I could see, this morning on the beach, what Sean had meant about Warrie Villiers, though. There was indeed something feminine about the child, something knowing and accommodating and almost sly. It would not have seemed awry in a little girl; one would have smiled at the miniature woman hidden in the child flesh. But you noticed it in Warrie. He did flutter his long dark lashes a lot, and look sidewise under them, mostly at his mother, and his long, supple fingers did indeed dance in the air, and flutter, and hover, their tips almost vibrating, over this object and that, without actually touching them. His voice was a fluting treble, normal in a small child, and the rapid French that spilled from his pursed pink mouth was only natural for a child born to a household where French was the first language. But somehow in Warrie those things lodged in the consciousness just a shade unpleasantly, casting just the smallest of shadows. I might have thought he was edging dangerously toward the irreversibly feminine but for his manner with his mother, and hers with him. It was more that of man to woman than child to mother; his hands were on her breasts and flanks and hair and nape as often and casually as they were on the shells and pebbles that he collected, and hers smoothed his silky brown nakedness all over with conscious delectation whenever he was near. I found that, even knowing the profound difference between Latin ways and those of this cold northern shore, I could not look at Elizabeth Villiers and her son after a while. And I saw that, try as she might to notice nothing, Amy could not either. Otherness clung around them, mother and son, like a miasma. Otherness and a kind of danger. It was the danger I had tasted in Amy Potter’s joy that morning, the danger that charged any air where Elizabeth was, and always had.
I remembered Miss Lottie Padgett’s words, twenty years before, when I had fled to her in pain and desperation over Petie and Elizabeth: “Elizabeth will never be safe. A lot of people are going to suffer because of that.”
And so they had, already. And so, I thought, more would. But not Amy. Oh, please, not my poor reborn Amy. I did not think Amy could take much more pain, not from this quicksilver prodigal daughter who was at the core of her heart. There had been enough pain already, from Parker. After more than a quarter of a century of warnings from doctors, scenes, crises, alarms, heartaches, and humiliations, Parker Potter seemed finally and truly to be near death from the drinking he could neither tolerate nor stop, and it was to stand by her mother in this last and worst siege that Elizabeth had ostensibly left Italy and come to Retreat. But day melted into summer day and Elizabeth spent far more time on the beach below Braebonnie than by her father’s side. Most mornings she managed to coax Amy to sit beside her, and Amy grew smoothed and sun-flushed and lightened with love and laughter, even as her husband swelled like a mordant toad with the toxins his liver could no longer fight. I thought Parker drank, now, with a new and bitter defiance since his daughter had come to beguile his wife, and the storms and tantrums and outrages that issued from Braebonnie increased in number and severity. Scarcely a day passed that Peter did not drop what he was doing and dash over at some frantic telephoned summons from Amy or Elizabeth, and I had gone a couple of times, too, to no avail. Parker drank and stormed on. But Amy had her girl and her mornings in the sun, and so far they had been more than enough.
Sally came toddling to me, pink-nosed from the high sun and howling from a careless blow from Warrie, who was both older and bigger. I caught her warm, wriggling little body into my arms and rocked her, glaring at Warrie. Was it only I who had seen the sly, sidewise little kick from his monkeylike brown foot? No, Elizabeth had seen too; she shook her head at her son, but she was smiling when she did it and made a little silent kiss to him. He sent one back. I turned the glare on her.
“She should just kick him back,” Elizabeth said, stretching so that one rose-brown nipple escaped the dull black of the bikini top. Warrie giggled and she tucked it back in, expertly. Her slicked-back hair shone as if lacquered, and she wore many gold and jeweled rings on her long fingers. With one of them she reached out and lifted Sally’s furious little red face up to the sun.
“Just kick him back, chérie, preferably in his little brown balls,” she said. “It’s never too soon for a girl to learn what makes a young man sit up and take notice. Lord, but she’s the image of Petie, isn’t she? I’ll bet he looked just like that when he was her age, all fierce and determined and stubborn as a little mule. I wish I remembered him then; the first clear memory I have of him is running after me yelling that he was going to tell if I jumped off the dock into the water. And I did, and he did too. Scared to death and furious, but he did. We must have been eight and nine.”
She laughed, and then let Sally’s face go and turned to me.
“I wish he hadn’t felt he had to leave, Maude,” she said lazily. “I had no intentions of gobbling him up this summer.”
I felt my anger swell, and even Amy stared hard at her daughter, a blush staining her face. Petie and Sarah had left the Little House and gone back to Boston only a few days after Elizabeth had come. The entire colony knew they had planned to spend the entire summer in the little cottage, which Peter and I had bought for them when Miss Lottie’s feckless son finally put it on the market, and I knew there had been a groundswell of gentle buzzing when they pleaded Sarah’s father’s sudden ill health and went back, leaving Maude Caroline and Sally with Peter and me. Most of Retreat would, I knew, remember the days of Petie’s desperate love for Elizabeth and put two and two together, or think that they had. Only Peter and I knew it was Sarah, her face white and set, who had insisted on leaving. I still did not know what had decided her, and I hoped I never would. If anything sufficient to send my son and daughter-in-law away from their long-planned summer had passed between Petie and Elizabeth, I knew as certainly as I knew the sun shone overhead that it had not originated with Petie. And I knew Amy Potter knew it, too.
“It just may be that one or two people in Retreat have plans that do not in any way concern you, Elizabeth,” Amy said crisply to her daughter, and Elizabeth laughed aloud, a rich, plummy, liquid sound. Light seemed to gather around her, thick as cream. She had lost none of that quality of luminous presence she had as a child; she remained, with Peter, one of the only people I have ever known who had it.
“I’m sure that’s true,” she said, and then, tilting her head and squinting at me, “Maude, I’d love to try you in one of my bikinis. You’re as lush as a ripe peach; you’d drive the guys up here berserk with those boobs of yours showing, and that tiny waist, and those hips—you wouldn’t last a minute in France or Italy. A Tintoretto, you are, or a Vel´zquez, with that black hair and those eyes. And just the right age for Europe. You should come back with me when I go.”
“Oh, but honey, you said you thought you’d be staying for a year or two at least!” Amy’s voice was almost a wail.
“Of course, Mommy. And I will. But sooner or later I’ll have to go get my things, and then there’s Warrie’s schooling….”
“Warrie should stay right here and go to Miss Dawson’s, and then to Choate and on to Harvard, or maybe Yale, like a proper Potter,” Amy said firmly.
“Somehow I can’t see Warrie’s dear papa letting him do that,” Elizabeth said, amused. “His family honor would be stained beyond repair. And he’s going to have to foot the bill for this chick, because I haven’t a sou. I had to literally pay ransom to get out of France, and then I had to sneak Warrie out in the dead of night. It was all very exciting, wasn’t it, Pippin?”
And she reached out and fondled her child’s hard little buttocks, and he squirmed against her in pleasure and complicity, and I picked up the sniveling Sally and said, “I think this pippin has had enough sun for the day. Her nose is on fire,” and turned to leave the beach. Behind me I heard Amy say something, sharp but unintelligible, and heard Elizabeth’s languid answering laughter. Enough of sun and indolence and flesh, I thought in sudden disgust. I wanted a bath and cool, starched, clean clothes for Sally and me, and a nap in a white room with a sharp little salt wind
blowing through it. And then I smiled into my grandchild’s sweaty neck. I was, myself, a creature of sun and indolence and flesh; Charleston was surely a city of all those things, fully as much as Cap Ferrat or Rapallo. What a very long way I had come from home.
The house was empty when Sally and I got there. Sean was, I knew, down at the yacht club, where Caleb Willis was schooling the colony juniors in the new Beetle Cats. The club had bought a fleet of them from a broker in Boston, small, tippy little catboats to replace the aging and nearly unsalvageable Brutal Beasts in which generations before had learned to sail, and we had all cheered when Caleb came into sight around the dark bulk of Little Deer on a misted June morning the summer before, his father’s lobster boat towing a long line of Beetles down the bay. Peter and I had taken one, for Sean and Maude Caroline and whoever came along behind them, but Maude Caroline had my inherent loathing of imbalance and cast her lot with tennis and swimming. She was twelve this summer and had, for the past four years, gone to day camp over on Rosier Pond, at Camp Four Rivers. Many of Retreat’s youngsters did; the wallowing yellow camp bus called every morning at the top of the lane, and the chorus of “Yay, Camp,” rising from sturdy young throats in the still dawns was so frequent and loud that most of us had forgotten the camp’s true name and called it simply Yaycamp. I knew Maude Caroline was there today, probably knifing like a brown minnow through that blue lake water her great-grandfather had loved…and died in. Peter would be out on the Hannah, and as for Happy, I did not know where she was, only that she was gone. She took the car most mornings and drove away about ten, and returned at perhaps three or four, in time to supervise Sally’s bath and afternoon bread and butter and to have drinks on the porch with Peter and me.
If we asked where she had been she would say only, “Around. To a yard sale here and a bake sale there. I like to keep moving.”
And so we seldom asked any more. My dear Happy; she did, indeed, like to keep moving.
Sometimes, if we were going for drinks to one cottage or another, she would come with us, but not often. There were few households in Retreat where Happy had friends. I did not insist when she did not want to come with us on those evenings; Happy when she had had one or two drinks too many was as formidable as she had been when she was a tantrumprone teenager. There was no telling what would come out of her mouth. I disliked those evenings, and Peter hated them; he would be cool and distant for days afterward, and Happy would be wretched. So she did not often come with us.
When she had not drunk a bit too much, she was good company that summer, for the most part. Peter’s delight in Sean spilled over her, and if she was jealous of the attention her father paid her son—as I knew she was—she wisely did not show that jealousy to Peter. Sean himself was offhandedly affectionate with her, as he was with everyone else except, I thought, his father. The few times I saw my grandson in the company of Tommy O’Ryan, there was an ostentatious boisterousness in Tommy’s manner, as if some savage competitiveness boiled just below the surface of his rough joie de vivre; I thought him just as jealous of his son as was Happy, but for different reasons, and felt contempt and uneasiness in the presence of that deep undercurrent. Except for his blazing strawberry-blond hair and the two deep vertical dimples in his cheeks, Sean was every inch a Chambliss, every inch his grandfather, both in looks and manner. He walked surefootedly and without thought where his father never could. I knew Tommy O’Ryan hated that, even as he beamed upon it and used it as his most effective wedge into the world of his wife’s birthright. That unspoken hate frightened me badly. It would, I thought, come home to haunt us one day. For his part, Sean was quiet and closed and unreadable in his father’s presence, at least around Peter and me, and of their times together in the smallish house we had bought them in Saugus, where Tommy’s latest job had taken them, Happy would only say, “He and his father don’t really get along. Tommy needs a little girl to adore him like Seanie does Daddy. He’s after me all the time about that.”
And she would smile, a deep and secret smile.
Lord, Tommy O’Ryan. How that handsome mountebank has haunted us, even in his absence; I was right about that, the first day I set eyes on him. He was as much a presence, in his way, as Peter was, or Elizabeth Potter. No one in a group that included him could look away from him. Until the last day I ever saw him he remained one of the handsomest men I have ever known. I have seen strangers, men and women alike, turn to look after him on the street, and at times when you saw him at close range, laughing his beautiful tenor laugh, say, with his white teeth flashing and his shining red head thrown back, or listening intently to you, with his blue eyes fastened full on you and that head cocked to one side, he simply took your breath. I could see, at those times, why Happy actually shivered sometimes with pure physical ecstasy in his presence; even when things were worst between them, there was that warm, invisible steam of flesh about the two of them together that spoke of night and bed, and even at my angriest with him I could understand why my child could not leave him. Had I not felt that way about Peter ever since the first night I met him? What, I thought often, would I have done if Peter had been a Tommy O’Ryan? I could not have walked away from him, any more than Happy could.
But he could not sustain any good feelings he generated. Tommy O’Ryan had no boundaries and no sense of them in others; given any time at all in any group, he seemed devil-driven to exceed the bounds of taste and sensibility and often even common sense, and his appetite for what he called, often and loudly, the good life, was bottomless. He bragged and boasted and assumed airs when he visited us at Northpoint or Retreat until Peter refused him both houses. He alienated the colony with his loudness and familiarity, outraged even Parker Potter with his drunkenness and language, and made flagrant passes at almost every woman under sixty in Retreat, with the exception of Gretchen Winslow, whom he called a frigid bitch—in her presence.
When he heard from an embarrassed Guild Kennedy that Tommy had cheated at poker during the hallowed Men’s Wednesday Night at the Yacht Club, Peter threatened to cut off Happy’s inheritance if he ever came back to Retreat. And so, except to deliver Happy and Sean to Liberty and fetch them, he did not. We saw little of him, I almost none. Peter, I knew, saw him periodically, since Tommy tossed away job after job, and another introduction would be required of Peter.
I believe he would have simply ceased to work at all, and lived off what he referred to as Happy’s birthright, if Peter had not tied Happy’s portion of Mother Hannah’s estate up into an unbreakable trust and arranged that only a middling income from it be sent her each month; he had done that upon meeting Tommy O’Ryan, long before Happy reached her twenty-first birthday. As for cash gifts to her, he simply would not make them. He would, he said grimly, continue to find jobs for Tommy O’Ryan as soon as he lost them, and was prepared to do so until hell froze over, and he would educate Sean and provide housing and an automobile, and medical care if it was required. But as long as Happy was married to Tommy O’Ryan, she would receive her inheritance in the form of gifts to fill particular needs. If that did not suit, she was free to divorce him. Otherwise, she would simply have to wait until Peter and I died to provide Tommy with the lifestyle to which he aspired, and even then there were ways to keep much of her so-called birthright from falling into those strong, shapely Irish hands.
Happy stormed and sulked and raged, but Peter held firm. And so, for several years, Tommy O’Ryan was with us largely in the hair and dimples of his son, the checks Peter sent for medical and dental bills, the inevitable calls from the latest of our old acquaintances who had employed him, and the shivering flesh and softly loosened mouth of his wife and our daughter. But with us he was.
“Is, was, and ever shall be,” Peter would say, closing the soft old leather check portfolio that had been his father’s after meeting still another demand from Sean or Happy’s doctor or dentist. “World without end, amen.”
“It could be worse,” I said once in the middle of this summer.
<
br /> “How?”
I did not answer.
That was on a day in July, just after the Fourth of July regatta, the very same day Elizabeth Potter Villiers came pounding into the cottage sobbing that her father was trying to kill her mother with a poker, and please, Peter, please come quick. And once more, Peter took her hand and ran for Braebonnie, with me behind them, my heart frozen with dread that this time Parker might actually succeed.
When we reached Braebonnie we found Parker on the floor before the cold fireplace, vomiting, and Amy trying vainly to pick him up. The poker was still sheathed in its iron stand. Peter gave Elizabeth a swift look of query but said nothing. She flushed and turned away. Peter put his arms under Parker’s armpits and hauled him to his feet and marched him, stumbling, toward the downstairs bedroom. Even monstrously swollen from the poisonous fluids that had collected in his belly and extremities, Parker was so desiccated that Peter lifted him as lightly as a bag of dry sticks. Amy pushed the white hair off her tearsplotched face and tried to smile at us.
“Sorry you had to get involved again,” she said, and her voice was remarkably steady, if deeply weary. “I told Elizabeth not to go running to you. It was only a stage two or three alarm this time. I don’t think he could have gotten the poker out of the stand, much less hit anybody with it.”
I hugged her briefly, and said, “No problem. That’s what we’re over there for.”
“Absolutely,” Peter said, returning.
“No,” Amy said, “it’s not. Nobody should have to do what we’ve called on you to do. It was a mistake to bring him, but the doctor said he probably wouldn’t have another summer.”
“I hope he doesn’t,” Elizabeth Villiers said in a low, cold voice. “I hope he doesn’t have another week. He’s not even a man now. As for a father, forget it. He was never that.”
Colony Page 31
