Strange Fits of Passion

by Anita Shreve

  I had a husband who beat me. The goddamn son of a bitch ruined my life. Goddamn ruined my life. Took away the best years of my life. You can't ever get them back. You know what I'm sayin'? I had my babies, I couldn't even love them. I mean, I loved them, but I couldn't ever enjoy anything, because I had to be so afraid all the time, scared to death every time he walked in the door, scared for them, scared for me. He hit my son in the high chair once, the baby was only seven months old. Jesus Christ, I ask you. Seven months old. I hadda take the baby to the doctor. I hadda lie. I hadda lie every goddamn day of my life because I was so ashamed and scared.

  I'll tell you something. I'm not afraid of anyone or anything now. Ever.

  So I know all about this. There isn't anything about this I don't know.

  Though I will say I didn't realize about Mary Amesbury until the next morning. You catch me while I'm readin' my magazines, forget it. Anyway, she came in, and when I looked at her, I was really lookin' at the baby, so I didn't see it.

  But next morning she came into the office, and she had the scarf around her and the dark glasses, and I knew, right then, and she saw I knew, and she looked at me, and I swear to God, I thought she was goin' to pass out. Then she says to me, when she recovers, do I know of a place where she can stay awhile, a cottage like. I mulled it over in my mind and said how Julia Strout might have something. Julia rents cottages in the summer.

  I guess it was 'cause I had a feeling of what she'd been through, and with the baby and all, that made me call Julia myself. Up here, we usually don't bother much with strangers, but this was different, you understand?

  I couldn't take my eyes off of her. She was tryin' to keep it hidden, but you could see it. You wouldn't of believed it if you'd seen it. It's a nightmare, a goddamn nightmare. Havin' to go out into the world with your life story all over your face.

  You're a reporter, right? Well, no one's goin' to tell you the truth about this kind of thing, so I'll tell you a story. I lost two of my top front teeth. I been knocked out. I had a broken arm and a shinbone fracture. I've got scars from cigarette burns where they shouldn't be. For five years I never once had what you would call intimate relations and liked it. Even now I can't think about sex without thinking about what he done to me. So that's another thing he took away from me. One time he thought the police were comin', he stole the kids and ran away to Canada. I didn't see my kids for six months. When he came back, I was so scared he'd take them again, I let him do whatever he wanted. Until he started on the kids. I couldn't take that. I called the police in Machias, he ran away. I prayed it would be for good. That was eight years ago. I hope he's dead.

  We had a share in a blueberry farm. I sold it and bought the motel. It was abandoned since the early fifties—an unbelievable mess. Some people from the town, they helped me fix it up. I've got three kids. We get by. They're good kids, but raisin' kids on your own, you better believe it's hard.

  I love my kids, but when I said he ruined my life, I meant it. I'm still angry. You can tell, right? I'm still angry. I see other families, they come into the motel in the summertime and they look happy, and at first I'm sad for myself, and then I look again—and I don't trust the happiness.

  Julia Strout

  Yes, I knew Mary Amesbury. She rented a cottage from me at Flat Point Bar from December 4 until January 15.

  The rent was minimal. Is that important?

  I saw her first on the afternoon of December 3, when she came into Everett Shedd's store.

  I would say that, yes, I thought at the time something was wrong. She appeared to me to be in distress. She seemed ill or undernourished. It was extremely cold that day. Extremely cold. It was all anyone talked about that afternoon. On the news, the weatherman had said that the temperature might go as low as minus sixty with the wind chill. In fact, it went to minus twenty, an actual reading. We aren't used to such low temperatures here, even as far north as we are, because we're on the coast.

  ***

  I may have asked her if she was all right. I can't remember now.

  Yes, Everett and I did discuss her after she left the store. We thought perhaps she might be running away from something. I know I thought about that, and possibly Everett and I talked about it. Everett may have suggested to me the idea that she'd been hurt, but I'm not sure about that now.

  My husband died in a fishing accident years ago. I'd really rather not talk about myself. I understood your article was about Mary Amesbury, not about the people in the town, isn't that correct?

  I don't think I can participate in this article if you're going to write about the town. I'm here only to talk about Mary, to make sure that the truth gets told. That is to say, the truth as I understand it. I can't pretend to know the whole truth. I'm not sure anyone does, apart from Mary herself.

  Yes, of course, I am aware that her real name was not Mary Amesbury. But that's how we knew her here, and I suspect that that is how she will be remembered in this town.

  Though Mary Amesbury is gone for good now, isn't she.

  I saw her again in the morning. Muriel Noyes called me and asked me if any of the cottages were winterized. I have one winterized cottage, over to Flat Point Bar.

  ***

  I wasn't concerned about making money. I don't normally rent cottages in the winter. The cottage had been winterized by a couple who planned to retire to St. Hilaire, but the husband died, and the widow went back to Boston last summer. I had been renting the cottage to an engineer who was working on a dredging project in Machias, but he left just before Thanksgiving. The timing was fortunate, as it happened, because I hadn't had the water or the heat turned off yet.

  She came to my house. She came to the door.

  She was wearing a gray tweed wool coat and a gray scarf. Later, when we were at the cottage, and she took her coat off, I saw that she was wearing blue jeans and a sweater and black boots, I believe. She was very thin.

  You've met her, I assume.

  She reminded me of a thoroughbred. She had what my mother would have called a patrician chin.

  I never did any more than any decent person would have done. There are people in the town you have to look out for, give a hand to when you can. I would say it was slightly unusual for Everett and myself to be concerned about a stranger, except that when you saw her, of course, there was no question of not helping her. And then there was the baby.

  What happened next? We got in her car, and I took her to the cottage.

  ***

  One thing I would like to say now, however. Something important I think you should know.

  This is a terrible story, and there are many tragedies to think about. But I will tell you this: I believe in my heart that the six weeks Mary Amesbury spent in St. Hilaire were the most important six weeks of her life.

  And quite possibly the happiest.

  Mary Amesbury

  In the morning I opened the curtains. The daylight was blinding—a blazing glare of light, the sun shearing off the snow in all directions. Caroline lay on the bed looking up at me, two tiny teeth winking from the bottom of her smile. I picked her up and began to walk with her. She was happiest when I did this—she liked the view from the top of my shoulder, or she liked the motion—and I felt good and whole when I held her, as though a piece of me that had been missing had temporarily been restored.

  I tried to sort out the immediate future while I walked. I didn't like the room, but I knew I couldn't relinquish it until I had found something more suitable. I thought I should try Machias; the larger town might have more to offer in the way of long-term housekeeping units, or even an apartment. I needed a newspaper and food, and that meant having to go into a store again—a task I dreaded.

  I decided that I would ask the motel owner for the room for another night. In that way, Caroline would have a place to nap during the day if I didn't find anything right away.

  I dressed the baby and myself, put on my scarf and coat and glasses, and went to the office. The motel owner wasn
't there, but I rang a bell and she came. She looked at me as though she had never seen me before. I asked her if I could have the room for another night, and I saw then that she knew.

  There was a time when I'd wanted people to know, and I'd been unable to tell them. But now that the truth was apparent on my face, I wanted more than anything else to hide.

  I raised my face to the motel owner and asked her if she knew of a place, a rental, where I could stay awhile.

  Around the woman, and emanating into the room, there was the stale drift of cigarette smoke. The motel owner peered at my face, at the small bit that was visible, as if trying to confirm her suspicions. She took a long pull at the cigarette, gestured with the cigarette between her fingers.

  "There's a woman in St. Hilaire rents cottages in the summer," she said. "I think one or two of them are winterized."

  "How do I get in touch with her?" I asked.

  The motel owner hesitated, then picked up the phone and began to dial. She kept her eyes on me, spoke to me as she was dialing. "Her name is Julia Strout. She don't rent much in the winter; no one ever comes here. But there's one cottage out to the point, another south of town, I'm pretty sure. The one out to the point that's winterized, there was this older couple from Boston, they was goin' to retire there, and so they winterized it, but then the husband died and she went back to Boston, sold it to Julia Strout, she rents ... Julia? This is Muriel.... I'm fine. Don't know if my car's goin' to start this mornin', though. You survive the cold last night?...Good. Good. Listen, Julia. I got a woman here with a baby needs a place to stay, and I was tellin' her about that cottage over to Flat Point Bar that's winterized.... Is that right? You think you can get the heat up over there? Be cold out to the point with the wind off the water.... There's the baby, don't you know...."

  There was a bit more conversation, and then the motel owner hung up the phone, looked at me. "She says she saw you yesterday in the store," she said.

  I thought about the tall woman in the taupe parka. I wondered if the motel owner would call the tall woman back again as soon as I'd left the motel parking lot and tell her what she had seen, or what she thought she had seen. I thought then of moving on, to the next town, or to the next.

  "Here, let me hold the baby for you while you go try to get your car started, warm her up," said the motel owner. "You can't put a baby in a cold car today. Freeze her tootsies off."

  I said thank you and walked out to the parking lot to start the car. The engine didn't catch on the first three tries, but at the fourth coughed anemically. I put my weight on the gas pedal, tried to rev the car into life. I looked up through the windshield, could see nothing. Thick frost coated the glass. While the engine was warming up, I got out and scraped the frost away from all the windows. The sun was brilliant but ineffectual in the deep cold.

  When the car felt warm enough for the baby, I packed the duffel bag and threw it into the trunk. I went back to the office. The motel owner was playing a game with Caroline, swinging the baby's arms high into the air. When she did this, Caroline laughed—a deep belly laugh. I felt a pang of guilt. It had been days since I had made my baby laugh, since I had played with her.

  The motel owner turned around and reluctantly gave Caroline back to me. "I got three of my own, in grade school now. I miss 'em, the babies. How old is she?"

  "Six months," I said.

  "You know how to get back to town?"

  I nodded.

  "All right. When you get to town, you'll see four old colonials across from the store. Julia Strout's is the one with the green shutters. Green front door. She's waitin' on you now."

  "Thank you for arranging this for me," I said.

  The motel owner began to light another cigarette.

  "Don't forget the key," she said.

  I took the room key from my coat pocket and put it on the counter.

  I circled around the oval common and parked in front of the only house of the four with green shutters. The house was the most prosperous-looking of the group, with a generous wraparound porch at the front. I climbed the steps of the porch, having left Caroline in the car, and knocked at the door. The woman who answered it was already dressed for the cold in her parka, her hat and gloves, and a thick pair of blue corduroy pants stuffed into her boots. She shook my hand and said, "Julia Strout. I saw you in the store yesterday."

  I nodded and said my new name; it caught in my throat. I had never said the name aloud before.

  "Your car started," she said, locking the door behind her. "You're lucky. They had to call school off today because they couldn't get the buses started. We'll go in your car, if that's all right with you. I haven't taken mine out of the garage yet."

  I said yes, that would be fine. She sat across from me in the front seat. She was a large woman, larger even than I had suspected the previous day in the store, and she took up all the space around me in the car. I looked quickly at the woman, but she didn't return my glance, as if she had already seen what there was to see and was too discreet to stare.

  "The cottage is just off the coast road, a bit north of town," she said. "Sorry to make you have to double back, but there was no way to direct you to the cottage on your own. The landmark is a pair of pine trees, and I doubt I'd have been able to describe them."

  Julia Strout, too, had the Maine accent, but her speech was more refined than that of the grocer or of the man with the handlebar mustache or of the motel owner.

  The road was nearly uninhabited and ran close to a serrated shoreline. The view of the water was unimpeded now—a vast, frigid gulf of blue, strewn with islands, stretching out to the Atlantic. There was a wind up; there were whitecaps.

  She said, "Here we are. This right."

  We turned onto a rocky road, covered by layers of snow and ice and bordered on each side by tall hedges that she said were raspberry bushes in the summer. We slipped and lurched down this narrow lane until we came, unexpectedly, into the open.

  A relentless tide licked at a waterline of dark seaweed. We were looking at a spit of land, with a smooth sand beach on one side and a flat mass of pebbles on the other. In between was a rangy swath of dried grasses, thinly covered with snow. A ruined lobster boat, doubtless tossed by a storm onto the grass, lay on its side, its weathered blue-and-white paint almost too picturesque against the desolation of the beach. Farther along the spit was a shingled shack, no bigger than a single room. And beyond the spit itself, four lobster boats—one a forest green and white—were moored in a channel.

  "There's three or four men keep their boats here, not in town," she said, "but they won't be bothering you. They'll be hauling their boats in a couple of weeks, except for Jack Strout, my cousin, and he'll haul his mid-January. And when they do go out, they go before daybreak and are out all day." The shack, she explained, calling it a "fish house," was for the lobstermen when they did not go out in their boats; they worked on their gear there during the winter months.

  A pine-covered island, barren of dwellings, made a dark backdrop for the boats, and beyond that a broken necklace of similar islands, each receding island a paler green than the one before, stretched out to the horizon.

  "The cottage is behind you, to the right," she said.

  I made a turn on a patch of wet sand and found better ground on a gravel drive that led to the cottage. It was on a promontory, with views out to sea on three sides, and when I saw it I thought: Yes.

  It was a modest house of white clapboards, like a Cape but not as well-defined, with a screened-in porch at the side. It had a second story with a wide dormer, no other ornamentation. The clapboards came all the way to the ground and were not shrouded by bushes or shrubs. Looking at it, one had a sense of neatness. A square lawn, surrounding the house, had been cut from a profligate thicket of wild beach roses, now dormant and broken here and there from the weight of the snow. The house looked naked, sun-soaked, freshly washed.

  "The key is in the doorframe," she said, unfolding herself from the seat.


  I took the baby from the back of the car and followed Julia Strout up the small hill to the cottage. She struggled with the key in the lock.

  There weren't many rooms inside the cottage—a living room, the kitchen, a bedroom downstairs, the larger bedroom upstairs, the porch. It was a simple house, sparsely furnished, and I must have noticed the white gauze curtains at the windows, for that is a detail I would have liked, but my memory of those first few minutes is of a glistening wash of corners, windows, shadows. I followed where Julia Strout led; she spoke plainly, defining objects, spaces.

  We returned to the kitchen. The table was made of pine, but it had a worn green-and-white-checked oilcloth cover on it, and around it were four chairs, mismatched, one painted a dark red. Julia was concerned about the heat—the cottage had been frigid when we entered—and was busy for a few minutes turning up the thermostat and descending into the basement to look at the furnace. She showed me where the hot-water heater was and turned it on. We talked about the lane down to the cottage: She said she would have one of the men plow it later in the day.

  I wanted to sit down and did. I kept the baby bundled in her snowsuit and her hat. She began to fuss; I opened my coat and nursed her. I sat sideways in a kitchen chair, one arm resting on the table. Through the window in front of me, I could see a gull rise nearly thirty feet straight up in the air with a clam in its mouth, then drop the shell to break it open on the rocks.

  Julia tried the plumbing in the bathroom and switched on all the lights to see if they worked. She was examining a light fixture over the stove when I asked if her husband was a fisherman. It was meant to be a pleasantry. I was looking at a gold wedding band on her finger. I looked at the indentation on my finger where my own wedding band should have been.