The front door opened and banged shut, and I ran into the living room. Peter and Petie stood there, dripping on the rug, their faces white as death.
“Peter?” I whispered.
“Get your rain things and come, Maude,” he said. His voice was very low and even. There was white around the base of his nose. Petie looked like a dead man propped on his feet. My heart froze.
“What? What is it?”
“Come. For God’s sake, just come. Hurry,” Peter said, and he and Petie turned and went out again, into the screaming dark.
I scrambled into my own foul-weather gear and shouted for Sarah. She came running.
“Is it a fire?”
“No, I don’t know what it is, but it’s not dangerous to us. Peter wants me to come. Please, Sarah, stay with the children and don’t let them be frightened. Keep them away from the back windows. I’ll come tell you all about it when I can.”
“I can’t stand not knowing—” she began.
“You damned well can, if you care anything about your children,” I shouted. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s nothing that could hurt any of us or Peter wouldn’t have called me over. Just do what I say this one time and don’t whine, Sarah! We don’t have time for that.”
“Yes, Grammaude,” she said in a level voice, and I knew that in that moment she hated me as I had hated Mother Hannah, and though I might try the rest of my life to make it up to her, I would not entirely succeed. I ran out into the wind and rain, my heart dead as a stone. I knew as if Peter had told me what I would find in Braebonnie.
Elizabeth lay in the upstairs bedroom that had been Amy and Parker’s. She was as white as paper; even her eyelids looked bleached, even her lips. The room was cold; the fire she had tried to get going spat and billowed smoke into the room, and there was only the light from that and one guttering candle, on the table beside her bed. But even in the flickering low light I could see that the sheets beneath and over her were soaked with blood, and that the baby she held against her breast was blood-dappled too, and whiter and more transparent than the petals of a narcissus. The baby was, I thought in a curious calm, almost surely dead; it was simply too small and too still to be anything else. It might have been a tiny china doll.
Peter and Petie stood side by side across the room, simply looking at me, and Elizabeth raised her head and smiled.
“Dreadful weather for a call, isn’t it?” she said, and her voice sounded as if there was not enough breath to push the words out. The white baby made a sound like a seagull, very far away. I moved then, fast.
“Peter, go downstairs and build a fire and heat me some water and find a hot water bottle, and do it fast,” I said, and he turned and strode from the room. “Petie, go get all the blankets you can find in the house, and find the whiskey and bring it up here,” and he, too, vanished. Neither he nor his father had said a word.
I went over to Elizabeth and looked down at the baby. It was premature, even I could tell that, so small it would have had little chance even in a hospital. Here, in this dark, cold house, in this storm? I pulled the bloody blanket back from the tiny face, and the mewling wail rose a bit higher. My blood turned to ice in my veins, and I really think that for a moment my heart stopped.
There was the unmistakable arched nose that I had looked down upon in the face of my own newborn son and the tiny delicate cleft in the chin that was unmistakable Chambliss. They looked as if they had been carved in that waxen little face by a miniaturist.
“Oh, Petie,” I said to my son, who had come in with a load of blankets and was looking down in horror a twin to mine at the fading baby. “Oh, Petie. What have you done?”
“I didn’t know,” he said, and his voice was none that I had ever heard. “I didn’t know.”
Tears welled in my eyes and spilled over and ran down my cheeks. I took the baby and wrapped it in one of the clean blankets—so light, so very light, so little—and laid it on the bed and lifted Elizabeth’s head up from the pillow. It lolled in my arms as if there was no spinal cord. She winced.
“Are you still bleeding?” I said urgently.
“No. That stopped a while ago. I’m just so…sleepy, Maude. So very sleepy. The baby…it’s too early, isn’t it? I know it is…. I didn’t know it was coming when I left Boston. It wasn’t until I was nearly to South Brooksville that…it started. I thought I could make it here and get somebody…maybe Frank Stallings or somebody from the village who’s a midwife…but it came by the time I got upstairs. It was real fast. I almost didn’t feel it, it’s so small, you see. Only there was all this blood….”
“Elizabeth, how did you get to Braebonnie?” I said idiotically, as if it mattered. I was packing clean towels around her crotch and legs as I talked, trying not to hear the sound of the baby’s breathing. It sounded like a tiny bellows, rasping, stopping, rasping….
“I parked the car on the road where the tree is down and walked,” Elizabeth said.
“Dearest God in heaven,” a voice behind me said, and I turned, and Peter stood there with a steaming kettle and a hot water bottle, looking from Elizabeth to the baby on the bed.
I took the kettle and hot water bottle and put them down, and took my husband and son by their arms and literally dragged them to the door. They stumbled behind me like automatons, like victims of a terrible disaster. They were, of course. We all were.
“Go back,” I said. “Go back. Get out when you can and bring help. Go to Micah, send Micah and Tina, and if there’s a doctor in the village bring him. I know there’s no one in the colony…. Go now. Don’t come here again.”
“Maude…” Peter said, his face awful.
“Get Petie out of here, Peter,” I said. “Get him away, him and Sarah and the children, take them to the Stallingses, or to the Willises and tell them—oh, God, I don’t know, tell them whatever you have to and don’t let Petie talk about this.”
“Maude…” Peter said again.
“In the name of God, Peter, go!” I screamed, and Peter took Petie by the arm and they went. I turned back to the woman and the baby on the bed.
“Why, Elizabeth?” I said, holding whiskey to her lips. I had laid the swaddled baby on the hot water bottle, and it thrashed feebly for a moment and then was still. I found I could not look at it.
“Because the colony will have to accept a little bastard if it’s born here,” she said. “Otherwise, I knew he’d never be acknowledged in Retreat. Where you’re born is very important in Retreat, especially if you’re a bastard. And besides…he has kin here. That’s important too. It is a he, you know, Maude.”
I closed my eyes, and when I opened them she was looking at me with those tilted eyes, and there was a terrible calm in them, a kind of serene madness.
“He isn’t going to live, is he?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said, and picked the baby up and held him, hot water bottle and blanket and all, close against my breast. I walked with him to the rocking chair by the fire, where Amy used to like to sit when Elizabeth was born, rocking her, rocking, rocking.
I sat there with the baby for a very long time, warming him with my body and hands, singing to him songs I cannot now remember, feeling rather than hearing the ragged, thready breath fighting on, and on, and on. I think I sat that way with him until near dawn.
But the baby died in the earliest hours of that morning, before help could come.
Chapter
Thirteen
Just before Easter, Peter’s publishers had a letter from President John F. Kennedy—to whom they had sent an advance copy of Peter’s book, expecting little but hoping against hope—praising Commons for its insight, humanity, and unsentimental wit. Jack Kennedy, himself a product of Choate and a participant in the same pageant of privilege and rehearsal for power that spawned the book, understandably could not endorse it with a promotional blurb, but he let it be known via one of the firm’s editors who had been at Harvard with him that he would not be unhappy with media reports
that Commons rested on his bedside reading table. This tidbit hit The New York Times scarcely a day later, and Commons went back for an astounding second printing within the week. The publishers promptly arranged a national author tour for Peter. When he replied that he didn’t wish to do that, his editor responded, not with the carrot of personal glory or a place on The New York Times bestseller list—Jack Kennedy had pretty much taken care of that—but with the request that the royalties be assigned to a scholarship in Peter’s name, and of his choice, at Northpoint.
“So,” Peter said to us at Easter Sunday luncheon, where he told us about the proposed tour, “I don’t see any decent way to get out of it. It would be like using Northpoint to feather my nest and then refusing to share the booty. It wouldn’t be more than a month or two. You could come with me, Maude; in fact, Martin suggested it. What do you say? First class all the way, to Pocatello, Idaho, and Scranton, Pa., and so on?”
“Oh, Peter, when?” I said. My heart was straining with pride in him, and relief that the film of dead dullness that had seemed to lie over him all that winter and spring had lifted a bit. His gray eyes were spilling a little of the old luminosity that had been there last summer, before the awful night of the hurricane. I would have given anything in my power to see those fires lit once more, anything but what I suspected I was being asked to give.
“They want to start in June and finish up in late July,” Peter said casually. But his eyes were intent on me.
“You mean, not go to Retreat,” I said.
“I guess I do, not until maybe the middle of August, anyway,” he said.
I was silent for a while, looking down, and then I said, in a low voice, “Peter, I have to go this year. Of all years, I have to be there this one. And you do too. We all do. Can’t you sort of make your base there and travel out of…oh, Bangor, I guess?”
“No,” Peter said. “I can’t. And to tell you the truth, Maude, I don’t think I was planning on Retreat this summer, anyway.”
“What?” I said, looking up at him. He was not looking at me now, but at the green-velvet limbs of the old willow that stood just outside our dining room windows. Easter was late that year, and it had been a warm spring.
“I guess you should know that we aren’t coming this summer either,” Petie said in a formal voice from across the table, and I swung my eyes to him. There were spots of color on his cheekbones, but he held his dark eyes resolutely on mine. Sarah bent her head over her plate. She did not speak.
I felt something akin to panic start up in my chest and had to take several deep breaths before I could say, “Why?”
Peter said nothing, and Petie finally said, in the same cool, formal tone, “There doesn’t seem to be anything there for us, Mother. We’ve talked about it and we agree.”
I looked from my son to my husband, heart hammering.
“Peter?”
He lifted his hands and let them fall and then shook his head slightly.
“I guess that’s it, Maude. There’s just…not anything there.”
I could not seem to get a deep breath or control the ridiculous racing of my heart. This was absurd. I forced level words out over the breathlessness.
“If any of you are afraid Elizabeth will be there, you can rest easy. She won’t. I very much doubt that she ever will be again,” I said.
“How do you know?” Sarah said. Her voice, too, was level, but I could read the cost in the whiteknuckled hands that were knotted in her lap. The girls had finished their lunch and gone out to the guesthouse that doubled as their retreat when they visited us; otherwise, I knew, Peter never would have broached the subject of the tour.
“I know,” I said. “Trust me; I know.”
And I did know. After the ambulance had finally gotten through to Retreat the morning after the hurricane, I had gone with Elizabeth to the South Brooksville medical center while Peter packed us up and closed Liberty and Petie and Sarah readied the girls and their station wagon to go home. I had told Peter in the thin, watery dawn that had broken after the storm that I wanted it that way, and he had nodded his agreement. I wanted, too, I told him, to stay behind with Elizabeth until she had been judged fit for travel and someone had come from Boston to see to the arrangements about the baby, and he had not argued about that either. He was white and remote and still-faced, and moved with a leaden stiffness I had never seen before. I did not know, and never will, what passed between him and Petie and Sarah after they returned to Liberty and left me at Braebonnie that night. I know only that somehow Peter handled it; Petie and Sarah stood together and in full knowledge of what had transpired, and I loved my husband for whatever he had given his stricken son that had enabled him and our daughter-in-law to do that. I knew that Petie and Sarah would not part now; the bond that lay between them was almost visible. I would ask no more of Peter.
I stayed at the inn in Bucks Harbor where Peter and I had stayed that past winter, and from there I called the guardian of Elizabeth’s trust at the bank and told him the situation—or what part of it he needed to know—and he agreed to send a junior trust officer with money and papers and power of attorney to act for her. And where, he asked, would she want the baby to be buried?
“In Boston in the family plot, I’m sure,” I said, and he said he would arrange it with Fitzgerald’s.
And would she be staying on at the family home in Boston?
“No,” I said pleasantly, “I feel sure she’ll be going back to France. The house will only need to be opened until she’s made her travel arrangements.”
He would, he said, see to the opening of the Beacon Hill house too. And he thanked me for my kindness and concern.
“You’re very welcome,” I said, and went to the medical center to see that all of it would transpire.
Elizabeth lay perfectly still in a white room in which cold blue light from the harbor danced on the walls and ceiling. Her red hair was as lusterless as a dead crow’s wing, and an IV tube snaked from a metal stand into her arm. She did not turn her head when I entered, but she said, “Maude. I knew you’d be here. I want you to see what we need to do to get the baby buried in the cemetery up here. Is it the preacher we ask, do you know?”
I sat down beside her.
“The baby is going to be buried in your family’s plot in Boston,” I said pleasantly. “That’s being arranged. Charters Cobb is sending someone to handle it from here and see that you get properly discharged and back to Boston safely. He’s opening the house for you and will make your travel arrangements when you’ve decided about that. He’ll go over your financial situation with you and make sure things run smoothly, both here and in France. You won’t lack for money, I’m sure. I’m going to stay with you until the man gets here.”
She turned her head and looked at me then. A ghost of that first Elizabeth shimmered over her white face for a moment and then flared out and was gone. She smiled, a small, weary, cynical smile.
“You’re running me out of town, aren’t you, Maude?” she said.
“If you want to put it that way,” I said. “Make it easy on yourself and go, Elizabeth. There’s nothing for you in Retreat any more. Not at Braebonnie and not in the Little House and not in Liberty. Simply…nothing. And there won’t ever be.”
She was silent, and after a long while she said, “No. There won’t ever be. I can see that. But I’ll tell you one thing: my baby is staying here. Here with…his family.”
And she smiled the smile again.
“No, he isn’t, Elizabeth,” I said, smiling back at her as easily as if we were chatting about the weather. “Your baby is going to lie at home, with his family. You said you loved your mother more than anyone on earth; how do you think she’d feel, seeing her daughter use her dead grandson as a little football, a little club…to bludgeon people with? How do you think your mother’s friends will feel?”
I did not say would feel.
After another long silence, she nodded her head weakly against the pillow and closed her
eyes.
“You’re right,” she whispered. “There’s nothing here for me any more. And maybe nothing in France either, but we’ll have to see about that. All right, Maude. Is this how it’s going to be? I leave and never come back to Braebonnie, and this just…ceases to exist? It didn’t happen? To me, or you, or Petie?”
“That’s right,” I said serenely.
“And it’s all for…him?”
I nodded.
“God Almighty,” she whispered. “The awful power of your love can alter reality. I never knew that about you. You’re such…a little thing. Such a little, soft woman.”
“Go to sleep, Elizabeth,” I said. “The sooner you get your strength back, the sooner you can leave here. Things will look better to you then.”
She closed her eyes. “I should thank you, Maude,” she said. “Without you I’d probably be dead. But I’m not going to. I wish I were dead, and I hope I never see you again.”
And I knew that she would not, nor I her.
“Even if that’s true, and she never comes back,” Petie said now, all these months later, “things can never be the same again in Retreat. Not for any of us.”
“They can if you make them the same,” I said.
“Mother,” Petie said with the cool patience that used to infuriate me when he was a teenager, “no matter how much you’d like to live happily ever after in that perfect little dream world you’ve made of Retreat in your own mind, the reality is that for the rest of us Retreat is not the same place after what happened, and if we don’t think we can bear to go there again you should respect that. You know people are going to talk, even if—”
He stopped and looked at Sarah and reached over and patted her clenched hands, and she gave him a brief, tight smile. Peter seemed miles away, gone from us all.
I thought quite clearly, It’s coming now, and only then realized that ever since we had all come home from Retreat in September and begun studiously avoiding talking about the night of the storm, to each other or anyone else, I had had the awful malignant feeling that I was poised on a precipice, waiting to be pushed over. I did not know whose hand would do the deed, but I knew that at the bottom of the cliff lay loss. Loss of Retreat, and possibly loss of everything. I looked at my stiff, miserable son, and though my heart wrenched with love and pity for him, I knew that I would fight him like a tigress to avoid that precipice.
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