning. We can’t resolve this now.”
“Mama,” Happy began again, and made a small movement toward me. Tears formed in her eyes and began to spill over the white-gold lashes that were Peter’s. I said nothing, and she came and put her arms around me and pressed herself against me. I held her loosely, feeling the hard new swell of her breasts, the rich, used curve of her young hips. My own tears overflowed.
“Go on now. I’ll call you,” I whispered, and watched as my child, my last baby, went out to spend the night in a hotel room with a man who would, I knew somehow, haunt our lives for perhaps the rest of our years. Then I went upstairs to talk to Peter.
It was a terrible night, awful past anything I had ever gone through with Peter. Even now I cannot remember much of what he said, and what I did; I have all these years later only a sense of anguish and finality, of hopelessness, of ending. I was not sure then what it was that was ending. Now I know it was any chance that Peter might ever truly connect with his yearning, destructive daughter. Poor Happy, she destroyed in that one night everything she had ached and burned for all her life. She always did that. Somehow, for Happy, the need was the death sentence of the fulfillment.
By dawn we had hammered it out. We would allow them to marry, since I knew they would elope to Maryland or somewhere and do so anyway if we did not. Peter would do what he could to help Tommy O’Ryan find employment; I knew he could do that. We would rent an apartment for them close to Tommy’s work and pay the rent for a year, so he could put aside his salary for a nest egg. We would pay Happy’s hospital bills if Tommy O’Ryan could not, when the time came. We would see that Happy had a nurse for the baby for the first year.
Happy would visit us at home no more than twice a week with the child, preferably when Peter was not there. Tommy O’Ryan was never to come to the house in Northpoint again. Neither of them was to come to Retreat.
The terms were hard. They were hard past, I thought, my ability to enforce them, but I would worry about that later. I knew I was fortunate to have gotten any terms at all from Peter. I have never seen him so furious, so implacable. There was, that night, nothing at all in him of the funny, tender, luminous young man who had danced with me in the moonlight on the banks of Wappoo Creek. Oh, he still burned, but it was a cold fire.
Happy began to cry when I told her her father’s conditions the next morning, but I cut her off.
“Give him some time,” I said. “Try and do this without making a fuss, and give him some time. It was an awful shock, Happy. This is the best I can do, and I don’t think you have any alternative.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered if it was Jesus Christ I brought home to him,” Happy sobbed. “He hates me, and he’d have hated anybody I wanted to marry. I should have known he hated me. I guess I did and just didn’t want to admit it to myself.”
There was nothing to say to that. Peter had never hated Happy, of course, but she had caught the essence of the truth about her father: he had never really loved her either. Not fully, not wholly, not without condition or boundary. It was that she sought and wept for on that morning. No, there was nothing to say. I did not answer her.
Two days later I stood in the shabby offices of a justice of the peace in a small village outside Laconia, rain falling steadily, and watched as my daughter became Mrs. Thomas Sean O’Ryan, and then I took the newlyweds to lunch at a little lodge near Lake Winnipesaukee, where Peter and I had spent the night once when we had first come to Northpoint. I remembered that we had sat, that evening, on the shore of the great lake and talked of the upcoming journey to Retreat, my first. I had not, I remembered, wanted to go, sensing ahead things that would alter me, change my life forever. We had made love in the pine-scented twilight, under the trees; we had laughed. My poor child, no laughter for her on this day. But for her, too, a journey ahead that would change her life. And ours.
We did not see much of them that summer and fall. Peter did not speak often of Happy, and I did not push it. When the baby came, I thought, maybe, maybe…. Once in a while Peter was at home when Happy, vastly pregnant, came to visit and was neutral and pleasant with her. He refused to see Tommy O’Ryan. He refused to speak of him at all.
Happy’s son, Sean Williams O’Ryan, was born in January, and I held him and felt again that sweet, milky-smelling solid weight, and touched the silky-swirled crown of the red-gold head, and was for a moment blissfully, blindly happy. Now, surely, Peter could not deny the existence of this child. The baby was a portrait in blood. There was the unmistakable Chambliss chin cleft, and the same whorl of hair at the crown of the head. And the eyes: Peter’s gray instead of Tommy O’Ryan’s watercolor blue.
But Peter would not come. And Happy would not bring the baby to him.
“He can avoid seeing him for the rest of his life, if that’s what he wants,” she said coldly. “He’s mine and he’s all I need, he and Tommy. The hell with Daddy.”
“Fine with me,” Peter said, when I told him Happy would not bring his grandchild to him.
I looked at him, sunk now for so long in the chilly stillness, the flat grayness that his father before him had gone away into from time to time. Peter that winter was with me in body only, and then not often. He stayed late and long at Northpoint and went in early. We did not often talk beyond desultory, carefully channeled conversations, and we had not made love since the autumn before. I wondered often in those days if our lives would end like this, flash-frozen years and years before death. It was the unhappiest period of my life; after all these years, I can still say that.
One day in early August, as we sat with our books on the sun porch of Liberty, we heard the noise of a car stopping outside, and footsteps on the walk, and Happy walked silently through the cottage and onto the porch and put her baby into Peter’s arms and stood and looked down at him. She did not speak. Peter whitened and stared up at Happy and then down at small Sean. The baby looked solemnly into his face, his great gray eyes fastened on Peter’s, the titian curls on his head blazing in the late-afternoon sunlight. Then he smiled, and then grinned, a wicked and completely enraptured grin, and put his finger into Peter’s mouth and crowed with delight. Peter shut his eyes, and when he opened them he was back with us as completely and unreservedly as he had ever been. His whole face radiated his presence; his old fire flamed; his eyes crinkled with something that had never been there for his own children, and his smile reached out and wrapped the baby in.
“Well, by God,” he said to the baby. “What took you so long?”
After that Sean became, simply, his heart. Peter’s delight in him was endless, bottomless, almost ludicrous. It lit the cottage and spilled over me and trickled over Happy, and even reached out, tentatively and fleetingly, to Tommy O’Ryan. There was, at least, a moratorium on his cold contempt for Tommy. He did not go back to Northpoint as he had planned; he stayed on in Retreat and did all the summer things that he had once done: he sailed, and played tennis, and read before the fire at night, and took me for trips to Castine and Blue Hill and Bar Harbor, and once even down to Camden for two entire days.
And wherever he went, even sometimes out on the Hannah, small Sean went with him in the crook of his arm. Tommy, who had driven Happy and the baby to Retreat in the old Ford he had bought, had to return to his job as
head of maintenance for the Northpoint motor fleet and left two days after he came…just in time, I thought, to spare him considerable grief, for in two days his insinuating manner and bluster and gaudy flamboyance of dress and manner and enormous ignorance of all the rituals and nuances that held the colony together had become painfully apparent, and thunderclouds were gathering in Peter’s gray eyes. But Happy stayed the rest of summer, and later in August Petie and Sarah and five-year-old Maude Caroline came for three weeks and stayed down on the beach in Miss Lottie’s newly refurbished house that we rented for them. The Sunday after the last regatta we christened Sean at the little chapel on the shore, and all of Retreat turned out for the small champagne reception I had at Liberty afterward. Peter carried Sean in his arms all afternoon, and everyone exclaimed over the baby and praised him to Happy, and there was, just for that moment and that summer, nothing in my child’s face of want or need but only what was, for her, joy. If, when they looked at her, my friends and neighbors saw, instead of a young mother, a troublesome, malicious child and heard again the long-vanished cry of the ospreys, they did not by so much as a flicker of an eyelash let on.
Bless you all, I said to them silently, loving them, and to Peter, aloud, after the last guest had left and Happy had gone to put Sean down for his nap, “Bless you. You’ve made me so very happy this summer. I didn’t think I’d ever have you back again.”
He put his arms around me and held me close and rested his chin on the top of my head, as he used to do.
“Bless you, my dearest Maude. It isn’t you I leave. It never is. Don’t you know that by now?”
“Oh, Peter. Don’t leave any of us again,” I whispered into his neck. “We’re all here, every one of us, all together in this place I love more than any other on earth; that you love. Nothing on earth could be better than this; this is what I used to dream of, all those summers…just this. All of us here. But it would be less than nothing if you left us.”
“Then,” said Peter, “I won’t.”
Chapter
Ten
There’s something rather pretty and Norman Rockwell about us this morning, isn’t there? Three generations all together for a day at the beach?” Elizabeth Potter Villiers said on a radiant, restless day in June of 1961, on the little shingle beach below Braebonnie.
I shaded my face against the high noon sun and looked up at her. Against the lead-foil dazzle of the bay she was all silhouette: long legs sliding up into narrow, canted hips, the sweet line of her waist flowing unbroken to the deep swell of her breasts. She seemed outlined with silver light, as things do on our coast just before a storm breaks. She also seemed naked and nearly was; she wore one of the new French bikinis that were only that year beginning to be popular on American shores, and then only on those far to the south of Retreat’s. Only the flash of her white teeth and the copper gleam of her sleeked-back hair broke the skin of the dull silver dazzle. I laughed aloud. Even in outline, there was nothing at all of Elizabeth that spoke to me of Norman Rockwell.
“Lord, sweetie, that makes me feel as old as Methuselah’s mother,” Amy Potter said, but her dark eyes, as she looked at her daughter, gave the lie to her rueful words. Her white curls were covered with a huge red straw sun hat Elizabeth had brought her from Italy, and with her face and eyes flaming with joy she looked younger than I had seen her in years. Elizabeth could have told her she looked like Whistler’s mother, and she would have laughed her delicious, rich old laugh. Despite the strife and illness in Braebonnie, above us on the cliff, Amy was happy this summer. Elizabeth was home from Europe for the first time in nearly ten years, and back in Retreat for the first time since she had left college and fled to Paris, when she was barely twenty. Amy’s was, I thought—by no means for the first time that summer—a dangerous joy.
Elizabeth dropped onto the towel beside her mother, showering us with droplets of water. They burned like acid or ice. I knew the bay must not have reached sixty degrees yet, but she had been in twice that morning, this last time swimming far out into the dazzle until we lost her in its radiance. My skin shrank from the icy pinpricks, but Elizabeth did not seem cold. She sat cross-legged beside her mother, the bikini barely containing her deep, coffee-cream breasts, reached up and coiled the wet sheaf of her hair into a severe knot at her nape, and fastened it with an ivory skewer that looked like a poultry lacing pin. She was all over tawny that morning, the shades and colors of the veldt. A predator among us, I thought. A predator among adoring sheep.
She had changed in all the years since I had seen her, of course, and yet somehow she was the same. How long had it been? Probably the end of that awful summer when she had gone back to Boston and left Petie skewered and bleeding on his desperate love for her. She had been fifteen then: a child, but somehow as fully a woman as the one who sat on this morning beach and sleeked back her wet red hair. All that had changed was the degree of the womanliness. What had been promise was now ripely fulfilled, and Elizabeth Potter Villiers was as beautiful and vivid and somehow implacably and sensuously innocent as a great predator.
And predator, I thought, was the right word. Behind her, I knew from the scraps Amy had given me and the colony gossip that had floated through those summers, lay a string of the dead and dying, both literally and figuratively. There had been two or three abandoned relationships in Paris and Greece and Spain in those first years abroad; a middle-aged French banker and his wife dead of murder-suicide and a crumpled note with young Elizabeth’s name in it; an abortion in Athens and Elizabeth herself near death from sepsis; more broken love affairs back in France, and a brief and savage flirtation with heroin in Paris, until young Toby Villiers met and married her and fathered the dark five-year-old who pranced naked in the shallows of Penobscot Bay this morning, chattering in silvery French.
And finally, the violent death of that marriage, and the flight to Italy and the sheltering hills of Tuscany, where Elizabeth found refuge in the arms and country villa of a Florentine baron of astounding wealth and charm. Unfortunately, the baron had, in the classic tradition of that worldliest of cities, a handsome wastrel son and a formidable feline wife. Both had dropped in unexpectedly at the villa while Elizabeth was there with the baron, and after a couple of titillating but tense weeks in which the baron and baronessa fought in hissing seclusion in the master suite and Elizabeth and the young baronet amused themselves in the taverns of the nearby hill towns and in other, more private places, Elizabeth had grown sufficiently intimidated by the baronessa’s increasingly murderous ire and fled home to her mother with her child. As always, when catastrophe had fallen on her head as the result of her own actions, she seemed genuinely bewildered and wounded by this latest contretemps. It had always been Elizabeth’s vulnerability, the slight, sweet odor of the victim in her powerful musk, that gave the final piquant twist to her attraction. Even when you most wanted to shake Elizabeth Potter, somehow you wanted more strongly to protect her, if only from herself. Even I felt that.
Except for dark little Warrie Villiers and Petie and Sarah’s fat little Sally, we three women were alone on the beach. Happy would not come near Elizabeth Villiers and had made that fact elaborately clear to everyone in Retreat. I never saw such instant antipathy, even in my emotionally naked child. She would not even allow Sean to be in small Warrie’s presence, a fact that bothered Sean not at all, especially given the gap in their ages. He was, that summer, learning to sail his first Beetle Cat, the Osprey, and totally absorbed in it and the waiting sea. He was all light and length and sinew, like his grandfather, and all boy; there was never even a trace of the feminine about Sean, as there is about most other small boys. He scarcely had time for his mother and me, and as for Warrie Villiers, he only said dismissingly, “He’s a baby and a sissy. A frog sissy. He flutters his fingers, and his eyelashes are too long.”
I spoke sharply to him when he brought out the “frog,” after waiting in vain for Happy to do it. She would not discipline her son and never had, and I knew Peter wou
ld lift neither a finger nor an eyebrow at anything the boy did. I caught the slow, small smile of satisfaction on Happy’s face at her son’s careless little epithet, and my face burned. Sean was nearly a perfect prototype of everything Peter and I loved in children; I would not allow him to be indulged in such ugliness.
“Whether or not you like Warrie Villiers is your business,” I said crisply. “What you call him in my house is mine. That’s an ugly and prejudiced word, and I don’t want to hear it again, Sean, is that clear?”
He looked at me with his brows level over his gray eyes and his mouth twitching with the impulse to sass me. But he didn’t. He only said, “Yes, Grammaude. I’m sorry.” And my heart melted, even though I knew he was not sorry at all.
“Come on, Slats,” Peter said to him, avoiding my eyes. “We’ve got a couple of hours before dinner. Let’s take the Hannah around Osprey Head and back. It’s calm enough, I think, for you to take the tiller.”
And they were off, the screen door banging behind them, before Happy or I could say a word. Even through my annoyance at Peter’s undercutting my discipline of Sean, I had to smile at the image of the two of them, loose and tanned in their khaki pants and polo shirts, hair flopping over their eyes, loping down the dock to the dinghy. Behind me, Happy said, “It’s really a lot of fun to play second fiddle to a child with your own father. Daddy never asks me out on his precious Hannah.”
Her voice was so childish and thick with spite and yearning that I simply did not turn to confront her. Though things were better with Happy during the years that she came to Liberty with her son than they had ever been before, there were small flashing moments like this one when I knew, wearily, that she would never be healed of her devouring need of Peter, and he would never meet it. I was tired to my very marrow of trying to mitigate, smooth, compensate. Sean was Peter’s heart and Happy was nowhere near it, and there was nothing I could do.
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