“Come in the house, summer lady,” he said, in the rich voice that, it seemed, had stood in my ears since last summer. “Do you know that you’ve never been here before?”
“Oh, Micah, I must have, in all those years,” I said.
“Nope. We always came to Liberty. It didn’t matter then and it doesn’t now; your mother-in-law could only bend just so far. But I’m glad to welcome you. It’s our turn and some past.”
He poured red wine for us into thin old crystal glasses, and we sat on the sofa before the fire and drank it and I looked around the room. It was the room of cultivated people; I had been in many like it at Northpoint and in Boston: rich with books and beautiful, fragile things on shelves, and warmed by firelight dancing on polished old wood and brass and silver. Oriental rugs worn thin and silky stood in pools on the floor, and plants and flowers, kept carefully away from drafty doors and windows, stood on tables and in deep Italian pots. A small spinet stood in a corner, with Christina’s violin lying on top of it, and a good phonograph and what seemed hundreds of records occupied its own wall unit. I remembered that Micah had said that both his and Tina’s fathers had been in the China trade; relics of that rich era stood all about the room. It was much more than a kitchen, it was the heart of this house, and the heart of what was, I saw suddenly, a rich and complicated and very complete life that Micah and Christina lived together. A thing entirely separate from what I knew of their summer lives; another universe entirely. I could not name the feeling that drifted like smoke to the surface of my consciousness: a kind of envy? A wistfulness?
“This is a glorious room,” I said. “I don’t know why it’s such a surprise: I guess I’m used to thinking of Maine in terms of Retreat, of summer, wicker and rattan and shabby old porches. It’s a very shortsighted way to look at it. I always thought of Retreat as the real world; I’d wait all year, through all the seasons in Northpoint, to get back to the real world. And I never knew, all that time, that when the summer was over, there was still, for you all…all this.”
“For us,” Christina Willis said, “the real world starts when all of you leave. This is our real world.”
She looked over at Micah and then at me and smiled.
“You can have two real worlds,” she said. “You just can’t have them at the same time. My real world and yours…they can stand side by side, but they can’t mingle. It doesn’t make either of them any less real or valuable. Only separate.”
She knows, I thought suddenly. She knows about Micah and me—whatever there is to know—and she always has. I wonder if she minds. Somehow I don’t think so. She said it herself: They can stand side by side, but they can’t mingle.
Micah’s eyes were on me, dark and unreadable and steady, the look I had seen a hundred times before, the look on which I had leaned over a score of summers, that had borne me up as surely as a rock or a tree.
“Peter is doing the right thing tonight, Maude,” he said. “He’s got the strength for it, and it’s his to do. Not yours this time. Lean back and let him do it and let us take care of you for a spell. It’ll come right. There isn’t much that doesn’t look better in the morning.”
I thought, suddenly, of that long-ago dawn after the endless night of the intruder that we still thought to be a German spy. Micah Willis had come that morning too, and things did indeed look better when he did.
“Do you still have your chinquapin?” I said.
“Ayuh.” He grinned. “Wouldn’t part with that.”
“You two are demented,” Tina Willis said equably, and brought the platter of lamb and browned potatoes to the table, and I was surprised to find, after all, that I was very hungry indeed.
After supper we watched a little flickering, utterly inane television from Bangor, and Micah played some records—the Brandenburgs, and the Goldberg Variations—and Christina played a few old French folk songs on her violin. But we did not talk much. Until the knock came that brought Peter and Petie with it—or brought whatever there was to come out of Braebonnie—there simply did not seem anything to say. I had thought I would stay awake, would sit up on the couch and wait, would not, could not sleep, but at midnight Micah leaned over and touched my hand and said, “It won’t help either of them to have you dead on your feet, and they can’t come out until dawn at any rate. Come on to bed, Maude. I promised Peter we’d see you got some sleep. Tina’s made up Caleb’s old room for you. You’ll see the prettiest sunrise in the world over the bay.”
“Peter might call—”
“He said not. He said to tell you not to expect a call. And not to call there either. You don’t want to talk to Elizabeth, I can promise you, Maude. From what he told me, she’s not got hardly an oar in the water right now. Never did have, if you ask me. Bad trouble she is and was, bad trouble for somebody she always will be. I doubt if it will be the Chamblisses after this night, though. Peter had a look in his eye I’d not like to meet on a dark night. Come, now.”
And he took my hand, and I rose and followed him down the hall to where Tina was folding back drifts and shoals of down comforters on a pretty, carved sleigh bed, in a room that looked as if it might have been a page torn from a book of old Scandinavian woodcuts. I undressed and stood still and let Tina drop one of her long full-yoked flannel nightgowns over my head, and when I had crawled under the covers, both Willises kissed me on the cheek and bade me good night.
“Call me if anything happens,” I mumbled, feeling sleep rising to take me under like a tide.
“I will,” Micah said.
And Christina said, “Pancakes and maple syrup for breakfast,” and they turned off the lamp, and the room and I slid together into darkness. I did not turn, and I did not dream.
I opened my eyes when I felt a weight fall on the edge of the bed, and it was full morning. Snow light stippled the ceiling. Peter was there. His face was stubbled with fine gold, and his clothing was rumpled and stale, and he simply sat, staring, his gray eyes focused on nothing at all. Haunted eyes. He felt my eyes on him and turned to me.
“Peter,” I whispered. I was terribly afraid. His eyes were terrible.
“Petie is on the train from Ellsworth,” he said, and his voice was hoarse and weak, as if he had been speaking, or shouting, all through the night. “I put him on it myself, at five this morning. Sarah will meet him. Elizabeth is in our room at the inn. Micah will drive her to the train in an hour or so. She’s going back to Boston, and then to Italy.”
“Peter, how—”
“Later, Maude,” he said. “Later. Please.”
“Is she really going back to Italy?”
“If I have to put her on the plane myself.”
“Peter…do you really think it’s over now?”
“Yes,” he said.
Chapter
Twelve
The weather was wild and strange the year my granddaughter Darcy was born. If I had been a wiser woman, or the wild one the colony thought I was when I first went there as a bride, I might have read the portents. But I was neither of those. I never was.
It was mid-February when tiny Darcy Chambliss O’Ryan came roaring into the world, but the air outside the window at Brigham and Women’s, where she lay with her mother, was as soft as May and freighted with the smells of spring. I opened one of Happy’s windows halfway, to let in the strange freshness, and caught the unmistakable smell of the Low Country river swamp in first bloom; I could not imagine what sly green wind had borne it all this long frozen way. I closed my eyes for a moment, transported, giddy and homesick. It was like a benediction on my new granddaughter’s red head, a blessing from my faraway people to her. Poor mite, she had need of blessings.
A nurse came bustling in and tut-tutted and closed the window.
“February air on a newborn? Really, Mrs. O’Ryan,” she said to Happy, who merely looked back at her dully. Happy had hardly moved since they had brought squalling red Darcy to her, and she had not spoken at all. She could not or would not nurse, either; Darcy got
her first sustenance in life in strange arms, from a bottle. And when the baby was put into Happy’s arms, she merely let her lie there. If Tommy O’Ryan had not leaped to catch his daughter, I think she would have rolled to the floor. I knew then that something was badly askew with Happy, but it was not until she looked dreamily out at the bare winter branches outside her window and said, “The fall colors are really pretty this year, aren’t they?” that her doctor grew alarmed and brought in a psychiatrist. Happy went into the psychiatric wing of the hospital with severe postpartum neurosis that afternoon, and Darcy, when she was able to leave the hospital, came home with me and a nurse to Northpoint. And Tommy O’Ryan, for once subdued and visibly worried about his child, came each weekend and stayed in our guesthouse at the bottom of the garden, to be near her. Even Peter could not object to that. He simply went in on Saturdays and Sundays to his office at the school, and Tommy prudently arranged his hours with his daughter during the daytime and spent his evening hours bragging about her in the taverns along Water Street. I don’t think he and Peter met more than once that entire winter and spring.
Tommy O’Ryan had done many things that disgusted and outraged me, and he would doubtless do others, but he went a long way, that strange soft winter, in redeeming himself in my eyes. He sat for hours in Darcy’s nursery, rocking her and singing to her in a silvery Irish tenor that proved to be as irresistible as his speaking voice, and he could soothe and quiet her as no one else: not me, not her phlegmatic German nurse, and not Peter, on the rare occasions that he picked her up. He was the first to point out that except for her silky thatch of curly, blazing red hair, she was the image of me, and after that, even I saw it and could not help being charmed by it.
“It’s powerful blood you have, you and Peter,” Tommy said. “First the boy, who was the picture of Peter, and now this scrap, who is you all over and no mistake. All there is of me is the hair, and just as well. I’m only hoping this one has your kindness, Maude. And your backbone.”
“Oh, Tommy, there’s more of you in her than that,” I protested, laughing. “Listen to her voice. Pure Irish blarney. Even when she cries you can hear the Aeolian harps. None of that Chambliss New England whonk through the nose, for which I am eternally thankful.”
“And I am that for you,” he said, and I thought he meant it. “I couldn’t have handled the baby by myself. I don’t even know if I can look after Happy when she comes home. I never meant my family to be a burden on you, and that’s the God’s truth, even though I don’t think Peter is ever going to believe that.”
“Give him a little time, Tommy,” I said. “He had a bad time with his son this winter, and now his daughter’s in a psychiatric hospital. There’s always been a kind of darkness in Peter’s side of the family, and it frightens him when he thinks he sees it in one of his children, let alone both. When he sees that this thing with Happy is hormones and not heredity, he’s going to feel a lot better. And I think he likes having Darcy here, whether or not he lets on.”
And I think that he did. The first thing Peter did when he came in on weekday evenings was to go upstairs to Darcy’s nursery and look in on her. She would have had her bath and her bottle by then, and was fresh and dewy and flushed, with her gold-red hair peaking in damp little whorls on her head and her great pansy eyes wide with interest. I would follow Peter and take Darcy from Fräulein Schott and send her down for her dinner, and would settle with the wriggling little bundle into the old rocking chair that had been Mother Hannah’s, beside the nursery fire, and rock and sing to her. Darcy would crow and pump her arms and legs, and Peter would laugh and touch her silky cheek, or the soft spot on her head and go down and make us cocktails, and we would have them there in the gathering dusk, with the newest of the Chamblisses. “The next of us,” as Peter put it. I could see that Darcy charmed Peter with the same tools that Sean had employed: laughter, fearlessness, a sort of cockeyed baby wit that burst out at odd intervals. And there was a plus: “It’s like looking at you when you were a baby,” he said. “It’s like being given the gift of all of you, not just you from seventeen on.”
But he would not often hold her or rock her. And he did not stay long in the nursery after he had checked in with her. Peter had given his heart away to one laughing baby. He was not going to do it again.
Happy came home from the hospital in an April week that was as gray and bone-sucking as February should have been, with no tender green haze at all on the trees and the cold of iron in the earth. I pleaded with her to come to us and let us and Fräulein take care of her and Darcy for a while longer, but she was implacable. Tommy took Darcy home the next weekend, his handsome face furrowed with doubt and worry, and the best Peter and I could do was insist that Fräulein stay for a week in the little house in Saugus and pay her ahead of time for that. I wept when Tommy took the baby from me, wrapped like a little Chinese child in layers of lacy-knit white, and handed her in to Fräulein in the clunking, fin-freighted Plymouth Fury he had bought years before. It was like handing away a piece of myself, a portion of my own flesh. Even Peter’s eyes glittered, and he turned abruptly away.
“Take care of her, Tommy,” I whispered. “Please, if you need us at all—”
“I’ll do my best, Maude,” he said, and there was nothing in that moment of bravado in his voice. Only worry, only doubt. “Maybe when things settle down Happy will see that she needs some help….”
But Happy did not. Whether she settled down we could not say, for we did not hear from her for a long time after that, but Tommy called to say that she had dismissed Fräulein after two days and hired a woman from down the street with whom she had become friendly to come every day and help her tend Darcy.
“I’m not liking the smell of it, Maude,” Tommy O’Ryan said. “Florrie Connaught has a kind enough heart, but she’s big as the side of a barn and not on the best of terms with soap and water, and she and Happy watch television from the time she comes in in the morning to the time she leaves, just before supper. And I don’t know for sure, but I think she nips a bit. I’ve smelt it on her when I come in. At least, I hope it’s her. I can’t have Happy nippin’ along with her, not with the little one in the house.”
“No, of course not,” I said, and after that I kept tiny Darcy O’Ryan in my heart as I had not had another child since Petie. Her gamin face and three-pointed kitten’s smile and flaming head were never out of my mind, nor was my worry for her.
“I wish we could get her away from Happy somehow, just until she’s old enough for school,” I said to Peter once that spring.
“You really think your own daughter can’t raise her child?” he said.
“I wish I thought she could, but I’m just not sure.”
“Relax, love,” he said, kissing me on the forehead. “Kids are tougher than you think. They’re more resilient than adults; I see it every day.”
There was a time you didn’t see it at all, I thought. You didn’t see that famous resilience in your own children, because it wasn’t there. What do you think we’re talking about now?
But I let it go. Peter was nearing the end of his book and was more distracted and fragmented than I had ever seen him before. When it was over, perhaps by midsummer, he could relax, and we would have the long, sweet days in Retreat, and then we would begin to sort it out, this endless dilemma of our children and theirs….
For the first time in my life, I went to Retreat alone that summer. I had known for weeks that I would and had not been bothered by the prospect. I often stayed alone in Liberty, now that the children were grown, and Peter sometimes came only for weekends or a week or so at summer’s end. I had not thought I would be lonely. There had never been a time that the wildness and grandeur of Cape Rosier, the wild, rich life of the woods and fields and ledges and the cold sea itself, the sheer intricacy and primal smoothness of the rhythms of each summer day, had not engaged and filled me. I could not imagine a time when all that was Maine would fail to sustain me.
But that su
mmer I was lonely. It took me almost a week of restless wandering and broken sleep to figure it out: there was no one within hundreds of miles who needed me. Peter was fully occupied with the closing pages of his book and the summer life of the school and was cared for by Mrs. Craig, our housekeeper, and Craig, her husband. Petie and Sarah had parked the children with the doting Forbeses at their Santa Fe retreat and gone off for two months’ healing hiatus in Jamaica. Happy would not part with Mrs. Connaught and her soap operas and bring Darcy to Retreat, and Kemble and Yolande, who had long planned a visit from Charleston this July, bought instead an old house on Sullivan’s Island and began a lengthy renovation there. Amy was newly gone and Braebonnie stood shuttered and dark for the first time in my memory, and Peter’s Hannah and Sean’s Osprey lay shrouded on blocks in Micah’s boathouse, and even Gretchen Winslow had gone abroad with Freddie and Julia and their families. I had waited all my adult life for this moment of perfect freedom in Retreat, and now everywhere I drifted in that foggy green June, only the soft footsteps of my dead went with me.
Even Micah and Christina Willis were absent. It was their forty-fifth wedding anniversary that June, and Micah had taken Tina on a long-promised trip across Frenchman’s Bay, in Bar Harbor, out into the wild blue Atlantic and east to Nova Scotia, where she had Duschesne kin she had not seen since she was a child. Caleb had sent his stepdaughter from Bucksport, a thin, closed-faced teenager named Ruby, to open Retreat and “do for me” if I wished, but I soon felt her dark presence in Liberty like a low-lying cloud, and paid her for the month and sent her on her way, assuring her that I could perfectly well attend to my own small wants. And after that I was as alone, even with the usual summer back-and-forth visiting for cocktails and the meetings at the general store, as if I had no kin upon the face of the earth.
This is what it would be like here if I were a widow, I thought, seeing in my mind’s eye the frail old ladies at whom Amy Potter and I had giggled, clinging together in their fierceness and fussiness in the prized rockers on the porch of the yacht club. I would never, I thought, laugh at them again.
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