Colony (31 page)

It was not that my mother-in-law disliked either of the Willises. In fact, in her austere way, she was as fond of them both as she was of many of her neighbors in Retreat, though in a different way, and probably fonder than she was of a few. It would not have occurred to her that Micah might remember with bitterness her outburst at him on the awful day he found Parker Potter molesting his young niece, Polly, in her living room, and to Micah’s credit, if he did, he never showed it.

“Micah and Christina are fine people, the salt of the earth,”

I heard her say often over drinks, when the eternal colony litany of servants, second only to that of sewage disposal, came up. “I am proud to have them as neighbors.”

But not, she might have added but did not have to, since everyone in Retreat understood, as guests. The fact that Micah could play a respectable classical violin and was reading his way through the world’s great philosophers, and Christina had a library twice the size of Mother Hannah’s back in Boston and was fluent in three languages, cut no ice with her at all. I think she thought of them as idiots savants or labor-atory chimpanzees, who could by rote perform wondrous tasks. Amazing, but still chimpanzees. I was used to this atti-tude and paid little attention to it, since it did not deprive me of the pleasure of the Willises’ company. Micah and Tina had delicate antennae for such things and simply did not appear when Mother Hannah stayed up with the family after dinner. I never did learn how they knew, but they did.

But it drove Peter wild. On the evening before he left to go back to Northpoint, he and his mother had had an argument about it. The Willises had been at Liberty the previous evening, and Mother Hannah had simmered and fretted all the following day and then jumped Peter at dinner.

“It’s so ostentatious, Peter, such a showy and unattractive gesture. What on earth can you possibly find to talk about with our caretaker and our cook?”

I grinned and crossed my eyes behind Mother Hannah’s back, because the showy and ostentatious gesture was so obviously mine. But I saw the familiar dull red come into Peter’s cheeks.

“Well,” he said, “last evening I believe we discussed Maslow and the nature of peak experiences. And then we moved on to Jung and his notion that the concept of time shuts out eternity. Because, as you know, Mother, eternity is by definition beyond time. Micah was interested in how the image of God becomes the final obstruction to the experience of God, and I believe it was Christina who pointed out that Jung said that religion was the best defense against a religious experience. Finally, we all agreed that the images of Christ in our culture are very dangerous, because it’s so hard to get past the image to the reality of him. You should come to Maude’s next salon. You might be intrigued.”

Mother Hannah sniffed. Two red spots flamed on her desiccated cheeks.

“That’s monstrous,” she said. “I thought the Willises were at least good churchgoers.”

“Well, now, monsters,” Peter went on thoughtfully. “We touched on that too. Micah said he’d read in his philosophy books about the notion that a monster can be a sublime being. That he can be someone who breaks all concepts of ethical behavior. Someone literally beyond ethical judgment, about whom all human concepts of morality are wiped out.

The French call those beings
monstres sacrés,
sacred monsters.

You may know some of them yourself. I think I do.”

“You cannot sit there and tell me that you discussed…those things with people we pay to do menial work for us,” she said coldly. “I find that impossible to believe.”

“Well, we talked about other stuff too,” Peter said, beginning to grin. “Micah said some of Caleb’s sheep had bad cases of chapped teats, and the lambs’ suckling wasn’t making them any better. And I asked what Caleb was doing for them, and he said he was using Bag Balm. Cleared those teats right up, it did.”

“If you are going to be vulgar, I am going to bed,” Mother Hannah said, and when I had settled her in, I came back into the living room and collapsed into Peter’s lap in helpless laughter. Finally, unwillingly, he began to laugh too.

“Sometimes I wonder how you’ve stood her all

these summers,” he said. “You’re the one who’s been stuck with her.”

“Now you wonder,” I said. “Just when it’s getting easier.”

“Is it, my poor little Maude?” he said, smoothing the hair off my forehead. “I’m glad. I’d hate to think Retreat meant only drudgery for a sick old woman to you. Even if she is my mother, and I do love her of course, I see every day I’m here how difficult she is. It’s funny; for the longest time I didn’t see that. I guess I didn’t want to. If I’d seen it, I’d have had to do something about it, and that would have meant giving up a few days out on the water or on the tennis court. You’ve never had it easy up here, have you?”

I felt tears flood my eyes and buried my face in his shoulder so he wouldn’t see them.

“I’ve had other things up here,” I said. “I’ve had Maine itself, the cape, the woods and the fogs and the ocean, the pointed firs…that’s worth almost anything to me, Peter. And I’ve had friends. Amy has been a wonderful friend. The Willises, too. And Miss Lottie, and the Mary’s Garden girls—God bless them, they finally taught me to play tennis.

And the children having their summers here, discovering this magical place for the first time…it’s more than balanced out.

“And,” I added, taking a bite out of the side of his neck, “I’ve had the supreme good fortune of making love in a bathtub and in the bottom of a Brutal Beast, and just yesterday on a bed of moss that was not only infested with redbugs but an inch deep in osprey shit. Talk about your peak experiences!”

“Well, yes,” he said, biting my neck in return. “I can see how those transcendent moments would be worth anything.”

We had taken the dinghy out the afternoon before, because the day was as still and warm as August, and

the bay was glassy and only heaving gently, like the breast of a sleeping woman, and rowed over to Osprey Head. We usually did this each year in late August, just before we left Retreat, to see how the young ospreys had fared during the summer and to picnic on the deep, silky, acid-green moss that covered much of the rocky little island. It was an immutable ritual with us; I do not think I could have left for Northpoint without my farewell engagement with the ospreys.

It had felt distinctly queer yesterday, though, almost eerily wrong, to make the pilgrimage in early summer. But as Peter said, the weather was too perfect to last; we could be sure of a nor’easter before the week was out. And it might be that he would be tied up at Northpoint at the end of the summer, and unable to come and drive us all back, and Petie would have to do it. So I packed a lunch and a blanket and we rowed the half mile from the yacht club harbor out to the round, green little island, first of the small archipelago that lay off the cove.

The osprey nest stood on the very crest of the island, on the ridge of naked pink rock that always reminded me of a dragon’s spine. It was in a dead tree that had somehow withstood the winter gales that howled in from the open ocean out past Deer Isle for as many years as Peter could remember. Some nests, he said, were used for a century, being added to each year by the birds until they reached a diameter of five feet or more. This one looked to be about four feet: an old nest. We stood looking up at it in the warm, insect-buzzing silence, slightly sweated from the climb and the high sun. The young ospreys were there, four of them, almost as large now as their parents but still swiveling their fierce, helmeted predator’s heads and shrieking for food. The adults were gone.

“Big babies,” Peter said. “Plenty big enough to fend for themselves, but still sitting there waiting for tired old Ma and Pa to haul lunch to them. Probably won’t leave home till their folks kick them out. Not unlike a few youngsters I know.”

I smiled and stared at the fledglings. I loved everything I knew about the ospreys of Osprey Head: their clean, lovely grace in flight; the fierceness of their attack on the fish they dove for, sometimes actually being drowned by their struggling prey because of their talons’ extraordinary grip; their faithfulness to their homes and their young. Maine had almost lost most of its ospreys in the early years of the century, I knew, because their reluctance to leave their nests made them attractive prey for hunters. But now by mid-century they were back in good numbers, because the state finally moved to protect them and because there was an old and pervading superstition that to kill an osprey brought bad luck. Standing there in that old blue sea silence, looking at the beautiful young birds, I hoped the superstition was true. I felt a pure and shaking rage at the thought of anyone harming them.

“I think I like them better than any other Maine birds, even the eagles,” I said to Peter. “They seem so…I don’t know: willing to share themselves with people. Not that they’re tame; they’re the wildest things I know. But they don’t run away from you. They’ll make their homes among you, if you let them. It somehow seems like a kind of blessing to have them near.”

“I know,” he said, smiling at my fancy. “A good example to their human counterparts. Pity we can’t always live up to them. Here’s to you,
Pandion haliaetus carolinensis.
May your tribe increase.”

We started back down through the dark stand of firs and moss to the little shingle beach where we had left the picnic basket.

“How did you know that? Their Latin name?” I said.

“Dad told me the first time he brought me over here,” he said. “He made me memorize it. He said a thing as noble as the osprey deserved to be known by its proper name, and we ought to know it even if we didn’t use it.”

“Then I’ll learn it too,” I said, and felt a sudden savage spasm of grief for my father-in-law. My eyes flooded. “I miss your father so much,” I said to Peter. “I don’t ever stop thinking about him when I’m up here. I can’t tell you what he came to mean to me.”

Peter dropped down onto the blanket I had spread in the shelter of a huge boulder, a sentinel left on that wild beach from the march of the last great glacier. He was silent for a while, looking out across the still blue water toward the shoreline of Retreat.

“I think I know,” he said.

I followed his gaze and saw that he was staring up at the distant chimney tops of the Aerie, just visible in the shimmer of noon light and the haze of heat. I had not been back there since the summer Big Peter died and Petie was born; Sarah and Douglas Fowler had sold it the following year to a family from New Haven, who only came in August, so we did not see much of them. I heard a few years later that Sarah had died, but no one seemed to know of what; it did not seem real to me. It still seemed she must be there, in her wonderful house high in the air and sun and wind; I still had the fancy that sometimes, when she was alone, Sarah Fowler flew triumphantly in the blue air around her home.

“So much has changed,” I said softly. “It looks the same, it seems the same, but there are so many of them gone now, and you can feel the holes where they were. What long shadows they cast….”

My eyes fell to the beach below the sheer cliff on which the Aerie sat. The Little House, that enchanted place of refuge for small creatures ruled over by Miss Lottie Padgett, also stood empty now. Since her death in the first year of the war the feckless Frankie, mired in his urban sanctimony, had never set foot in it and, so far as we knew, wished neither to sell nor rent it. It was as if his mother and her sanctuary for the colony’s lost had never existed. Several of us had written Frankie with offers, mainly because it was so painful to see the cottage closed and dark and falling further into disrepair, but none of our letters were answered. Of all of old Retreat, except Peter’s father, I think I missed Miss Lottie most. I often wonder what might have become of my poor Happy if Miss Lottie could have taken her under her wing. When I think, as I often do, that Retreat and Cape Rosier have the power to heal, it is chiefly of Miss Lottie Padgett that I think.

Many others who were so indelible in my early years in the colony were gone too. Mamadear long ago, of course, and Helen Potter just the winter before, so that Amy was at long last the sole mistress of Braebonnie. Dr. and Mrs. Lincoln had both died, and Land’s End was now the property of the still-interchangeable “boys,” who alternated summers with their interchangeable wives and children. Miss Isabelle and Miss Charlotte Valentine had left Petit Trianon to a dis-interested niece from Mobile, who summered at Point Clear and sold the cottage to the Winslows; Gretchen promptly made a guest house of it, flossing it up with no end of expensively shabby, brand-new wicker and chintz. Only Augusta Stallings, older than Mother Hannah, was, incredibly, still alive and contentious, if bedbound, in Utopia while her aging sons and desperate daughters-in-law and burgeoning tribe of grand-and great-grandchildren burst the seams of the Compound. My mother-in-law was, for all intents and purposes, the matriarch of Retreat. I sometimes thought that fact was keeping her alive.

Peter poured wine and we drank it, and ate our sandwiches, and then lay back and let the sun pour over us like wild honey. Then came that sound I listen for each summer, and hear only once or twice, and only in moments of perfect suspension and stillness: the high, eerie hum I always fancy is the music of the earth itself, or the real old secret of the sea. I wondered if Peter heard it; I was about to break the spell of it and ask when he said, “Dad took you up to see Sarah Fowler at the Aerie, didn’t he? The summer he died?”

I lay there for a moment, the weight of the sun red and heavy on my eyelids, and said, “Yes.” And when he did not speak again, I said, “I didn’t know you knew that he…went there sometimes.”

“Yes. I knew. I knew that he did, and that he’d gone there for many summers, and why. I knew he was in love with her.

I followed him there once, when I was about eighteen, I guess, and watched them through the windows. He never touched her, but you could tell by his face, and hers. I’m glad he shared her with you. She was a special person, and it’s a special place. I wish he’d felt he could have shared it with me.”