“’Bye,” I said breezily. “I’ll get the crab anyway, on our way back. We can have salad for supper.”
“Goodbye, darling,” she said. And I went out into the diamond morning to meet Warrie, who was standing in the lane outside the barberry hedge in white pants and a striped shirt looking decidedly international. He had a string bag with a real French baguette in it and bottles of red wine and Perrier.
“Good God,” I said, grinning. “Matelot, matelot…remember the old Noel Coward song? You’re far too exotic for Retreat. I ought to take you over to Northeast Harbor or somewhere rich. Where on earth did you get the French bread?”
“Bribed the baker in Castine to make me some,” he said. “It’s probably made with brown flour and Crisco, but the shape’s right.”
The yacht club was practically deserted, and I could see from the number of empty floats that almost everybody had had the same fog-spawned yearning for open sea that I had. One or two small boys were still wrestling with their Beetles, and a small knot of women sat on the porch, taking a breather from the preparations for that afternoon’s tea. It was Saturday, one of the last regattas. I had forgotten. I felt my throat tighten a bit; I had not wanted to meet anyone I had known before in Retreat this summer, except Grammaude and her old friends. But I had been bound to do it sometime. Looking at them, I could not tell if they were old acquaintances of mine or people I had never seen before. They looked almost exactly alike to me, in tennis dresses or white shorts and shirts, and no one looked familiar. I wondered if twelve years had altered me as much in their eyes, or if it was my own eyes that had changed their way of seeing. I lifted a hand and smiled toward the group in case they were known to me, and a chorus of polite greetings floated back: “Hello, Darcy. I heard you were here.” “It’s nice to see you; you’ve cut your hair or something, haven’t you?” “Come and say hello, when you get back, and have a cup of tea.”
I called back that I would, meaning to do no such thing. I did not take Warrie up to be introduced. I never even considered that he might know these women, but when one of them called out, “Warrie! Wait up!” and got up and started down the steps toward us, I wondered why I had not. Of course he would have met them; he would have met almost everyone by now. He’d been here since April, after all. It was I who had been sequestered.
The woman came close, and I saw she was about my age or perhaps a bit older, and startlingly beautiful. Familiar, too, in a way that brought the old fear out of hiding to snap at me briefly. Who was she? Why the stab of anxiety? Then I knew: Gretchen Winslow, my grandmother’s old enemy’s granddaughter. Her grandmother had been a beauty too, and her mother, I had heard, and fully as mean as Gretchen. What a pity to waste those genes on Winslow women, I said to myself peevishly, remembering the ugly little scene on the Willises’ boathouse dock all those years ago, when she had jeered at me about my mother’s madness and nymphomania in front of all the colony children. It had taken Mike Willis to shut her up, Mike and his grandfather Micah.
“Hello, Gretchen,” I said. She smiled sweetly at me and reached up and kissed Warrie lightly on the mouth.
“You rat,” she said. “You never called after Southampton. I waited all the rest of the weekend. If you think you’re getting your sweater back, think again.”
“Hello, Gretch,” he said, disentangling himself and patting her on the rear. “Keep the sweater, by all means. You do it far more justice than I. When did you get here?”
“Day before yesterday,” she said. “I was going to come over and see if you wanted to sail with Corky Stallings and me this afternoon, but I see you’re spoken for.”
“I’m not regatta material,” he said. “Darcy’s going to show me about this fabulous creature called a Beetle Cat. I’m only familiar with power boats, I’m afraid.”
“Too bad,” she said, turning away to resume her place in the group. “I’d have bet you were world-class material. Regatta, of course. We’ll have to work on that.” She smiled again and went up the steps, and we went down the dock gangway to the dinghy, to row out to the Beetle Cat.
“I didn’t know you knew Gretchen,” I said. “I didn’t remember your knowing her that last summer.”
“I didn’t,” he said. “I met her at an extremely silly house party in Southampton early this summer, before you got up here. She hadn’t brought any warm clothes with her and I lent her a sweater, which, as you’ll have guessed, she still has. Gretchen is a beautiful woman, but a bit…hard-edged for my tastes. No subtlety or nuance. She hasn’t been divorced six months and she’s already been through New York’s finest. Or so I’m told.”
“And were you…one of the finest?”
I was laughing, but my face began to redden too. Oh, Lord, why on earth should I care? In truth, I didn’t.
“Not fine enough, obviously,” he said, grinning.“For all her talk she went home from Southampton with a gentleman in a Rolls-Royce who, I understand, made a killing in insider trading. My modest inheritance couldn’t stand up to that.”
I brought the little boat about. The wind was light and soft and steady. I had us on a long beat over toward Eggemoggin Reach and Little Deer Isle. In the opposite direction lay Osprey Head. I did not want to see those waters again.
When we were under way, I said, “I thought somehow that you’d come straight here from Italy. The way you talked—”
“I was in New York for almost two years before I came to Retreat,” he said neutrally. I was silent; so was he, for a long moment. There was only the low rushing of the wind and the little liquid spill of quiet water past our bow. Then he turned to me and said, “I was in a hospital outside Manhattan for almost fifteen of those months, up the Hudson Valley past Sneden’s Landing. It was a hospital for alcoholics and other addicts. My wife’s parents picked it out and sent me there, and paid the bills, and rented me an apartment in New York when I got out. That and a rather substantial cash settlement were the price they paid for getting me out of Giulia’s life. I think they considered it cheap at the price. By that time I was an outrageously bad husband and probably a dangerous one. My mother died while I was in the hospital, and then there was nothing left for me to go back to and a good bit of money…so I stayed around Manhattan awhile, seeing bankers and finance people about this project up here and going to AA. The Winslow bank was one of the places I contacted. Gretchen’s brother runs it now and remembered my name. He and his wife and Gretchen had me for dinner. That’s how I know her. That’s all. Just that.”
The heat in my face roared into full flame.
“Oh, Lord, Warrie, I wasn’t prying,” I said. “It’s certainly none of my business where you’ve been and who you’ve seen. You don’t have to report to me.”
“No, I know you thought I came here from Europe,” he said, looking out to sea. His face was grave. “I let you think so. I didn’t want you to think—I remembered the last words you said to me, before. About Eurotrash. I didn’t want you to think I was that.”
Pity flickered, pity and perhaps the smallest taste of triumph. He remembered then, those last words of rage and pain I had spoken. But, oh, dear God, the hospital; I should have known. I should have sensed it. There is a fraternity of us, those of us who have been inside such places. We know one another on meeting, as if by some scent on our skins. Why had I not picked it up?
“I’m sorry about the hospital,” I said. “I was in one too. I just got out to come here. Not for addiction, but for what they call panic disorder. I can usually tell who’s been in one, but I’ve been pretty wrapped up in myself lately. It must have been bad, all alone and sick in a strange country, and then losing your mother.”
“Yes,” he said. “That was bad. That was the worst part. She died before I could get home. Hepatitis. She’d lived a hard life, but she was still very beautiful.”
We sailed in silence for a while, and then he said, “Actually, I knew about your…illness. Your grandmother told me before you came. Not what it was, precisely, but tha
t it was quite severe and emotional in nature. I can see now that she was warning me off you. Maybe she was right.”
“She was not right, and I’m very angry at her,” I said. “Not that she told you—I’m not ashamed of it—but that she’d take it on herself to do that. She had no right.”
“I think,” Warrie said, “that she probably had every right. I also think you’re better now,” he said. It was not a question.
“I am. I didn’t expect to be, and I find myself really sort of surprised that I am. When you’re in the middle of those things you don’t think they’re going to end,” I said. “You think in terms of living the rest of your life in accommodation to the…whatever. The fear, in my case. Of finding a way you can live out your years without just dying of it or killing yourself. You think in terms of what you’ll have to do to keep it under control, how and where you can live with it. It’s like some huge, awful, inevitable animal or something, that’s chained to you for the rest of your life. You only look for places that will take huge, awful animals. It’s a terribly minimal way to live. I’m sorry, Warrie. I didn’t mean to make a speech. I am better. The animal is a much smaller one now, and shrinking every day. It’s about down to poodle size. It surprises me.”
He reached over and put his hand over mine on the tiller, briefly.
“I know,” he said. “I do know. I know every syllable of what you’re saying. It’s hard, and there are so few people you can talk about it to. I won’t, to you…but it’s very comforting to know that I can, if I need to, and I hope you know that you can, to me. Always.”
“Yeah,” I said, and smiled at him. “I know. Let’s don’t…but let’s hold it in reserve.”
After that we did not speak of our pasts again. We found a little cove off Herrick’s and dropped anchor and ate our lunch with the high noon sun pouring straight down on us, and laughed a lot about things I cannot even remember now, except that Gretchen Winslow and her New York set were part of it, and we came sailing home in the afternoon just before the fleet came in, at that hour when everything stops still in a kind of dreaming lull before it flows forward into evening, and we were still laughing when we docked. We went straight up the dock and the path to the main lane of Retreat without even looking toward the clubhouse, and when someone—Gretchen, I think—came out onto the clubhouse porch and called after us, “But you said you’d come have some tea,” we joined hands and ran up the lane laughing like two children with a delicious guilty secret between them. I dropped his hand when we turned into the lane, and he straightened up and walked decorously beside me carrying the empty wine bottle in the net bag, but the secret still lay there in the air, whole and living.
“See you,” he said, and ruffled my hair, and went on down the meadow path past Retreat to the turnoff to Braebonnie.
“Yes,” I said, and went into the cottage.
When I came into the living room the fire was lit, and Grammaude sat before it in her Spanish shawl talking to Mike Willis. For a moment I stood in the doorway, still unseen, and simply looked at him. He was sitting on a hassock leaning forward with both of Grammaude’s hands in his, and she was talking intently to him. Firelight threw dancing planes and pools over their faces and picked out the glint of his white teeth and something—could it be tears?—on her face. If it was, she was smiling faintly through them, looking at him with the old mixture of fondness and careful attention that I remembered as if on my very flesh. I had seen them sit so, talking by the fire, since my earliest memories in Liberty. He looked so utterly familiar and natural there in the firelight that I realized I had carried just that picture of him with me through all the years since I had last seen him, closed out of my sight like an old photo in a wallet but never away from me.
Mike, I said soundlessly, and then, aloud, “Mike.”
He turned his head and looked up at me, and I could see then that there were indeed twelve years of wear and weather and care in the dark face, and wires of silver in the rough hair that still hung over his brown forehead. But he was still Mike and no one else on earth, uncannily, like his grandfather Micah in that light. No wonder I had mistaken them in the cemetery, the day I had come. The likeness must give my grandmother a turn whenever she looked at him.
He smiled and said, “Hello, Red,” and I ran across the room and threw my arms around him. He half rose, hugging me back, smelling of salt and soap and Mike, and then lost his balance and we both sat down heavily on the hassock, me in his lap. I sat there for a moment, my face buried in his shoulder, feeling all the summers flood back over me like a runaway reel of movie film, and then I leaned back and said idiotically, “I wish you’d let me know you were coming home. I must look like a mess; I’ve been out on the water.”
“So I hear,” he said, standing and pulling me to my feet. “You look pretty good to me, though. A sight better than the last time I saw you, and that’s the truth.”
Only then did I remember that we had parted in anger and misunderstanding, with me running from him up the dock to Liberty and him running after, not knowing what he had done except kiss me once. I felt shame and pain. Another memory swept in behind that one: Mike leaning over me in the hospital, talking softly, me with my face turned away. Or was it a dream? I could not remember much about those few weeks.
“Did you come to the hospital that time?” I said.
“Did I ever. Hitchhiked all the way from Boston, only to have you turn your face to the wall. Yep, this is a decided improvement. I always thought you’d look like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like a ginger cat. A reasonable assumption, when you consider you looked like a ginger kitten before. Stripe you up a little and you’d look like old Zoot here, with his plumy hair and big fat tail.”
Zoot came eeling out from under the sofa and coiled himself around Mike’s leg, purring creamily.
“Thanks ever so much for the bit about the tail,” I said. “I see you two have met.”
“Oh, ayuh. Zoot and I have shared many a can of sardines in mustard on my visits to your grandmother. He insists on the mustard. About the tail…it looks good on you. A little skinnier than I’d have thought, but still substantial. Glad to see you haven’t taken up anorexia.”
“I will, after this discussion of my tail,” I said, leaning over to kiss Grammaude on the cheek by way of hello and apology for my behavior that morning. It was wet. They had been tears, then.
“What’s the matter?” I said, looking from one of them to the other. It struck me suddenly that it was odd that he was here. Hadn’t Grammaude said he would be downcoast all summer and fall supervising a seaside house he had designed for a wealthy summer resident?
“My grandfather had another stroke last night,” he said, the laughter leaving his face. “He’s in the hospital in Castine. It doesn’t much look like he’s going to make it.”
“Oh, Mike,” I said, feeling tears start swiftly. “Oh, Grammaude…oh, I’m so sorry. Oh, Lord….”
“Well, darling, I am too, but my poor old Micah…he hasn’t enjoyed these last few years,” Grammaude said. “It’s going to be better for him presently.”
Her face was white and worn, but calm. I felt a palpable shiver along my arms and legs. What must it feel like, to be her age, so very near to the other end of life herself, watching everyone she loved go, one by one, through a door that was even now half opened to her? What did she think came next? Why would it be better for Micah Willis on the other side of it? I knew she was not a conventionally religious woman, but I did not, I realized, know what she did think about life and death and what lay beyond. I’d have said my grandmother was solidly on the side of life; life was the force I connected most with her. But here she sat, speaking with a kind of approval of death. I remembered that when I had thought of it myself in the past few years, the death of a suicide, I had thought only of a surcease of pain, an ending, not the beginning of anything. When this is over and she has grieved a little, we must talk about this, Grammaude a
nd I, I thought.
“I know how much you’ll miss him,” I said, and, looking at Mike, “and I know how much you loved him. I did too. I do, rather. I always thought you were more like him than like your father.”
“That’s nice,” he said. “I hope that’s true. There aren’t going to be any more like him. I think his time in the world is past. What we’ll have ahead will need lesser men than he could ever be.”
Grammaude laughed aloud, almost a gay sound, almost girlish. “Oh, how he’d growl about that, and how proud he’d be to hear it,” she said. “He always was the worst man about accepting thanks or a compliment I ever met. I think I’ll go sit with him awhile and just pump him full of flattery, gush all over him, while he can’t yell back at me.”
“Good idea,” Mike said, grinning himself. “I really came to see if you wanted to ride over with me. I was there all morning, and he was sort of in and out of a coma, but just before I left he rallied a little, and I think he’d like to see you. If you’re going, it ought to be now. Will you come, Darcy? I’d like it if you would.”
“Of course,” I said. “Just let me run change—”
“Better come as you are,” he said. “I don’t much think he’s going to hang around.”
I sat in the back seat of his mud-spattered Cherokee on the trip to Castine, not talking much, listening to the soft talk between him and Grammaude while the sunset miles unrolled and the pink-flushed panorama of sea and sky and woods flashed past. They did not talk much, mainly about his project down at Wells, and how his design firm was doing, and a little about the changes in the village and the colony. Neither of them mentioned Warrie Villiers and his purchases in Retreat, and neither spoke directly to me.
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