I kept my voice light when I talked to Peter most evenings, but finally one Sunday, when we had had five straight days of fog that pressed itself against the windows like a great, blinded face and I had seen no one and heard nothing but the incessant booming of the fog buoy off Head of the Cape, I broke down.
“I’m so lonely I think I’m going to die, Peter,” I half wept. “I’m ashamed of myself, but I am. I never realized how much of the magic of this place rode on you and the children.”
He was silent for a moment, and then he said, “Maude, what would you think about a place on Winnipesaukee? There’s a great old house on Weirs Beach coming on the market; Gordon Wells told me about it. I thought I might run up and take a look. It’s at most two hours from our front door; I could get there after school in time for a sail before supper every day, and you could run in to see the kids whenever you wanted to. It’s making better and better sense, with me working the hours I do.”
“Oh, Peter…leave Retreat?” I could not take in his words.
“It just seems to me we’re drifting away from it,” he said slowly. “It’s harder and harder for me to get there, and the kids aren’t coming so much, and you’re feeling so lonely and blue….”
“Peter, it’s…a part of us,” I said. “Retreat is part of who we are. I don’t think we could just—what, sell it? Rent it?”
“There’s not much for me there now, Maude,” Peter said in a soft, dull voice, and I knew he was seeing again the empty slip in the storm-tossed harbor where Sean’s Osprey should have bobbed, and did not, and winter lights in Braebonnie where no lights should have shone.
“There will be again, darling,” I said. “Just wait until the book is done and you’re back and out on theHannah in the sun, with all the time in the world ahead of you. I shouldn’t have laid all this on you. It’s just the damned fog; we’ve been socked in for days.”
“Well, think about it,” he said. “Will you do that for me?”
And I promised that I would, and I did just that. I took a sandwich and a glass of milk and went to bed, closing the shutters against the face-pressing fog and the banshee weeping of the buoy, and I thought about summer nights on another shore. Could I leave Liberty and Retreat? In the middle of that long white haunted night, it began to seem to me that perhaps, after all, I could, if Peter went with me.
I woke to a blazing blue morning and a rattling in the big fireplace that meant a fire being laid, and smelled fresh coffee, and ran in my flannel nightgown into the living room, to find Micah dusting birch bark off his hands and whistling “The Road to the Isles.” He wore the striped jersey and old white pants that meant he was going sailing, and I could have wept with the rightness of him, solid and brown as ever in my cold living room. Flames leaped on the hearth and steam coiled out of the mug of coffee that he held out to me, and I simply grinned at him and took the coffee.
“Did you bring the sun, or did it bring you?” I said, after I had drunk half the mug. The world had transmuted itself again in an eye blink, and the thought of leaving Retreat was as ridiculous as the notion of colonizing Saturn. Why had I thought it was necessary to be needed incessantly to be content? Surely, simply being was enough.
“Followed it all the way west from Grand Manan,” Micah said. “I think all the fog in the world makes up in Nova Scotia. Can’t think of a crowd that deserves it more.”
“You can’t be speaking of your long-lost in-laws, can you?” I said. “Shame on you, Micah Willis.”
“Puts me in mind of something I read about Verrazano, who fell on those parts looking for the Northwest Passage,” he said. “Said something to the effect that they found the natives to be a discourteous lot, and when they ran out of gewgaws to trade and left, the natives ‘made all signs of scorn and shame that any brute creature would make, such as showing their buttocks and laughing.’ And I quote. Old Verrazano called it Terra Onde di Mala Gente on his map. Means Land of the Bad People. I always did think it was Tina’s tribe he was referring to.”
“I trust you haven’t shared that insight with Tina,” I said, laughing.
“Nope. You’re the first I’ve breathed it to. If you tell her, I’ll tell the tribunal at the general store that you receive gentlemen in your shimmy of a morning.”
I looked down at my nightgown. It covered me from chin to ankles, but I was as aware of my naked flesh beneath it as if I had not worn it at all. I blushed, and he laughed aloud.
“Go put on something you can sail in,” he said. “I’m going to show you something.”
“You know I hate sailing.”
“You’d hate missing this more.”
“You promise to be careful?”
“No need to fear today’s sea, Maude,” he said gently, and I knew that he too sometimes saw the empty slip in the yacht club harbor and its small occupant dashed on the rocks of Osprey Head.
“I won’t be a minute,” I said.
Micah had been right; there was no need to fear the water off Cape Rosier on that diamond morning. We went in Caleb Willis’s slender new wooden sloop, which had just come off its blocks in the Willis boatyard that April, and the Beth slid across the glittering water as if her keel had been oiled, listing hardly a foot in the light breeze. As we rounded the headland out of Harbor Cove I could see we were headed for Osprey Head, and I drew in my breath slightly in pain and surprise that Micah would take me there so soon after Sean’s death, if indeed at all. He caught the sound and looked over his shoulder at me.
“I can’t change what happened out there, Maude,” he said, “but I can make it bearable for you again, I think. Or at least introduce you to some souls who can.”
“I never wanted to see it again,” I said softly.
“You couldn’t stay in Retreat and not see it,” he said. “It would mean never looking out to sea, and sooner or later you’d do that or you’d leave.”
I was silent, watching the quick grace of his stillcompact body, and the cat-footed ease with which he moved in the Beth. Like Tina, he must be sixty-five or past that now, but the young man who had pulled me out of the cold sea still lived very close to the surface in him. Only the white grizzle of hair at his temples and neck, and the cross-webbing of lines in his dark face, spoke of work and weather and pain and the passing of time. We had none of us slackened in age, I thought, looking down at my own body in sweater and pants. Not Tina and Micah, not Peter, not me. We had, instead, hardened and gone sinewy, weathered, corded. Cured with the cold like aging Inuits, I smiled to myself. Maybe Ponce de León was wrong, and the Fountain of Youth was up here in these cold bays and inlets all the time.
Micah began a long beat over to Osprey Head, and the sun’s dazzle was behind us, and I saw for the first time that a low, spidery bridge, perhaps a pontoon affair, stretched from the long finger of Loon Ledge to the rocky beach of Osprey Head. You could not see it from Liberty or Braebonnie, but I could tell now that it would give access to Osprey Head to anyone who could make their way through the dense undergrowth of Loon Ledge. I felt alarm tighten my stomach.
“Micah,” I said, “when did that bridge go up? Who put it there?”
“Thought you’d never notice,” he said, grinning at my tone. “There’s a wicked good story behind it, if you’d care to hear.”
“You know I would! Has somebody bought it, then? Oh, Micah, don’t tell me somebody’s going to put a house on Osprey Head!”
“Not going to tell you anything unless you hush and listen,” he said, letting the mainsail fall slack and gliding to within a few yards of the shore. Then he heaved the anchor overboard and turned and faced me, arms resting on his knees, eyes squinted against the brightness.
I waited.
“You know that the Fowlers up to the Aerie owned Osprey Head and sold it along with the big house to those folks from wherever, the ones we don’t see much of. Well, late last fall they put it up for sale without telling anybody, and it was bought on the sly, if you will, by an outfit out of New Jer
sey who planned to put a sardine cannery here. Water around the outside of Osprey Head has always been so thick with sardines you could walk on ’em, almost. It’s what brought the ospreys in the first place.”
“Oh, God,” I whispered, stricken, but he raised his hand and grinned and I fell silent.
“Well, the word got out around here about Christmas, as it was bound to do, and a group of us went to the national parks boys. We knew if we could get the parks people to buy it we’d at least be safe from development. And they were interested enough to make a good offer. But the sardine people weren’t interested, so we formed ourselves a little committee and went to them and told them that not a man or boy Down East would work on the construction. Now that gave ’em pause, sure enough, because they were counting on cheap native labor, as they put it. Couldn’t bring in their own crews anywhere near as cheap. Finest word a New Jerseyite knows, seems to me, is cheap, and the men around here don’t know how to work any other way. But we all agreed; we wouldn’t touch the damned construction if it turned to gold in our hands. Well, that put a crimp in things right enough, because the sardine folks had jumped the gun and brought in a whole fleet of their bulldozers, ready to go—tore hell out of the county roads, I can tell you—and the foreman was so mad he said he was going to start his dozers next dawn if he had to do it himself. Didn’t look good for Osprey Head, I tell you.”
“What happened?”
“Well, funny thing,” he said, looking off toward the horizon. “Foreman scraped him up a crew from a couple of bars in Ellsworth and got out here at sunrise, and damned if every one of his dozers hadn’t just broke down in the night. Missing cog here, broken teeth there, busted gear somewhere else. Damned fool. Should have known what cold salt air does to machinery when you leave it out overnight.”
“And so?”
“So he stomps back to the New Jersey bunch and tells them they owe him for a bakers’ dozen of dozers and he’s out of there. And the owners saw the wisdom, finally, of accepting the Park Service’s offer and did just that, and all that’s going to happen, looks like, is that bridge. Just so the Park Service can get in and out with a four-wheeler occasionally, to clean up the coastline after storms and replenish some of the mussels and clams and quahogs. I don’t like it either, but it seemed the best of a bad situation.”
“And you wouldn’t have any idea who—er, helped the salt air along a little bit with those dozers,” I said.
“I couldn’t really say for sure,” he said. “I’d hate to think any of my friends and neighbors had such calumny in their hearts.”
“You damned fool,” I said, starting to laugh. “You could have landed in jail for years and years. Why would you risk your stubborn neck like that?”
He looked at me steadily. His face was calm.
“There are eagles there now, Maude,” he said. “I saw the nest last fall, and the eggs at the beginning of mud time. I think there may be more than one pair. I’d risk a lot more than my neck to have eagles come where the ospreys haven’t been able to.”
I felt the hair at the base of my neck begin to prickle and my forearms shiver as with cold.
“Is that what you brought me to see? The eagles?”
“Ayuh,” he said, looking away. “They aren’t a trade for the boy you lost there, but it’s mighty grand to have that kind of life back on the Head. I thought it might…ease you a bit.”
“Then take me to see them, Micah,” I said softly.
We rowed ashore in the Beth’s dinghy, to a different part of the beach from where Peter and I had come ashore all those years ago for our picnic and Sean had gone off the Osprey into the water. This was wilder coast altogether, sown as thick with rocks and boulders and twisted roots as a lunar stone garden and inches deep in brilliant neon-green moss. It was still wet from the days of fog, and so slippery we often went on all fours, pulling ourselves up the face of the near-vertical cliff like rappellers on a mountainside. The cliff was rock; the great shrouding firs and pines and spruce began farther up, on the crown. We did not speak; there was no sound in all that great expanse of salt-scoured air and high sun and dark blue sea except the call of the gulls and the slap of the small waves on the beach below us and the soft grunts of our breathing. Occasionally Micah reached a hand back to me, but always I shook my head, determined to come to this healing, if healing there was here, alone and on my own. It seemed, that morning, the most important thing I might ever do.
Near the crown of the cliff Micah Willis said, almost under his breath, “Look up,” and I did, and the impossible, incredible shadow of an enormous bird soared across my face and his, and then the bird itself rode in on a current of air and dropped onto a branch of a dead fir, perhaps blasted many years ago by lightning, beside a huge rough nest that clung in the crotch of the tree. The tree sat atop the rock that capped the cliff; nest and bird could not have been more than ten feet above us, and the bird could not have failed to see us. But it did not move, and we did not either. For a long moment we stared directly into the cold yellow eyes of a great bald eagle, the largest, Micah said later, that he had ever seen, and time and sound and sensation stopped as if all life save that of the eyes had gone out of the world.
The eagle’s head was white and shone in the sun, and in its great hooked yellow beak, almost as long as the head itself, a fish flopped feebly. The eagle turned its head from left to right, regarding Micah and me frozen to the rock, and then dropped the fish over the lip of the enormous nest. It was both wide and deep; it might have sheltered two or more adult humans, but from the shrill clacking clamor from within I knew it sheltered eaglets. I stared, breath still held; a downy head, all gaping yellow beak and pink maw, appeared over the rim of the nest, and another, and another, and the eagle spread its vast wings in a flash of white tail and underbelly and lifted off again into the blue, and we felt on our faces the wind of its passing. In the air above us it screamed, and far away and below us, the scream of another eagle answered, and the babies’ kik-kik-kik-kik grew more frantic, and I knew the other parent was on its way to the nest with more food for the young. I laid my cheek against the stone face of the cliff and wept. The surge of joy and strength and fierce, singing love that shook me was nearly monstrous; I could have flown away into the pure air on it as the eagle had, as I had fancied Sarah Fowler doing in the air above the Aerie, all those summers ago. I knew in that moment that I loved this wild place, this Cape Rosier, with a passion and power that was all engulfing and all my own, independent of Peter or Micah or Petie or anyone and anything else on earth. I clung to the cliff and wept, as strong as the rock in that moment, as whole as the island. I knew that I would never leave Retreat.
It never occurred to me that we had been in danger on the cliff face until much later, when Micah told me, tears not yet quite dry on his own face, on the sail home.
After that, the tide of the summer turned toward joy, and in all the summers at Retreat I remember now, that summer of the eagles was, until its end, the most golden.
Just before the Fourth of July, Peter finished his book and sent it to his Boston publishers and received such an enthusiastic reception from those august personages that I believe he could have flown to Retreat on the wings of their praise. As it was, he came careening down the lane and into the driveway of Liberty nearly a week early, in a sleek, growling foreign roadster I had never seen before. He slammed to a gravel-spurting stop, took the front steps in one leap, and caught me up from the porch where I was potting begonias and swung me around like my father used to do when I was a small child. Then, before I could get a word out, he kissed me full on the mouth so hard and long that my breath vanished, and Jane and Fern Thorne, on their way to the tennis courts, clapped, and Phinizy Thorne put two fingers to his mouth and whistled. Peter released me and bowed deeply.
“It’s an Austin Healy,” he said a bit later, showing me the creamy leather interior of the little car. “British Racing Green, they call it. You wouldn’t believe how fast it i
s, Maude; it’s like driving a missile of some kind. And the way you can feel the road!”
“I can just imagine the way you can feel the roads on Cape Rosier, Peter,” I said, smiling at him. “Sixty-year-old spines are not designed for that.”
“Speak for yourself,” he said. “My spine feels about twenty. My legs and arms, maybe fifteen. And you wouldn’t believe how young my—”
“No, I probably wouldn’t,” I interrupted hastily, seeing Erica Conant and her bridge club approaching on the lane, bound for the yacht club porch. “But you could probably convince me by showing me.”
“My very deepest pleasure, if you’ll pardon the pun,” Peter said, grinning in the sun of that enchanted afternoon, and I hugged him fiercely, Erica or no Erica. Peter was back, Peter without shadows; all light and as young, to me, as when he had waltzed with me on the moonlit banks of Wappoo Creek. I did not care to whom or what I owed the gift of this joyous, burning Peter; if it took a successful manuscript or a new sports car or was simply the product of sunspots or positive ions, so be it. Peter for the rest of that summer was Peter as I had always thought he would be, and me with him, when the two of us were finally alone in Liberty, with a purse full of blue days to spend as we wished. I had, I remembered, looked far ahead out of that early fortress of rules and duties and reprovals and seen precisely this summer.
Looking back, it seemed to me that it never rained, and yet the grass and wildflowers in the salt meadows were more brilliant than I had ever seen them; that it never grew hot and muggy; that the fog never came crawling back to press its hungry face against my window; that the black flies and mosquitoes and no-see-ums never bit. Crystal-blue days followed one another in a stately procession, a string of perfect weather breeders that spun on through July and August and yet never bred any weather but ringing bronze days and star-bright nights. Petie and Sarah came back from Jamaica renewed and redeemed and closer than ever and opened the Little House, and both Sally and Maude Caroline went happily each day to Yaycamp, and when we did see our son and his small brown wife, it was briefly: for cocktails or a cold Sunday supper or a picnic on one of the inner islands—for that was a summer spent on the water, even for me—and always they were wrapped in a quilt of deep, quiet love and content that sometimes brought tears of thankfulness to my eyes. My boy had weathered his great storm and found his harbor, just as Peter had apparently, found his own. If we owed that to Elizabeth Potter Villiers, Sarah and I, I believe we would both have heaped our gratitude on her red head with no reservations. Whatever had transpired in that cold, awful night scarcely seven months ago, it seemed to have drawn Peter and Petie together as nothing before had been able to do. They sometimes sailed together, far out into the bay, and more than once I saw Peter drop a hand on Petie’s shoulder and leave it, and Petie smile up at him with nothing in his round brown face but simple content. Elizabeth had gone back to France late that past January and moved back into the chateau of her husband; Gretchen Winslow heard it in Paris and told us when she and her children arrived in Retreat. I often thought, that summer, it was Elizabeth’s final and definite leavetaking that so lightened and charged the air around me and mine.
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