Colony (4 page)

“I always proud of you,” Aurelia said. “You know that.”

I had hugged her, and she hugged me back and went out of the room. At the door she looked back.

“That Peter a nice boy,” she said. “You behave yourself with him. You don’t want him gittin’ no wrong ideas about you.”

I stared at her, affronted. “What ideas? I don’t even know how to…give anybody wrong ideas.”

She looked at me for a space of time and then pointed at the mirror.

“That girl know,” she said, and went out the door and closed it.

I leaned now, in the low yellow lamplight, to the very surface of the mirror, so that the hair at my forehead touched that other hair, and my nose bumped that nose. Our breaths met and mingled, frosting the glass.

“Do you know?” I whispered. “Do you?”

“Let’s go, Maude,” Kemble shouted from downstairs.

And I touched the girl’s cheek and said, “Yes, you do,” and turned swiftly so that my dress billowed out behind me, and ran, lightly and in joy and terror, down the stairs of Belleau to meet Peter Chambliss.

“So it was perfect, huh?” my granddaughter Darcy said on that evening in Retreat, across a bridge of years and pain from me.

“Yes,” I said, smiling into the birch fire that whispered on the old black stone hearth. “Yes, I think it was. Like a movie.

Or, no…like a very good romantic play. One of Noël Coward’s, maybe. With just that bittersweet edge to it, for salt.

A perfect night.”

“Nothing is perfect, Grammaude,” Darcy said with the creamy assurance of youth. She stretched her pretty cat’s body out to the dying warmth of the fire, slowly, so that all the muscles played and snapped back in sequence. It seemed newly ripe and fluid with love, that young body; I remembered that. The oiled sweetness echoed in my own limbs.

“Very few things, I’ll admit, but that was,” I said. It nettled me slightly to have that night so summarily dismissed by one too young to have had many such herself.

“Oh, nuts. I never figured you for a softie. You know as well as I do, there’re thorns on the roses.

Blood and entrails in the pretty white snow. Tiny screams under the birdsong, and all that. ‘Life is real, life is earnest.’

”

Darcy was herself a child of woods and water and the wild, as I had been; she was right, and I knew it. Still…

“You sound just like your great-grandmother Hannah,” I said. “I’ll bet she said the very same thing to me a thousand times in the first few summers we spent up here. ‘Life is real, Maude; it is not a silly child’s fancy. Life is real.’ I was a great trial to her.”

“Hah,” Darcy said. “She should talk. From what I hear of that old martinet and her crowd, life up here was about as real as tea with Helen Hunt Jackson. Morning calls with cards, and nature walks, and drives with rugs and parasols, and luncheons with linen and china, and servants and bridge and dessert parties and musicales: all of Retreat was a stage set for a play about country life. Still is. Look at it. Look at us. You’re sitting in her chair and I’m sitting in one Great-grandpa brought up from Boston, and so far as I know neither one has ever been moved an inch. Or a pillow changed. Or a new picture hung. You could set the cast of some old Mary Roberts Rinehart play down in this place and they’d be able to pick up in mid-line. Real and earnest indeed.”

I laughed. She was right about that too. Retreat is and always has seemed as timeless and lost to the world as a page from a Victorian novel. But under it, under all the careful rusticality, rocks lie, as cruel and tearing as the ledges on the outer islands in the little picture-book harbor, as the ice of winter in the black ponds. Well, Darcy herself surely knew that, and one day would know it even better.

“Maybe most things only seem perfect,” I said. “But that night really was….”

* * *

And it was. As far as human life can be, in one small arena of time and space, perceived through one pair of very young and human eyes, that night in November of 1923 at the Saint Cecilia Ball was perfect. It might not have been, undoubtedly was not, to anyone else there; I don’t even think Peter found it perfect, though he came later to speak of it with me as though it were.

“Our one perfect moment”; we laughed about it many times later, when things went awry: when Petie cried through the fourth straight night with colic; when the hours dragged on and on and Happy did not come home or when Tommy O’Ryan came home yet another night stumbling drunk; when small Sean’s screams of rage and terror left the colony heavy-eyed and thin-lipped.

“Well, we had our one perfect moment, anyway.”

But no, I don’t suppose Peter really thought it was. By then Peter knew about the dark places that lie even at the heart of light, even if he had not yet visited them. Even in the light places, even in the heart of love, the dark waited for Peter.

That night, however, Charleston brought out every trick and wile and enchantment in her arsenal for us, so that even my father, sitting bemused in his own father’s greenish swallowtail in the front seat of the Packard with Kemble, turned to Peter and me in the back seat as we rounded the point of the Battery on East Bay Street and said, “Have they cleaned up downtown or something? It looks different.”

“It looks just like it has for three hundred years, more or less.” Kemble grinned at him. “When was the last time you were downtown at night, Papa?”

“I don’t remember,” my father said vaguely. “I don’t get in to town much. I suppose it was the last time I went to a Saint Cecilia.”

“And that was?” I teased him.

“Well, I don’t think your mother and I were married yet,”

he said seriously. “I remember I had on this same coat, though.”

We all laughed with giddiness and affection and joy at the sheer, flagrant, throat-tightening seduction of Charleston on a Saint Cecilia evening. Overhead the high white hunter’s moon sailed above the great moss-shawled oak trees in Battery Park, and across the black harbor a string of lights picked out Fort Sumter and the tip of Sullivan’s Island. Palms rattled in the warm wind off the sea, and gas lamps glowed yellow on the brick streets and on the lacy swirls of the wrought-iron gates and fences and balconies of the high old town houses.

By day they were the ripe-fruit colors of the semitropics: yellow, pink, coral, green, cream, white, aquamarine. But in the moonlight of November they were all silver and pewter and gilt, and the night around them black velvet, and the stars above them diamonds of the very best quality. Down here, south of Broad, in the warren of old brick streets and alleys, where the oldest names of the city dwelt, there were few cars in sight and virtually none abroad on the streets, but there were fleets of shining-black horse-drawn carriages and, in them, glimpses of cloudy white dresses and flowers and correct black evening dress, and young faces blanched with expectation. Candles blazed in many windows, and from one, which I knew was the fabled Manigault House with its Sword Gates, a little liquid curl of Palestrina spilled like a handful of jewels flung out into the night.

“God, it’s the most beautiful city in the world!” Peter breathed.

I turned to see if he was being sarcastic. He moved, after all, in the exotic streets of Boston and the East and, Kemble had said, Europe and South America. He wasn’t. The smile he turned to me was that of a child at a wonderful party.

“It’s completely out of any world I know. It’s like a night in some fabulous Creole place a world away, centuries ago, or like a fairy tale…. Where are the cars? Where are the people going to the movies or to…to buy toothpicks and Sen-Sen?”

“They say that on the night of the Saint Cecilia, everybody who isn’t invited puts the car in the garage and turns off all the lights and sits in the dark till dawn, so nobody will know they’re home,” Kemble said. “You’re chopping tall cotton tonight, old man. I hope you’re properly impressed.”

“I am,” Peter said. “By the dance and the town and the night and…everything.”

In the darkness of the back seat my face burned, and my hands, when I clasped them together, were as cold as a dead woman’s.

In the foyer of the old hall, standing at the edge of the red carpet with my arm through my father’s and my heart bidding fair to buck out of my chest, I stopped for a moment, looking inside. In my terror and exaltation the great, graceful old room seemed a teeming swarm of candles and roses and gilt and faces turning toward us, faces over severe black evening clothes and dark silks and drifting cumuli of white, faces I did not recognize, though I almost certainly knew most by name. Music swelled and eddied and ebbed; voices and laughter murmured and rose. Was it at me? Surely it was.

Surely it had always been…. My wrists and lips began to buzz horridly, and I thought I would surely vomit or faint. I tensed my muscles to turn and flee, and felt a hand on my shoulder, and heard Peter’s voice in my ear.

“There isn’t a woman in that room who can hold a candle to you tonight,” he whispered. “Every one of them looks as if she’d like to stab you through the heart and grab that dress and go in the Ladies’ and put it on and leave hers in the trash can. Drawers too, probably.”

I took a deep breath that came out in a hiccup, and my heart jolted forward and into a deep, smooth groove, and laughter bubbled up from under my ribs, and I said over my shoulder to him, “Thank you,” and to my father, “Let’s go, Pa,” and we swept into the ballroom and into the night.

From the beginning it was a triumph and I was a belle. I can say that now because it had never happened to me before and it never did again, and because I know full well it was Peter Chambliss who lit the fire that burned in me that night, who made the assembled friends and acquaintances and know-by-names and know-by-sights and cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents and even old family servants believe that Caroline and Gus Gascoigne’s strange brown gnome of a daughter had, against all odds, turned into a beauty. Because I was far from beauty, then or ever. Too darkly earthbound, too clearly a small creature of swamp and creek and old green darkness. But that night I shone like a tall taper, shimmered, burned. All because he stood beside me, and held me on the dance floor, and bent his head down to mine to laugh and whisper at supper.

It is a thing I saw people notice about Peter from the day I met him to the day he died: that impact on the eye, that almost physical clap of presence, as if some invisible concus-sion had left the very air shivering. He drew the eye like wildfire, or a wild animal. It was hard to look away from him. And yet, if you attempted to analyze it, you would come up with nothing that added up to that silent thunderclap.

Peter was very nearly a plain man.

He was always too thin, and very nearly stooped with his height, and his features were long and sharp, a veritable caricature of wellborn New England. His chin jutted and his sandy eyebrows overgrew his deep-set gray eyes and his thick white-blond hair was

usually down across his forehead, and his mother Hannah’s vulpine white teeth were startling in the deep-water sailing tan he kept most of the year. But he moved with a sinuous, lazy cat’s grace even when he shambled along at his slowest, and he was a wonderful and boneless dancer and an effort-lessly good tennis player, and his smile was the very definition of the word sweetness. And there was that other thing about him, that caught and held eyes: a kind of goodness. A deep, bright aura of safety. Caring seemed to flow from him like wild honey. His father had it too, if more dimly. Poor Big Peter, poor Little Peter. No one could have lived up to that.

Everyone noticed and responded to him that evening. I saw it happen. I saw my Brundage grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins in their accustomed places before one of the four great Adam mantels, where Brundages had stood to receive their friends since, I suppose, there had been any Brundages in Charleston, stop their flocking chatter and turn and look at him, and at me, and then at Kemble and our father, and I saw them nod and smile. And beckon us into their ranks. As we walked across the vast, shining floor to them, eyes burning like bees on my bare shoulders and neck, my father said in his soft, vague voice, “You know, Eulalie once told me I looked like an organ grinder’s monkey in tails,” and instead of a rush of rancor, or the accustomed sting of mortified tears, the new healing laughter came bubbling once more into my throat.

“She isn’t going to say it tonight,” I said. “And if she does, just tell her she looks like South America. Right down to the tatty little train on that dress. Aunt Eulalie could do with a little boning.”

“Did I tell you how pretty you look tonight?” my father said. “I probably didn’t. I think it often, but I never seem to get around to saying it. Your mother would be proud of you, little Maude. I am too.”

“And I am of you,” I said, finding the never-said words surprisingly easy on this magical night. “I’ve had a wonderful growing-up.”

He looked at me and smiled, just before we reached our group.

“And now you’re there, aren’t you? I just never noticed.”

“Neither did I,” I said.

After that, I could never remember the particulars of that ball. I tried often; I would lie in the dark of many predawns, in cold New Hampshire nights or firelit Maine ones, trying to tell the details to myself like the beads of a rosary. But I never could. For me, once the music started and the dance cards were filled and the first waltz swelled, that night was a runaway carousel of flowers, candles, music, laughter, champagne, flowing motion and billowing skirts and fast-coming breath. My dance card filled quickly, with the names of boys I had known all my life but somehow never seen before; I smiled and laughed and chattered and flirted as if I had done it all my life, but through each dance that I did not have with Peter my eyes kept seeking him, and whenever they found him, whirling some newly blossomed nursery school or Ashley Hall compatriot over the mirror floor, his eyes met mine and he smiled. He danced five dances with me—unheard of in that day and place—and his was the name scrawled on the sixteenth line. We did not, that night, do the new, fast, jittering dances that were coming into vogue; the Saint Cecilia has never really yielded itself up to modernity. We swayed and dipped together to the ballads of that year, though: “My Wonderful One,” “April Showers,” “Whispering,”