Colony

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Hush over there,” Mike’s father said in a voice that froze my blood. We hushed. Mike’s grandfather got up at the knock and went to let the men from Augusta in.

  It was an awful night. There was cold, muted talk of legal ramifications and punishment; voices were raised; angry talk flew. Once Caleb Willis raised his fist at a colorless, vulpine Park Service man who seemed to be the most adamant about punishment and his father silently caught it, whispered something to him, and led him out to the kitchen. Beth Willis went out to join her husband, and after that things were quieter. But still no one talked to us. Grammaude sat in the big twig rocker that had been my grandfather’s, rocking silently, not speaking, while Micah Willis argued with the Park Service. Despite our misery Mike and I dozed; dimly we heard talk of remuneration, and court orders and probation, but none of it seemed very real. Just before dawn the park people left, and Micah Willis came and sat down heavily beside Grammaude on the rocker’s hassock, rubbing his eyes.

  “Can’t do anything much to them because of their ages,” he said tiredly. “Can press charges against them as juveniles and get ’em put on probation, and still may do it, but it’s more likely they’ll just ask for damages.”

  “How much do you think that would be?” Grammaude was nearly whispering.

  “Don’t imagine Park Service bridges come cheap,” Micah Willis said.

  Mike got up and went over and stood before his grandfather. I followed him and stood looking down at Grammaude. She was looking not at me but at Mike. I did not see anger in her eyes, but I could not read what I did see.

  “I’ll work and pay for it, Granddaddy,” Mike said.

  “Then you’ll be working for a good part of your life,” Micah said. His face, too, was grave and still but not angry.

  “I can work too,” I said, struggling not to cry. “I can get jobs babysitting after school; the sisters let us do that.”

  “Oh, Darcy,” Grammaude said, finally looking at me, “it’s not the money. We’ll find the money. It’s just that…oh, darling, it’s happened before. Your mother, when she was a little girl—”

  “I know,” I said, the tears spilling over in spite of me. “Mike told me. That’s why, Grammaude. We thought…we thought if we did something to save the eagles it would help make up for—”

  I couldn’t go on without sobbing aloud, so I stopped, my face screwed up furiously with the effort to repress outright weeping.

  Grammaude began to cry too, softly, her face still. I could not ever remember her crying before. It hurt my heart.

  “You could have been killed, darling. You could have so easily been hurt or killed, and then what would I do? You simply can’t do things that put you so at risk.”

  “Yes,” I sobbed. “Yes, you can! You have to do them! You have to do anything it takes, if it matters.”

  Grammaude reached out and pulled me to her and held me against her for a long while. I could hear Mike’s breathing, and his grandfather’s, but neither of them spoke. Finally Grammaude put me off at arm’s length and looked at me and smiled faintly.

  “Maybe you do,” she said slowly. “Well, of course, maybe you do.”

  In the end, no one brought any charges and there were no repayments required from the Park Service, for the simple reason that the state media picked up “the heroic efforts of two young Hancock County residents to save a colony of bald eagles being threatened by a proposed Park Service bridge that would open their habitat to pedestrian traffic,” and even though Grammaude and Mike’s parents would allow no interviews and no contact with the media, we became, for a brief moment in that age of growing environmental awareness, something of cult heroes. Indeed, the outcry fanned itself and grew so raucous that the embarrassed Park Service reconsidered its notion of opening Osprey Head to the public, tore down the charred remains of the bridge, and spent an additional several hundred thousand dollars in restoring the old narrow bridge, posting KEEP OUT signs on the beaches of Loon Ledge, and mounting a discreet public relations campaign via an agency in Portland.

  Mike and I enjoyed little of our fleeting fame, however. He was put to work in the boatyard all day and until noon on Saturdays, and I was kept under house arrest in Liberty for the rest of the summer. We were forbidden to see each other and we did not, until the next summer, when he was even taller and I was even rounder and softer and more loathsomely feminine, and everyone had forgotten that we had ever laid siege to the bridge to Osprey Head—or, if they had not, did not speak of it—for such was the way of the colony. And the summer flowed on as all the ones before it had, and we were together again, and though the outsides of us had changed, nothing else had. And it was enough.

  In the end, it was not enough, and it was Mike who ended it. Or perhaps it was me, but it was assuredly Mike who precipitated it. At the end of his seventeenth summer and my fourteenth, when he was preparing to go away to MIT to study architecture in the fall and I was determinedly pretending that nothing had changed and nothing would, he took me in his new still-nameless sloop over to Osprey Head for a farewell picnic, and there he abruptly pulled me up from the rocks where I had been sitting and put his arms around me and kissed me hard. It was a long kiss, and a seeking one, and it felt as if I had swallowed fire down into my stomach.

  When he raised his head, I drew back my arm, blinded with panic, and slapped him. He simply looked at me.

  “I thought you might feel the same as I do now,” he said. His voice caught in his throat, and his eyes were dark with shock and pain. The print of my hand was livid on his tanned face.

  I began to cry. “Why did you have to spoil it?” I wept. “Why did you have to change everything? Don’t you see we can’t ever be the same now? Don’t you see what you’ve done?”

  “It couldn’t have stayed the same, Darcy,” he said.

  “Yes, it could! Yes, it could have too! But it can’t now; now it will have to end! It’s what happens when people start kissing and being in love and all that stupid business…it ends! It ends and they go away!”

  “I won’t go away.”

  “Well, you damned well are going away in just two weeks,” I wailed. “You’re going all the way to Boston, and you’ll be gone for five whole years, and when you get back I’ll be nineteen and you won’t even remember me!”

  “I’ll be here summers, just like always,” he said. “I’m going to work in the boatyard; nothing will change, you know that.”

  “Yes, it will! It already has!”

  “You want me to pretend I don’t feel any differently about you from when we were kids? Okay, I will. But it’s not true. I feel…awfully different. You’re not a kid. I’m not either. I want something else for us now. I thought maybe you did too.”

  “I want you to take me home. I want to go home. And I don’t want to talk to you any more. I don’t want to see you any more.”

  We did not speak on the sail home, and when we docked I jumped from the sloop and ran up the dock and back to Liberty. I locked myself in my room and would not come out, and I cried and cried and cried. I did not know what I wept for, and I did not know what had so frightened me. I have never been entirely sure about that. But it did not matter. He left three days later for MIT, much earlier than he had planned, and for the next two summers he did not come home to Cape Rosier but found construction jobs in Marblehead or on Cape Cod.

  No one, not Grammaude, not Mike’s parents, not Micah Willis, mentioned him to me after that. Once only, the first summer he did not come back and I had taken to spending all my time in my own new catboat, did my grandmother say, “Is everything all right with you, darling?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

  And such was the power of the sea and the solitude wrapping me that summer that for a long time I thought everything was.

  * * *

  “What did you do with yourself today?” Grammaude said that night, after I had come up from the beach and she had finally gotten up and dressed and made
our supper. I thought she looked as insubstantial as a moth, nearly transparent, and her breath was still short and fragile in her chest, but her eyes shone and there were two spots of color in her cheeks. We had wine with our chowder, but no more of the lethal martinis.

  “I sat on the beach and watched ghosts,” I said.

  “Oh, dear. I hope they weren’t threatening.”

  “No. These were nice ghosts. You’d have liked them.”

  “Maybe I still do,” she said, and smiled.

  I slept that night, for the first time, in the little upstairs bedroom that had always been my grandmother’s, and found to my relief that it was as small and enfolding and comforting as a cocoon or a womb. I could see the stars and the silhouettes of the pointed firs outside, but I could not see the great restless glitter of the bay. I could hear it, though, a sweet sussuration, an endless soft sighing. I thought I could sleep here, and I was right: I got into the narrow little white bed and pulled up the silky old cutwork linen sheets that smelled of cedar and lavender and slid fathoms deep into that lightless, dreamless sleep that the sea gives. Sometime during the night Zoot sailed up onto the bed with me, and I pulled him into the curve of my arm without really waking and slept on.

  And when I woke in the morning it seemed that, for just an instant, I was seventeen again, and the summer was new, and in a moment I would be running across the dew-cold grass to Braebonnie to meet my love.

  Chapter

  Sixteen

  On a Sunday morning in my second week in Retreat, the year I was seventeen, I came stumbling barefoot out of my room with my hair falling uncombed into my eyes and the oversized Cove Harbor Yacht Club T-shirt that I slept in slipping off one shoulder and found Grammaude sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee with a young man I had never seen before. I turned to rush back to my room, seeing in my grandmother’s face the picture I must make, but he smiled at me and said, “Don’t run. I was looking at La Primavera in the Uffizi just last week, and here she is in the flesh.”

  And I stood still, smiling tentatively at him. I had studied the Botticelli painting in art history the winter before and knew he had given me a double compliment: one on my looks and another by not explaining the allusion.

  “Providing she had six million freckles,” I said.

  “And a T-shirt down to her ankles,” he said, in a soft voice tinged with something…what? Not a foreign accent, but the shadow of one. “Never mind. The look is the same.”

  “Warrie, this is Darcy O’Ryan, my granddaughter,” Grammaude said, looking from me to the young man. “Darcy, this is Warrie Villiers. Warren, of course. His grandmother was my best friend, and his mother owns Braebonnie now. I haven’t seen him since he was a very small boy. He’s lived abroad all his life, and this is the first time to my knowledge he’s been back to Retreat since he was about five. He popped in on me just a minute ago and I knew him immediately. He’s the image of his grandmother Amy.”

  “That’s nice,” the young man said. “Most everybody thinks I look like my mother. Almost nobody thinks I look like my father. I can’t really remember him—or my grandmother either. Hello, Darcy O’Ryan. There are all the fires of Ireland on your head, but the rest of you is very French.”

  I felt myself blushing and ducked my head.

  “I don’t think so,” I mumbled. “Mostly Irish and whatever my mother’s side of the family is. English, I guess.”

  “Well, there’s a touch of French Huguenot way back,” Grammaude said. “My surname was Gascoigne before I married your grandfather. Though I can assure you that those good gray souls were not the ooh-la-la French you might imagine.”

  “Too bad. It’s what we do best,” Warrie Villiers said, and smiled again. It was a small smile, soft on his full red mouth, and had a hint of sadness in it. His whole face did, somehow. He was dark, and had a head full of dark curls cut longer than the fashion that year, with threads of silver through them, and his eyes were hooded and nearly black and tilted up at the corners: gypsy’s eyes, I thought. His nose was high and narrow and long, and he was very tan. Even if Grammaude had not told me he had lived all his life abroad, I would have known it. There was something ineffably foreign about him, a difference so powerful it was almost palpable. He was smoking a short brown cigarette without a filter, holding it between his thumb and middle finger, and there were very fine white lines webbed around the extraordinary eyes. He was older, on second look, than I had first thought.

  “Well, let me fix you some breakfast,” Grammaude said to him. “If you got in past midnight last night, I’m sure there’s nothing to eat in that kitchen. Are the covers even off the furniture? I haven’t seen anyone over there airing. Darcy, go put something on.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, still mumbling, and crossed my arms across my breasts and tiptoed out of the kitchen as if by doing so I could keep them from bobbling extravagantly. It was useless; the growth spurt I had had at ten had not been repeated, so that I still stood just at five feet, but the early promise of breasts and hips had been amply kept. I was, I knew from looking at old photographs, shaped exactly as my grandmother Maude had been when she was only a few years older than I. I heard Warrie Villiers chuckling softly as I went and blushed again, not knowing if it was at the mutinous, animated lushness beneath my T-shirt, my discomfort at it, or simply something my grandmother had said. I put on the tightest bra and the loosest oxford cloth shirt I had, and cut-off blue jeans, and dragged a damp comb through my wild mop and came back into the kitchen. Grammaude smiled at me and handed me a cup of coffee, but she did not speak to me, and the smile was an abstract one. Her attention was fully on this strange young man, and she seemed of more than one mind about him. Her mouth smiled at him and said warm, gracious words, but her eyes on him were uncertain, troubled. Grammaude was seldom of two minds about anything or anyone. The kitchen and the morning felt strange, displaced in time.

  I slid into a chair opposite Warrie Villiers and buried my nose in my coffee, looking at him through steam. He smiled at me again but did not speak to me. He leaned loosely back in his chair, balanced on the back two legs, and drank his coffee and watched my grandmother moving about the kitchen making breakfast. He seemed completely at home for someone who had not seen Grammaude since he was very small and perhaps did not even remember her. It was that quality of total self-possession that struck me first about him, and it is the last thing I remember of him. He seemed utterly at home in his dark skin, profoundly sure of his place in this kitchen and this colony and this world. It did not seem to me a quality born of conceit: more, perhaps, of control. He seemed to exude control like a body scent. I was powerfully drawn to that. I had spent my short life in search of it.

  “So what brings you to Retreat?” Grammaude said, stirring eggs, not looking over her shoulder at him.

  He laughed, a short, sharp laugh. “You might ask, rather, what sent me. Or who,” he said. “I’m here because my mother has a new prospect on her line, and the presence in her life right now of a twenty-three-year-old son does not, I suspect, exactly jibe with the age she’s hinted to him. He’s going to be at the villa all summer, it seems, and since I was supposed to be at home working on my senior thesis, it struck Maman that Retreat and Braebonnie might be just the place for it. Peace and quiet, you know. Isolation, healthy living, no distractions. I gather that the gentleman in question, who, I believe, drives racing cars or something, is hardly ten years older than I, and Maman’s last overhaul in Switzerland was superb; she looks younger than he does. I told her I’d say I was her little brother, but she was adamant. Adamant is Maman’s forte. So here I am, and she’s right. It’s going to be just the place to think and write; I can’t imagine that the night life is terribly distracting. It’s really beautiful; I’ve seen pictures, but I didn’t really remember the house and the sea and all that. Very different from the sea I know.”

  “Where’s that?” I said, feeling a pang in my heart for him, unwanted by his mother. I knew that
feeling.

  “Sardinia. Maman has a villa there from her third husband, the Yugoslavian greengrocer king. It’s beautiful too, all hot pinks and reds, and rocks and sand and blinding blue and white, but it doesn’t sit softly on your heart like this place does.”

  I smiled. That was just what Retreat did.

  “Where do you live in the winter? Where do you go to school?”

  “We live in a flat in Trastevere, in Rome. It’s the old section, very old, very picturesque, very expensive, if you live where we do. Maman got it from her fourth and last husband, the importer of Taiwanese ‘antiques’ and perhaps a few selected controlled substances. She’s set now, as far as primary and secondary dwellings go, and can shop for more—transitory pleasures. I think my father’s family paid her enough to leave France—and them—so she can live as she pleases if she’s very careful. Of course, she seldom is. I’m not in school this quarter because she’s forgotten to send them my tuition again, and she’s neglected to wire me the money for the cottage and food and a servant this summer, so I’m probably going to be grazing on the lawn like a cow. But I’ll get a check from my trust fund next month—that’s done out of Paris; she can’t get her hands on that—so I’ll be fine. And I’m used to managing. I’ve lived alone since I started school.”

  His words might have sounded bitter if he had not been so at ease in our kitchen and his smile had not been so quick and free. As it was, he merely sounded amused by his mother and affectionate toward her. But my heart gave another fishlike leap in my chest. Controlled perhaps, resourceful maybe, but Warrie Villiers was like me, a child abandoned by its parents. Well, of course I had Grammaude, and she had made all the difference—but still, I had walked in that wilderness too. I wanted him to know that, but I did not know how to tell him.

  “I’ve been alone a lot too, except when I’m up here,” I said. “It’s really not so bad.”

  “Not by half,” he said. “But I wish I’d had this place when I was growing up. What a difference it could have made.”