The Maytrees

by Annie Dillard

  It did not settle Maytree down. Why else had he brought her to the shack? Why did she go along? Why so stubborn over a technicality?

  In all the years he had known Deary she did not lie. She met his eyes stricken. What did they both fear? Or was it excitement? He drank a gallon of water; nothing wet his mouth. Deary licked her cracked lips. They were a mess. From the shack steps he saw three clouds long as pickets charge from over the sea. A fishing boat set out. Its transom’s tin patch flashed.

  Far more onus attached to divorce than to a discreet affair. No wonder she kept marrying. What if everyone married every lover? Any number of women he knew held open house. His past month’s turmoil whenever he caught himself imagining he might one day betray his Lou and their marriage he loved—was in vain? Not even hardly ever? He thought Deary promoted divorce and remarriage as Reevadare did, for its bracing effect. Those were high ideals, in his own, his brave girl. Her warm limbs hooked his heart to the world.

  He lifted her curls. Her head quivered. He cupped his palms over her hot ears. Her ears were soft as Petie’s, flat to her head. He held them for dear life.

  To enjoy simple and god-given loving she thought at first that she required the folderol of marriage, and even, save the sailors, of wedding? Was she so terribly old after all? At forty-seven, she had no gray hair. She was born during World War I. Could three years’ age difference mean separate worlds? A few years after the war, when, historians said, European class bounds broke, and others said aristocracy had dropped both its faith and its duties, Deary would have been six years old—scarcely an age by which a girl’s sexual mores entrench. She got it somewhere, or it got her, this business of waiting for marriage. “The littler the maid, the bigger the riddle, to my mind.” Damned if Maytree would marry again. His parents were dead. She would have to settle for cohabitation. Which was not at all the done thing. —Until Lou knew they were serious lovers, and gone, she now specified, whether or not they married. Maytree thanked bohemians everywhere.

  That day with Deary at the shack gulls again rose from the beach to blow over the dunes like ashes. He had to go. He wanted to think, but at home he had to act—here on this thrust stage without walls at what someone called the limit of the world. Where his tongue died in his mouth. Do I want to be this young again? Your sweet life I do. With Deary under his shoulder he entered the moving edge of air.

  That was in the fall. It struck him often, even then, that a real affair with Deary might last only a month and do less harm.

  Now he trod black cordgrass where the beach narrowed. Burning trash limned a stick figure ahead. At his feet Maytree made out a bird’s neck bones. His jacket’s collar, turned up, shielded his neck only a bit. How had it come to this? His telling Lou sickened him. Best go right away.

  THE NAUSET TRIBES ON Cape Cod had nothing with which to build monuments. They marked big events’ sites by digging ceremonial holes. They kept these sand holes well dug out, here and there and year by year. Everyone who passed, seeing the hole, recalled its occasion.

  The Maytrees and their crowd marked occasions by getting lit, as did, it must be admitted, most peoples on earth.

  The Maytrees’ story was not worth a hole in the ground. The Nausets—the Pamets, the Wampanoag—told a story like the Maytrees’, or perhaps they did not, wherein their founder, now a star, was originally a whale from the deepest waters of antiquity. Some winters this divine whale beached himself to feed famishing villages. Villagers offered his bones back to the sea, where he put on weight. He came again in famines when the people needed him. Then She, Corn, appeared from sunset lands rattling a pouch. She taught the people to sow, parch, and grind corn. The whale surfaced. The two fell in love.

  The whale, knowing his people would never again starve after they learned to parch corn, was free to go. He carried Her off on his mighty back and never came again. Often he sent to his people stranding whales—blackfish—as remembrances. The Maytrees performed no heroic deeds, neither Toby or Lou, and both acted within any decent heart’s scope. They became not constellations but corpses.

  The last anyone saw Lou alive, thirty-nine years later, she was doubled over, walking with two black canes up the steep dune to the shack. Her canes’ tips she had fitted into rubber plungers to spread them on sand. Her legs like gutterpipes extended from corners of her red dress. Her arms worked the plunger-canes. From each wrist hung a full straw bag. That year she permitted her Pete and Jane Cairo, of the tormented hair already gray, to help her hoist two months’ supplies straight up loose sand from the jeep track to the door. She let them prime and pump the well to fill gallon jugs and lug them up the path to get her started. Most years she shook her wide, white head and refused aid. —She’s impossible, they said, fond and scared.

  The grown son was a solid stump. In profile he resembled his father squashed—eyes set deep directly under browbone. He and his wife Marie and Jane Cairo tried to imagine Lou’s carrying a full water jug up sand, her knees lacking cartilage. How did she manage—with two canes, with one cane, or no canes, and the jug? At least weekly one of them crossed the dunes to learn if Lou was alive, and if so, to refill, if only on the sly, buckets and jugs at her well, and carry them up to the shack. Old Cornelius still lived in the dunes, and checked on her, too.

  One morning Jane Cairo learned that Lou Maytree was not alive at all, but, prone on the bed, was blue on her low side—ventrally—like a boat with fresh bottom paint. She was white above the waterline. Otherwise she looked quite like Ingrid Bergman, as people used to say when Lou and Ingrid Bergman were young.

  That day Jane saw Lou had brushed and braided her hair and wound it in coils on her head. A neat trick, holding a hand mirror. She had dressed in a lace-bodiced nightgown and thoughtfully crossed her arms. Jane tried to close Lou’s eyes. In the end she covered them with scallop shells from the windowsill. Already blowflies walked into Lou’s nostrils. Greenbottle flies slipped under the scallop shells to find her eyes; one bluebottle fly worked a lip’s corner. Where had the flies come from? How did they know? Jane smelled no odor. Lou had been eighty—not enough.

  Jane lowered the bedspread. Her glasses fell on Lou’s neck. She drank two quarts water. At the pump she filled every jug from the house. Where should she do this? For she must wash Lou’s body now. Later the gown and bedding. Pete could haul the messed mattress to the dump.

  The Cape’s nonconformists, including the Maytrees, had consigned their burnt bone knobs, which they imagined as fluffy stove ashes, to a biplane pilot, Loopy Devega, who lived near the airfield. For a fee he would scatter ashes like a sower, over the sea.

  Even Jane Cairo was old, decades hence, when the paper reported that Loopy Devega possessed on his bookshelves some 170 crematorium seven-pound cans. The first time he tried to scatter ashes (he said), and also the second time, “they all blew back at me.” The newspaper never told what became of the ashes. The Maytrees liked bookshelves. It would all fall into the sea eventually.

  WHEN HER HUSBAND RETURNED from the beach walk he took after he told her he was leaving her, he got into their marriage bed as usual. Lou felt his chill. He started to speak. She felt his elbow dip their mattress. She heard his rangy voice turn toward her back in the dark. Was there nowhere else on the planet’s face for him to sleep? On the whole, she did not want to hear it.

  What in the name of God could she have done? They had had a good run. And if love itself, as well as Petie, was the fruit, she could keep loving if she chose, which she at forty-one did not. Petie once told them—he acted it out—that when fishermen gaffed a hooked shark aboard, to save their legs they slit its belly and gave it its own entrails to chew. She would not.

  The next morning when Maytree actually left, Lou and Sooner Roy carried the white ironstone bed downstairs for Petie. They set it inside the French doors, so Petie could watch beach, sea, and sky. She pulled a chair beside him. Petie knew his father had left them. She dreaded putting what she saw as Petie’s large-heartedness to test.
She placed a hand lightly on his good leg near the ankle, and saw his dark eyes jump.

  One of her speech difficulties was starting. The other was proceeding. Really, she could talk only to Maytree, Cornelius, and the Cairos, dry as they were. They could trace implications to their ends and respond as if she had said those very things aloud. She should say, Your father loves you very much and his leaving is not your fault. And she did repeat those things in the weeks and years ahead. She never brought up Deary at all.

  Their first morning alone she and Petie, red and blue sweaters, watched through the doors the fall of the sea. The horizon crossed each pane at a fractionally different angle. The green sea made the glare in the sky accessible.

  Soon despite cruel medical protocols—Children forget pain, the doctor explained—Petie could swing on crutches like a parakeet.

  That first June after Petie’s leg healed, his friends called him from the rain or frost and he left, and left her arm bones hollow. The Maytrees’ crowd closed the gap Maytree and Deary left as if the two never were. Only Jane Cairo, suddenly twenty-three, registered her entire outrage at moral wrong, scandal, evil (etc., etc., etc.), by staying away and seething in New York all summer. She told her mother she never wanted to see another body on a beach. Jane Cairo was eighteen years Lou’s junior. Lou missed having her around. Everyone else was so old. Last summer this Jane—with her professor parents and Deary and Reevadare—had cooled with the Maytrees waist-deep in the bay behind their house. Jane complained about The Golden Bowl; Maytree had put her on it. —You’ll get used to James, he told her. —Not sure I want to. She wore her glasses into the water; a clothespin held back her hair. Off-season she was in Columbia’s graduate program in comp lit.

  One July morning, cold stirred Lou. The tide had withdrawn to the Azores. Wind through the windows smelled of mullions’ dust. She knew Maytree had loved her. The perception was correct; only her inference was false. What should Maytree have done? Stayed in harness? She just had not known she was harness. Nor presumably does baitfish consider itself baitfish. Nor did she know how long she had been harness.

  Why surprise? She remembered what the scorpion said to the camel: You knew what I was when you agreed to carry me. To marry me. What was Maytree? A man in love. Who else would a woman marry? Among Maytree’s many early loves, both the rancher and the teacher lasted over two years. Is all fair? Is love blind? There must be some precept she could have heeded. On the beach below, the pram’s red mooring buoy chained to a cement plug lay on mud. All over New England, it rained three days out of nine. She hoped Deary was worth it.

  Downstairs she cracked kindling on her knee and boiled the kettle. Why sadder but wiser? Why not happier and wiser? What else could wisdom be? She drank coffee black. She would not fall apart.

  She enjoyed benefits. Maytree no longer interrupted her to read aloud from his book. He never stopped doing it, though he knew it drove her crazy. And he never stopped talking. At last she had time to think. Plus she had his dune shack now, that Maytree’s father built near the coast guard station. And she could eat crackers in bed.

  She sorted and soaked beans; she would bake cornbread at five. What was it she wanted to think about? Here it was, all she ever wanted: a free mind. She wanted to figure out. With which unknown should she begin? Why are we here, we four billion equals who seem significant to ourselves alone? She rejected religion. She knew Christianity stressed the Ten Commandments, Jesus Christ as the only son of God who walked on water and rose up after dying on the cross, the Good Samaritan, and cleanliness is next to godliness. Buddhism and Taoism could handle all those galaxies, but Taoism was self-evident—although it kept slipping her mind—and Buddhism made you just sit there. Judaism wanted her like a hole in the head. And religions all said—early or late—that holiness was within. Either they were crazy or she was. She had looked long ago and learned: not within her. It was fearsome down there, a crusty cast-iron pot. Within she was empty. She would never poke around in those terrors and wastes again, so help her God. Provincetown was better. She witnessed the autarchy of the skies.

  —I have to blame Deary, Reevadare Weaver confided as though it cost her. Reevadare, wearing the first djellaba anyone had seen, held forth in her garden. Hazy air brightened as the sun fell. —But what can you expect? Fourteen years is too long to stay married. (Decades later Lou determined that one of Reevadare’s ambitions had been to define a marital maximum, in years. It switched between seven or eight.)

  —I hate to blame her, she was such a love…

  So don’t. Both Deary and Maytree could be material and final cause without being at fault. On principle Lou avoided blaming. Reevadare’s lipstick smeared her wet corncobs.

  —But she stole Toby Maytree pure and simple. Reevadare laid it out with a nod.

  Lou lifted her chin. —He left freely on his own two legs.

  Lou found no comfort in friends’ disparaging either Deary or Maytree. What about her own loyalty to both? They had a right to live as best they could. Did Reevadare think Lou would hate them—once she got her bearings—as if either had changed?

  —He wasn’t a paperweight. No one can steal a man.

  —I could, Reevadare said, in my day.

  —Everybody’s sweetheart not so sweet after all, is it? Jane’s professor father had named her after his own father, Jeremy. Now he was bugging Lou about Deary. Everyone gets carried away sometimes, she thought. Hers was a private matter, weightless in any possible world scheme. She dreaded her own friends. She could persuade no one she was not heartbroken. She had seen her own mother heartbroken, and knew she could do better.

  When Marblehead school let out the year her father left, Lou’s mother moved them to Provincetown’s West End on the water. Child Lou had no inkling at Marblehead breakfast, say, if it was indeed at breakfast, that this was her final glimpse of her wonderful father. She could not remember what he ate, said, or read. She began to suspect that many moments were possibly last ones. She strove to impress what she could on her memory, which she imagined as a clay cylinder. Her mother’s fingers around a Pink Lady, the Cape’s fish flakes and laundry drying in yards, foghorn, seasmoke, school roll-down maps. In bed at night she inventoried that day’s catch: her yellow-toothed teacher’s deploring her penmanship, gulls in full cry above their dodgeball game, her friends’ high voices, and mostly her mother’s smell of talc, her smooth dress, her retreating as if kicked.

  Why not drop all this saying hello and good-bye to everything, this effort both grateful and scared? That was an eventful year. Girl Lou liked her easy Provincetown friends—hardworking, laughing girls, half of them Portuguese, who directly stuck her like spat to their clump. Aware how keenly she would miss any who vanished, she never considered loving less. Presently she forgot about memorizing. New Provincetown and then boarding-school friends caught her up. Still, she attended the smallest college she could find. There she learned to skate and sing.

  Now Petie went back to school, and streets and air replaced crowds. Cairos and Lou’s other summer friends would bear her abandonment tale to Boston and New York. She eased her guard and got sucker-punched. I am not going to fall apart, she had told herself, but this was an edge from which she could only slip.

  Do not drive in breakdown lane, said the Route 6 signs. Do not break down in driving lane. The sea poured over the stone lip at Gibraltar and emptied.

  In late September, when Lou could stir at all she moved like a glacier, the queer sort at which dogs bark. Reading Hardy always distracted her in rough patches, as when her father vamoosed. Now she might enjoy the company of solid Farmer Gabriel Oak. She read, “It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in.”

  Lou (and Maytree, too) shunned drama, inside and out, as, at least, bad taste.

  Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

  O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

  Why ever had she neglected to become a Budd
hist? Low blood pressure. Anyone could see how fat the Buddha was.

  She had no force to fight what held her as wind pins paper to a fence. She was a wood horse, a rock cairn, a jerry can of pitch. She found herself holding one end of a love. She reeled out love’s long line alone; it did not catch.

  She fell apart. She should have lashed her elbows and knees, like Aleuts.

  ABLAZE, SHE SCRAPED THE pot. She boxed her paints. She scoured the sink till the sponge reverted to spicules. Petie gave her wide berth.

  One cold June morning Cornelius appeared. —Say, Lou, I wish you’d stop poisoning yourself. She did not whine or voice any grief or anger. Did it show?

  After Cornelius left she climbed the steep street to Pilgrim Monument. She mounted the monument stairs in her camel’s hair coat and red earmuffs. From the top she looked at flat sky, flat sea, and flat land. She was ready to want to stop this. Thereby she admitted—barely—that she could choose to stop. For one minute by her watch, she imagined liking Maytree impartially. For only one minute by her watch she saw him for himself. That day, having let go one degree of arc only, for one minute, she sighted relief. Here was something she could do. She could climb the monument every day and work on herself as a task. She had nothing else to do. Their years together were good. He was already gone. All she had to do for peace was let him go.

  Within a month she figured that if she ceded that the world did not center on her, there was no injustice or betrayal. If she believed she was free and out of the tar pit, would she not thereby free herself from the tar pit? What was this to, say, losing Petie? Why take personal offense if two fall in love? She knew they reproached themselves. Maytree was party to fits of enthusiasm. Loving was Deary’s nature. What would any of this matter two hundred years hence? She had many decades more to live. Whether she lived them or not was her call.