Colony (13 page)

“The miserable little creature is dead,” Mother Hannah said coldly. “Its leg was broken. It couldn’t have been saved no matter what you did. Micah went back down and shot it.”

F
or the next five days Dr. Lincoln and Mother Hannah conspired to keep me in bed, or at least sequestered on the sun-porch chaise, covered with quilts and throws and the omnipresent Hudson Bay blankets, and for once I was glad of the cover, if not the incarceration. One of the cape’s notorious five-day fogs came ghosting in on the night of the incident with the fawn and held Retreat fast in its cottony manacles for nearly a week. Without the sun, the cottage stayed damp and cold all day, and I would have been grateful to stay in my bed upstairs, where a fire could be lit. But Mother Hannah put paid to that notion.

“With the fog and nobody being able to get out on the water, everyone will be calling on you,” she said. “You can’t get up yet, and this is the only faintly proper place I can think to put you where the men can visit. If it were only the women, I’d just bring them on up to you or put you in our bedroom.

Of course, by rights this should be the week we called on them. Your little swim has upset more than a few applecarts, dear Maude.”

“Well, Ma, you can’t blame Maude for the fog, at 103

least,” Peter put in cheerfully from the old Windsor chair at my side. He too was fogbound and seemed content to loll beside me in a heavy sweater, eating apples and reading course literature for his first classes in the fall.

“I don’t blame Maude for anything, of course,” Mother Hannah said, putting plates of Christina’s warm doughnuts about the living room and sun porch. “I only point out that not many new brides have the entire colony come to them instead of the other way around. I can’t recall its ever happening.”

“Time it did, then,” said Peter, snagging a doughnut. “Start a new tradition.”

“Leave the doughnuts alone, Peter, please,” his mother said crisply. “I don’t want Tina to have to make more this morning. She’s got her hands full with the laundry; it will never dry in this mess.”

“There are enough doughnuts there to feed the entire county,” Peter said lazily. “Who do you think is going to come out in this fog to eat them?”

“Everybody, of course,” Mother Hannah said, and went into her bedroom to put on a suitable morning frock.

And they did. By ten-thirty the sun porch was full of the Retreaters who were in residence, muffled in sweaters and scarves and, in the case of the old ladies, hatted and gloved, sipping coffee and tea and munching Christina’s delicate doughnuts with relish. Wrapped in a bright Spanish shawl of Mother Hannah’s that she said had always overpowered her but suited my baroque coloring perfectly, I lay under layers of damp wool and shook hands and had my hot cheek kissed and murmured that I was perfectly fine and they were so kind to call until my head swam and I could remember no names and few faces. I had met all of them, I knew, in the dining hall on the night of my arrival, but it seemed to me that ages—eons—had

passed since then. But of course it had scarcely been a week.

The occupants of Braebonnie came first, en masse, led by Parker’s towering father, Philip, red-haired like his son and similarly boyish of face but altogether larger in scale and without Parker’s compensatory slyness. Philip Potter was a mastodon of a man. He roared his greeting at me, thumped Peter on the back, grinned and kissed Mother Hannah on the cheek when she turned her head hastily to avoid being kissed on the lips, and stumped off in search of Big Peter and a glass of something decent for a foggy day.

“Don’t have to wait for the yardarm when you can’t see the damned thing,” he shouted, and I heard, presently, the clink of the decanter that Peter’s father kept on the desk in the little room behind the living room that served as his study, and men’s voices mingled in the patterns of long familiarity.

Parker, who came next with his timid, sparrowlike mother, Helen, kissed me on the forehead and whispered that I looked like a Cuban doxy in that shawl and vanished in search of his father and the decanter. Peter looked after him but stayed valiantly at my side to present his bride to his childhood friends and neighbors. I thought that in the close, chilly little sun porch, with only a yellow lamp for light and thick white fog pressing close against the small-paned windows, he was like a fire on an open hearth. People clustered around him as if for actual warmth. Men pounded him on the back and shook his hand in obvious liking; old ladies simpered; young women smiled widely and held his hand for perhaps a beat longer than I liked. I wondered, suddenly and for the first time, if any of them there that morning had hoped to be in my place one day. It seemed more than likely.

Amy came last, with Mamadear tottering fiercely on her arm. The old woman looked like a malevolent

baby, muffled to the tips of her ears and chin with shawls and sweaters. She wore on her head, astonishingly, a sailor’s watch cap, or what looked like one, rolled down until it sat atop her falcon’s eyebrows, giving her the look, Peter whispered, of one of those coconut heads you get in Miami, carved to look like a pirate. Her eyes glared out from between strata of wool, yellow as an owl’s.

“All she needs is a dagger in her teeth,” Peter said. He said this aloud, to Amy, and I gasped in horror until I realized that Mamadear was deaf as a post, especially when swathed in wool. Amy grinned at Peter and kissed me.

“Forget the dagger,” Amy said. “Her teeth are all she needs.

The better to eat you with, my dear.”

“What?” shouted Mamadear. “What are you whispering about, Amy? I can’t stand it when you whisper; you do it all the time. I shall tell Parker.”

“We’re saying what a becoming cap you’re wearing, Mrs.

Potter,” Peter said loudly, taking her savage little talons in his hands and smiling into her face. Incredibly, she stopped scowling and grinned back, an arch, terrible caricature of a flirtatious smile.

“Go on with you, Peter Chambliss,” she shrilled. “I’m wise to your ways. Got them from your grandfather. Step back, now, and let me have a look at this wife of yours. Did somebody tell me she came from Egypt?”

“Charleston, Mrs. Potter,” Peter said, his mouth trembling with laughter. Mine, too, quivered as I put up my hand to the old lady. Amy flushed brick red and turned away. Mamadear leaned over and peered into my face.

“Gussie Stallings said nigger,” she said. “You certainly don’t look it to me. Gussie never could tell the truth to save her life. But you surely aren’t one of us, are you? Are you a Jew?

Surely, Peter, you wouldn’t bring a Jew here.”

“Come on, Mamadear,” Amy said, giving the old woman’s arm a sharp jerk. Her face had gone from the pink of mirth to the white of anger. “Let’s get some doughnuts down your craw. Shut you up for a minute, at least. I’m sorry, Maude.

She yelled until Papa Philip said to bring her, and of course that meant me…. I’d say she didn’t know what she was saying, but she does. So I’ll just apologize for all of us, and you won’t have to bother with her again.”

“What are you saying?” the old woman shouted.

“I’m saying it’s time to have some tea!” Amy shouted back.

“Is this the one that stayed out with Parker all night on the boat? That Micah Willis brought in wet as a drowned rat with no clothes on, carrying her right up in his arms?”

“Come
on,
Mamadear!” Amy dragged her grandmother-in-law away. The old voice floated back to Peter and me.

“She doesn’t look like the kind of girl a Chambliss would marry, does she? Lying up there on that chaise, as la-di-da as a horse. I always thought he’d marry Gretchen Constable.

Hannah always favored Gretchen….”

I looked at Peter. His face was thunderous. I laughed. He grinned then, too.

“Gretchen Constable?” I said.

“One of the girls who grew up here summers. Married Burden Winslow the day he graduated from Princeton, just like they’d planned since they were thirteen. We were never anything more than friends, and that old harridan knows it as well as anybody up here. Mama never had any such ideas about her that I know about. Gretch is older and
lots
richer.

God, somebody ought to throttle old women when they hit eighty; it’s when the Cute Old Lady syndrome sets in. You know, where you can just say anything awful

you think of, and do any damned spiteful thing you feel like, and people are supposed to say how you’re so feisty and full of life. Or maybe it’s just up here that it happens. Something in the water. I don’t see how Parker stands it.”

“I don’t think he does,” I said acidly. “I think it’s Amy and Parker’s mother who stand it. Mostly Amy, from what I can see. I don’t imagine Parker and his father have had anything to do with her in years.”

He gave me an odd look out of his long gray eyes and then turned to greet the next arrivals Mother Hannah was shep-herding onto the sun porch. I sighed. It seemed to me that she was leading in a small army of people, and at their head stumped my first foe in Retreat, the redoubtable Augusta Stallings.

“Jesus,” muttered Peter under his breath. “It’s Stallings, Inc., with Grendel’s Mother at the fore.” He raised his voice.

“Good morning, Mrs. Stallings. It’s a lovely morning for ducks, isn’t it?”

Augusta Stallings ignored him and came to peer down at me as Mamadear had done. I smiled tightly up at her, vowing silently that if I ever got to my feet no old lady in Retreat was ever going to be able to look down on me again. It was definitely a position of weakness.

“Well, my girl, not a week here and you’ve put the colony on its ear twice,” she said. “Looks like you southern girls just can’t stay out of the water. I was telling Hannah that we won’t need to have concerts or musicales this summer; we can just put you in the water and watch the fireworks.”

“They were accidents, Mrs. Stallings,” Peter said levelly, and I knew that he was finally angry. “You know, like when you fell out of the chair here the other night? Just accidents.

I know Maude regrets them as much as you do.”

She rounded on him to say something, but one of the younger women who had come in with her took

her arm and murmured, “Mama Gussie, did you fall and not tell us? What are we going to do with you?” And one of the men said, “Mama, you promised you wouldn’t go visiting without one of the girls along.”

I looked at them all. There were, besides old Augusta Stallings, four middle-aged men and four slightly younger women, and at first glance they seemed as identical to me as buckshot. The men were round and soft and short, like their mother, and had wet-looking black hair and hooded hazel eyes and full pink mouths, and the women looked remarkably like them except that their mouths were thinner and paler and their eyes more shadowed, as if with fatigue. All eight had a high color in their cheeks, and all wore prim, too-tight clothes under their sweaters, and all talked in the same loud, uninflected tones as Augusta Stallings, and all their conversation was of themselves: their cottages, their children, their servants, their boats, their activities back in Providence over the past winter, the state of their health. When old Augusta led them off toward the doughnuts and coffee, still talking at full bore among themselves about themselves, I turned to Peter and said, “I will never on this earth keep them straight.

Except that they’re all Stallingses, aren’t they?”

“How could they be anything else?” he said, amusement and annoyance in his voice. “The Stallingses are our collective punishment for defrauding the natives of their land. They’ve been here since day one, and if nothing else they have heeded the Lord’s dictum, ‘Go forth and multiply.’ They have God’s own amount of money from the old grandfather’s patent medicine, which I gather cured an entire nation of its hemor-rhoids or something else unspeakable before it merged with Bayer, and since then they’ve never lifted a finger. Oh, the boys—that’s Albert and John and George and Henry, whom you just met—sit on the board and go to offices back in Providence, but nobody pays any attention to them there.

Here either, for that matter, but they never notice, since they stick together so and hardly ever mingle with the rest of us.

For which we give silent thanks every day. They’re duller than dishwater and dimmer than unlit bulbs, but they’re too arrogant to realize it. They drive everybody nuts, but I think the only real harm they’re capable of is voting in a bloc at the yacht club. As many of them as there are, they could turn us into a skating rink if they wanted to. Fortunately, they all live together, so you’ll know how to avoid them, anyway.”

“All together in one cottage?” I said incredulously. “It must be the biggest one in Maine.”

“Well, the big house is, practically,” Peter grinned in enjoyment. “It’s enormous. ‘Utopia,’ the old man named it. Thirty rooms, I’m told. But old Gussie lives there by herself. Won’t let any of the boys or her daughters-in-law or her thousands of grandchildren spend the night under the ancestral roof.

The boys all have identical smaller cottages on the shore down from Braebonnie toward the club, clustered around the big one like baby pigs around a sow. And they and their ever-swelling broods are jammed in there just waiting for the old bat to kick off. There’s going to be a fight for that big house when she does that will put the Civil War to shame when it comes to brother against brother.”

“And these are the people whom the soul selects as her own society and shuts the door?” I said. “These are the plain-living high-minded people for whom Retreat, according to your mother, is famous?”

“To mother, the Stallingses are the horrible exception that proves the rule,” he said. “And to give us our due, I don’t think you’ll find anybody else precisely like them here. The Winslows and the Conants may not be exactly plain-living, but they’re about a million

times higher-minded than Stallings
mère et fils,
which may not be saying a lot.”

Dr. Lincoln and his wife came in then, and I smiled in genuine pleasure to see him. His had been a consistently kind face and voice to me during the past week, and I had found nothing but succor at his cool, gentle hands. He leaned over me as he had done many times already before, holding my hands in his, his long index finger automatically finding my pulse, and smiled his vague, sweet smile. Though I knew that he was near seventy, he looked nearer fifty, thin and erect, with a full head of only slightly graying dark hair and mild blue eyes with the soft cloudiness of myopia in them.