Lost Island

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  King Arthur was every bit a king, but less glamorously garbed in the makeshift garments that gave an effect of medieval tunic and robe. His crown was suitably royal, and intact, as his queen’s was not.

  Next to Elise stood Floria in her own particular dress. “Floria was always Merlin,” I told Richard. “She was older than the rest of us, and some of the time she wouldn’t play with us. But when she felt like it she would dress up in that pointed cardboard cap you can see in the picture, and the black cape she made for herself, with white paper crescents and stars pasted all over them. Her long gray beard is Spanish moss. She made a wonderfully spooky Merlin.”

  “I know,” Richard said. “She still dresses up like that for the Camelot ball, and she still has that cape. She lets me wear it sometimes. But who’s the boy on the other side of my father?”

  “That’s Paul Courtney. He was your father’s best friend, in those days, and he used to come over to the island a lot. You know him, don’t you?”

  “Of course.” Richard nodded his bright head. “He’s coming for lunch today, I think. He works for my father at the plant now. But who was he in the pageant?”

  I remembered Paul very well. He had been a rather quiet boy, disinclined toward warlike deeds, and often cast in the role of Galahad. In the picture he wore layers of cardboard armor, and carried a wooden shield and sword. His jousting, however, had been against trees to which we gave the name of knights. He and I had been good enough friends. He had a crush on Elise, as I had on Giles, so that threw us together for mutual support and friendship.

  “He was Sir Galahad here,” I told Richard.

  “Where is Sir Lancelot?” the boy asked.

  I shook my head. “Our King Arthur had no Lancelot among his knights. We played all our games in the time before Guinevere and Lancelot fell in love. Your father was too proud to take second place. Of course he might have been the brave Sir Lancelot himself, but we had to have a king, so we really had no other choice. Paul took different roles—playing whichever knight we needed. And sometimes I was allowed to be Elaine the Lily Maid. Mostly, though, our extra characters had to be imaginary because there weren’t enough of us to go around.”

  “We still have a Camelot ball on the island every year,” Richard said. “Sometimes they let me stay up late to watch.”

  “And do you sit on the stairs and look down at the dancing in the hall?” I asked, while old nostalgia and a strong feeling for the boy beside me swept in to take possession. It brought him close to me to know that he did today what I had done in the past.

  He looked at me with new interest, as if I had become more real for him. “Did you do that too when you were young?”

  “When I was your age—yes,” I said, and tried to harden myself against the longing that filled me. A longing to touch Richard with a mother’s right and affection—when I had no right. I wanted too much, and coming to the island had opened an old Pandora’s box of yearnings.

  “You can keep the picture,” Richard told me. He studied me thoughtfully for a moment, and then seemed to reach a favorable conclusion. “Will you come to the beach with me later, Cousin Lacey? I must go eat breakfast now.”

  I was pleased and touched that he wanted me with him, flattered beyond all reason. He was an attractive little boy when he lost that faintly imperious manner.

  “I’ll try,” I promised. “It depends on your mother. I’m going over to The Bitterns now. Would you like to come along?”

  “Not now.” He paused before he went out of the room. “I forgot to tell you—my father came home early this morning, so he’ll be here for the weekend. Maybe we can get him to do something with us.”

  “That would be lovely,” I said, outwardly calm and unshaken, while something within me crumbled.

  Richard went away and I sat down on the edge of the bed, trying to face the imminent prospect of seeing Giles. This was what I needed to do. I needed to face him, to look at him quietly and remotely, and recognize that he belonged to another life as far as I was concerned. He was a man I did not really know. Perhaps he had made Elise a very good husband. Perhaps he couldn’t be happier than to have Elise as his wife. Or, on the other hand, perhaps he had disappointed and disillusioned her, if anything was wrong with their marriage. All these things I should be able to appraise coolly. I was no longer seventeen. I was a woman grown. I would not remember old love, old quarrels, old pain.

  When I was a bit more sure of myself, I got up and went out of my room. As I descended the stairs I could hear voices coming from the dining room, but I did not need to go past the door. I let myself out the front way and ran down the steps into morning sunlight.

  The path that led to The Bitterns was well worn. My feet knew the way through the oleander thicket, and pink blooms nodded over my head as I walked toward Hampton Island’s oldest house.

  The old fort had occupied the bend in the Malvern River, where it turned to meet the sea. At the water’s edge on my left rose the stones of the powder magazine which were all that remained of the fort buildings. All around the area were to be found traces of the earthworks which had once surrounded the fort, protecting the little town which had thrived near the rim of the marsh.

  The path I followed took me past the fort and into a place of green gloom, where morning sun filtered through the high loblolly pines and sweet gums. From the branches of live oaks and gum trees hung huge wild grape vines, some of them thicker than a man’s arm. Underfoot were hundreds of the rough little brown balls that were the seed pods of the sweet gums.

  Once this place had been the burying ground for the town, and a few empty tombs were left above ground. I could remember sometimes running through hurriedly as a child on my way from The Bitterns to Sea Oaks, half fearful lest some old settler should step from behind a tree and accost me. Though sometimes I had been brave enough to play here. Now it seemed a peaceful, dreaming place, and there was no need to hurry my steps as I followed the path that led past the edge of the marshes.

  The Bitterns had been built wide and comparatively shallow, with a high tabby foundation. A long, deep veranda ran across its entire front, shielding the house from the heat of summer. Two peaked roofs made gables high over the front door, and I remembered that as a child they had always reminded me of a fox’s ears, forever pricked to attention. A cat would be too tame and domestic an animal to be compared with The Bitterns.

  The same thorny, seldom trimmed hedge I remembered stretched away on either side of a peeling white front gate. Apparently Elise’s fever of renewal had not been extended to The Bitterns, and Aunt Amalie was accustomed to the shabbiness and did not care. She was well-to-do and could have spent almost any sum she liked on repairs and refurbishing if she had chosen. Sometimes Southerners made almost a fetish of shabby gentility, I thought affectionately.

  Hedge and gate successfully concealed the garden that lay within, though from what The Bitterns seemed to hide I was never sure. The only likely eyes nearby were at Sea Oaks, and the two houses surely had no secrets from each other. Nevertheless, the hedge was there, higher than ever, and it had always added to my feeling as a child that the house wrapped itself in mystery, concealing its life from the island around it. From its upstairs windows it looked out toward river and marsh and mainland, but downstairs it hid, and those who rocked on the deep veranda could see nothing of the world beyond the encircling hedge.

  The gate stood unlatched, and I let myself through. I would not be too early for the Hamptons. Aunt Amalie was an early riser, and, as I saw at once, my cousin Floria was already up and out of doors. She knelt, trowel in hand, near a tulip bed, and her colorful garb rivaled the bright morning. She wore slacks of a deep red-orange that nearly matched her hair. A flowered brown blouse topped the slacks, and a wide yellow band held back her red hair. Her taste for vivid hues had not changed since she was young. Now she made a blaze of color there among the tulips. Her flo
wered blouse was sleeveless and the skin of her arms prickled with flecks of red from the sun. Floria had the redhead’s sensitivity to sunlight, but she never did anything about it. She had always had a strange affinity for her antagonist, the sun.

  She looked up to see me as I came down the brick path, and sat back on her heels to scrutinize me thoroughly as I came toward her.

  I nearly laughed in her face. “Don’t tell me I’m too thin and the island had better fatten me up,” I said. “I’ve already been told.”

  She shook her red head and a thick mass of hair danced over her shoulders, restrained only by the band around her head. “I wasn’t thinking that. I was thinking how smart you look. Right off Park Avenue, I suppose. You don’t belong to Hampton Island any more.”

  “Hello, Floria,” I said. “It’s good to see you haven’t changed.”

  She gave me another long stare out of brown eyes that were flecked with yellow, lending them an almost golden look. “Because I speak my mind, do you mean?”

  It was always best to bait Floria quickly, before she baited you. Friendship of a quiet, soothing nature had never been possible with Amalie’s eldest daughter. I sometimes felt that she wore some sort of psychic chip on her shoulder that made her always ready for attack. Aunt Amalie, for all her obvious effort, had never been able to help the fact that Elise was her favorite daughter. Since Floria adored her mother, there was likely to be some scarring here.

  “Do you still put on your Merlin hat and cape?” I asked her quickly. “Do you still cast spells?”

  “Of course,” she said. “I’m casting them on these tulips now. Though I’ve lost the original hat, I still have the cape. I let Richard wear it now and then when he wants to evoke the elements and stir up storms and lightning.”

  “Does it work?” I asked.

  She nodded, giving me her quick flash of a smile that could vanish so quickly. “Always. How are you, Lacey? You’re really looking fit enough.” She got up from her knees and dusted earth from orange slacks. “I’ve been wondering if you would come. Elise said she was going to whistle for you, but I wasn’t sure you loved her all that much to come running back to Hampton.”

  “I haven’t seen the island in years. So I was happy for the invitation,” I said. “As you know, New York is still cold. I must revel in this sunshine while I have it.”

  I held out my arms and turned around twice with my face lifted to the sun.

  Floria started ahead of me toward the house. “I’ll call Mother and tell her you’re here. Elise will be keeping you busy, so we’d better take you while we can get you.”

  She went up wide steps to the shadowy veranda, brilliant in her orange pants and flowered blouse, and I remembered her mother’s comment one day long ago—“That’s Floria in super gorgeous technicolor.” But color had always seemed to suit Floria’s nature. There was something dramatic and passionate and a little stormy about her that raw, wild colors suited. She lacked her sister’s cool, elegant beauty, but she held her own in other ways. One looked first at Elise, and was then drawn by Floria’s sheer overemphasis. Sometimes it was Floria you thought about later, when Elise’s charm had palled a little. Yet of the two Elise was the stronger, the more stubborn-willed. It was Elise who always won. It was Elise who always got what she wanted.

  I caught a flash on Floria’s left hand as she went up the steps and I ran up beside her and took her hand to study the shining ring on her engagement finger. This was a surprise. One somehow never thought of Floria as the marrying sort. She had too sure a way of frightening men off.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  She drew her hand away too quickly. “Paul, of course. Paul Courtney. Who else would you think?”

  This was a further surprise. I would never have thought that she and Paul Courtney would marry. How Floria had felt about Paul had been no secret in the past, but in the old days he in turn had looked toward Elise, even though he had known he could never compete with Giles.

  “That’s wonderful,” I said gently. “Now there’ll be two weddings coming up on Hampton Island.”

  She didn’t answer me, but went inside, and I heard her calling her mother. I sat down in the old-fashioned glider couch on the veranda and let the feeling of the house absorb me.

  They existed at two opposite extremes, these houses of Hampton Island. Perhaps that was what fascinated me about each of them. Sea Oaks was an open house. Many of its windows faced the ocean, and the sound of waves rushed through every room. The Bitterns stood across the curving horn of land that projected southward from the island at this point, and it belonged to river and marsh, as Sea Oaks belonged to the sea. It was a dark house, and sometimes a little dank. Built in 1720, on the burned-out foundations of an even earlier Hampton house, it was dark, not only because it was well shielded from the sun, but dark psychologically because of its memories as well.

  For the most part, death had come to Sea Oaks quietly and decorously. It had its historical past, as any house must that had stood that long, but for The Bitterns death had often come violently and left its shadow behind. There was the ancestor who had shot himself in one of those upstairs gable rooms. There was the young girl who had pined to death because of a forbidden lover, and whose headstone in the small cemetery that had superseded the burying ground told of her foolish loving. Once a duel had been fought beneath the live oaks of the other house, and it had been The Bitterns man who had died. He too was buried in the historic little cemetery. There were other dark tales as well—one of madness and suffering, another of dishonor and suicide at sea.

  All these had left their shadows, it seemed. As a small child I had sometimes imagined fearfully that I would meet one or another of these dark-fated personages in the hallways of the house, and I had shivered pleasantly, loving it all the more. Not that I was a morbid child. Away from The Bitterns I was cheerful enough. But the house set its spell upon me, and I reveled in its haunting quality. Here where those strange birds which gave the house their name could be heard calling from the marshes, I was ready to fall under the old spell again. I sat in the glider, touching the floor gently with my toe, and looked out from behind the wisteria vine toward a tight little world whose boundary was the unkempt hedge across the front of the yard.

  Aunt Amalie came quietly through the screen door behind me. She was dressed for an early morning ride in fawn-colored jodhpurs and a brown jacket, a creamy cravat tied at her throat. Whatever she did, she always managed to look elegant while doing it. Floria got her red hair from her mother, but Amalie’s hair had now turned rusty, and she brushed it back from her wide brow and wound it into a soft coil at the nape of her neck, with a wide brown velvet bow pinned above the coil. She was a handsome woman, tall and poised, yet with a gentleness in her, a feminine quality that Southern women often have.

  Her lips were smiling, but her brown eyes were grave as she stood watching me. It was always the same when we met. She never rushed at me, but stood back a little and waited for me to come to her. I left the swing and went to put my arms about her, remembering the faint lily-of-the-valley scent she wore.

  “Lacey,” she said. “Dear Lacey.”

  I understood her hesitance in welcoming me until I had made the first move. She had told me once that she was always afraid that a time would come when I would blame her because I had given Richard away. I had not, ever. She had counseled me as wisely as she knew how, and I knew very well how loyal and loving a friend she had been to me. More than an aunt. More than my mother’s sister. She had been a friend. I had missed being away from her, though we wrote to each other several times a year.

  She stepped back and held me away from her, searching my face, searching past the outer surface of my being. Then she glanced quickly over her shoulder toward the house.

  “Floria has gone to see about coffee. Lacey, have you seen him yet? Have you seen what a fine, proud little boy he is? And
somehow radiant? There’s a look of the island sun about him.”

  “I saw him this morning,” I told her quickly. “He came to show me a picture of our old King Arthur games Elise sent me. He’s all you say. Is he happy? Is he contented? Is he growing well?”

  Floria came through the screen door. “Susy will have coffee for us shortly. Are you talking about Richard? There’s nothing wrong with him that a little more discipline wouldn’t cure. And perhaps a little more of the right kind of attention from his mother.”

  Aunt Amalie went to sit in a porch chair. “Floria! You’re always popping off carelessly. Elise is an affectionate mother.”

  Floria flung her beflowered self down in the swing and patted the cushions beside her. “Come and sit down, Lacey. You’re one of the family. We don’t have to mince words around you. Elise is affectionate when she thinks about it, but she’s not very attentive. His Grandmother Amalie is more of a mother to Richard than she is.”

  “He doesn’t want for mothering,” Aunt Amalie said, and it was plain enough that she was annoyed with her elder daughter.

  I did not want to talk about Richard in front of Floria. I was too afraid of giving myself away. Besides, these were things I had come to observe for myself. I had no great confidence in Floria’s opinions. There was not a great deal of love lost between her and her sister.

  “Charles has told me about your coming marriage,” I said to Aunt Amalie. “I’m very happy for both of you.”

  Amalie’s face glowed, and I could see her happiness. “Thank you, dear. I’d like to make it a double wedding, with Floria and Paul marrying at the same time.”

  “That’s not for me,” Floria said. “I want my own private ceremony. And I want it at the time I choose.”