Lost Island

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  “I could give love. The love of a mother,” I said.

  Aunt Amalie came to stand beside me at the rain-streaked window. The smell of the marshes was heavy that day.

  “Is this a generous love, darling?” she asked me.

  I knew it was not. It was a selfish, possessive love that wanted something for me, more than for my baby. I was seventeen years old. I had made a dreadful mistake. At least my baby should not suffer for it. But oh, how I hated to give him up.

  “What about Giles?” I said. “What about the fraud upon Giles? Would it be better if he knew the truth?”

  Aunt Amalie shook her head. “If you can say that, you don’t know Giles. He would be forever torn between you and Elise. He would feel a duty toward you, and every time he looked at his son—”

  “I don’t want that,” I said. “But I want to keep the baby. I must keep my baby.” Suddenly I was determined.

  Aunt Amalie was silent for a few moments. Then she put an arm about me.

  “In that case, so you shall, Lacey dear. Don’t worry about expenses and what you will live on. I can take care of all that.”

  “My father wasn’t rich,” I said, “but he left me enough to manage on for a short time. I’ll be all right.”

  “Yes, of course you will,” she said, but her eyes were kind, sad with regret, because she could see what lay ahead of me far better than I could.

  It was only after I left her and went back to Chicago that I began to think, that I began to see what I was doing. I was already sure, somehow, that the baby would be a boy, and now I could see what I was taking away from him. His father’s love and protection. The safety and enrichment of life at Sea Oaks, where everything he needed would be given him. I was taking away the future that was due my son—as heir to the island and Giles’s fortune. In Giles’s hands he could grow up to be what he had a right to be. If he stayed with me I would have to hire someone to raise him while I was at work. I could give him so little. Not even a name!

  The one great question was Elise. How much would she want him? I would not give him into indifferent hands. I had glimpsed a side of Elise that frightened me. If she resented the child as my son, then this plan would never work.

  I wrote to Aunt Amalie, and when Elise came back from her honeymoon, and Giles was gone, they came to see me. Elise talked to me as sweetly and sincerely as I could have wished. She had what she wanted now, and she could afford to be kind to me. She almost made me believe that she had changed toward me, and that I had imagined a ruthless cruelty where none had been intended. Almost, but not quite. I was not so gullible as to think that my cousin held any love toward me, but I could see that this further move was to her advantage, and another way of binding Giles to her. She would never dare be unkind to his son, and perhaps the natural mother instinct which is part of every woman would take over once the baby was in her care. Besides, Aunt Amalie would be nearby to look out for him and to see that her daughter played the role of mother as I would want it to be played. So I listened and weighed, and came to my own decision.

  Aunt Amalie’s plan was elaborated in detail. It was even conceded that in my position as the baby’s “cousin” I could see the child whenever I wished, and that it was not as though I would be parted from it entirely.

  When the time agreed upon came, I went to Philadelphia and began visits to a new doctor. I went to him as Elise Severn. When I went into the hospital I was registered as Mrs. Giles Severn. In the meantime Aunt Amalie had brought Elise north too. The doctor who had diagnosed that she could never have a baby was dead, and there was no one to challenge what we were doing. Not even Floria had been told that her sister could have no children, and Floria was away from the island much of that time. The story was given out that Elise’s condition was rather precarious and that she needed a particular specialist in attendance. When her pregnancy should have begun to be noticeable she moved away from the Malvern area and came to Philadelphia with her mother.

  For a few days after his birth Richard was mine. I held him in my arms every day at the hospital. I loved him fearfully and painfully. Then I was released and Elise took him, delighted and apparently loving. He solved a very great problem for her, and since she was never very perceptive about others, I think she did not fully understand how I felt. Aunt Amalie knew. For a few more days in Philadelphia she was a rock for me to lean on. Then I gathered my resources and what inner strength I had and went back to Chicago. Richard was taken to his new home at Sea Oaks, to await the return of a proud father from his next leave.

  I was eighteen and Aunt Amalie insisted that I go on to college. That was wise counseling. School seemed irrelevant at first. But I had to live, I had to make my own life, and there was more strength in me than I knew. I learned quickly, after two or three trips, that I must not keep running back to Hampton Island to play the role of fond cousin. That was too painful, too destructive of the separate life I was trying to build up for the child and for myself. Instead, as Richard grew out of babyhood, I settled for an occasional letter, and gifts for birthdays and Christmas, so that he would not forget me altogether. I treasured pictures of him and watched him growing from a distance. The acute hurting dulled, but the aching emptiness remained. Worst of all, there was, as well, still too much feeling for his father left in me.

  Later on whenever Elise invited me to the island, I declined. Until now. I had not changed my mind until letters from old friends hinted at how things were at Sea Oaks, hinted, without knowing the import for me, that perhaps Elise was not being the best mother in the world for her son. That was when I determined to return and see for myself. And here I was.

  I breathed deeply of the quiet night air. I would not disturb them at The Bitterns, after all. In a little while I would go back to bed. It seemed strange that by Sunday night I would be in blustery New York. But before I could step out from beneath the shadowy tree and follow the walk to the house, I heard the sound of running feet, and I paused in surprise, sheltered by hanging moss and trailing vines of wild grape, unseen by the woman who ran past me up the shell drive.

  It was Elise, still in the white dress she had worn when she came to meet me, white sandals on her feet, as she ran lightly, swiftly toward the house. I stepped out to call after her, and then hesitated. There was something secret about her running, something furtive that I did not understand. I let her go and waited in silence for a little while. There were no sounds anywhere except for the buzz of insects until I heard the house door open and close.

  More slowly than she, puzzled and a little troubled, I started up the driveway, walking through the shimmer of moonlight on the shell road. Why had she been out at this hour? It seemed unlikely that—as was the case with me—Elise Severn would be driven to walk about at midnight by restless, haunting dreams.

  2

  As I neared the house I was startled to see that a figure had stepped into the driveway and stood looking up at soaring columns. For an instant I thought I had my answer and that this was the person—a man?—whom Elise had come out to meet. Then the figure turned and I saw it was a woman. I knew who it was, and I hurried my steps.

  “Vinnie!” I said. “We all seem to be up late tonight.”

  She looked at me, guarded and silent.

  “I couldn’t sleep for thinking about the island,” I said. “So I got up to have a look at it. Now I can go back to bed.”

  “Under the moss there’s ghosts out tonight,” Vinnie said solemnly.

  I nodded at her. “I know. Ghosts of the children we used to be—Elise and Giles and me. Do you suppose my cousin is seeing ghosts tonight too?”

  “Miss Elise don’ see ghosts,” Vinnie said. “Might be better for her if she do. Might be better to remember how come she’s where she’s at.”

  I did not attempt to unravel her cryptic meaning. We turned together toward the house.

  “I hear there’s to be a wed
ding at Sea Oaks,” I said.

  Vinnie’s face lighted. “That’s gonna be a fine day, Miss Lacey.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m happy for them both.”

  “And for Miss Elise,” Vinnie said. “She need her mama here at Sea Oaks.”

  This was what Charles had said too.

  The steps of the house were before me and I told Vinnie good night and climbed them, increasingly uneasy. The peace of the night, the sense of nostalgia had been ruffled. When I let myself in the front door, Elise was halfway up the stairs. She turned and looked down at me.

  “You’re up late, Lacey. I thought we’d tucked you safely into bed some time ago.” There seemed an exhilaration about her—a certain wildness.

  “I haven’t seen the island for so long. I wanted to prove its spell couldn’t touch me any more.”

  “But of course you couldn’t do that!” She was assured. “Once the island has you, it keeps you forever.”

  “I saw Vinnie out there,” I said. “She says there are ghosts about tonight.”

  She stood on the stairs looking down at me, her white dress aglow in the lamplight, her hair a pale gold fall as she wore it shoulder-length in a modified page-boy. The style was coming back, and it became her beautifully. After a curious, still moment, unusual in one so mobile, she smiled at me.

  “Vinnie’s head is filled with nonsense. Come along, Lacey,” she said, and held out her hand, charmingly my hostess and my cousin, yet still with that odd exhilaration about her. “I’ll see you to your room again. After a whiff of sea air you’ll sleep better, I know. Tomorrow we’ll talk. We’ll get acquainted again. And there’s something you can do for me, if you will.”

  Her chatter offered me no explanation of why she was up and about. I gave her my hand and we went lightly up the stairs together—affectionate cousins, and friends of old. Or so we would seem to anyone who watched us. Yet I was uneasy about her, unsure.

  We were silent in the upper hall, not wanting to wake young Richard. Elise saw me to the door of my room, pausing on its threshold to speak softly.

  “I don’t know if I mentioned that we have a guest,” she said. “He’s Hadley Rikers from Connecticut. Giles and I met him when he came down with some friends last year for duck-hunting. You probably know his name—he’s famous in racing-car circles.”

  “I remember vaguely,” I said.

  She nodded. “You’ll meet him in the morning. Sleep well, Lacey dear.” She moved away from me and went to the door of Richard’s room. There she stood looking in, listening to his soft breathing. It was a small thing, but an assertion of her motherhood. I wondered if it was an act done naturally, or if she meant it as a gesture of possession for my benefit. With Elise I could never be sure.

  From across the hall she blew me a light kiss from her fingertips and turned away. I went into my room wondering if marriage and motherhood had changed Elise more than I had realized. Was the mistrust I felt groundless?

  At least I was sleepy by this time. It took me only a few moments to get undressed and into bed. I fell asleep at once, lulled by the sound of rushing surf and the soft breeze rattling palm fronds at the window. There were no more dreams of Elise pursuing me, and I slept into the morning.

  Vinnie wakened me when she brought a tray to my room. I sat up in bed and smiled at her.

  “Such spoiling! You didn’t need to do this. I’m perfectly capable of coming downstairs for breakfast.”

  Vinnie had been a pretty girl in her youth and she was still a fine-looking woman. She carried herself well, and there was a lively intelligence in her eyes. She led a busy life of her own, helping out in various civic and church efforts over in Malvern. She had been married twice and her first husband was dead. George Taylor, her second husband, also worked at Sea Oaks. She had a grown son by her first marriage. A son who had gone North and now occupied himself with movements which Vinnie sometimes regarded with a skeptical eye. Hampton Island was only part of her active existence, but she had known us all for a long time, and she gave us her warm affection, or her disapproving counsel, as the case might be, though she was far from the Mammy cliché of old. Vinnie belonged to the modern South.

  “If I’m a mind to spoil you, I will,” she told me now. “You hurry and wash your face. Then I fix this tray for you.”

  I hurried obediently to the bathroom and was back quickly. She plumped up pillows behind me in bed, set the bed table across my knees and the tray upon it. There was buttered toast, with Hampton honey, a small pot of coffee, bacon, a poached egg, and a familiar dish of hominy grits. Lovely! I was awake and rested and hungry. She moved to the windows, opened draperies and flung up sashes to the morning sun.

  “It’s a beautiful day, Miss Lacey. You get out in it fas’ as you can, you heah?”

  “That’s what I plan to do,” I assured her.

  She moved on about the room and I watched her as I ate.

  “How do you like working at Sea Oaks?” I asked her. “As against The Bitterns, I mean?”

  She paused at the dresser, brushing away a speck of imaginary dust, her back to me. “It’s all right, Miss Lacey. Maybe I’d ruther work for Miss Amalie than Miss Elise. But Miss Elise needs somebody ’round to tell her what’s what.”

  “Doesn’t Mr. Giles?”

  Vinnie raised her shoulders in an expansive shrug. “Mr. Giles is pretty busy. He got his own hands full. Besides—Miss Elise don’ pay him no mind. She don’ listen to nobody ’round heah any more. But I can’t stand talkin’ like this. I gotta get back to my work.”

  She went off quickly, as though she felt she had said too much. Certainly she had said enough to make me thoughtful. I remembered Elise running so swiftly and secretly down the driveway last night, and wondered about her all the more. Wondered about her marriage to Giles and her relationship to Richard. I had heard unsettling rumors and there seemed a suggestion that they might be true. If they were true, was there any action I could or should take? That was a decision I must eventually face, and I would have to question my own motivations honestly.

  I finished breakfast and put on green gabardine slacks and a white blouse. I didn’t know what Elise would expect of me this morning, but perhaps I could take a brief walk over to The Bitterns, or down to the beach before I did anything else.

  Just as I was ready to leave, there was a rap on my door.

  I called, “Come in,” and Richard pulled the door open. He stepped full into a band of yellow light from the window and stood looking at me. With his light brown hair and tan skin he seemed like a slim golden figurine of a boy. But for all his golden coloring, he was Giles’s son, with the same green eyes and strong chin line.

  My heart seemed to stop in my throat, and I longed to open my arms to him. Of course I did not. He was nine years old now, and there was a certain dignity and aloofness about his slender person that held me off as the stranger I was to him. His look appraised me curiously, not giving so much as challenging.

  “Hello, Richard,” I said softly.

  “Hello, Cousin Lacey.” He answered me guardedly, and left the band of light to come toward me. “Mother said I should show you this.”

  I was glad of something to do, some action to keep me from staring at him openly, and I took the enlargement of a snapshot he held out and carried it to a window. I remembered very well the day this picture had been taken, and I could not help a faint wincing.

  “Mother said you’d tell me what it’s all about.” Richard was waiting, and it occurred to me that there was something faintly imperious in his manner. I gave my attention to the picture.

  It was like Elise to choose this particular shot with its humiliating memories. The Doric columns of Sea Oaks rose in the background, and the small gathering in the foreground had been grouped on one curving arm of the double steps that ran down from the portico. The picture was a vivid reminder of those
King Arthur games we used to play. By the time of this scene we had made something of a pageant of them, and Charles had come outdoors to snap several shots of us in our homemade costumes.

  This scene I had reason to remember. In it Floria was thirteen, Giles eleven, Elise a rather grown-up nine, while I was a skinny little eight-year-old. There I was in front of Giles, with my short hair thoroughly mussed because Giles had just rumpled it, trying to tease me back to good humor. Good-humored I was not. I glowered angrily at the camera, with my lower lip stuck out and my eyes defiant and furious. I could still remember the shame that had curled its red-hot little claws inside me. Because of Elise. When we had lined up for the picture I had angled openly for a place beside Giles, and Elise had seen and teased me. “Lacey-loves-Giles!” she had taunted. “Lacey-loves-Giles!”

  And I had gone for her furiously. I kicked aside the long skirt of my lady-in-waiting gown made from an old evening dress of my mother’s, and flew at Elise in a rage. I managed to rip Queen Guinevere’s dress and mash in her cardboard crown before Giles pulled me off and shook me gently into shameful tears. Perhaps it would have been better if he had laughed at me, but he did not. He knew that Elise’s words were true, and that I didn’t want him to know. So he had been kind, and when we had all pulled ourselves together for the picture, he stood behind me with his hands on my shoulders quieting me, gently affectionate.

  “Tell me about the picture,” Richard said, calling me back to the present, commanding me.

  This was not the way to overcome the Sea Oaks spell. Too often nostalgia seemed to lie in wait for me, ready to engulf me when I least expected it. Because of Richard, I thrust away hurtful memories and went over the figures in the picture one by one. His mother was Queen Guinevere in a lovely gown Aunt Amalie had made for her, and with a slightly squashed golden cardboard crown on her head. The reason one hand was clasped behind her was so that she could pull out of sight the rent I’d made in her dress. For the snapshot, nevertheless, she had managed a beautifully royal smile, and no one would ever guess I’d had her in the dust moments before. Elise would never give herself away as I did.