Colony (26 page)

I put my hand gently on her curly head, nearly white by now, and went heavily back to Liberty. I should have known Amy could not help me. Everyone in the colony knew her world hung by the most precarious of threads, and Elizabeth was simply and inalterably the joy of her heart. Over the years Amy had lost several other babies, but somehow I did not think those losses had touched her deeply. Elizabeth was, for Amy, always sufficient.

We thought that the winter hiatuses away from Retreat would sap the attraction of its heat, but for two more years they did not. Petie and Elizabeth matured and met in far more than childish passion, and we had cause then, I knew, to worry about what they did in the long hours when they vanished. The second summer Peter took Petie back to Northpoint in mid-July and enrolled him in summer school after he and Elizabeth disappeared in the
Hannah’s
dinghy and did not come home until dawn, and Petie promptly ran away and came back to Retreat. When, in the beginning of the third summer, Ella Stallings found them entwined in each other’s arms in her and John’s boathouse, two of the three youngest Stallings looking on solemnly, Amy took Elizabeth back to

Boston and ensconced her in the chilly camphor-smelling home of a Back Bay aunt, with a tutor and a governess. She was back within three weeks, having stolen money from her tutor’s wallet and caught the train from Boston to Bangor and hitched a ride on an ice truck to Retreat. I had a baby and an ill and impossible Mother Hannah by myself that summer; Peter had stayed behind at Northpoint for the first time in our marriage to serve as acting headmaster after Dr.

Fleming’s first stroke. When Elizabeth appeared back in Retreat, stained with travel and exuding an invisible musk that my son flew to like a yellow jacket to overripe fruit, I found myself in Lottie Padgett’s fusty, chirruping living room in tears, quite literally at the end of my rope.

“What am I going to do?” I sobbed. “I can’t lock him up.

They can’t lock her up. They’re too young; it’s no good, this kind of…of craziness. Everybody’s talking, including the villagers. Even if they were old enough, it’s no basis for any kind of permanence. This kind of intensity—it can’t help but damage their very souls. There’s no balance, no lightness, no sweetness…. Oh, what does she
see
in him? You can see what he sees in her, my God, but what can she possibly see in my poor awkward Petie?”

Miss Lottie brought comfrey tea and shoved a fat, plumy yellow coon cat off her chair and sank into it. For once the Little House was empty of children, though the smells and sounds coming from the kitchen indicated that something small and wild and orphan was in residence. The room, as usual, was cluttered beyond description. Just being there made me feel young and new and soothed again, made me forget I was sole custodian of a large old house and an ill and angry old woman and a chunky, grave blond toddler and a fourteen-year-old son who had lost his soul to a siren.

Miss Lottie let me snivel myself out, and then she said, “What does she see in him? Herself. She sees herself whole and complete and beautiful in a man’s eyes. She never did in her father’s, you know; how would you like to be a highstrung little girl growing up in Parker Potter’s house?

What kind of picture of women could she possibly see reflected there? So she thinks she’s just nothing, nobody, not even there, until she sees an absolute blind adoration in some man’s eyes, and it’s like a mirror. She sees that in Petie. She feels whole again. Safe. No wonder she’s after him so desperately. Without him she just disappears.”

“But she’s not safe,” I said. “Petie can’t make her safe; that’s ludicrous.”

“No,” Miss Lottie said sadly. “Elizabeth will never be safe.

A lot of people are going to suffer because of that.”

“Oh, God, Miss Lottie, our poor children,” I whispered.

“We try so hard. I know Amy does. But it isn’t enough….”

She reached out and smoothed the tangled hair off my face.

Her old fingers felt like twigs, warm and dry.

“You’ve been a good mother to Petie, Maude,” she said.

“You mustn’t go blaming yourself for everything. Some things you’re just not going to be able to help. This is a bad place for some children, this colony. A bad place for little wild things. Even though I love it dearly, I’ve always known that.

I’ve tried to make a kind of safe harbor here for the wild hearts, the different ones. They might be perfectly fine somewhere else, somewhere more in the world, but here….

I’ve seen them go to war against all this before. Not like Elizabeth, maybe, not so destructively, but it happens about once a generation. Sometimes they fight it, sometimes they run. You can’t do much about it but try and be there when they fall.”

I thought of Big Peter, heading joyously each week for the Aerie, on the cliffs above where we sat now, and of my Peter, heading like a golden arrow to the sea.

“What am I going to do for my boy?” I said.

“I think, give him the gift of his whole pain,” Miss Lottie said. “Let him have the dignity of the full brunt of it, without his mama trying to shield him from it. Then it won’t be so bad when she’s off and gone. He’ll have a kind of map to go by.”

“You think she’s going to drop him, then?”

“It’s what Elizabeth is all about,” she said, and there was pain in her old voice, but strength and surety too. I came away up the cliff path to Liberty feeling cooled and smoothed and somehow infused with quietness. Perhaps she was right; perhaps there would soon be an end to it….

There was, within a fortnight. Petie came home at dusk one Friday after a day on the water with Elizabeth, looking blind and sick and white-bled, and went straight to his room and crawled into bed. He would not open the door when I tapped on it, and he did not eat the supper tray I left outside his door. When I tried the door again at bedtime there was no answer, and I was not in the least ashamed to go around the side of the house and peer into his room through the gap in the old shutters. He lay mounded deep under the bedcov-ers, obviously asleep.

In the morning he was gone by the time I was up, and I sent Christina Willis down to the yacht club to see if the dinghy was there. When she said it was gone, I walked over to Braebonnie and found Amy in the kitchen, putting an invalid’s breakfast on a linen-covered tray. She looked flushed and pretty again, young.

“Is Elizabeth here?” I said. “Petie’s gone in the dinghy, and I thought she might be with him.”

“No, she’s upstairs packing,” Amy said, not quite looking at me. “She said this morning that she wanted to go back to her Aunt Liza’s and take lessons at the Art Institute for the rest of the summer. There’s a

new watercolor class starting Monday. Parker’s going to take her down in the morning. You know she’s quite gifted with her drawing, but we’ve never thought she was particularly interested—”

“Did they have a fight, do you know? Petie’s in an awful state,” I said. “I never saw him like he was when he came in last night.”

“Well, I don’t think so,” Amy said. “She said she told him she thought it would be the best thing for both of them if they didn’t see each other for a while, and that she’d always think of him as her best friend. And she said he didn’t say much at all about that, so I thought—really, Maude, it’s the answer to all our prayers, don’t you think? I mean, we’ve been at our wits’ end about them, and now there’s nothing more to worry about.”

“Except for Petie,” I said, rage flaring within me. “Only Petie, who looks like the walking dead. My God, couldn’t she have given him some kind of warning, some kind of notice? He literally worships her!”

“It was you who came over here wanting me to keep her away from him, and not so long ago either,” Amy said crisply.

“Now she’s taken care of it herself, and just listen to you.

What do you want, Maude?”

“I don’t know,” I said, turning away. “I thought it was this.

But now I don’t know.”

The next week was a terrible time for Petie, but I think it was just as bad for me. He would not talk with me about Elizabeth, and he ate little and that in his room, and he stayed on the water alone in the dinghy from sunup until long after dark. Only the constant attention that small Happy and Mother Hannah required kept me from dogging his tracks, running him to earth, holding him forcibly to my breast as I had when he was small. Only that, and Miss Lottie’s words not long before: “Give him the gift of his whole pain.”

And so I sat by, my heart physically hurting in my chest for his silent white agony, and let him fly to the sea with it as his grandfather and father had before him. And after that first terrible week he came in one night and asked, in nearly his old, froggy adolescent voice, if he might go to Northpoint and spend the rest of the summer with his father.

“I can get a leg up on calculus,” he said. “I might even pass it on the first go-round, if I get on it now.”

And I watched him off for the Ellsworth train station in Micah’s truck with pride and love and pity for him tearing at me like gulls at a fish on the shore, thinking I could see clearly the shape of the man he might be one day, and liking very much what I saw.

“God, let it be over now,” I whispered as the truck lurched up the lane and vanished, and when they met again the next summer, the one in which Amy and I sat on the dock watching and waiting, it truly seemed to be. Elizabeth was even more beautiful at fifteen, more a creature of smoke and flame and laughter, and she treated Petie with the kind of lighthearted, bantering affection that old friends have for each other. And he in turn treated her lightly, casually, as a lordly teenager might a pretty child. And only I saw the white pain that simmered in him like a fire in the earth, that would never burn out. I knew, that night as we waited for their lights on the black water, that wherever they were, riding the wind side by side in
Hannah
and
Circe,
Peter hurt for Elizabeth and labored mightily not to show that he did.

“Oh, yes,” I said to Amy Potter again. “I remember.”

“All those years ago,” she said. “Can you believe it? You think when you’re up here that time doesn’t pass at all, but it does. It does. Oh, Maude! If we could only stop time right now! I don’t ever want this to change.”

She was silent awhile, and then said, “Maude?”

“Hmmmm?”

“Did you ever feel that way about Peter? That wildness, that burning up?”

I smiled in the darkness, though I did not think she could see.

“Still do,” I said.

“Lord,” she whispered, but that was all she did say.

Presently we saw a light, far out on the water, and got to our feet and went down to the end of the dock, but then we heard the soft rumble of a motor and knew it was not, after all, the returning fleet but a lobster boat, and a lone one. We watched as its light rode nearer and nearer, and soon we could see the black shape of it, and see on its white side the black letters:
Tina.

“It’s Micah,” I said to Amy. “What on earth is he doing out so late, do you think? He usually finishes hauling by noon.

Oh, Lord, I hope nothing’s happened to the fleet.”

A few yards out he cut the
Tina’s
engine and glided silently into the dock, and I caught the line he tossed over to me and said, as he jumped lightly from the deck to the planks where we stood, “Did you see the fleet? Is everything okay out there? We heard there was fog, and they’re awfully late.”

“Didn’t see ’em,” he said, his eyes showing white in the star-pricked night. I could feel the heat of his body in the cold off the water and hugged myself with my arms. I watched as he tied up the
Tina.
Who are you? I said to myself, looking at his silhouette moving deftly about his mooring. I’ve known you for eighteen years, and I still don’t know who you are.

Only then did I think to wonder why he was tying up at the club dock. He always took the
Tina
into the boatyard harbor, around the point.

“Is something wrong?” I said again.

“Peter up at the house?” he said. “Heard he was here this weekend.”

“No, he’s out with the fleet. It’s the Northeast Harbor regatta this weekend. Micah, what
is
it?”

“Don’t know,” he said. “At least, not for sure. Might be something, might be nothing. I wanted to talk to Peter and maybe Guild Kennedy and the Thorne boys about it, seeing they’re from Washington. ’Course, there isn’t a real brain among them—”

“Micah!”

He looked at me with the white eyes and then sat down on a piling and lit one of the stubby cigarettes he smoked.

In the flare of the match his eyes burned blue.

“I was over to the Deer Isle bridge this morning, taking the
Tina
to pick up a pump at Eaton’s, on Little Deer. There was an almighty big sailing yacht anchored under the bridge, right in the middle, and traffic on each side of the bridge was stopped. Looked like the sheriff’s boys holdin’ it up. There wasn’t any craft in the water around it, just the big boat, shining in the sun like a wedding cake. Couldn’t see her name or her registry, and she wasn’t flying her flags. Thought I’d take a closer look, so I cut the engines and kind of coasted on in there toward it, and pretty soon here comes this military cutter out after me like a chicken hawk, Navy, I’m almost sure, motioning for me to go back, go back. I wasn’t too fond of that, so I came on, and then I could see she was a gunboat, had a couple of 40 mm Bofors mounted on her deck. Trained right on me. So I reversed and got on out of there, but not before I saw a couple of people on the yacht’s deck, sittin’

in easy chairs and drinking and smoking like they were anchored off Miami and not Penobscot Bay, Maine. Saw ’em pretty clearly too.”

“And?” I said, my brow furrowing. Gunboats, under the old Deer Isle bridge? A coldness that was not of the night crawled up the back of my neck.

“And nothing,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette and starting up the dock toward the colony. “Except that one of ’em was Franklin Roosevelt. I’d know that chin and that cigarette holder anywhere. And I’m right sure the other was Winston Churchill!”

“Oh, surely not,” Amy said on a soft little breath.