Colony

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “I’m not going to discuss it,” he said, and rose. “I can’t believe you’re saying this. Elizabeth is…a child. A child, Maude. Would you have me turn my back on a child that needed me?”

  I stared at him.

  “Peter,” I said, “you’ve been doing exactly that with Happy all her life.”

  I thought he was going to be very angry with me, but then he sat down again and took my hands in his.

  “Maude, let me see if I can tell you how I feel about this, about Happy,” he said tiredly. “It’s like it was with Petie; I can love them both, and I do, but I simply can’t hold up under all that need. It’s too heavy and too constant; I can’t fill them up and still breathe myself. I feel sometimes as if that…wanting will just smother me. I have to step back or I’ll die. They have you; they don’t need all that much of me, not all the time…. My mother always held me lightly; she didn’t hang on me. You don’t; you never did. You love me, but you don’t need me to death….”

  I sat looking at him. There was nothing to say. I do need you, my heart wailed silently. I always have. I always will. I love you and need you both; don’t you see? Why don’t you see? You’re always here to love me, but you often don’t even notice when I need you. It isn’t your hands that bear me up then….

  I thought of whose hands were there, always had been, and shut the thought away from me. There was a line I loved in a poem of Robert Frost’s: “Only where love and need are one, and the work is play for mortal stakes….”

  Peter would not like that poem. It would sit too heavily on his heart.

  Oh, Mother Hannah, I thought bleakly. You crippled your son in your awful strength. He spent his life running from the power of your grasp; it’s the sum of what he learned from you.

  “Well,” I said, “see if you can’t make it up to Happy in the morning. You were terribly hard on her, in front of everybody. Do it for Sean if you won’t do it for her, or me. He’s going to suffer if you don’t. I found that out tonight.”

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  And dear God, I did not tell him. I sat there and said, “Later, please, darling. I’m about to die right here.”

  I did not tell him.

  We woke to gray, scudding clouds and a tossing bay. Micah, coming in with wood for the fireplace, said he had heard on the radio that there was a gale coming up the coast, first of the autumn storms, and none of the lobster boats had gone out. It should, he said, hit with rain and high winds about midafternoon.

  “Good day to sit by the fire and read a book.” He smiled at me, as if the night before had not been limned in destruction.

  “That’s just what I’m going to do,” I said. “Why don’t you and Tina come share the fire with us after dinner? Peter brought some Courvoisier back from Ellsworth.”

  “Done and done,” he said. “Is everybody okay over here?”

  “Seems to be,” I said. “Peter’s gone over to Castine to get something or other for the Hannah from Pengallen’s, and Happy’s sleeping in, I think, and I heard Sean leave at dawn. He wanted to go sailing with Peter, but I expect he met him on his way back from the yacht club and rode over to Castine with him. It’s surely not a day to be on the water.”

  “It’s not, and that’s a fact,” Micah said, and went out of the kitchen, and I went back to the old book of English gardens I had found in the bookcase. Except for the lingering frisson of hurt and anger that stood like stale smoke in the air of Liberty, it was my favorite kind of day.

  Happy came creeping down about two, looking swollen-faced and sheepish.

  “Is Daddy here? I thought I’d apologize right quick and get it over with,” she said.

  “Gone to Castine with Sean,” I said. “That wouldn’t be a bad thing to do, Punkin. He will too, when you do, and then we can put it all behind us.”

  “Huh!” She snorted. “Until the next time Elizabeth calls.” I looked at her, and she said, “Sorry,” and went to fix herself a late lunch.

  About four Peter came stamping into the kitchen, dashing rain off his hair and clothes. The wind outside had risen to a howl, and I could see the lilacs thrashing in the front yard.

  “Daddy, I’m sorry,” Happy said instantly in a small voice.

  He hesitated, and then said, “No harm done. Where’s Sean?”

  Happy and I went still, looking at each other. My heart began to pound. Happy’s face blanched.

  “I haven’t seen him, but I heard him go out early this morning, and I thought he’d caught up with you,” I said through stiff lips. “Have you not seen him at all?”

  He did not answer. His face was still and blank.

  “Happy?” he said.

  She shook her head back and forth, no, but she would not meet his eyes or mine. She looked down at her hands. Her face reddened and then whitened.

  “Happy,” Peter said. It was not a question.

  “I haven’t seen him, really,” she whispered. “But I…I think he might have, you know, run away or something.”

  “Why?” Peter said. It was almost casual.

  “Well, I told him—it was after you were so awful to me, Daddy, last night, you know, in front of everybody when you made me go—”

  “Happy!”

  “I told him we were going home today and never coming back,” she whispered, and then she began to cry. “But he’s heard me say that before; he knows I don’t mean it. He knows I just say it….”

  Peter wheeled and ran out of the cottage. I stood in the kitchen, my head buzzing, the room seeming to revolve slowly around me. Happy ran out of the room, and I heard her pound back upstairs and slam her door. I caught up my own raincoat, then, and ran out after Peter. I knew he would head for the yacht club.

  The wind was so strong I had to fight against it. The rain blew past in horizontal silver bands. I could not see far ahead of me. I met Peter in the lane in front of Camp Corpy. He swept me around and dragged me toward the cottage, head down, not speaking.

  “The boat?” I screamed. “Peter, is the Osprey there?”

  “No,” Peter called back, and I began to cry. I think I knew then.

  It was Caleb Willis, in Micah’s lobster boat, who found him. He told me much later that his father had said, when Peter’s call came, “You go, Caleb. I’ll man the radios to the fleet this time. I can’t go to her and tell her the sea’s got that little boy.”

  I knew when Caleb told me that Micah had not meant Happy.

  Caleb found him almost immediately. There was no anguished, two-day ordeal for us; I have always been thankful for that. It was almost as if Caleb knew just where Sean would take the Osprey, and he went straight there: to the rocky near beach of Osprey Head.

  “I taught him in the Osprey, remember,” he told Peter sometime during the haze of red pain that wrapped us that night, “I knew and he knew that he could just about make Osprey Head alone, if he was careful—on a sailing day, of course, not…like this. We used to joke that his was the only Beetle Cat with its very own home port. I’d have made for there if I’d been him. But in this sea—”

  In that angry sea Sean had never had a chance. How he had gotten as far as he had was something that will haunt my nights for all the time I have left to me, as it did Peter’s. I know that. I used to waken at night in a sweat, seeing the wave that finally took him over and wondering what those last moments must have been like, and then I would hear Peter groan and stir, and I would know as if a red cord bound our two minds that he was seeing it all too.

  Caleb found the Osprey beached on the near rocks of Osprey Head. Sean bobbed nearby, in the shallows, the long halyard that must have taken him and the flying little boat all the way across that crazed stretch of sea to the haven of Osprey Head wrapped firmly around his foot. He must have gotten tangled in it within sight of the head, and fallen, and the little cat, without its taut sail and a hand on the tiller, had flipped. Caleb had taught even the smallest juniors how to right a Beetle Cat if it flipped over, but he had taught
them in the gentle water of Cove Harbor, under the sweet high sun of summer.

  Except for the abrasion around his ankle, Sean seemed merely asleep. Even his tan had not faded. I supposed stupidly, when Caleb pulled the tarpaulin back from Sean’s face, his own face tracked with tears, that the cold sea had seen to that.

  Peter turned at that sight and pulled himself up the stairs of Liberty. Happy, more crazy and senseless in that moment than ever before, started after him.

  “I’ll have another one for you, Daddy,” she screamed, as I caught her around the waist and held her fast. “I’m pregnant now, three months; I’ll have another one for you—”

  “Hush, darling, hush.” I wept, holding her. “You don’t know what you’re saying. Hush….”

  Peter turned and looked down at her.

  “You can’t seem to keep one alive, Camilla,” he said, almost pleasantly. “Please don’t honor us with another.”

  And he went into his bedroom and closed the door. For a long terrible time, while the storm boiled itself out and the cottage filled and the ambulance from the new South Brooksville medical center came howling in, and Happy screamed and screamed and screamed, I did not see him.

  Finally, at midnight, when I was at last dozing in front of the fire, with Christina Willis sitting quietly across the room knitting, he came back down. He was dressed in his oil clothes and carrying his ditty bag.

  “Have the arrangements been made?” he said. His voice was formal.

  “Yes,” I said, past surprise and almost past grief. He wasn’t, could not, be going sailing. The wind had died, but the rain still pelted down.

  “Tommy is coming in the morning,” I said. “They’re going to…there will be a service and an interment here, in the churchyard. I told him we wanted to take him home to Boston, that Happy would want that, but he won’t hear of it. I couldn’t talk him out of it, Peter. Sean’s not our child, he’s Tommy and Happy’s, and that’s what they want. Or at least, Happy does. She was adamant. She’s out of it now; Frank gave her a triple dose of sedative. Tommy said…he said they’d do it day after tomorrow. He wants us to ask the new minister—”

  “Fine. You ask the minister,” Peter said. “I won’t be here. You all do whatever you like with…him. Let Tommy O’Ryan have an old-fashioned wake, with all the trimmings, if he likes. Dance a jig.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Where do you think?” he said, and walked out the door and shut it behind him.

  I leaped off the couch and ran after him, out into the rain. I caught him just as he cleared the path and turned onto the lane toward the yacht club. I spun him around by his shoulders.

  “Peter,” I said, “if you go off on that boat now, I will leave you and never come back. Do you hear me? If you go off on that boat now, I will not be here when you get back. And I never will again. And I mean that, before God.”

  “And where would you go, Maude?” he said. I could not see his face under the brim of his slicker hat.

  “Home to Charleston,” I said instantly, and in that moment knew I would. I had not called it home for many years, not even in my heart, but some long tap root must have remained; Belleau rose before my eyes, dreaming in the silence of the summer swamp, golden and whole and eternal. Kemble had not wanted it, after our father died, and had rented it to a doctor and his wife from Connecticut after he and Yolande Huger had moved into her parents’ great old house on Legaré. I could go to Belleau, and I would; I was a creature of those swamps, that water, long before I became a creature of this bay. I might come near death from grief and loneliness without Peter, but I knew Belleau would sustain me. I would have no compunctions at all about ousting the Yankees from my old home.

  “Would you do that?” Peter said wonderingly. “Would you, Maude?”

  “You just try me and see,” I said.

  And so it was that on a bright-washed cool August day in the year 1961, Peter sat beside me in the little church overlooking Penobscot Bay, with all the colony and much of the village behind us and a stunned Happy and a white-faced Tommy O’Ryan in the pew ahead of us, and heard the new young minister pray.

  “O merciful Father, whose face the angels of thy little ones do always behold in heaven, grant us steadfastly to believe that this child has been taken into the safekeeping of thine eternal love, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.”

  I lifted my streaming eyes to Peter and saw his lips form the words, Mother, take care of him, and then he put his head in his hands and cried aloud. In all my life, I had never seen Peter do that, and I never did again.

  Most of the congregation left after the service. Only a few remained with Happy and Tommy and Peter and me—Micah and Christina Willis, and Caleb, and the young minister, I think—when Sean Williams O’Ryan went down into the summer-warm earth beside Penobscot Bay, there to stay, as he had wanted to, forever.

  Chapter

  Eleven

  We all left Retreat after that. Though there were a couple of weeks of summer left, and Maude Caroline’s camp was not over for another few days, Peter was gone from beside me the morning after Sean’s funeral when I finally woke, aching and heavy and stiff as if I had been beaten, and I found him in the driveway loading the car. I took two cups of coffee and went out, the grass dew-sharp and cold on my bare feet. I saw, suddenly, what I had not noticed before: that somehow, in the week past, summer had died. There was a new steel-edged blue to the bay and the sky, and the barberry hedge was going scarlet in clumps, as was the rowan down the lane on the Compound lawn, and the bracken at the edge of the little birch wood behind the tennis court had turned its pale Florentine gilt. It would be an early winter on Cape Rosier, and a cold one.

  “Are you going back to school, or are we all?” I said. I really did not know. After the funeral Peter had taken the Hannah out, and I had been finally fast asleep, fathoms deep in deathly weariness, when he returned. We had not talked since.

  “I thought you’d probably want to come with me, and I can’t stay,” he said. He looked dreadful, gray all over, bloodless. His old mythic fire was out.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think I can either. It’ll be better next summer, but this one is over. Let me go wake everybody and tell them.”

  “Happy and Tommy left an hour ago,” Peter said. “I saw the car turning out of the lane when I came downstairs. Just as well. I couldn’t have spoken to either of them. I’ve already called Petie and Sarah, and they’re going to come down to Northpoint and get Maude Caroline and Sally. Let’s just throw our clothes in the car and get out of here. Micah and Tina will close up, and I’ll call about getting the Hannah wintered when we get home.”

  “Peter,” I said hesitantly, “about Happy…. You can’t cut her off now. Surely you see how badly she’s hurting. Let’s just try, darling: reach out some way, let her know she’s not alone.”

  “She’s not alone,” he said. “She has Tommy. She has this brand new fruit of her singular womb. She has you. She’s a long way from alone.”

  “Peter…”

  “All right, Maude,” he said, and his voice was dead and level. “I’ll try. I’ll do my best with her. But I’ve got to have some time first.”

  As if sensing the tenor of things with her father, Happy stayed away from us that fall. She did not even phone, which she had always done on weekends. When I called the little house in Saugus, she was polite, if subdued and weary-sounding, and did not mention her father except to ask after him perfunctorily. When I asked if she was all right she said yes; when I asked how her pregnancy was coming she said fine; when I asked after Tommy she said he was doing as well as he ever did. She did not ask to come for Thanksgiving or Christmas, and she did not mention any plans she and Tommy had for the holidays. When I asked when her child was due, she said only, “February,” and when I suggested coming to be with her then, she said Tommy’s sister from Chicago had volunteered to take her in her little city flat, and Tommy wanted that, so that’s what she planned to do.
Knowing a little of Tommy’s malevolently ignorant clan on the South Side of Chicago, I cringed at the thought of Peter’s and my grandchild coming into their superstitious and mean-spirited world. But I held my tongue. There was time to think what to do about that. I would figure a way.

  It seemed to me that fall and winter as if we were proceeding with our lives via some prescribed set of external imperatives. It was as if there were some universally accepted manual for those who lived on after the death of a loved child, and we were trying our best to follow it as scrupulously as we could, all the while resolutely stopping our ears to the screams of rage and tearing pain and grief that flew about inside us like bats. I threw myself into my duties as chatelaine of Northpoint as I never had before, finding a kind of anodyne in motion and involvement, escaping anguish by the oiled wheels that seemed to bear me, machinelike, through the shortening days. Peter began, that autumn, a long-planned and often-delayed book, a memoir of his decades of ministering to the orderly boyhood of New England’s privileged sons. It had a wry, graceful lightness to it, an affectionate but entirely unromantic vision of the boys who trooped and whooped through its pages, and I thought parents all over the Northeast would love it. Peter was a good writer, as he was most everything else he set his hand to, and nothing in the steadily mounting pile of pages that kept him late in his study every night would wound or threaten. It was as if, by holding many boys lightly in his mind and heart, he could exorcise the pain of the one boy who lay heavily at its core. Both of us worked prodigiously. After a few weeks, both of us, I think, slept fairly well once again. Our lives went forward, and if we did not hold each other close for comfort, at least we stood shoulder to shoulder and looked outward. It was serving; it would serve.

  But sometimes…oh, sometimes, a pause would come to each of us, and we would find ourselves still and empty and caught without occupation, and we would stop and stare blankly at nothing at all, and we would have to think consciously then: What next? What is the next step here? What would the next action, thought, feeling be for someone whose heart had not been burnt dead and cold with loss? And when an answer came to us, that is what we would do.