I was just about to broach the subject aloud when I saw Elizabeth’s head go up, and something like deliverance flare in her brown eyes, and an actual radiance flood her face. Following her gaze, I saw that Petie and Sarah stood in the doorway to the drawing room in their coats and boots, a powdering of new snow on their shoulders and the soft-footed old butler behind them. Sarah, her dark hair ruffled from the scarf she had flung over it and her snub nose reddened with cold, smiled faintly and waved at Peter and me, and then started toward Elizabeth. Petie stood still, staring across the room at her. I read his face and felt cold fear flood me. It was the old look, the one I remembered from that awful time in their adolescence: pure, naked, living wanting. Elizabeth jumped up from beside Peter and ran past Sarah and her outstretched hands and straight into Petie’s arms, and I saw rather than heard her lips form the words, into his neck, “Oh, Petie, help me,” and felt in my very bones, rather than heard, his answer: “I’m here. I will.”
After that, through that evening and the next day, through the morning of the funeral and the funeral itself, through the small gathering in the town house afterward and the night after that, through Peter’s and my frowning looks and then admonitions and then outright warnings and Sarah’s white-faced silence and then inconspicuous departure from the Endicott Street house, Petie tended his old love with his whole heart and his constant presence, and nothing—not the tears in Sarah’s voice on the telephone that I could not help overhear, not the closed faces and lifted brows of all Elizabeth’s kin, not the hissed, whispering argument with his father that I heard from the kitchen of the Potter house—could move him. When Peter and I went to his and Sarah’s house in Brookline to spend a final night he was not there, and Sarah was shut up in her room and would not talk to us, and when we got up the next morning he had not come in. I got breakfast for the children while Peter, grim-faced, went over to the town house on Endicott Street to have it out with his son, only to find Petie getting into a taxi with a pale, fur-coated Elizabeth and a silent Warrie, and when he asked where they thought they were going, it was Elizabeth who said, “Back to Italy, Peter. Petie is taking us to the airport.” Petie said nothing at all. Elizabeth kissed Peter softly on the mouth.
“Thank you,” she said. And then they were gone.
Peter came back to the Brookline house to wait for his son, and presently, when Petie got out of the taxi and came into his silent house his round face was so drained and blasted that Peter had not the heart, after all, to excoriate him.
“Sarah is upstairs,” he said quietly. “She’s not in very good shape.”
“I know,” my son said. His voice was dead. “I’m sorry, Dad, Mom. I’m going to fix it now, if I can.”
“Is it over?” I said. I was beyond feeling.
“Yes,” Petie said.
But it was not over. Just after the New Year dawned, Sarah called us in Northpoint, her voice so thick with crying that at first I could not understand her, and told us that Petie was up in Retreat with Elizabeth, holed up in Braebonnie. She found out when Micah Willis saw lights in the Potter cottage and called Peter and me to see if we knew who might be in residence there and, failing to reach us, called Sarah and Petie in Brookline and talked to Sarah. Sarah knew instantly and viscerally that Petie was not at an American Bankers Association meeting in New York, as he had said; she called Braebonnie and got Elizabeth Potter, who laughed but did not deny that Petie was with her. Petie himself would not come to the telephone. He had been gone three days by then. She was certain Elizabeth had been drunk when she called.
“Please, please, Grammaude,” Sarah sobbed. “Please go get him. He’ll listen to you when he won’t anybody else. He’s drunk, or crazy, or something. If you don’t I can’t stay with him any more, and what will happen to my children? Please help me.”
We went. There was never any choice about that.
My heart had always lightened as the car turned east from Northpoint, onto the wandering little blacktop that would take us, ultimately, over the border into Maine. But on this bleak, ashen morning it lay stonelike in my chest, as if Peter and I were driving to attend a dying. And perhaps we were, I thought; the dying of my son’s marriage, and his place in the world our family had always known: the world of orderliness and rules, the world of accountability. Outside that world lay wildness. I knew about that wildness, perhaps better than anyone in Petie’s ken, but Petie himself knew virtually nothing of it except those brief years so long ago when he had stumbled after Elizabeth Potter in her molten wake, and he had been burned so badly by it I had thought he abjured it forever. Poor Petie, perhaps he had thought so too. But Elizabeth was wildness itself, and when he had come within her range, even after all these years, she had toppled his towers with one sentence. I had no idea, on that long and largely silent drive through winter-locked Maine, whether I could prevail against that power.
Peter drove steadily, so locked within himself that I rarely spoke to him. What, after all, was there to say? Once, he turned his head to me and said, “What is going to become of our children, Maude? Is all of this our doing? What could we have given them that we didn’t? What can we give them now?”
There had been snow, finally; it lay in great grayblue banks along the highway, where the plows had pushed it, and on fields and rocks and the boulderstrewn shore below the Camden Hills. The islands were all blue and black and white, and the small bays and inlets themselves were blue-shadowed white: ice beneath snow. I have never seen such a blue as the snow blue of Maine. The cold light threw Peter’s face into sharp relief and backlit the networks of fine lines around his eyes and mouth and on his forehead. His fair hair was more silver in that northern light than gilt. Peter was sixty years old that year, and looked to me, for the first time, every moment of it and more. I felt tears come into my eyes.
I had some ideas about what we had not given Happy and Petie and what we might attempt to give them now, but I did not speak of them. Now was not the time, not with the man I loved most and longest in the world beside me in his pain and defeat. If we could win Petie back, then would be the time for Peter and me to talk of compensatory palliatives for him. As for Happy, I did not think anything could heal or change her. I reached over and touched Peter’s cheek.
“There are a great many things our children must do for themselves, that they have not or cannot do yet,” I said. “They either will or they won’t. Don’t go borrowing guilt, darling.”
“I wonder if anything could have made a difference to Elizabeth,” he said.
“Nothing but Parker, and it’s decades too late for that,” I said. “Peter, dearest, when we have Petie back—and we will—you’re going to have to cut Elizabeth loose from our family. There isn’t any help for her in us, and there’s nothing but grief for us in her. You do know that, don’t you.”
“Oh, yes,” Peter said. “I know that.”
We came to South Brooksville at midafternoon. A new little inn had opened there the summer before, and though it was closed in the winter months, Peter had called ahead and obtained the promise of a room to be opened for us and a fire lit in the fireplace. The innkeepers, an interchangeable pair of chic middle-aged men in narrow blue jeans and sweaters that spoke of Abercrombie and Fitch, said our room was at the top of the stairs, there was a space heater and some additional quilts, and we might share their early breakfast of tea and toast but no other food could be provided. They were, they said, on their way to an estate sale in Castine and would see us, perhaps, in the morning. Otherwise we could leave payment on the kitchen table.
“Are you always so trusting?” I said pleasantly.
“Hardly ever,” one of them said. “In fact we wouldn’t have opened for you at all except that Micah Willis came by and put a deposit down. Everyone around here knows the Willises.”
“Most know the Chamblisses too,” Peter said tightly, and the pair tossed their heads in tandem and went out, leaving us to the chilly comfort of a small, low-ceilinged room with a
sputtering fire, three thin gray blankets, a scuttle of coal on the hearth, and a bathroom at the opposite end of the hall. But the view out of the small-paned window over Bucks Harbor was breathtaking, a woodcut in blacks and grays and smoke blues and the white of fine rag paper. A white ghost of a quarter moon hung in the tender blue over Harbor Island.
“Cold Comfort Farm,” Peter said, piling coal onto the fire. “I’d counted on something hot to eat. We’ll just have to nip instead.”
And he produced a bottle of good old brandy from his suitcase, and poured some for me into the toothbrush glass, and took a neat swig himself from the bottle. I sipped, and warmth curled into the cold hollow at my core.
“I’ll bet Tina and Micah would feed us,” I said. “I’ll call them from downstairs. We can’t go over to Retreat on empty stomachs. Lord, Peter, it’s a totally different world, isn’t it? I didn’t expect it to look like it does in the summer, of course, but this is…implacable. Outside human ken, somehow. It’s almost frightening.”
“It’s beautiful,” Peter said, staring out at the fast-falling blue dusk. “I never thought much about insulating the cottage before, but it would be something to be able to stay up here occasionally in the winter. The Potters used to do it, you know.”
I thought of Braebonnie, and how it must look in all that empty blue: a lightship, a fortress lit against the cold and endless night. A fortress where two errant children played corrupted games in a world of pure inhuman white….
“We should go,” I said. “We’ll stop at the Willises on the way. Let’s just get it done.”
“I don’t want you to come with me, Maude,” Peter said, not turning from the window. “I want you to stay here where it’s warm, at least until I see the lay of the land. I want to handle this myself; I’ve let you carry the load with Petie far too long. This may be very unpleasant, and it’s mine to do.”
“Do you think I’ve never handled unpleasantness?” I cried, stung. “He’s my son; I know him better than anyone else—”
“Precisely,” Peter said. “He is now going to get to know his father.”
“Are you going to be hard on him?” It was a stupid thing to say. Did I expect that we were up here to coax and coddle Petie home?
“Hard enough to get done what has to be done,” Peter said. “Hard enough so that he knows once and for all that I care very much what happens to him. Don’t fight me, Maude. I’ll call on you if I need you.”
“All right,” I said weakly, suddenly hating the thought of the empty hours ahead of me in that stark room, hung in the air over no landscape that I knew. And then, “But let me call Micah. He could go with you.”
“No.” Peter looked levelly at me, two hectic red spots on his high cheekbones. “He could not. Call him if you like; he and Tina will give you some supper. But I don’t want Micah Willis to help me get my boy home.”
He kissed me on the cheek and went out the door and closed it. I heard his footsteps echo on the old steps, and the front door of the inn open and shut again, and, in a moment, the car engine start. And then there was silence. I brought the brandy bottle and glass and put it on the bedside table, and wrapped myself in the three blankets, and stretched out on the bed to read my paperback and wait for my husband to bring my son to me. I have seldom felt so alone in my life. I have seldom felt so heavily, hopelessly sad.
I must have dozed, despite the discomfort of the thin mattress and the scratchy blankets, because when the knock at the door waked me, the fire had all but burned itself out, and the square of the window was full black and pricked with stars. The room was cold; the floor numbed my stockinged feet as I ran across it and threw the door open. Peter, I said with my heart and head, but it was not Peter who stood in the door. It was Christina Willis, and she was smiling and holding out her arms. I ran into them with a little wail of disappointment, mingled with sheer gratitude at her solid, comforting presence. Her heavy sheepskin coat was cold from the night air, and her cheek, as she pressed it to mine, was icy, but her arms and voice were warm.
“I’m some mad at you for not letting us know you were here,” she said, pulling me up to the guttering fire. “Sitting in the dark and cold when I’ve had a leg of lamb roasting for you and Peter for hours, and good red wine open…. Come on, get your coat and boots and let’s get out of this disgraceful garret and home by the fire. I wonder those two fancy boys ever make a dime, the way they treat their guests.”
“Tina, I can’t leave, Peter could be back any minute—” I began, and then stopped. How much did she know about what was transpiring at Braebonnie, or how much had she guessed? There was little that Micah and Tina Willis did not know about us by now, but this…this was a special pain, a special shame. I did not think Peter would want me to speak of it.
She looked at me, her smooth face as serene as ever, but her eyes were soft with pity.
“Peter called Micah a little while ago,” she said gently. “He asked us to come get you and give you some supper and a bed for the night; he’s going to stay at Braebonnie until morning. I gather Petie is…he doesn’t want to leave, and Elizabeth is pretty drunk and near hysterical. Peter said he could handle it, but it’s going to take a good while yet.”
“Oh, Tina, I’ll have to go,” I cried, reaching for my coat.
“No. He said absolutely not. He made us promise, Maude. And we agree, Micah and I. It’s no place for you tonight. What needs to be done in that house needs to be done by Peter and his son. Please let it be that way.”
I started to flare up; what did she know of me and my son, of the long bond between us and the pain of this terrible winter rendezvous? And then I thought of the years of pain that she and Micah had borne while Caleb wandered in his own wilderness, and of the hard peace to which they had won through. Christina Willis knew. Tiredness and a kind of heavy peace flooded into me.
“All right,” I said. “Okay. I’ll be very glad to get out of here. I’ve felt like the Snow Queen in her prison, up here above all the cold and the blue.”
“I feel that way from November to April.” She laughed, and we went out together into the vast night.
Tina and Micah Willis lived in a neat, pretty Dutch Colonial directly on the road a half mile above the entrance to Retreat. Behind it lay a garden and salt meadow, snow-covered, and then a small stand of fir and birches, and beyond that the boathouse and the beach and the bay. Everything was silent, silvered by the thin young moon.
I had always wondered about the houses of the natives of Cape Rosier; with all the empty and spectacular shoreline, they invariably sat within three or four strides of the pitted blacktop road, with their great barns connected by covered walkways beside or behind them. But on this night I understood. The new snow, three or four feet deep and even more where it drifted against houses and piled stone walls, was impassable except where it had been shoveled. No one down on the shore, once snowed in, could dig their way to the road. They would be imprisoned until a plow could come, or a thaw. I thought of the narrow lanes of Retreat and wondered if two cars sat on the road in the moonlight, at the entrance by the weathered oar, and if two sets of footsteps had broken the diamond-white surface of the snow, along with those of partridges and foxes and hares, until this last fall had buried them? How would Peter get in?
As if in answer to my unasked question, Christina said, “Micah took Peter in on Caleb’s old snowshoes. He’s okay. Micah came back as soon as he saw Peter clear the porch. He’s going to send Enoch Carter with the plow in the morning. Then they’ll all be able to come out.”
“Will they all come out, do you think, Tina?” I said.
“Oh, ayuh,” she said calmly. “I reckon they will.”
“There’s not much you don’t know about us, you and Micah. I wonder sometimes you bother with us.”
“You’re worth bothering about, Maude. You’re one of the few who are,” Tina Willis said, smiling at me. She must be older than me by a decade, at least, I thought, but in the green light fro
m the old Volvo’s sturdy dash I could see clearly the young wife I had first known, the fair girl, as placid and deep as a pond of clear water, that Micah Willis had married.
“If you can say that after tonight, you’re a better woman than I would be,” I said, sudden bitter tears in my nose and throat. “My son isn’t much of a man tonight.”
“My son is alive because of you,” she said. “He had his bad patch, just like your Petie is having, and he found himself a snug harbor. But he wouldn’t have been alive to do it if you hadn’t been there the day he cut his foot so fierce. It’s not the least of the reasons I think you’re worth bothering about, but it’s the first. I think you may be the only ones of the summer complaints I do think that about, though, you and Peter. There were a few others, but mostly they’ve died.”
I reached over and squeezed her hand on the wheel, and she took it off and squeezed mine back. The door of the great barn was open and we drove in, and she shut the door and we ran through the dark connecting hallway, piled with boots and snowshoes and trunks and lawn furniture, and into a great terra-cotta-tiled kitchen where a fire roared on an open hearth, and cherrywood chairs stood around a polished table in the center of the room, and a deep-cushioned sofa and chairs made a grouping in a corner by the fireplace, and Micah Willis in a handsome icelandic sweater and corduroys stood at a modern range carving a crusty brown joint of lamb into thin pink slices. I could have wept at the warmth, and the smell of garlic and basil and red wine, and the sheer dark safe bulk of him. He held out one arm and I ran into it and he kissed me on the cheek, still brandishing the knife in the other hand.
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